Discussing Modernity : A Dialogue with Martin Jay [1 ed.] 9789401209304, 9789042036642

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DISCUSSING MODERNITY

VIBS Volume 262 Robert Ginsberg Founding Editor Leonidas Donskis Executive Editor Associate Editors G. John M. Abbarno George Allan Gerhold K. Becker Raymond Angelo Belliotti Kenneth A. Bryson C. Stephen Byrum Robert A. Delfino Rem B. Edwards Malcolm D. Evans Roland Faber Andrew Fitz-Gibbon Francesc Forn i Argimon Daniel B. Gallagher William C. Gay Dane R. Gordon J. Everet Green Heta Aleksandra Gylling Matti Häyry Brian G. Henning

Steven V. Hicks Richard T. Hull Michael Krausz Olli Loukola Mark Letteri Vincent L. Luizzi Hugh P. McDonald Adrianne McEvoy J.D. Mininger Peter A. Redpath Arleen L. F. Salles John R. Shook Eddy Souffrant Tuija Takala Emil Višňovský Anne Waters James R. Watson John R. Welch Thomas Woods

a volume in Central European Value Studies CEVS Emil Višňovský, Editor

DISCUSSING MODERNITY A Dialogue with Martin Jay

Edited by Dorota Koczanowicz, Leszek Koczanowicz, and David Schauffler

Amsterdam - New York, NY 2013

Cover photo: www.morgueFile.com Cover Design: Studio Pollmann The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “ISO 9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents Requirements for permanence”. ISBN: 978-90-420-3664-2 E-Book ISBN: 978-94-012-0930-4 © Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2013 Printed in the Netherlands

CONTENTS Introduction

Mysterious Power of Intellectual History 1 DOROTA KOCZANOWICZ AND LESZEK KOCZANOWICZ

ONE

Photography and the Event MARTIN JAY

TWO

Regaining Experience? DOROTA WOLSKA

29

THREE

Deconstruction and Hermeneutics. On the Controversy between Jacques Derrida and Hans˗Georg Gadamer PIOTR DEHNEL

41

FOUR

The Beautiful Art of Cooking DOROTA KOCZANOWICZ

55

FIVE

Exposing Experience and Facing Photography TERESA BRUŚ

69

SIX

Photography as a Means of Re-presenting the Past. Caring for Memories. PIOTR JAKUB FEREŃSKI

79

SEVEN

Abject Spaces, Pre-Modern Time and Baroque Scopic Regime in Andrzej Stasiuk’s Travel Essays EWA IGNACZAK

89

EIGHT

Scopic Regimes and Modernity: Hypotyposis ROMA SENDYKA

103

NINE

Modernity versus Postmodernity. Various Aspects of the Problem of Periodization PAWEŁ DYBEL

115

TEN

Dialogue, Activity, and Mendacity LESZEK KOCZANOWICZ

125

9

Continuing the Dialogue MARTIN JAY

135

ABOUT THE EDITORS AND CONTRIBUTORS

145

INDEX

149

Introduction MYSTERIOUS POWER OF INTELLECTUAL HISTORY Dorota Koczanowicz and Leszek Koczanowicz To do intellectual history is a difficult task. Those who chose to pursuit this field have to cope with special difficulties going beyond the scope of a “normal” historical work. The intellectual historian shares with her colleagues the same dilemmas concerning the validity of sources, methods of descriptions, and the objectivity of narrative, to name only a few. But to speak about ideas demands more. Ideas have a double reference, they live according to their own inner rhythm but on the other hand, they have to confront the outer social and cultural reality. Intellectuals who generate ideas cannot be indifferent to this dual task and neither can their historians. Intellectual historians who are as much historians of intellectuals as of their ideas have to cope with the aporias of their political and social involvement. Martin Jay, whose work towers over the field in his first book on Critical Theory, notes this dilemma, which touches the intellectuals on the Left. The intellectual is always engaged in symbolic action, which involves the externalization of his thought in any number of ways. ‘Men of ideas’ are noteworthy only when their ideas are communicated to others through one medium or another. The critical edge of intellectual life comes largely from the gap that exists between symbol and what for want of a better can be called reality. Paradoxically, by attempting to transform themselves into the agency to bridge that gap, they risk forfeiting the critical perspective it provides.1 Losing critical power is also a professional risk for intellectual historians. Intellectual history demands that its practitioners to live in a world of ghosts. Ideas, which furnish their world, are by no means innocent. They, even the most obsolete ones, still retain the power which once made them weapons in social or cultural struggles. They mobilized thousands to fight and to risk their well-being or even their lives. To deal with them is not only the task of an archivist but always a work of passion, of engagement. Therefore an intellectual historian has to become in his or her work at the same time an impassioned archivist, uncovering ideas from the dust of the past, but also an active militant who has to make a judgment on their validity for the present. He or she has to be also a translator who is able to transform old ideas into a

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new context. As an archivist, the intellectual historian is supposed to master all the skills of the historian but with a special glance at the places where ideas are born and die. As a militant he or she is supposed to relate those ideas to the present, which is never an impassionate job. So the intellectual historian can be described in his or her work as an impassionate partisan. As a translator he or she must manage both idioms, that of the past and that of the present, in order to make what is untranslatable understandable. This threefold task determines the whole field of intellectual history and makes this field at once so difficult and so attractive. In a strange way the field of intellectual history is also socially important. Superficially it seems that the explosive potential of ideas, which the intellectual historian deals with has been waned. Old discussions and old arguments lost their vigor and potential to arouse any significant interest. It turns out, however, in that almost entirely unpredictable ways they can be resuscitated and suddenly return with new vigor. In the sixties in communist Poland three books were of special importance: Jerzy Szacki’s Counter-Revolutionary Paradoxes: The World-Views of the French Antagonists of the Great Revolution, 1789-1815,2 Leszek Kołakowski’s Religious Consciousness and the Church Bond. Studies in Nondenominational Christianity in the Seventeenth Century,3 and Bronisław Baczko’s Rousseau: Solitude and Community.4 It might seem that all of these books are very far from any political involvement. Szacki writes about the dilemmas of the thinkers who did not accept the French Revolution, Kołakowski shows the complicated relationships between freethinkers and established denominations, and Baczko studies Rousseau as a thinker of the freedom and autonomy of the individual. None of these tackles any political questions but it was at that time obvious that they provoked thinking about the fundamental problems of legitimization of the socialist state. This was intuitively clear but in retrospect it is very difficult to gauge why these reflections on esoteric subjects had so much power not only intellectual but also ideological. One of the reasons was certainly the ideological vulnerability of the communist state, as its power legitimization was founded on Marxist thought even if as impoverished version of it. Any subtle shift in intellectual perspective could lead to a political earthquake. We are writing about this period not because of communist nostalgia of which one of the authors could be suspected but because the peculiar political arrangement of the communist state shows, as in a natural experiment, the significance of intellectual history as a source of social self-understanding. In the example given above the influence of these works of intellectual history was not immediate. It worked more as if stirring wider and wider circles in water after a stone is thrown into a pond. This pattern of influence was also characteristic of the great days of the dissident movement in the late seventies and eighties. Flood of books about historical facts but also about historical ideas which had been forgotten or abandoned, were published (mainly clandestinely) and became a landmark of the “new nation” as opposed to the corrupted reality of the communist state and its ideology.

Introduction

3

Does the same model work also in democratic, free-market societies? In this case the legitimization of power is less dependent on ideas. In fact it is other way around, because as Richard Rorty argues democracy is prior to any metaphysical justification.5 Taken literally such a standpoint leaves hardly any room for the social significance of intellectual history. Democracy constitutes itself in action and its history can have at best only the status of heuristic guidance and at worst that of an interesting curiosity. The free market economy, on the other hand, seems to have an even more devastating effect on the social usefulness of intellectual history. In its neoliberal version, which praises almost exclusively free market mechanisms as the foundation of every social interaction, any reflection on the historical background of democracy is practically excluded. In Poland, as in other post-communist countries this situation gives rise to a mood of disappointment, which is so often expressed by intellectuals. The special role of the intelligentsia so appreciated in East Central Europe resulted inter alia from its privileged access to the historical fund of ideas. If this access were meaningless what would be a sign of its special status? But we need not care about the special status of the intelligentsia in order to appreciate the need for self-reflection in society. Even we do not need any metaphysical premises for democracy or philosophical foundations for a free market economy, we do need a critical reflection on axes, which constitute values and norms of our societies. Jay’s work is a paradigmatic case of such a reflection. Here we need not discuss the impressive corpus of his work as it has been done elsewhere. 6 However we want to show what we can learn from his work in our current circumstances. As we have signalled earlier, intellectual history is not a set of ready-made recipes for any society. If historia is really magistra vitae it is only in the sense of being a receptacle of possibilities for self-reflection of the society. There are recurrent topics in Jay’s oeuvre, which can serve as a point of departure for this self-reflection in our society and we would like to enumerate some of these options. First, we have to mention his preoccupation with Western Marxism in all of its incarnations. One reaction to this preoccupation could be just a dismissive shrug, indicating that such involvement does not have any meaning in the face of the discrediting of Marxism as a foundation of the communist state. The issue is however more complicated, as the history of Marxism is also a part of the emancipative project. Jay, who is a meticulous historian of Western Marxism, can provide us with useful insights to understand the role of Marxism especially so-called “revisionist Marxism,” in the development and critique of the communist state. Looking back to the late fifties it is easy to see that Marxism in its revisionist stage was actually a transformative phase in the development of communist society in Poland. It was transformative in several senses. First, revisionist Marxism was a path by which dogmatic philosophers to change their minds. Revisionist Marxism gave them a link to other philosophical

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orientations that they at some point fully accepted instead of Marxism. Second, revisionist Marxism was a transformative phase in the means employed for the critique of communist society. The crucial concept in the critique in this period was “alienation.” So the critique had a mainly existential bias. It was directed at showing that “real” socialism could not fulfil the promise to actualize the “essence of man” in empirical life. In fact the Marxist critique of “real socialism” was limited by a double horizon: on the one hand existential philosophy á la Jean-Paul Sartre, and Frankfurt School Marxism on the other. Therefore, irrespective of the level of sophistication of this critique, it was restricted in its political consequences by accepted assumptions. It never questioned the economic basis of the system; rather it aimed at improving it and making it more humane. Such a position harmonized with the Western radical (but not communist) critique of capitalism at that time in the sense that the hard core of the critique was the emphasis of the harm that technological and bureaucratic society had done to the social and psychological dimensions of the human individual. Communism in its potentialities was, however, perceived as a system superior to capitalism, but stress was put on the barriers that barred the way to the society of “free and associated producers.” The students’ strikes in March 1968 in Poland saw the greatest political consequences of revisionist Marxism. Rioting students extensively used the rhetoric of freedom of speech and struggle with bureaucracy as the first step in the overcoming of the alienation of citizens from the communist state. The suppression of the student movement meant in fact the end of this philosophical critique of “real socialism.” It was mainly caused partly by the political repressions and the expulsion of some of the leading revisionist Marxists but even more by the exhaustion of its theoretical potential. A massive worker's protest in 1970 eventually informed oppositional intellectuals about the necessity of shifting critique to the sphere of the organization and conditions of work, the political and economic system. For such a purpose, the language of alienation turned out to be entirely inadequate or at least it was so perceived at that time. The story of the Marxist critique of “actually existing socialism,” as the system was labeled, has not yet been written but it seems to be quite obvious that there were parallel movements in the West and in the East. We are sure that for this yet-to-be-written book Jay’s massive account of Western Marxism will be one of the prime sources. 7 Such a work could also correct at least partially Jay’s remark that: The reverse side of this internecine quarreling has been the enormous creative fecundity of the tradition, which sharply sets it apart from its orthodox Marxist or Marxist-Leninist opponents. Western Marxism has been open and experimental in a way that is not comparable with anything in this century except perhaps aesthetic modernism, which also exploded in a whirl of movements and counter-movements. Lacking the

Introduction

5

means to impose intellectual conformity, the various subcurrents of Western Marxism have had to coexist uneasily and engage, if often indirectly, in a critical dialogue that has been sadly absent in the institutionalized socialist world.8 Of course it is true that the revisionist Marxism of the institutionalized socialist world can be considered more as a part of Western Marxism at least from the point of view of its theoretical reference but its social function had a different character. Marxism in the socialist world was a part a social reality as it was noted by Herbert Marcuse: [T]he fact is that the Bolshevik Party and the Bolshevik Revolution were, to a considerable degree, developed according to Marxist principles, and that the Stalinist reconstruction of Soviet society based itself on Leninism, which was a specific interpretation of Marxian theory and practice. The ideology thus becomes a decisive part of reality even if it was used only as an instrument of domination and propaganda.9 Thus it could be an interesting project to investigate the rise and disappearance of Marxism from the public sphere of communist countries.10 Although Marxism in the seventies and eighties vanished as a theory which could invigorate the public discussion, its partial resurrection was paradoxically due to the collapse of the communist state. This posed the problem of the construction of a democratic state as the most important issue. Which model of democracy, which relations between the economy and politics, which system of institutions? They have remained at the center of political discussion since 1989. These questions can be to some extent reduced to one big question concerning the role of Enlightenment ideals and values in the creation of a democratic state. In Poland as in other postcommunist countries the main axis of the political division lies in rejecting or accepting the Enlightenment perspective on social life. Thus we have on one side of the political spectrum so-called liberals who declare their loyalty to such values as the freedom and autonomy of individuals; on the other side we have so-called nationalists or patriots (as the term nationalism has a negative connotation in these countries). For such discussion, if it is not to be an empty quarrel, one needs to have tools that help to organize discourses and sort out arguments. And again intellectual history can be of help for such an endeavor. Jay’s Downcast Eye provides us with useful insights how to deal with the past and how to make sense of scattered statements. He writes: Discourse in this usage is explicitly derived from the Latin discurrere, which means a running around in all directions. The antiocularcentric

6

DOROTA KOCZANOWICZ AND LESZEK KOCZANOWICZ discourse I hope to examine is precisely that: an often unsystematic, sometimes internally contradictory texture of statements, associations, and metaphors that never fully cohere in a rigorous way. No single figure expresses all of its dimensions and none would be likely to accept them all, even if they were explicitly posed as positive arguments. Nor has there been anything like a conscious conspiracy determining its dissemination.11

Jay in his analyses lives up to these promises treating others’ concepts, no matter how foreign they are from his own, with the same attention and compassion. This does not mean, however, that he accepts all of the perspectives he refers to. Even a method which assumes that we can make sense of others’ standpoints situates his thought on a certain side of contemporary discussions, as he confesses: “I remain unrepentantly beholden to the ideal of illumination that suggests an Enlightenment faith in clarifying indistinct ideas.”12 Public life of course is not a kind of university seminar but such “committed impartiality” could be a model for any public discussion. It does not have to be an exercise in neutrality, at least to an extent, which excludes passion, but it fails if each side is narcissistically preoccupied only with its own position. So the moral, which Jay draws from his carefully done research, is a plea for the multiplicity of scopic regimes. When ‘the’ story of the eye is understood as a polyphonic—or rather, polyscopic—narrative, we are in less danger of being trapped in an evil empire of the gaze, fixated in a single mirror stage of development, or frozen by the medusan, ontologizing look of the other. Permanently ‘downcast eyes’ are no solution to these and other dangers in visual experience.13 Perhaps this courage to endure heterogeneity is the only way to defend rationality in the age of the new unsurveyability as Jay following Habermas, calls our times. The same lesson can be drawn from the scrutinizing experience, which Jay does in his monumental Songs of Experience. In its conclusions he emphasizes that any hope of treating a certain experience as an exclusive property of a clearly defined group has to be a failure, because …our tour of the different notions of experience demonstrates that if it means anything at all, it involves an openness to the world that leaves behind such exclusivist fortresses. In this sense, we might speak of the strong identity politics version of experience as the diametrical opposite of the unclaimed variety that has been so often linked with trauma. 14

Introduction

7

Transformation, the building of a democratic state, has been for our society a painful process, which has required the toleration of multiple voices and rejection of the temptation to fill the “empty space” of power (Claude Lefort) with unambiguous symbols be they religious or nationalistic. In a sense this temptation has been stimulated by the fresh memory of the last years of the communist state with their crystal division between a powerful but corrupted “them” and a weak but morally superior “us.” The dream of repeating this unequivocal division between truth and lie has haunted the democracies of all post-communist countries but as Jay shows in his Virtues of Mendacity it is an endemic threat to all forms of democratic society. 15 The dramatic turn which our political life has taken in the last few years can serve as a verification of the statement that if all sides in political struggle are convinced that they possess the ultimate truth then any kind of comprise is unattainable. Democratic politics is an exercise in the tolerance of multiplicity regardless of how painful it can be. Intellectual history cannot give any simple recipe which could serve as a panacea for the ills of society. However in its highest achievements it shows two simple things. First, we have to live with a multiplicity of different, often-contradictory voices. Second, we can make sense of them and communicate with each other. This book would not have appeared without the help of such institutions as the University of the Social Sciences and Humanities, the Foundation for Polish Science’s Program Academic Grants for Professors, and the WRO Art Center.

NOTES 1. Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination. A History of Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research 1923-1950 (London: Heinemann, 1973), p. xiv. 2. Jerzy Szacki, Kontrrewolucyjne paradoksy: wizje świata francuskich antagonistów Wielkiej Rewolucji, 1789-1815 [Counter-Revolutionary Paradoxes: The WorldViews of the French Antagonists of the Great Revolution, 1789-1815] (Warszawa: Państwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe, 1965). 3. Leszek Kołakowski, Świadomość religijna i więź kościelna. Studia nad chrześcijaństwem bezwyznaniowym siedemnastego wieku [Religious Consciousness and the Church Bond. Sudies in Nondenominational Christianity in the Seventeenth Century] (Warszawa: Państwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe, 1965). 4. Bronisław Baczko, Rousseau: samotność i wspólnota [Rousseau: Solitude and Community] (Warszawa: Państwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe, 1964). 5. Richard Rorty, “The Priority of Democracy to Philosophy,” The Rorty Reader, eds. Christopher J. Voparil and Richard J. Bernstein (Malden, Mass.: WileyBlackwell, 2010), pp. 239–259. 6. Lloyd Kramer, “Martin Jay and the Dialectics of Intellectual History,” The Modernist Imagination: Intellectual History and Critical Theory, eds. Warren

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Breckman, Peter E. Gordon, A. Dirk Moses, Samuel Moyen, and Elliot Neaman (New York: Berghahn Books, 2009), pp. xi–xxxvi. 7. Martin Jay, Marxism and Totality: The Adventures of a Concept from Lukács to Habermas (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984). 8. Ibid. p. 10. 9. Herbert Marcuse, Soviet Marxism, a Critical Analyzes (New York: Columbia University Press, 1958), p. 11. 10. Cf. Leszek Koczanowicz, Politics of Time. Dynamics of Identity in Post-Communist Poland (New York: Berghahn Books, 2008). 11. Martin Jay, Downcast Eyese: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press,1994), p. 16. 12. Ibid. p. 17. 13. Ibid. p. 592. 14. Martin Jay, Songs of Experience: Modern American and European Variations on a Universal Theme (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), p. 408. 15. Martin Jay, The Virtues of Mendacity: On Lying in Politics (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2010).

One PHOTOGRAPHY AND THE EVENT Martin Jay “The language in which photography deals,” writes the novelist and critic John Berger “is the language of events.”1 “With photography,” adds the art historian Thierry de Duve,“ we have indeed the paradox of an event that hangs on the wall.”2 If this is the case for all photographs, which record moments of time as much as objects in space, it is even truer for those photographs that claim our attention as historical documents. For history, we are often told, is itself composed not of mere happenings or occurrences, most of which fall into condign oblivion, but rather of events significant enough to warrant a place in our memory. But what precisely, is an “event,” we have to ask. And how do photographs record and preserve what can justifiably be grouped under that rubric? In this paper, I want to put some pressure on the concept of the “event” which has been the source of a very lively debate in recent French theory, and then offer some thoughts on its relevance to the still influential ruminations on photography presented in Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida. My goal is to flesh out and make sense of Berger’s claim that the language of events is the language in which photography deals, and in so doing illuminate the relationship between historical narrative and the photographs of the past. To make my case I want to focus in particular on what became known as “the events” of May, l968 in France and look at the discourse of “the event” which followed in their wake. I will finish with a quick glance at the photographs taken at that time by the distinguished photojournalist Serge Hambourg, which have recently been exhibited in the United States. What makes the choice of “events” to describe May, l968 so ironic is that for the previous twenty years the most influential historical school in France, that associated with Fernand Braudel and his colleagues at the Annales, had been denigrating the importance of a narrative history of discrete and ephemeral events (“histoire évenémentielle” as François Simiand had called it) in favor of a search for the deep structures that lasted over long periods of time.3 The reason for their hostility was put succinctly by Braudel in his classic work The Mediterranean: “an event is explosive, a ‘nouvelle sonnante’ (‘a matter of moment’), as they said in the sixteenth century. Its delusive smoke fills the minds of its contemporaries, but it does not last, and its flame can scarcely ever be discerned.”4 Imitating the social sciences with their penchant for comparative analysis, enduring patterns and statistical regularities, the Annales School eschewed traditional historical narratives of the lives of great men, the chronicle

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of political regimes, and the tactical accounts of decisive battles. Enduring or only slowly changing socio-economic systems and the collective mentalités of a culture were the primary focus of their attention. Disentangling temporalities, they bypassed the rapid flux of daily happenings for the more permanent rhythms of lasting structures conditioned as much by geography as culture. During that same era, French Marxism in the hands of theorists like Louis Althusser and Étienne Balibar also rejected the primacy of discrete events in diachronic succession in such works as For Marx and Reading Capital. By l968, however, the structuralist conjuncture was itself soon over, and many French thinkers began to reconsider their hostility to the role of “the event” in history. Sociologists like Edgar Morin and historians like Pierre Nora were quick to speak of the “return of the event.”5 In fact, it returned with a vengeance as the pendulum swung rapidly in the other direction. Even structuralists like Roland Barthes—still in that phase of his development— would now speak of the challenges of “writing the event.”6 Soon, “the event” gained an exorbitant meaning that lifted it beyond the conventional understanding of the term. By the late 20th century, it had assumed an aura of profound significance, which was manifested in the almost worshipful way a number of leading social theorists and philosophers came to evoke it. The question remained, however, of how to define its contours and interpret its meaning. What might count as the criteria of a genuine “event”? In what follows, I want to trace some of the efforts made by both historians and non-historians to make sense of the idea of an “event,” and then explore its implications for photography as the “language of events.” As we will see, the revival of interest in events had, broadly speaking, two very different implications. To anticipate our conclusion, it could express a renewed faith in narrative as the essential mode of historical presentation, with events functioning as a pivotal moment in a meaningful story, or it could betoken an even more radical discrediting of narrative than had the alternative interest in enduring structures. In the latter case, “event” was the marker of something so profound or so ineffable that no coherent story could contain it. With the help of Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida, we will try to understand how this tension also informed the photograph, in particular the historical photograph. ONE Among the first to challenge the structuralist dismissal of events was the philosopher Jean-François Lyotard, who did so in an introduction to a book that was ultimately never published on what was then called the “March 22 Movement.”7 The title referred to students at the university in Nanterre who had occupied the administration building to protest the arrest of six leaders of the National Vietnam Committee, which took place on March 22, 1968. In this short piece, Lyotard distinguished between “the system” and the “event.” The former was designed to regulate “the entry, distribution, and the elimination of

Photography and the Event

11

the energy that [an ensemble of persons] spends in order to exist,” 8 and was manifested in institutions that bind the energy in a field of circulating objects, such as an economy, a language or a kinship network. A structuralist analysis based on Saussurean linguistics, Lyotard, argued, was inadequate to define its workings, for it lacks the ability to explain revolutionary eruptions, which involve a “dimension of force that escapes the logic of the signifier.”9 History is precisely the discipline—as opposed to political economy, social anthropology and linguistics—that takes seriously the consideration of these forces, which it understands as events. “One could call an event,” Lyotard explained, “the impact, on the system, of floods of energy such that the system does not manage to bind and channel this energy; the event would be the traumatic encounter of energy with the regulating institutions.”10 The self-regulating system that is capitalism, Lyotard continued, is confronted with such events either when its attempts to colonize previous modes of social life are met with resistance or when energy in the present cannot be fully regulated and tamed. In the latter case, which was the one that most interested him in the wake of May 1968, there were two orders of events, which he called quantitative and qualitative, the latter being more “enigmatic.”11 The first involved those traditional Marxist favorites: overproduction and technological unemployment. Although Lyotard, not yet past his Marxist phase, did not deny their importance, he was more interested in the second, “when the very forms through which energy is rendered circulable (the institutions, in the sense that I have given to the term) cease to be able to harness that energy— they become obsolete. The relationship between energy and its regulation undergoes a mutation. This enigma is thus the only event worthy of the name, when the regulator encounters energy that it cannot bind.”12 To make sense of that unbindable energy, Lyotard turned to the theory of “libidinal economy,” which he was developing around the same time.13 “The event, as a qualitative force,” he wrote, “is an inexplicable mutation in the position of desire.”14 The March 22nd movement, Lyotard concluded with an optimism that would soon prove unwarranted, is an event in all senses, but insofar as it belongs to the qualitative type, “it has performed a work of unbinding, an antipolitical work, that brings about the collapse rather than the reinforcement of the system.”15 Even after it no longer signified a revolutionary rupture threatening the system, as it ceased doing after Lyotard’s turn away from Marxism to post-modernism, “the event” nonetheless remained a figure of radical disruption and incommensurability. In fact, it came to function for Lyotard as a kind of marker of absolute freedom.16 In his 1982 discussion of Kant’s philosophy of history in “The Sign of History,” he focused on the German term Begebenheit, translated as “event,” which when “delivered in human historical experience must indicate a cause the occurrence of which remains undetermined (unbestimmt) with respect to time (in Ansehung der Zeit)—and we recognize in this rule the clause stating the independence of causality by freedom from the diachronic series of the mechanical world.”17 In connection with the French Revolution, Lyotard

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claimed, the “event” was understood by Kant as related to the sublime because of its resistance to subsumption under cognitive categories and its accompaniment by the emotion of “enthusiasm.” In the present, he concluded, a Begebenheit eludes both the constraining power of the dominating subject and the attempt of capitalist rationalization to contain it. While Lyotard was elaborating his notion of the “event” as a mark of radical freedom, sublime unrepresentatiblity and unrecuperable libidinal energy, it was also being idiosyncratically developed in the work of another thinker whose mark on what became known as post-structuralist thought was no less profound: Gilles Deleuze. In The Logic of Sense, published in 1969, Deleuze gave the concept of the event special attention. There is no easy way to paraphrase the convoluted and challenging arguments of this remarkable book, but a few tentative observations are in order. The Logic of Sense begins significantly with an evocation of the enigmatic works of Lewis Carroll, which, Deleuze tells us, “involve a category of very special things: events, pure events.”18 These he defines as “the simultaneity of a becoming whose characteristic is to elude the present. Insofar as it eludes the present, becoming does not tolerate the separation or the distinction of before and after, or of past and future.”19 Paradoxically, events affirm both directions at once, “active and passive, cause and effect, more and less, too much and not enough, already and not yet. The infinitely divisible event is always both at once. It is eternally that which has just happened and that which is about to happen, but never that which is happening.”20 Operating on the surface rather than on some putatively deeper level, not even the rabbit hole into which Alice first tumbled in Lewis Carroll’s tale, events have no sense beyond themselves, no latent meaning into which they can be translated. They are the folds in being that interrupt states of affairs like flashes of lightning in a darkened sky, virtual potentialities immanent in what is actual. Deleuze was clearly a philosopher with no intention of turning his theory of the event into a tool for the writing of history in any plausible sense of the term,21 but his idea of the event was soon incorporated into the thinking of another post-structuralist luminary, Michel Foucault, whose archeological and genealogical methods were intended to help us make sense of the past.22 Although a student of Althusser and initially grouped among the structuralists,23 by the l970’s Foucault was rapidly moving away from many of their most fundamental assumptions. The shift is evident in his review of two books by Gilles Deleuze in l970, The Logic of Sense and Difference and Repetition, in which Foucault explicitly interpreted the philosopher’s work as a repudiation of structuralism’s disdain for “the event.” Deleuze’s anti-phenomenological philosophy, a nomadic affirmation of theatrical surfaces rather than cognitive or meaningful depths, was a heady mixture of Nietzsche and Spinoza, and as such might seem scarcely applicable to historical analysis. Foucault nonetheless seems to have found at least some inspiration in it for his recovery of the importance of the event. But it was, to be sure, a version of the event in no way comparable to what had normally informed the narrative historiography

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disdained by structuralists in the l960’s. Whereas the latter situated events in an emplotted story as critical turning points or sites of heightened meaning, fully integrated into a pattern of development or decline, he followed Deleuze in stressing their idiosyncratic and irreducible singularity. But unlike Lyotard, Foucault did not assume that each event was an irruption of utter incommensurability and absolute freedom. In his inaugural lecture at the Collège de France in l970, he emphasized the importance of seeking to reveal new ensembles of events on all levels of the decentered historical totality. “What is significant,” he insisted with an implicit bow to Deleuze, “is that history does not consider an event without defining the series to which it belongs, without specifying the method of analysis used, without seeking out the regularity of phenomena and the probable limits of their occurrence, without enquiring about variations, inflexions and the slope of the curve, without desiring to know the conditions on which these depend.”24 There is certainly no “subject of history,” either actual or potential, whose intentionality produces events. Nor is there any unified process of historical evolution, dialectical mediation, teleological purpose or a single cause-andeffect determinism, as some earlier historians had assumed. But history did not abandon this quest “in order to seek out structures anterior to, alien or hostile to the event. It was rather in order to establish those diverse converging, and sometimes divergent, but never autonomous series that enable us to circumscribe the ‘locus’ of an event, the limits to its fluidity and the conditions of its emergence.”25 Such series out of which events emerged had to be understood as discontinuous from each other, undetermined by a master code, and possessing a certain unmotivated randomness of their own. In short, whether understood as an irruption of freedom, as in Lyotard, pure, singular difference, as in Deleuze, or as a nodal point of multiple series of converging and diverging phenomena that allow something unexpected to happen, as in Foucault, “events” were no longer banished to the margins of historical discourse as they had been during the heyday of the Annales school prior to l968. In the hands of certain other French thinkers of the era, in fact, the importance of “the event” grew to even greater heights, which might be seen as more metaphysical—albeit negatively rather than positively valenced—than historical. I want to look at two theorists in particular before turning to the issue of what it all means for the photograph. They are the philosophers Jacques Derrida and Alain Badiou. But before doing so, we have to open a brief parenthesis to consider the impact of yet another celebrant of the “event” from across the Rhine, whose thoughts on the matter were profoundly influential in France, Martin Heidegger.26 The Heideggerian term of art that is most often rendered in English as “event” is Ereignis, which has a number of meanings and connotations not present in Begebenheit.27 Although it is most closely linked with sich ereignen (to happen or to occur), its sedimented implication of owning—from the word eigen—has also allowed it variously to be translated as “appropriation,” “the event of

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appropriation,” or even the awkward neologism “enowning.” At the risk of simplification, let me focus on a few salient implications of his complicated argument. First, it is closely linked with Heidegger’s mature notion of “experience,” which he differentiated sharply from the notion of “lived experience” or Erlebnis, which his earliest French readers had mistakenly conflated with subjective inwardness.28 Whereas the latter implies a world of pre-reflexive meanings that were located in the interiority of a subject, endowed with intentionality, the experience of Ereignis is more fundamental, passive and impersonal. Second, it suggests the appropriation of Being, as opposed to the trivial happenings of the beings of daily life, which take place on the more superficial level of the ontic rather than the ontological. The appropriation that takes place is, however, not that by man (or Dasein) of Being, but rather of man (or Dasein) by Being. It is thus far more, Heidegger contended, than mere Begebenheiten, which are “visible, dramatic, but superficial public events.”29 But third, its appropriation of man does not imply a positive presencing of Being in a moment of fulfilled time, a kind of secular parousia in which alienation is ended in a grand moment of reconciliation and home-coming. It is more a partial disclosure than a full possession. This is all very heady stuff, and certainly not very easy to translate into anything remotely helpful to a historian struggling to figure out what events are and how they can be understood historically. There were, nonetheless, three lessons that were important for the French thinkers who pondered these questions and tried to find answers that would be relevant to our contemporary understanding of the past and the historicity of our present experience, Derrida and Badiou. The first concerns the extraordinary importance put on the concept of event itself, which took it beyond the realm of mere happening or occurrence and connected it with something as profound as Being. Although both would distance themselves from Heidegger’s ontology, they absorbed his lesson that an event was an unusual and profound thing that opened up a tear in the fabric of everyday, mundane life. We have already seen Lyotard argue something similar, although from the Freudian perspective of a libidinal economy filtered through a Kantian notion of the causality of freedom. Unlike Lyotard, they took seriously Heidegger’s stress on the essentially passive nature of an event, at least to the extent that it was not a human appropriation of the world, imposing our meaning on that world or mastering or dominating objects that lay before us. An event was not the effect of intentional praxis, individual or collective, although it did involve a certain delayed response on the part of those who recognized it as such. And finally, they were in accord with his understanding of events as having a complicated temporal dimension that prevented them from being simple momentary punctuations of a continuum of time, incarnations of what Derrida famously was to damn as the “metaphysics of presence.” For Derrida, the event is not the hinge moment of a meaningful, coherent narrative. Nor is it a punctual moment simply interrupting a routine continuum,

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the revelation of an ontological truth hidden by trivial ontic occurrences. Instead, it is the intensified expression of the time out of joint that he called “hauntological” in his Specters of Marx.30 That is, it perpetuates the spectral trace of past traumas as well as the promise of a future—the avenir that is always à venir—always destined to be delayed in arriving. In one of his last essays, “A Certain Impossible Possibility of Saying the Event,” Derrida compared the event to the unanticipated and unreciprocated gift that disrupts the smooth workings of an economy of exchange. When it happens, “not only does it come about as something unforeseeable, not only does it disrupt the ordinary course of history, but it is also absolutely singular.”31 The arrival of the event is like something that drops from on high, a vertical interruption in the horizontal course of history, something that cannot be anticipated in a normal horizon of expectation. It cannot be fore-seen or fore-said (pre-dicted). Despite it having happened, it remains a kind of impossibility, or rather it shows the entanglement of possibility and impossibility. One implication of this description is teased out still further by Jean-Luc Nancy in a contribution he made to a volume entitled Hegel after Derrida called “The Surprise of the Event.” Surprise, Nancy explains, “is not only an attribute, quality, or property of the event, but the event itself, its being or its essence. What eventuates in the event is not only that which happens, but that which surprises.”32 It is not what happens, the advent of something like a birth or a death, he goes on, but that it happens that is the event. It is, Nancy claims “empty time, or presence of the present as negativity, that is, as it happens, and, consequently, as non-present and all this in such a way that it is not even ‘not yet present’ (which would reinscribe the whole thing in a succession of presents already available ‘in time’), but on the contrary, in such a way that nothing precedes or succeeds it: time itself in its arising, as the arising it is.”33 It is precisely the negativity that cannot be recuperated in a grand meta-narrative as in Hegel, the emptiness that cannot be filled, the discordant note that can never be harmonized, the rupture that resists dialectical incorporation. For deconstructists like Derrida and Nancy, the event is thus beyond the actual and the virtual or the present and the absent; it is a mark of hauntological not ontological reality, containing a trace, but not a simple repetition of what went before.34 Alain Badiou, the final theorist I want to consider in this exercise, adamantly separated himself from deconstruction, indeed from all post-structuralist philosophy in general because of its disdain for unequivocal truths. He also explicitly differentiated his interpretation of “the event” from that of thinkers like Deleuze.35 Nonetheless, Badiou’s reading of its role shares certain characteristics with those we have already encountered. Developed throughout his voluminous oeuvre, it is most extensively discussed in his opus magnum Being and the Event, first published in l988.36 As his title indicates, there is a certain amount of Heidegger in Badiou, even if his mathematical interpretation of Being—based largely on an imaginative reading of Georg Cantor’s set theory—distinguishes him from the German philosopher, with his privileging of language. When it

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comes to “event,” however, there are clear echoes of Ereignis, at least in the broad sense of a tear or opening in the fabric of everyday, routine existence. “The event” transcends as well normal knowledge of Being, or 'the encyclopedia' as Badiou likes to call it, revealing instead a deeper insight into what he calls “truth.” For Badiou, a genuine event is unfounded, haphazard, unpredictable, evanescent, an expression of pure chance. Whereas Being appears in mathematically legible terms, the event is “supernumerary,” outside of the order of the normal, not part of “the one,” but an “ultra-one.” It is like a gift of grace, an undeserved and unjustifiable donation, a religious analogy that is made explicit in his admiring evocation of St. Paul, about whom he was to write a later book.37 Not surprisingly, one commentator has called “the event” in his system the “twentieth-century avatar” of divine revelation, an apocalyptic moment of unveiling.38 Another has drawn comparisons with the religious notion of kairos.39 A great deal more might be said of the pivotal role of “the event” in Badiou’s work, but it is time to bring this part of my argument to a close. Despite all of the differences separating the French theorists we have been canvassing, a number of more or less common themes emerge. All of them reject the structuralist disdain for ephemeral surface events and search for deep-seated repetitive patterns. All invest the event with the pathos of disruptive innovation, either as a moment of freedom, radical surprise, libidinal energy, the appropriation of being, or the undermining of conventional meaning. All understand the temporality of the event as not simply punctual, bisecting the flow of routine time, but possessing a multiple time, hauntologically preserving traces of an unfulfilled past or signaling the emergence or at least promise of a radically new future. Or to put it in more colloquial terms, for them no event is ever a “current event.” If it has any basic temporality, it is that of the future anterior (sometimes called the future perfect), the time of what will come to be a completed past in what will be the future.40 The very singularity of the event, its resistance to being recuperated by contextual or conceptual meaning, serves for them all as a marker of distinction. For all of them, it is a sign of the ineffable, the surplus that always exceeds any attempt to contain it. Against the historicist faith in narrative development, they were attracted to ruptures and caesurae in the coherent flow of time. They were also often suspicious of the claim that events were self-contained mini-narratives of their own, preferring to think of them as necessarily involving iterative reworking after the fact, which led them to have a plural openness rather than meaningful closure.41 In other words, to put it in a nutshell, whereas most conventional historiography understands an event as a punctuating moment in a coherent narrative of development, the thinkers we have been following pit it against both structure and meaningful narrative, against both of what Hayden White calls “formalist” and “contextualist” strategies of explanation. 42 For them, “the event” is precisely what cannot be absorbed into either, signaling instead the radical interruption of smooth development, the surprise incursion of the

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unexpected, even the revelation of an ontological truth and the manifestation of a freedom that exceeds human understanding. Like the “derealized” events of modernist literature, to borrow a term Hayden White appropriated from Fredric Jameson, they rob “the event of its traditional narrativistic function of indexing the irruption of fate, destiny, grace, fortune, providence, and even of history itself into a life.”43 If events are understood as ragged and unexpected ruptures with temporalities that are neither punctual bisections of the flow of history into before and after nor climactic episodes in meaningful narratives of transformation, then we have to acknowledge the radical contingency of our post facto reconstructions, which cannot count on events as hinges in a coherent plot. We have to admit that events may be sublime objects of an unfulfillable desire, denying positive representation, defying our search for coherence and contextual explanation. TWO How can these reflections on the event illuminate the role photographs play, to cite de Duve again, as “events hanging on the wall?” How do they help us understand the special status of photographs that depict events we can call historical (or perhaps better put, those unique phenomena that somehow exceed banal historical occurrences)? Although it is always a danger to look for the essence of photography or assume that any single theorist has captured that essence, we can do worse than turn for an answer to Roland Barthes’ classic reflections on photography in Camera Lucida. There is, of course, a small cottage industry devoted to clarifying and criticizing the often cryptic arguments in that small book,44 and it would take a very long time indeed to present all their nuances and implications. But if we focus on the celebrated, albeit controversial distinction Barthes makes between a photographic image’s “studium” and its “punctum,” we can swiftly appreciate its relevance for our general discussion. “Studium,” Barthes tells us, implies a general interest aroused by the photographic image, an interest that is polite, moderate, docile, and broadly shared by a culture. It imbues a photograph with a common meaning, a meaning that is derived from an intelligible code and the prevailing rules of taste. “It is by studium,” he writes, that I am interested in so many photographs, whether I receive them as political testimony or enjoy them as good historical scenes: for it is culturally (this connotation is present in studium) that I participate in the figures, the faces, the gestures, the settings, the actions.45 If they arouse an emotion, it is that resulting from a certain cultural conditioning, ethical and political, that is common to all who are in its orbit. The photograph that generates only this kind of interest, which is more of a

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moderate “liking” than a passionate “loving,” Barthes call “unary,” by which he means an image that emphatically transforms ‘reality’ without doubling it, without making it vacillate (emphasis is a power of cohesion): no duality, no indirection, no disturbance. The unary photograph has every reason to be banal; ‘unity’of composition being the first rule of vulgar (and notably, of academic) rhetoric.46 If we had to translate the “studium” into the vocabulary of the event, it would be the event as understood by mainstream historiography, at least in its anti-structuralist guise. That is, it implies the event as intelligible in the context of a meaningful narrative, what we might call an historicist account of unique development with a recognizable plot. As such, events are understood to be explicable in terms of a linear temporality of succession in which there is a before and after, a beginning, middle and end. They capture what is sometimes called the “decisive moment” in a narrative, like a visual ekphrasis serving to highlight the meaning of a story.47 They also often function as episodes in a story whose ethical implications are not hard to interpret, the most obvious example being what has come to be called a Whig interpretation based on identifying progressive and reactionary actors and interests in a general story of emancipation. The counter-concept to “studium” in Camera Lucida is, of course, “punctum.” Unlike its consciously sought, culturally meaningful counterpart, the “punctum” unexpectedly happens to the beholder, like a wound or a prick made by a sharp instrument. “The word suits me all the better,” Barthes explains, in that it also refers to the notion of punctuation, and because the photographs I am speaking of are in effect punctuated, sometimes even specked with these sensitive points; precisely, these wounds are so many points….sting, speck, cut, little hole—and also a cast of the dice. A photograph’s punctum is that accident which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me).48 Is the “punctum” entirely the product of the individual beholder and whatever idiosyncratic associations he or she brings to the image? Or is the viewer entirely passive, opening him or herself up to what wounds and pricks without warning? Barthes hedges his bets on this crucial question: “whether or not it is triggered, it is an addition: it is what I add to the photograph and what is nonetheless already there.”49 As with the miraculous image of Christ’s face on the veil of Veronica, the photograph is an archeiropoietos, not made by the hand of men. Very much like the intransitive writing he championed in his earlier defense of the middle voice, it goes beyond the simple dichotomy of active or passive.50

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Unlike the “unary” photograph which has nothing but a “studium,” an image with a “punctum” is disturbed, split, often with a singular detail that operates like a “part object.” It is uncoded, impossible to render intelligible in a semiotic system. Garden-variety pornography is an example of the former, the unary photograph, whereas genuinely erotic photography exemplifies the latter. Although the completed object is missing, the “punctum” nonetheless “has, more or less potentially, a power of expansion. This power is often metonymic.”51 But it resists closure in a meaningful whole. Instead, it is a “subtle beyond—as if the image launched desire beyond what it permits us to see.”52 But the desire unleashed by the “punctum” is not for some future state of bliss or happiness or completion. Unlike the cinema, to which Barthes invidiously compares it, the photograph occludes the future. It is resolutely backward-looking, bringing into the present a moment that is inevitably past. What, we have to ask, is its link then with history, which also turns our gaze back into the past? Barthes is very explicit in his denial that, unlike a Proustian madeleine, the photograph can ever awaken the world of memory. “The Photograph does not call up the past (nothing Proustian in a photograph). The effect it produces upon me is not to restore what has been abolished (by time, by distance) but to attest that what I see has indeed existed.”53 It is thus not inherently an instrument of nostalgia, even though it sometimes can function as such. It is not in the service of anamnestic totalization, in which there is a “remembering” of what has been split asunder.54 Its temporality is in what the Greeks called the aorist tense, in which an action, pure and simple, is utterly completed in the past, with no continuity or repetition in the present. The experience of this temporality, Barthes tells us, is also a “punctum,” one of intensity rather than form, which conveys a grim message: that of the mortality of those who are preserved in the image, and by extension our own as well. “By giving me the absolute past of the pose (aorist), the photograph tells me death in the future…. This punctum … is vividly legible in historical photographs: there is always a defeat of Time in them: that is dead and that is going to die.”55 It is thus inherently traumatic, in a way that invites comparison with the traumatic quality of the genuine event as understood by theorists like Lyotard and Derrida, incapable of being assimilated easily to our normal consciousness of meaningful continuity. Rather than presenting a decisive moment in an emplotted narrative, it expresses what might be called the “indecisive moment” of a temporality that is inherently fractured. Whereas we might say that the studium of a photograph is of a conventionally understood event, which can be situated in a temporal order, its punctum is itself an event in the sense of interweaving the pastness of the moment when it was taken and the presentness of its effect on the beholder who is moved by it, but without reconciling the two. To illustrate the mixed nature of the photograph, especially historical photographs containing both studium and punctum in Barthes’s sense, I want to consider two images taken by the celebrated French photojournalist Serge Hambourg of the events of May, l968.56 The first, taken on May 9th, shows the

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Communist writer Louis Aragon addressing the crowd through a bullhorn at the Place de la Sorbonne.

In front of him, his arm raised and his eyes looking away into the distance, is the student leader Daniel Cohn-Bendit. It is a remarkable image in many ways, juxtaposing in one space the embodiments of the Old and the New Left.57 Although Aragon may still have the bullhorn, no one seems to be hanging on his words. Cohn-Bendit is clearly indifferent to Aragon’s harangue, his gaze averted and his hand raised perhaps to attract the attention of someone else in the crowd. Or if some license is allowed, he may be pointing his finger to an unnamed higher something that transcends the amplified words spilling out of Aragon’s mouth. It is as if the distinction Derrida draws between the horizontality of normal historical narrative, like Barthes’ studium interrupted by the vertical surprise of the event or punctum, is depicted in the clash between the two figures. But, perhaps it might be argued, the clash itself can easily be assimilated to a narrative of the passing of one Left and the arrival of another, and thus be understood as an expression of traditional historical practice or Barthes’ studium. There is, however, another element of the image which works perhaps as a kind of punctum, much harder to absorb into a simple linear narrative of succession. It is the expression of the bearded student in the lower left corner of the image looking intently up at Cohn-Bendit. Echoing countless devotional poses in religious paintings, it nonetheless has a troubling implication. Although his gaze is fixed on the student leader in a way that

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suggests he is waiting for an indication of what next should be done, his eyes look worried and his mien somber. It is as if he had a premonition that the student movement would be no more successful than Aragon’s Communist Party in challenging the status quo, as if he understood in advance the vanity of Cohn-Bendit’s transcendent vertical gesture, pointing nowhere. It suggests that momento mori of which Barthes speaks, which is especially evident in historical photographs: “there is always a defeat of Time in them: that is dead and that is going to die.”58 But perhaps reading it this way also remains within the realm of the studium insofar as it is informed by our later knowledge of the outcome of the events of l968. One detail of the photograph, however, escapes that conclusion. In the lower right hand corner, there is a slightly fuzzy image of a crutch raised in front of the tableau playing out behind it. It is a detail that the photographer, I think it fair to say, did not intend to capture, but there it is anyway. Once you notice it, it cannot be ignored, although until you do, you look right past it. But if it then works for you as a punctum, it disrupts both of the narratives suggested above, introducing an uncertainty about what it all means, if indeed it has any meaning relevant to the stories at all. Or perhaps better put, it shocks us into acknowledging the frailty of human flesh, almost like the famous anamorphic skull at the feet of the figures in Hans Holbein’s famous painting of The Ambassadors. A similar effect radiates from a photograph taken by Serge Hambourg two days later, on May 11, of a boulevard leading to the Panthéon. Here there are no people in the frame, the street is utterly deserted, eerily reminiscent of Atget’s celebrated pictures of Paris in the early morning before pedestrians and traffic disturbed the quiet of the scene. Taken from a low angle nearly at street level, the picture is almost all foreground with a reduced image of the famous building, where France’s heroes are buried, shrouded in mist at the perspectival vanishing point. Littering the street are cobblestones that had presumably been dislodged to serve as projectiles for the students battling the police the night before. One way to read the image is to contrast the proximity and presence of the cobblestones with the receding glory of the building celebrating the official icons of the old order. Fresh turmoil seems to hang in the air, disturbing the memorial peace of the imposing building with its famous motto “AUX GRANDS HOMMES LA PATRIE RECONNAISSANTE.”

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But there is also something already elegiac about the scene, its time being that of the morning after, when the streets are no longer filled with protestors and the government still stands. Are the stones ready to be picked up for a new battle? Or do they signal the dwindling of the struggle? What struck me as the punctum of the image, in this case a surprise that paradoxically counteracts the notion that events are always ruptures in the status quo, is produced by something that I bring from the outside: that is, a memory of the famous slogan of the protesters of May, l968, “sous les pavés, la plage,” (under the paving stones, the beach). Beneath the restrictions of the hegemonic order, so implied the utopian hope, lies freedom, play and happiness. But what the picture shows instead, and this is why its punctum is not assimilable to the dominant narrative of the May events as an emancipatory festival, is the sobering reality that beneath these stones are only more cobblestones, no beach. Here the event, we might say, is not an exemplar of Lyotard’s explosion of libidinal desire or Badiou’s gift of grace, let alone Heidegger’s revelation of an ontological truth beneath the flow of ontic occurrences. Instead, it expresses Barthes’ melancholic insight into the traumatic realization that death lies in the future, even for dreams of liberation. If photographs, historical ones in particular, are indeed “events that hang on a wall,” to return to our point of departure, then we have to acknowledge that they may well need to be read as manifestations of that elusive term in at least three registers: events as studium, in which they function to buttress a coherent narrative of development; events as punctum, in which they signal a rupture in the status quo, an unpredictable surprise that may signal the onset of something new and perhaps emancipatory; and events as punctum, in which they express the always already defeated outcome of such hopes. Perhaps the most powerful historical photographs, the ones that enter our collective image repertoire and refuse to leave, contain all three at once. As such, they are not mere additions to or illustrations of conventional historical accounts, more than just visual accompaniments of linguistic narratives, but instead richly evocative and invaluable links to a past that resists being fully mastered by the present. NOTES 1. John Berger, “Understanding a Photograph,” Classic Essays in Photography, ed. Alan Trachtenberg (New Haven: Leete’s Island Books, 1980), p. 293. 2. Thierry de Duve, “Time Exposure and Snapshot: The Photograph as Paradox,” Photography Theory, ed. James Elkins (New York and London: Routledge, 2007), p. 109. 3. As Peter Burke points out, the assault on events in the name of structure has happened before in historiography, for example in the Enlightenment with Voltaire and John Millar and during the early 20th century with British historians like Lewis Namier and R. H. Tawney. See Peter Burke, “History of Events and

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the Revival of Narrative,” New Perspectives on Historical Writing, ed. Peter Burke (University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992), p. 233. 4. Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean, Histories: French Constructions of the Past, eds. Jacques Revel and Lynn Hunt (New York: New Press, 1995), p. 118. 5. Edgar Morin, “Le retour de l’évenément,” Communications, 18 (1920); Pierre Nora, “Le retour de l’évenément,” Faire de l’histoire, eds. Jacques le Goff and Pierre Nora, vol. 1 (Paris: Gallimard, 1974). 6. Roland Barthes, “Writing the Event” (1968), The Rustle of Language, trans. Richard Howard (Berkeley: Farrar, Straus and Girou, l986). He finishes by declaring that “the critical aspect of the old system in interpretation, i.e., the operation by which one assigns to a set of confused or even contradictory appearances, a unitary structure, a deep meaning, a ‘veritable’ explanation. Hence, interpretation must gradually give way to a new discourse, whose goal is not the revelation of a unique and ‘true’ structure but the establishment of an interplay of multiple structures: an establishment itself written: i.e. uncoupled from the truth of speech; more precisely, it is the relations which organize these concomitant structures, subject to still unknown rules, which must constitute the object of a new theory” (p. 154). 7. Jean-François Lyotard, “March 23,” Political Writings, trans. Bill Readings and Kevin Paul Geiman (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993). Lyotard was not an historian, but his work often reflected on the assumptions of historical narrative, especially when they led to a single, normative “grand récit.” For an appreciation, see Sande Cohen, “The ‘Use and Abuse of History’ According to Jean-François Lyotard,” Parallax, 17 (October-December 2000). 8. Lyotard, “March 23,” p. 63. 9. Ibid., p. 64. 10. Ibid. The general importance of events in Lyotard’s oeuvre is discussed in Geoff Bennington, Lyotard: Writing the Event (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988). 11. Lyotard, “March 23,” p. 65. 12. Ibid. 13. Jean-François Lyotard, Libidinal Economy, trans. Iain Hamilton Grant (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1993). 14. Lyotard, “March 23,” p. 65. 15. Ibid. p. 65–66. 16. The identification of the event with radical freedom became one of the general earmarks of the post-structuralist recuperation of the concept, for example, in the work of Jean-Luc Nancy. See Jean-Luc Nancy, “The Surprise of the Event,” Hegel after Derrida, ed. Stuart Barnett (London: Routledge, 1998). 17. Jean-François Lyotard, “The Sign of History,” The Lyotard Reader, ed. Andrew Benjamin (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, l989), p. 400. 18. Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester and Charles Stivale, ed. Constanin V. Condas (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), p. 1. 19. Ibid. 20. Ibid., p. 8. 21. See Paul Patton, “Events, Becoming and History,” Deleuze and History, eds. Jeffrey A. Bell and Claire Colebrook (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009). 22. Thomas R. Flynn, “Michel Foucault and the Career of the Historical Event,” At the Nexus of Philosophy and History, ed. Bernard P. Dauenhauer (Athens, Ga.: University of Georgia Press, 1987).

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23. For a discussion of Foucault’s similarities with the Annalistes in the l960’s, see Thomas R. Flynn, Sartre, Foucault and Historical Reason. A Poststructuralist Mapping of History, vol. 2 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), chap. 1. 24. Michel Foucault, “The Discourse on Language,” appendix to The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (London: Tavistock Publications, 1972), p. 230. 25. Ibid. 26. The early reception, to be sure, did not normally focus on the concept of the event. See Ethan Kleinberg, Generation Existential: Heidegger’s Philosophy in France, 1927-1961 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005). But there were some French interpreters, such as Michel Haar and Jean Beaufret, who did note its importance. See Tom Rockmore, Heidegger and French Philosophy: Humanism, AntiHumanism and Being (London: Routledge, 1995). 27. In the voluminous literature on Heidegger, the word has been given considerable attention. See, for example, the entry on “event, happening, occurrence” in Michael Inwood, A Heidegger Dictionary (Oxford: Blackwell, l999) and Robert Bernasconi, The Question of Language in Heidegger’s History of Being (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1985), chapter 6. It should be noted that he was not the first German philosopher to comment on Das Ereignis, a term used, for example, by Nietzsche in Thus Spoke Zarathustra in the section “Of Great Events.” See Friedrich Nietzsche, “Thus Spoke Zarathustra,” trans. Adrian Del Caro (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006). 28. For an attempt to spell out the differences, see Martin Jay, “The Lifeworld and Lived Experience,” A Companion to Phenomenology and Existentialism, eds. Hubert L. Dreyfus and Mark A. Wrathall (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2006). 29. Inwood, A Heidegger Dictionary, p. 56. 30. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994). For a general account of his understanding of the event, see the entry in Niall Lucy, A Derrida Dictionary (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2004). 31. Jacques Derrida, “A Certain Impossible Possibility of Saying the Event,” Critical Inquiry, 33:2 (Winter 2007), p. 446. 32. Jean-Luc Nancy, “The Surprise of the Event,” Hegel after Derrida, p. 91. Elsewhere Nancy would link the idea of surprise with freedom, in a manner recalling Lyotard’s argument. See Jean-Luc Nancy, The Experience of Freedom (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), chap. 11. 33. Ibid., p. 98. 34. One of Derrida’s first discussions of the event comes in his early essay “Signature Event Context,” in which the event of the individual signature is characterized as both singular and based on what went before it and presumably will come after. “Does the absolute singularity of an event of the signature ever occur?,” he asks. “Yes, of course, every day,” he answers. But then he adds, “in order to function, that is, in order to be legible, a signature must have a repeatable, iterable, imitable form; it must be able to detach itself from the present and singular intention of its production.” Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), p. 328. Are all events, however, like signatures, singular, but iterable? 35. Alain Badiou, “The Event in Deleuze,” Parrhesia, 2 (2007). He describes the basic difference between them in the following terms: “In the first case [Badiou], the event is disjoined from the One, it is separation, assumption of the void, pure

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non-sense. In the second case [Deleuze], it is the play of the One, composition, intensity of the plenum, the crystal (or logic) of sense” (p. 37). Deleuze, he goes on, “chooses for destiny. The event is not the risky [hasardeux] passage from one state of things to another. It is the immanent stigmata of a One-result of all becomings. In the multiple-which-becomes, in the between-two of the multiples which are active multiples, the event is the destiny of the One” (p. 39). See also Alain Badiou, Deleuze: The Clamor of Being, trans. Louise Burchell (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000). 36. Alain Badiou, Being and the Event, trans. Oliver Feltham (London: Continuum, 2006). For a helpful overview of his argument, see Peter Hallward, Badiou: A Subject to Truth (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), chap 5. For a comparison with Deleuze, see Véronique Bergen, “The Precariousness of Being and Thought in the Philosophies of Gilles Deleuze and Alain Badiou,” Deleuze and Philosophy, ed. Constantin V. Boundas (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006) and Bela Egyed, “Counter-Actualization and the Method of Intuition,” Deleuze and Philosophy. See also the discussion of their work in John Mullarkey, Post-Continental Philosophy: An Outline (New York: Continuum, 2006). 37. Alain Badiou, Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism, trans. Ray Brassier (Stanford, Ca.: Stanford University Press, 2003). An Event, he writes, “is falsified if it does not give rise to a universal becoming-son. Through the Event we enter into filial equality” (p. 49). One wonders about the half of the species omitted by this claim, as well as the explicit Christian message it conveys. 38. Amy Hollywood, “Saint Paul and the New Man,” Critical Inquiry, 35:4 (Summer 2009), p. 869. 39. Antonio Calcagno, Badiou and Derrida: Politics, Events and their Time (London: Continuum, 2007), p. 98–109. He doesn’t simply argue that Badiou’s event is kairological, but says it can be enriched by introducing the concept as a way to describe the pre-political conditions that allow the event to appear. 40. An example of the future anterior tense is the sentence, “when he arrives I will have already have left the room.” 41. This feature of the event is developed by Andrew Benjamin in The Plural Event: Descartes, Hegel, Heidegger (New York and London: Routledge, 1993), where he argues that “the event can never be commensurate with itself since the ‘itself’ will already have been a plural possibility....What it can never have is absolute finality, the end as completion” (p. 191). 42. Hayden White, “Formalist and Contextualist Strategies in Historical Explanation,” Figural Realism: Studies in the Mimesis Effect (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999). 43. Hayden White, “The Modernist Event,” Figural Realism…, p. 74. Jameson introduced this term with reference to the novels of Sartre. White’s larger point is that derealized events are typical of modernist literature in general and should be understood as informing historical discourse as well. He adopts Eric Santner’s term “narrative fetishism” to define what he opposes. 44. For the most recent efforts, see Photography Degree Zero: Reflections on Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida, ed. Geoffrey Batchen (Cambridge: Routledge, 2009). 45. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), p. 26. 46. Ibid., p. 41.

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47. According to Elsner “[t]he photograph is a visual ekphrasis – interpretative, angled, chosen, made possible by a particular circumstance, the presence of a photographer in a specific time and place.” Jaś Elsner, “Art History as Ekphrasis,” Art History, 33:1 (February 2010) p. 13. 48. Ibid., p. 27. 49. Ibid., p. 55. 50. Roland Barthes, “To Write: An Intransitive Verb?” (1966), The Rustle of Language. 51. Ibid., p. 45. 52. Ibid., p. 59. 53. Ibid., p. 87. 54. For a discussion of the tradition of anamnestic totalization from Plato to Hegel and Marcuse, see Martin Jay, Marxism and Totality: The Adventures of a Concept from Lukács to Habermas (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), chap. 7. 55. Barthes, Camera Lucida…, p. 96. 56. They are included in the catalogue for his show at the Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, which was later mounted at the Art Museum in Berkeley, see Anne Sa’adah and Thomas Crow, Protest in Paris‘68: Photographs by Serge Hambourg, intro. Katherine Hart (Hanover: Hood Museum of Art, 2006). 57. The tensions in this image invite comparison with those detected in late l8th and l9th-century French history painting by critics like Norman Bryson, Tradition and Desire: From David to Delacroix (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, l987) and Christopher Prendergast, Napoleon and History Painting (Oxford: Oxford University Press, l997). 58. Barthes, Camera Lucida…, p. 96.

Two REGAINING EXPERIENCE? Dorota Wolska Even when certain topics are just academic fashion, they should not be disregarded, as Mircea Eliade suggests, because they expose the “spiritual and existential situation” of those who succumb to them. Writing about the structuralist fashion, Eliade points to its anti-existentialism, anti-historicism and fascination with fundamental, deep structures of the matter. I am not sure if we are dealing with a “fashion for experience” as the issue is resistant to systematic thought, but since the 1970’s a growing interest in experience has indeed been observed, both in academic terms and as a problem of individual and social life. In the latter case, Michael Rutschy discuses “hunger for experience” (Erfahrungshunger).1 It seems that we owe this return to experience to existentialism, historicism and fascination with the “hard surface of life” (as Clifford Geertz put it). In cultural anthropology, attempts to regain experience as its own research category are proof of retreat from limitations of the functionalist-structuralist paradigm of its research, but also from the traps of text-centrism, at least in Victor Turner’s understanding.2 “Experience” appears in various contexts—as a cognitive, existential and political category. It is situated within the boundaries of both humanist philosophy and particular humanities, including cultural anthropology, history and literary and cultural studies. It serves as a subject of study, but also a category systematizing the field of humanistic study in disciplines like history and cultural anthropology. In this sense it may be viewed as both a historical and “transhistorical” notion, in the meaning given to this distinction by Reinhart Koselleck. In his Songs of Experience, Martin Jay undertakes an incredibly difficult task of presenting the history of modern ideas about human experience.3 Jackson Lears begins his review of Jay’s book with a scene which, in his opinion, has been recurring for the last two centuries of the intellectual history of the West—a philosopher builds sensible reasoning in favour of authentic experience, which he nearly always defines as irrational. He has a deep conviction that we have been deprived of a direct contact with life, that full involvement in reality has in fact become problematic due to either social, spiritual and economic circumstances, or the perverse nature of the individual psyche. Experience becomes something inaccessible and external at the same time, a matter of fierce speculation.4 Does this scene refer to Songs of Experience? Right at the beginning of his book, Jay quotes Giorgio Agamben

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from his Infancy and History, who claims that modern man has been deprived of his ability to have and communicate experience. The question of experience can be approached nowadays only with an acknowledgement that is no longer accessible us. For just as modern man has been deprived of his biography, his experience has likewise been expropriated. Indeed, his incapacity to have and communicate experiences is perhaps one of the self-certainties to which he can lay claim.5 Walter Benjamin, Agamben’s major inspiration, and Theodor W. Adorno, who owes Benjamin so much in terms of understanding experience, its crisis and “salutary” nature, both appear in Jay’s story in the roles of those “lamenting the crisis of experience.” And I think this is one of the crucial motifs in the whole book. Jay also quotes Detlev Claussen’s opinion, according to which, together with reification and alienation, “the experience of the loss of experience is one of the oldest motifs of Critical Theory, which even outsiders from the circle around Max Horkheimer like Kracauer and Benjamin had already expressed in the 1920’s—further on, Jay adds: “But whereas reification and alienation, for all their subjective pathos, were philosophically generated terms, derived in large measure from a materialist reading of the legacy of German idealism, the origins of the idea of a crisis of experience lay elsewhere.”6 Where, then? Jay suggests those origins are not easy to pin down as they are rooted in Benjamin’s early life experiences, his First World War trauma, and may be traced back to his mystical thinking. As a result, the author considers the song devoted to Benjamin “the most complex and lyrical song of experience.”7 The genealogy of Benjamin’s concept of experience would therefore also be the genealogy of the concept of the crisis of experience. Clearly, what lies at the root of the undertaking called Songs of Experience is both the conviction of a modern-day crisis of experience and the actual presence of this motif in contemporary thought. Jay borrowed the title of his book from William Blake, an artist and visionary living in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. By doing that, as Jay emphatically points out, he did not intend to enter into any academic rivalry with the lyrical story of experience as the Fall. He borrowed Blake’s title because, in his opinion, it best corresponded with the subject matter of the book and his intentions as its author. Jay’s interest lies less in the “elusive reality of what is called experience”8 than in the “songs” sung about it, many of which are in fact more lyrical than analytic in character. We are therefore confronted with a story of thought struggling with an exceptionally resistant matter. Jay’s interest focuses on the way experience has been contemplated in a number of disparate traditions of thought. Hence the multitude of “songs” and the author’s firm belief that it is impossible to create a single metanarrative history of the idea of experience. The author settles for a polyphonic and non-conclusive story instead. He treats his task as a study in experience, understood the Gadamer way—undogmatic and open.

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Jay accepts the polysemy of the “auratic” term, as he refers to “experience” the Benjamin way, and makes another uncomfortable decision. Rather than force a totalized account, which assumes a unified point of departure, an etymological archē to be recaptured, or a normative telos to be achieved, it will be far more productive to follow disparate threads where they may lead us. Without the burden of seeking to rescue or legislate a single acceptation of the word, we will be free to uncover and explore its multiple, often contradictory meanings and begin to make sense of how and why they function as they often have to produce so powerful an effect.9 It is yet another reason for his choice of “songs”—Jay observes the strong emotional charge of the vast majority of deliberations about experience and disputes resulting from them. He concentrates his attention on committed “believers” in experience, taking into consideration the views of just two of its sworn “enemies”—Richard Rorty, a neopragmatist contesting the category which is so important for the tradition of pragmatic philosophy, and Joan Scott, a historian and feminist whose Evidence of Experience is one of the most frequently quoted critical voices in discussions about experience. Rorty is afraid that the issue of experience will open the floodgates for cognitive naivety, whereas Scott warns that it may obliterate the discursive construct of the subject. Both these critical approaches are based on the assumption of an inalienable and creative power of language within the framework of the linguistic turn. Using a topographical metaphor, Jay compares the results of his queries to a map of various meanings of experience. Richard Bernstein, a discerning reader of Jay’s study, admiring his reliability and immense range of material, at the same time observes that covering so much without formulating clear criteria of selection the author exposes himself to criticism.10 Bernstein accuses Songs of Experience of insufficient consideration for literary and poetic thought about experience. I do not think this accusation is entirely justified. The body of footnotes in Jay’s book, his references and comments, are not only a supplement to the main narrative, but an encouragement to follow some roundabout routes, including literary and poetic roads to reflection on experience. Bernstein points out that two figures who have changed our perception of experience—Husserl and Wittgenstein—are barely mentioned in Jay’s book. Jay also omits a discussion of the relationship between psychoanalysis and experience. Only three perspectives are clearly distinguishable in Jay’s study—Critical Theory, pragmatism and poststructuralism. Jay distances himself from the tradition of philosophy of mind, Hegelianism and phenomenology, which introduced influential concepts of experience in Western thought. Indeed, Jay tends to emphasize what results from the polemic with the Hegelian and phenomenological understanding of experience. What is, in my opinion, worth mentioning in modern phenomenology is the trend in which the future of phenomenological thinking lies in the radicalization of the concept of experiencing reality as experiencing sense. To express this radicalization process

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in a concise way, I would say it may be encapsulated by the formula: from an experience to an event. Let it be an answer to the process of deconstructing sense.11 Even though in Songs of Experience the author does not seek to explain what experience is by presenting or analysing a single chosen concept, at the beginning of the book he does put forward some general declarations concerning ways to understand experience. He rejects the alternatives of nondiscursive experience versus its full discursive mediation. Jay writes: Experience is at the nodal point of the intersection between public language and private subjectivity, between expressible commonalities and the ineffability of the individual interior. Although something that has to be undergone or suffered rather than acquired vicariously, even the most seemingly ‘authentic’ or ‘genuine’ experience may be already inflected by prior cultural models (an insight that novels, if René Girard’s celebrated argument about mediated desire is right, have made especially clear).12 Jay says that those poststructuralist thinkers who decided to defend the significance of experience should be credited with ending the stalemate caused by the alternative of naïve directness and absolute discursive mediation of experience.13 An experience, writes Jay, does not merely duplicate one’s prior reality, it is “a personal possession,” transforming and hence difficult to share, but it may “be articulated and become the stuff of group identities.”14 The history of thought—if we assume that social and cultural contexts are not epistemically innocent—tends to be exposed to two types of dangers, recalled by Bernstein. They result either from overestimating, or underestimating, the role of those contexts. The former case may lead to an accusation of reducing or simplifying the researched ideas and alleged falsification of their relatively specific intellectual history. In the latter case, criticism concentrates on excessive departure from the circumstances in which the thoughts are constituted and function, which in turn leads to simplifying the complex matter of the relationship between the history of idea and the history of culture and social life. Jay is too experienced as a researcher to fall into either of those traps; nevertheless some reviewers suggest that he rather approaches the latter polarity, and—as one of them puts it—“he seldom looks at the world,” another adding that he sacrificed historical contextualisation in favour of conceptual analysis. The advocates of experience often appeal for more attention to it on behalf of “reality,” “life,” “practice,” “authenticity of involvement in reality,” and against abstract thinking, theory and complicated mediations in our relationships with the world. When discussing politics and experience, Jay quotes what Hannah Arendt said in an interview conducted a few years before her death. Asked what occupied her thoughts, she responded: “Experience! Nothing else! And if we lose the ground of experience then we get into all kinds of theories. When the political theorist begins to build his systems he is also usually dealing with abstraction.”15 “The world,” however, may mean

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different things, just as experiencing it evokes various associations. And Jay shows this diversity in his impressively thorough study. He multiplies the meanings and contexts of experience. At the beginning of his book he admits that setting out on this “journey” (as implied by the root of the German word Erfahrung), he is ready for “peril” (embedded in the English experience) and has no idea how the journey will end. How does it end, then? Which territories does his map of experience delineate? Even though Jay first refers to the ancient Greeks and then begins his proper journey of experience from the Renaissance humanist Michel de Montaigne, to finish it looking for a “poststructuralist reconfiguration of experience” in the views of Georges Bataille, Roland Barthes and Michel Focault, the true boundaries of his research are set by the subtitle of the book—Modern American and European Thought, which in practice means the last three centuries. Montaigne, if not the first philosopher of experience then certainly the first thinker who gave it deeper consideration, who virtually set a paradigm of humanist reflection on this category, is for Jay—as well as for Agamben—an important protagonist in the story of the Western approach to experience. The humanist experience, as Jay calls it, becomes a starting point for further progressive fragmentation, destruction or problematization of experience. Montaigne offers no systematized concept, and Jay focuses on the holistic character of experience, its intrinsic and existential nature. His subject matures for better life, approaching death (references to death, as in Heidegger, save one from illusory existence) and even though he is rational and values cognition despite scepticism, his veins carry more than just the “lymph of reason”—also the blood of emotion and will. Wilhelm Dilthey complained that what flows in the veins of the subject of cognition created by John Locke, David Hume and Immanuel Kant is not real blood but the “diluted lymph of reason” (which in Kant’s case does not seem justified). It is a truly embodied subject. Montaigne’s attitude toward the body was that of someone who inhabited it fully as a lived reality, not that of an observer who could examine it from afar as an object in the world. Self-understanding, he demonstrated, should not be the same as an autopsy performed on a corpse, a sentiment that has earned him comparison with such twentieth-century phenomenologists as Maurice Merleau-Ponty.16 This holistic character of experience emphasized by Jay in Montaigne’s concept seems especially important in the light of the next episodes of his story, in which the protagonists treat experience fragmentarily, concentrating their attention on particular modalities. And for Jay, one of the characteristic features of modern thought is the modalisation of experience. Next to experience in the service of scientific cognition and entangled in the struggle between empiricism and idealism, we also have religious and aesthetic

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experience. In the case of religious experience, Jay initially refers to Kant as the thinker who exposed the experiential dimension of morality, showing how the rebellion against reducing religiosity to morality, and morality to duty, leads to Schleiermacher’s religion of the heart. Pastor and philosopher, Friedrich Schleiermacher appears as one of the fathers of 19th-century Lebensphilosophie. The valorisation of life is a source of understanding experience as Erlebnis, a notion which became widespread later, after the publication of Schleiermacher’s biography by Dilthey. The first to show interest in the history of the term Erlebnis were Hans-Georg Gadamer and Rene Wellek as Karol Sauerland writes.17 The distinction into experience understood in two ways—as Erlebnis and Erfahrung— recurs in Jay’s book, but is also present in most discussions about experience. (In his work about Erlebnis, Sauerland mentions that the director of the German Dictionary Institute in Goettingen informed him that the word has an earlier origin than the sources given by Hans-Georg Gadamer and Rene Wellek, and in neuter gender, suggesting its semantic independence, it was first used by Ferber in his book Blicke auf Sachsen in 1814. Paradoxically, its use is close to Ereignis, i.e. “event,” so important later in Heidegger’s vocabulary and rather associated with experience in the meaning of Erfahrung.18) Erlebnis is intuitive and prereflective, it connotes directness and emotional intensity, features which have always made it an attractive concept but have also allowed excessive subjectivity and irrationality in the treatment of experience. Erlebnis seems to be a notion which sometimes accentuates experience at the cost of the object, even though some of its proponents would prefer to see in this lived experience an ecstatic conjunction of the subject and the object. Jay’s “song” about Rudolf Otto, reclaiming the holy as the source, object and power of religious experience, resulted among other things from the fear that in the concern with the depth of religious experience initiated by Protestant theology, noumenal reality is reduced to experiential, psychical reality, discussed in depth by the American pragmatist William James. Martin Buber appears at this point, a fervent supporter of Erlebnis in his youth, participating in Dilthey’s and Simmel’s lectures, and later a philosopher of dialogue inspired by Hasidism. Jay also takes this opportunity to explain the reasons for the fall from grace of Erlebnis and the ensuing aversion to this term—Erlebnis was used in the discourse legitimizing the First World War as a special common experience, and was later to be found in the anti-civilisation Nazi rhetoric praising the primordial community of blood. What constitutes the background for the “songs” of aesthetic experience is the diminishing Western belief in the objectivity of beauty on the one hand, and on the other—progressively more and more liberated, autonomous and independent art, functioning in public space according to new rules. These changes allowed a new focus on the corporeal, sensual response of the beholder of art, as well as on his capacity to exercise the judgment of taste. The subject who emerged from this discourse was not, however, permitted to follow his fleshly desires and interests, but was instead

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understood in the tradition that culminated in Kant’s Critique of Judgment as inherently spectatorial, contemplative and disinterested. 19 Further interpretations of aesthetic experience undermined this tradition, calling for its “carnality” and a moral, cognitive, more creative dimension. John Dewey, as Jay points out, advocates the view that any practical experience has its aesthetic component. Because of the division into three kinds of experience, Colin Koopman refers to the Kant-Weber concept of modernism divided into three major spheres of experience: epistemological, ethical and aesthetic, corresponding with Kant’s three critiques. Koopman observes that Jay has belittled the significance of Kant’s impact on this key modernist “division” of experience, and thus on his own historiographic procedure, which results in the fact that the presentation of modernism in his work tends to be a specific uncritical selfpresentation.20 In fact, Jay distinguishes two more modalities of experience. By presenting political experience, he shows how referring to it may legitimize both progressive and conservative views, giving an account of the important dispute over experience between the British Marxists (the so-called “humanists”) and the Althusserian structuralists. Jay’s final modality is historical experience, a category which accommodates Dilthey with his criticism of historical cognition and key role of Erlebnis, Michael Oakeshott with his aversion to history, in which Jay sees Friedrich Nietzsche’s opinion of history’s “harmful effect on life,” and Robin Collingwood, convinced that history is not as much a modality of experience as in fact its integral part. Jay also discusses the issue of regaining by history its “everyday,” “common” experience, quoting as inspirations both the first attempts of “criticism of everyday life” by Marxists in the 1930’s (later followed up by e.g. Michel de Certeau) and works by historical anthropologists. On the other hand, in my opinion he does not devote enough attention to phenomenological inspirations in this respect. Cognitive, aesthetic, religious, political and historical experience constitutes its modern modalities. Critical Theory was the first to identify a crisis of experience resulting from its fragmentation. Pragmatism and poststructuralism are within Jay’s scope of interest as those schools of thought that could build the framework for re-establishing a holistic approach to experience, as well as looking at it from the point of view of its boundaries. American reviewers agree that one of Jay’s biggest achievements has been to give credit to American pragmatism,21 at the same time objecting to his insufficient attention paid to the “cult of experience” in American literature, as well as to what John J. McDermott called the “culture of experience,”22 supposedly the key to understanding the uniqueness of American culture. American writers mentioned in Jay’s book include Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman, but the author has been careful to avoid an overestimation of their role:

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DOROTA WOLSKA If, then, it is an exaggeration to claim that America has always had a culture fundamentally based on the valorisation of experience, it is far more plausible to argue that at least one of its most powerful intellectual movements did indeed give it pride of place: that small, but increasingly influential group of thinkers who became known as pragmatists … And in doing so, they also redirected its meaning away from most of its earlier versions in imaginative ways.…23

According to Jay, when experience returned to life, it was accompanied by the undermining by pragmatism of the traditional notions of subjectivity. This philosophical strand was excited by the desire to “heal the split between subject and object” and overcome the division of experience into its component parts.24 Jay believes that the contemporary renaissance in pragmatism is caused by its “antifundamentalist distrust for universalist axioms,” which once aligned it with European vitalism, later to assure the contribution of American pragmatism in broadly understood postmodernism. Rorty, once an analytic philosopher, then a declared neopragmatist and last of the heroes in Jay’s tale of pragmatism and experience, saw the excessive valorisation of experience as a threat for this antifundamentalist orientation of pragmatism. We may also add here that Rorty’s hostile attitude towards the validity and usefulness of experience as a category has contributed to the questioning of his pragmatist identity, a dispute which has not ended to this day, several years after the philosopher’s death. Despite Jay’s reservations, Richard Bernstein notes in his story a certain “metanarrative,” an ordering principle or pattern, and characterises the project as quasi-Hegelian, with emphasis on the quasi part. Jay seems to give up any general synthesis, and he also does not suggest that any phase be included in the one to follow. However, what Bernstein sees in the overall, humanistic concept of Montaigne’s experience is a structural counterpart to Hegel’s invocation of the naive holism of early Greek culture, followed by fragmentations and specialisations, and leading to the 20th century quest for an antidote to the disintegration of experience—a more holistic alternative. From the subject’s perspective, what we initially see is experience with a strong, fully embodied subject, which in the concepts discussed later gets disembodied, sublimated, reduced to selected mental faculties and spheres of sensitivity (the object of experience is also fragmented, composed of autonomous modalities of reality—science, morality and religion, art, politics, history), to be ultimately disinherited from experience whatsoever. Jay finishes his peregrinations through the history of experience arguing the fairly well-established opinion that the concept is finally losing its significance in postmodern thought. For instance, Jean-François Lyotard, quoted by Jay, says that experience, requiring a strong subject, should be banished to history as an obsolete figure of modernity. However questions concerning experience asked by Georges Bataille (a sui generis precursor of

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poststructuralist thought), Barthes, Foucault and Jacques Derrida laid the foundations for the “reconfiguration of experience” and despite efforts to “write its epitaph” they allowed experience to be still actively present in some areas of thought. Inspired by the poststructuralists, Jay puts forward a catalogue of further questions: Can there be experiences worthy of the name, experiences without the robust, integrated subject, which deny presence, plenitude, interior depth, and narrative completion? Can there be a non-phenomenological notion of an experience that isn’t so much actively ‘lived’ as suffered or endured? Must a plausible notion of experience mean refusing the insight that the object, thing, or other at least to some degree inhabits or haunts the subject, agent, or self?25 The pattern of experience which Lyotard rejects was experience referring to a dialectical narrative of meaningful development (Bildung). Three selected concepts of experience proposed by poststructuralists Bataille (“inner experience”), Barthes and Foucault (“limit experience”) are characterized by Jay exactly as opposing this pattern. Each of these concepts deserves a separate study. What connects them is the conviction that constructing and presenting them is in itself a kind of penetrating experience which is not reduced to its cognitive dimension. Experience is understood as a force-field, its subject is never prior to it and seems to be constituted together with it, the boundary between the internal and external is not unequivocal or easy to identify, and its meaning is never ready and does not materialize fully. Ending this part of his book, Jay quotes Foucault’s comment on his widely remarked announcement of the “death of man”: “man is an animal of experience, he is involved ad infinitum within a process that, by defining a field of objects, at the same time changes him, deforms him, transforms him and transfigures him as a subject.”26 It appears that Jay, unable to defend the “strong,” “unequivocal” notion of experience, sympathizes with this anthropological thought using experience to define human condition. In the final stages of his peregrinations, Jay wonders whether the term experience may signify anything coherent. He is fully aware that his way of relating the history of this concept may provide arguments to those convinced of the term’s indelible ambiguity, disqualifying any attempt at its operationalization. By way of conclusion, or rather instead of it, Jay identifies problems emerging from his research. First of all, he focuses on the tension between understanding experience in its general, often strikingly different modalities, and attempts to treat the concept as a whole. In the latter case, it is the Lebenswelt (or Lebensumwelt, as Husserl would have it) and the “lived body” that become the context for experience. Regaining holistic experience tends to be seen as restoration of a lost state of affairs, or—as in the case of Critical Theory—attaining a postulated state which requires world transformation. At this point, Jay observes that efforts to “regain” holistic experience may mean privileging one of its modalities.

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DOROTA WOLSKA Although the yearning for an all-inclusive concept of experience cannot be brushed aside as necessarily problematic, the jury is still out on the costs that even a successful overcoming of modalisation might produce. The quest for the holy grail of ‘absolute experience’ may ironically be little more than a vain desire for the purity of an innocence that can produce, as Blake knew, a songbook all of its own. 27

Another problem is the relationship between the experiencing subject and the object of experience. Jay notes a problematisation of this relationship caused by phenomenology, Critical Theory, pragmatism and poststructuralism. These traditions do not regard experience as a mere attribute of a subject confronting an object; it cannot be reduced to “the interior registering of or reflection on something that stands entirely without.”28 Experience “assumes” the openness of the subject, a confrontation with otherness which is always a danger to its identity. Yet another problem is the relationship between experience and language, a tension so often discussed these days. Jay observes that reactions against the linguistic “imprisonment” of experience lead to concepts which associate it only with moments of maximum transgression, creativity, and spontaneity. He would rather see experience as “the site of a productive struggle between all of these contesting impulses or demands, the place in our lives in which neither binary dualisms nor reductive monism rule out the experimental moment in living.”29 In his opinion, experience is something deeply personal, which at the same time may be to a large degree shared with others. In my view these are the premises that make the category of experience so attractive for modern humanist thought. The cultural anthropologist Clifford Geertz once wrote: The application of critical categories to social events and sociological categories to symbolic structures is not some primitive form of philosophic mistake, nor is it another mere confusion of art and life. It is the proper method for a study dedicated to getting straight how the massive fact of cultural and historical particularity comports with the equally massive fact of cross-cultural and cross-historical accessibility—how the deeply different can be deeply known without becoming any less different; the enormously close without becoming any less far away.30 This observation seems to contain a challenge which is still valid for the humanities. The issue of the cognitive accessibility of “distant” experiences of others (without their “empathic” reduction) emerged with the new wave of research on the Holocaust, initiated in the 1980’s. This changed the humanist approaches, treating the problem of the Holocaust as a problem of experience (usually limit-experience and traumatic experience) as well as one of testimony. It revealed the irreducible tension between experiencing the world

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and its cognition, but also emphasized the role of humanities in articulating human experiences. On the one hand, the category of experience serves as a reference for those who see the limitations of scientific models in humanistic fields, and on the other, for those who have noticed symptoms of advanced secular creationism in some elements of extreme constructivism. To simplify it a little, it may be said that the former associate experience with the hope of taking into consideration the dimension of life which is free from recognizable systematic necessities and has an incidental nature, whereas the latter seek a way to articulate the “resistance” the world puts up against us after all. 31 NOTES 1. Michael Rutschy, Erfarungshunger: Ein Essay über die Siebzinger Jahre (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1982). 2. See Victor Turner, From Ritual to Theatre. The Human Seriousness of Play (New York City: Performing Arts Journal Publications, c1982); The Anthropology of Experience, eds. Victor Turner and Edward M. Bruner (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1986). 3. Martin Jay, Songs of Experience: Modern American and European Variations on a Universal Theme (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2005). 4. Jackson Lears, “Keeping it Real,” The Nation (June 2006). 5. Giorgio Agamben, Infancy and History: Essays on the Destruction of Experience, trans. Liz Heron (London: Verso, 2007), p. 15. 6. See Jay, Songs of Experience…, p. 313; Detlev Claussen, Theodor W. Adorno: Ein letztes Genie (Frankfurt: S. Fischer, 2003), p. 20. 7. Jay, Songs of Experience..., p. 314. 8. Ibid., p. 1. 9. Ibid., p. 3. 10. Richard Bernstein, rew. of Jay, Songs of Experience, Bryn Mawr Review of Comaparative Literature, 5:2 (Winter 2006). 11. See, e.g., Bernhard Waldenfels, Topographie des Fremden, Studien zur Phänomenologie des Fremden (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1997). 12. Ibid., pp. 6–7. 13. See Martin Jay, “Granice doświadczenia granicznego: Bataille i Foucault,” Nie pytajcie mnie, kim jestem. Michel Foucault dzisiaj, ed. Marek Kwiek (Poznań: Wydawnictwo Naukowe Uniwersytetu Adama Mickiewicza, 1998), p. 59. 14. Ibid., p. 21. 15. Hannah Arendt, “On Hannah Arendt,” Hannah Arendt: The Recovery of the Public World, ed. Melvin A. Hill (New York: St. Martin Press, 1979), p. 308; quoted by Jay, Songs of Experience…, pp. 176–177. 16. Jay, Songs of Experience…, p. 27. 17. Karol Sauerland, „Od ‘wyobraźni’ do ‘przeżycia’, czyli droga do Diltheya,” Studia z estetyki niemieckiej: Od Diltheya do Adorna (Warszawa: Państwowy Instytut Wydawniczy, 1986).

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18. Ibid., pp. 9–66. 19. Jay, Songs of Experience…, p. 168. 20. Colin Koopman, http://www.symposium-journal.com/issues/Vol10no2/rewJAY.htm, accessed 23 December 2008. 21. See Bernstein, rev. of Jay, Songs of Experience…. 22. John J. McDermott, The Culture of Experience. Philosophical Essays in the American Grain (New York: New York University Press, 1976). 23. Jay, Songs of Experience..., p. 268–269. 24. Ibid., p. 314. 25. Ibid., p. 367. 26. Michel Foucault, “Adorno, Horkheimer, and Marcuse: Who is a Negator of History?,” Remarks on Marx: Converstions with Duccio Trombadori, trans. R. James Goldstein and James Cascaito (New York: Semiotext(e), 1991), p. 124; quoted by Jay, Songs of Experience…, p. 400. 27. Jay, Songs of Experience..., p. 403. 28. Ibid. 29. Ibid., p. 404. 30. Clifford Geertz, Local Knowledge. Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology (New York: Basic Books, 1983), p. 48. 31. Text based on a chapter from my book Odzyskać doświadczenie. Sporny problem humanistyki współczesnej [Regaining Experience. The Humanist Contention] (Kraków: Universitas, 2012), and “Konfiguracje i rekonfiguracje doświadczenia,” Teksty Drugie, 4 (2009).

Three DECONSTRUCTION AND HERMENEUTICS. ON THE CONTROVERSY BETWEEN JACQUES DERRIDA AND HANS-GEORG GADAMER Piotr Dehnel In his Songs of Experience, Martin Jay1 cites Jacques Derrida’s critical assessment of the fact that experience has always been referred to in terms of metaphysics of presence, which he finds both in Edmund Husserl’s experience of meaning and in Emmanuel Levinas’s utterances about experiencing the other or a difference. Jay reflects also on the 1981 debate between Derrida and HansGeorg Gadamer and stresses Derrida’s objections to the hermeneutical reliance on the dialogic experience. In this paper I would like to have a closer look at the aforementioned debate and shed some light on the question whether Gadamer’s hermeneutics can be grasped in the categories of the metaphysics of presence. Gadamer, the founding father of philosophical hermeneutics, and Derrida, the founding father of deconstruction, met in April 1981 in the Goethe Institute in Paris during the Text and Interpretation Symposium organized by Philippe Forget.2 Inaugurating the symposium with an eponymous paper, Gadamer discussed various elements of his own intellectual biography, which commenced with a critique of idealism and methodologism of the prior epistemological theory and was decisively influenced by his encounter with Martin Heidegger’s philosophical thought. Heidegger, namely, broke with Wilhelm Dilthey’s concept of understanding as a method of humanities and made it into an existential, i.e. into a basic determinant of the human Dasein. For Heideggger, understanding is simply a certain mode of being, and not a mode of knowledge. Such formulation enabled Gadamer to include the experience of art and the experience of history into the sphere of hermeneutics, both types of experience culminating in the concept of historically effected consciousness (wirkunggeschichtliches Bewußtsein). Nevertheless, what Gadamer saw as his own contribution to the development of philosophical hermeneutics is the dialogic principle applied to the phenomenon of language, including also the so-called language of metaphysics or the language of philosophy as such. For Gadamer, language is first of all the language of dialogue, in which words acquire their real sense and reveal their origins. The hermeneutical effort of understanding would then consist—most generally speaking—in restoring to the philosophical concepts an ability to speak in ways that are rooted in the living language of conversation, that is, in changing writing into speech and texts into language.

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Derrida asked Gadamer three fundamental questions. In the published version of the debate, the voice of Derrida was dubbed with a poignant title: Good Will to Power (Gute Wille zur Macht),3 which was not coincidental since the first question pertained specifically to “good will” and the duty of commitment to agreement in understanding. And so, Derrida asks whether appealing to “good will” as an unconditional axiom of any discussion does not simultaneously presume that “good will” remains a form of this very unconditionality, its absolute foundation and basis. In other words, does understanding really rely on will and should will be defined from the perspective espoused by Kant, who in Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysics of Morals wrote that “Nothing can possibly be conceived in the world, or even out of it, which can be called good, without qualification, except a good will?”4 Derrida perceives here a certain similarity with Heidegger’s description of the being of beings as will or as a subjectivity that wills; he also suggests that such a way of speaking belongs to the past epoch of metaphysics. Derrida’s second question is concerned with psychoanalysis. Namely, what should be done with “good will” in the context of psychoanalytical hermeneutics? Is it enough to extend the interpretive field of traditional hermeneutics and to include the experiences discussed by Freud and his followers into it? According to Derrida, what is necessary here is rather a structural change of the context of meaning and a change of the very concept of context, owing to which interpretation of a text would approximate interpretation in the Nietzschean style. We should specify here that what Gadamer has in mind is the context of a living dialogue, the experience of an authentic conversation, the voice which—though soundless—can be picked up and followed in our interiority. It is exactly this context, this reliance on the speech of a living dialogue, which seems particularly problematic to Derrida. What is the context then and what does it mean to understand the context? Is it an understanding based on continuity or is it a discontinuous change of the contextual structure itself? Is interpretation of a text supposed to grasp its meaning in the way we grasp a thread in a conversation and continue it or does “understanding” of a text consist in deconstructing meanings comprised in it? “Understanding” must of necessity be written here in inverted commas since in the latter case one does not grasp an intended meaning but acts against it. The third and last question Derrida asks sums up the previous two and also concerns the axiomatics of “good will,” which according to Derrida is not the basis of a dialogue and, moreover, makes dialogue rather problematic. What is the meaning of the axiomatic condition of interpretive discourse that Gadamer calls “understanding,” “understanding the other,” or “understanding one another?” We must always ask whether the prerequisite of understanding does not consist exactly in disruping the continuity and eliminating the mediation. At the end of his speech Derrida stated:

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Finally Professor Gadamer has insistently referred to ‘that experience that we all recognize,’ to a description of experience that is not in itself to be taken metaphysically. But usually—and maybe even always— metaphysics presents itself as the description of experience as such, of presentation as such. Furthermore, I am convinced that we never really do have this experience that Professor Gadamer describes, of knowing in a dialogue that one has been perfectly understood or experiencing the success of confirmation. In the tangle of this web of questions and remarks, which I abandon here in their elliptical and improvised form, can one not glimpse a quite different way of thinking about texts?5 Gadamer’s answer to Derrida’s questions reverberates with doubts about the possibility of a genuinely hermeneutical dialogue. According to Gadamer, the very questions Derrida has asked emphatically prove that the reflection on text and interpretation has not yet achieved its intended goal as far as Derrida’s position is concerned. The effort of understanding the other and of being understood has nothing in common with metaphysics or the Kantian concept of “good will.” For Gadamer, “good will” means what Plato called eumeneis elenchoi. The point is not to maintain one’s own stance and detect weaknesses in the interlocutor’s opinions. It is rather the other way round: the interlocutor’s position should be strengthened for his utterances to become legible and clear. It is a simple matter-of-fact statement which does not have anything to do with any “appeal,” and even less to do with ethics. Gadamer emphatically insists that whoever opens his mouth at all in order to say something wants to be understood. If it were not the case, he would neither say nor write anything. So when Derrida asks his questions, he must assume that they will be understood. In a sense this argument is a version of Karl-Otto Apel’s argument about the performative contradiction. Apel states that questioning of argumentation necessarily entails acknowledging rules of this argumentation. One who claims, for example, that interpretation is based not on understanding and continuity, but on rupture and deconstruction, must in fact assume continuity of understanding. He must assume that continuity occurs and that his own arguments will be understood by the other to whom these arguments are addressed.6 Additionally, contrary to what Derrida claims, the aim of philosophical hermeneutics is not to include psychoanalysis into it and thereby to extend a classical, and naïve, form of understanding. Psychoanalytical interpretation goes in the direction opposite to that of hermeneutical interpretation. This can be seen on the example of the attitude of Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics to psychoanalysis. First of all, Gadamer perceives Sigmund Freud’s work from the perspective of his own hermeneutical assumptions as striving after “true meaning” and restoring the interrupted process of understanding. Psychoanalytical interpretation first of all would aim at a latent meaning

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unknowable by the cognitive procedures based on egological reflection, and secondly would have a therapeutic character. These two aspects distinguish psychoanalytical interpretation from hermeneutical interpretation and, according to Gadamer, these two ways of grasping meanings should not be confused. Furthermore, psychoanalytically motivated interpretation can in no way jeopardize or undermine hermeneutical interpretation since they move in different directions: the former towards a meaning that is hidden and not yet made conscious, and the latter towards a meaning that is intended but never given in advance and is co-created by the horizon of our consciousness effected by history. In “Rhetoric, Hermeneutics and the Critique of Ideology,” which contains his polemics with Habermas and response to Habermas’s objections, Gadamer phrased the relationship between psychoanalysis and hermeneutics in slightly different terms. Namely, he states that unconscious motivations do not constitute any boundary for hermeneutical theories since psychotherapy can be described as a process of re-connecting the ruptured understanding in a continuous history which can be narrated. With its typifying opening onto the linguistic nature of all understanding (cognition), hermeneutics has its role here, which can be seen on the example of Jacques Lacan’s theories. Taking a slightly different viewpoint, i.e. not reducing psychoanalysis to its pragmatic component, one should—according to Gadamer—hermeneutically reflect on psychoanalysis anew and inquire about the relationship between a psychoanalyst’s knowledge and his locatedness in the social reality he is part of. The philosopher sees the social consciousness within which a psychoanalyst as well as his patient understands others and communicates with them as constituting the limits of his emancipatory reflection.7 To Gadamer, then, psychoanalysis does not mean another method of understanding the same thing; what happens here is a rupture rather than a continuation. However, there remains a problem: namely, when and how does such a rupture of the continuity of meaning take place? Therewith, the viewpoint of Gadamer does not seem all too distant from that of deconstruction, and anyway it is closer to deconstruction than to the stance taken for example by Paul Ricoeur, who depicts the difference between the patent and latent senses as a conflict of different hermeneutical paradigms.8 One side of the conflict is a hermeneutics that aims at exposing, demystifying or destroying the uttered meanings and represents the style of suspicion developed by Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche and Freud; the other is a hermeneutics of reconstruction or hermeneutics of listening, which aims at recreation of meaning in its fullness, exemplified in Heidegger’s and—we could also add—Gadamer’s works. According to Ricoeur,9 we should stop oscillating between these two hermeneutical paradigms and understand that in a sense both have the same object. For Gadamer, let’s repeat, these two different paradigms do not say the same thing, and in this sense he seems to be closer to Derrida. On the other hand, however, the very question of when and how they begin to differ assumes that it is possible to look at both of them from a perspective that does not distance them so radically but highlights their affinity, though not identity.

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If we had not gone a long way together, a difference, a feeling that we speak past each other, would not be possible, both when we talk to others as well as when the soul speaks to itself. To go along the same path?—perhaps so, but only up to the moment when writing appears. So, practically speaking, the same path has never really been there, because, according to Derrida, writing precedes speech. Writing, everything that we encounter as a written word, would always already be the breaking up with the immediate presence of the subject, and hence with the presence of voice/meaning. The written text actually demands that we renounce all our expectations of meaning, and our experience which could anticipate meaning in this or that way. Unlike Gadamer, one should stop reading a text with stress, modulation or sometimes gestures because one must not change in this way the signs of writing into speech, which change—as already mentioned—is the essence of hermeneutical understanding. In his texts, Gadamer repeatedly emphasizes that reading with understanding entails applying intonation and modulation which anticipate the meaning of the whole. Writing wants to be read. In fact there is actually no ambiguity of writing or sign; there is rather an ambiguity of what writing signifies.10 Following the exchange of opinions between Gadamer and Derrida, one could infer that they spoke languages which differed considerably if not completely, and that they moved in a space of reflection that was demarcated by marginal subjects. But it would be only a false impression caused by the elliptical character of their utterances and by something else that we are not likely to fully identify here. Lack of mutual understanding naturally belongs in polemics between real thinkers, and this lack is something more than simple misunderstanding, confusion or neglect of the proper sense. And the “good will” to understand each other is of no avail here since it is the spark of conflict in itself. Let’s recapitulate here: in the reflection of philosophical hermeneutics, “good will” is a pre-condition of all dialogue, whereas Derrida perceives it as a symptom of metaphysics already belonging to the past, a gesture too violent to be convincing. Hence the formulation good will to power. Is this assessment right, however? Gadamer directly rejects the Kantian context and refers, as we have seen, to Plato’s definition of “good will” as a will to make the interlocutor’s point of view into a standpoint that speaks with full strength of its arguments. What conditions “good will” comprehended in this way is an interlocutor, the other to whom we address our utterance. It is difficult to believe that Derrida failed to notice this. Philippe Forget is probably right when he says that the questions asked by Derrida are strategic maneuvers in the margins which allow him both to keep distance and to maintain contact.11 Actually, “good will” to understand the other is as it were an assumption known in advance to be difficult to maintain. Gadamer himself acknowledges this in the preface to the second edition of Truth and Method, in which he writes: „However one tries to see through the critics’ eyes, one’s own generally pervasive

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viewpoint prevails.”12 Basically, Gadamer reduced all his conflict with Derrida to the question of language: “What in the final analysis is linguisticality? Is it a bridge or a barrier? Is it a bridge built of things that are the same for each self over which one communicates with the other over the flowing stream of otherness? Or is it a barrier that limits our self-abandonment and that cuts us off from the possibility of ever completely expressing ourselves and communicating with others?”13 For Gadamer, the true nature of language reveals itself only in speech, and strictly speaking in a conversation. In conversation we always address the other, and we accept his point of view in order to understand what he says to us. A dialogue is a process of reaching an understanding on a given matter. According to Gadamer, many issues can be developed only on condition that we speak about them with the other. The more authentic a dialogue is, the less it depends on its participants and on the fact that it is being “conducted.” We enter a dialogue, but we do not direct it; conversely, it directs us. Each dialogue “has a spirit of its own, and … bears its own truth within it—i.e., that it allows something to ‘emerge’ which henceforth exists.”14 Such a hermeneutical dialogue always leaves a possibility to carry on, to continue “communicating.” That is why there is neither the last word nor the first word. Each moment new ones can appear; a new thought opens up to something else. According to Gadamer, philosophy should be such hermeneutical dialogue, or rather “enter” it, avoiding in this way the danger of becoming merely a monologue of a mind constructing a theory. This is what the discursive nature of truth requires. In the dialogue proposed by Gadamer, a written text is an “interlocutor,” the other. It is the text that is understood (interpreted), which means that as in a real dialogue, it can speak only due to an “interlocutor” (an interpreter), owing to whom signs of writing transform back into meaning. All understanding becomes thus an interpretation in the medium of language. But it is not the so-called language of metaphysics, or generally speaking “the language of philosophy,” but the language in which we talk to others and with others. The hermeneutical effort of understanding—let’s repeat—consists in restoring to concepts an ability to speak, which they have in a living language of conversation. It consists in changing writing into speech and text into language. One understands a text when one understands it differently each time, which does not mean a deconstruction of meanings present in it, a concept so dear to Derrida. The point is rather that words of a written text should turn out live and somehow relevant to us, and this in turn demands that each time they should be different because we are different, we keep changing, we live in different times and in different contexts which co-create senses that also keep changing. On the other hand, the experience of art, particularly what Gadamer called its “contemporaneity,” teaches us that “a single thing that presents itself to us achieves in its presentation full presentness, however remote its origin can be.”15 For Gadamer, unlike for Derrida, a written text is always an alienated speech and we need transform it back into speech and meaning. The philosopher discerns the methodological primacy of the written text because it

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allows the hermeneutical problem to appear in separation from all things psychological; nevertheless, writing also reveals its weakness and helplessness since—as Plato taught—speech written down cannot be helped by anybody if it yields to—conscious or unconscious—misinterpretation. Briefly speaking, for Gadamer writing is an abstract ideality of language, a self-alienation, the overcoming of which through reading becomes the most important objective of hermeneutical understanding. The objective will be accomplished when we manage to transform text into language, which is the domain and the task of interpretation without which the text does not exist. But on the other hand, Gadamer states repeatedly that the text is what is “given in advance” (Vorgegeben), what is “pre-scribed” (Vor-schreiben), a “pre-scription” (Vorschrift) which awaits reading and executing, or something that is dictated to us, a dictate (Diktat). In connection with this, Gadamer endeavors to show that as far as the art of the word, i.e. poetry, is concerned, word, sentence, discourse do not refer us back to the author and his intention. It is rather the other way round. Each reader feels himself compelled to the Diktat of the poem and text. That poetry (Dichtung) means a Diktat seems to him to support the phenomenological reversal which emerges whenever a work has something to communicate to us because of its own intention, through what it really expresses.16 In the Grimm brothers’ Deutsches Wörterbuch, dichten, from which Dichtung is derived, is related to the Latin dictare: “In French and English, this word [i.e. the equivalent of dichten, P.D.] is not used and its meaning is conveyed by s’adonner à la poesie, faire des vers; to compose a poem, to make verses, to versify and also to poetize. Dichten is the Latin dictare.” And Ernst R. Curtius in his monumental European Literature writes: “Dictare originally signifies ‘to dictate.’ Now, even in Antiquity, it was usual to dictate; and not only letters but especially compositions in elevated style. Hence from the time of Augustus, the dictare acquires the meaning ‘to write, to compose’ and particularly ‘to write works of poetry.’”17 It is to this development in the Latin language that German owes the words “dichten,” “Dichtung,” and “Gedicht.” “Dichter” and “dictator” are made of the same linguistic material. Dante calls the troubadours “dictatores illustres.” To define the text as a pre-scription (Vorschrift) that awaits realization reveals a certain similarity with Derrida’s protowriting. But the similarity is only a superficial one, since the Vor—and calling the text a Diktat even more so—suggests that the text is not exposed to a free play of interpretation, but that we deal here with a certain preservative force which prevents us from participating in such a play. It is the force of tradition in which we are entangled and from which we are never able to fully liberate ourselves to assume the position of an unbiased observer and look at the world and ourselves with eyes free from any prejudices. Historically effected consciousness (das wirkungsgeschichtliche Bewußtsein) is—as Gadamer repeatedly stresses—more of being than awareness.

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The concept of hermeneutical understanding breaks up with the idea of re-creating the original meaning, typical of Romantic hermeneutics. As Gadamer writes, if “we are concerned not with the individuality and what it thinks but with the truth of what is said, a text is not understood as a mere expression of life but is taken seriously in its claim to truth.”18 The Diktat of the text (writing) is not connected then with the author’s original intention and the whole effort at re-creating it. In one of his later texts19 related to the Paris controversy, Gadamer agreed with Derrida that the text does not depend on the author and his intention. Essentially, both philosophers loosen and sometimes entirely disrupt the connection between the author and his text, but there are different motivations and intents behind their gestures. As we have just seen, Gadamer stresses that what is said has its claims to truth and exposes the entanglement of a text in the context of tradition, which has an impact on us and constitutes part of our Dasein. Hence the author-creator is as it were a medium through which meaning and truth speak to us, both determined by the attempts human existence undertakes in its pursuit of continuity and unity of self-understanding. The rather declarative agreement, however, conceals diverse interpretations. Gadamer prioritizes the voice, its sound, which evokes a certain presence. For Derrida, the matter is more complex and requires a deeper insight into his concept of the text and textuality. Namely, according to Derrida, the author’s intention is a specific effect of the text itself, and more precisely, an outcome of the critical reading, reading which—we should add—is never completed. That is why the author’s intention is constantly exceeded by the text and its readings. While for both philosophers the intention neither precedes the text nor determines it in advance, but is located in the text itself, for Derrida the intention is comprised in the text as its organizing structure and is discovered in the critical reading, which distinguishes the clear, explicitly delineated argumentative line from a tendency opposite to it, concealed somewhere in the murky corners of the text. In his interpretation of Plato, Derrida focuses on the word pharmakon, which is entangled in a chain of meanings which creates a system, a work of the author known as Plato. Derrida writes: The system is not primarily that of what someone meant-to-say (un vouloir-dire). Finely regulated communications are established, through the play of language, among diverse functions of the word and, within it, among diverse strata or regions of culture. These communications or corridors of meaning can sometimes be declared or clarified by Plato when he plays upon them ‘voluntarily.’ … Then again, in other cases, Plato can not see these links, can leave them in the shadow or break them up. And yet these links go on working of themselves. In spite of him? thanks to him? in his text? outside his text? but then where? between his text and the language? for what reader? at what moment? 20

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For fundamental reasons, it is impossible to answer these questions. Such an answer would assume that somewhere there is a place where meaning is constituted, where relationships and connections actually come into being, for example in Plato’s linguistic competence. For Derrida, there are however no rules or principles which would in advance prohibit certain relationships and exclude certain meanings. The critical reading of Plato that he proposes establishes certain semantic relationships which are not conditioned by any rules or principles transcending the text; it is just the other way round— language seems to create them under the pressure of deconstructive reading. As a result, new interrelationships unknown or unexposed before appear between pharmakonon, pharmakeus and a certain cultural institution called pharmakos. In Plato’s Phaedros, writing was described as pharmakon, which can mean both a medicine and a poison simultaneously. For those who invented writing, it is a remedy supporting memory and wisdom, but for Socrates it seems to be as dangerous as a drug. At the same time, pharmakon is closely related to pharmakeus (a sorcerer, a magician), a name frequently applied to Socrates, who bewitched his interlocutors. The sorcerer in a strange city would have been treated as a deceiver, which is what actually happened to Socrates in Athens, where he was apprehended and forced to drink poison (pharmakon). Thus, as Derrida writes: The pharmakon is ambivalent because it constitutes the element in which opposites are opposed, the movement and the play by which each relates back to the other, reverses itself and passes into the other (soul/body, good/evil, inside/outside, memory/forgetfulness, speech/writing, etc.) It is on the basis of this play or this movement that Plato establishes the oppositions or distinctions. The pharmakon is the movement, the locus and the play (the production) of difference.21 The differentiating power of pharmakon is augmented by its relationship with pharmakeus. Expulsion of the deceiver from the city resembles elimination of writing, which pollutes the proper sense of speech and thought. As a representative of evil that brings confusion into the city, pharmakeus comes from the outside and is banished back there. The division into the inside and the outside is very complex here, but for pharmakeus to be able to play the role of someone who comes from the outside, he must first find himself among the people of the city. Writing presents a similar case; it can be removed, leading to purification of speech, only when it has found itself in speech. While in Plato writing is defined as pharmakon, the ambiguity of which is irreducible, in Jean-Jacques Rousseau supplement fulfils the role of such an undecidable. For Rousseau, the spoken word clearly precedes writing, which is only a support, a memory storehouse of speech, and in its sense also a complementation, a surrogate and a supplement of speech. But as Jean-Jacques, he writes his Confessions and dedicates himself to writing, which is in fact

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something more than a mere preservation of speech; it has a vital meaning, being—so to say—life itself, its fulfillment and refinement, and thus also a supplement. This double sense of the word supplement is for Derrida a key to understanding all the philosophical thought of the author of The Social Contract.22 In his reading of Plato, but also of other philosophers, such as Rousseau, Hegel, Husserl, Nietzsche and Heidegger, Derrida resorts to rhetorical layers to be found in any philosophical text in order to demonstrate through extracting “indirect communications” from them how the text denies “its manifest content,” acting against itself.23 Paul de Man seems to have been a master of such subversive reading. For example, in his interpretation of John Locke, he wrote: One has to read him, to some extent, against or regardless of his own explicit statements. … That is to say, he has to be read not in terms of specific statements (especially explicit statements about statements) but in terms of rhetorical motions of his own text, which cannot be simply reduced to intentions or to identifiable facts.24 Texts submitted to deconstructive reading actually contradict what they explicitly express and first of all undermine the hermeneutical primacy of the signified over the signifier, the meaning over the sign. According to Jürgen Habermas,25 such operation is possible only when a philosophical text is treated as a literary text, i.e. something a philosophical text never wants to be. What from the perspective of the philosophical content of the text, from the perspective of its directly or indirectly expressed meaning, seems to be incidental and irrelevant (e.g. the fact that pharmakon can denote both a medicine and a poison) achieves the philosophically more important status although in itself it is only “the rhetorical surplus of meaning inherent in the literary strata of texts.”26 Nevertheless, it would be a gross simplification to assume that deconstruction cancels the difference between philosophy and literature, between the contingent features of language and thinking itself.27 Derrida, as he claims himself, writes with two hands. On the one hand he accepts that, from the point of view of thinking itself, the fact that pharmakon or hymen have two opposite meanings is purely coincidental. In other words, he accepts the difference between the empirical dimension of language with all its figurativeness and thinking itself. Concentrating on things incidental and irrelevant from the point of view of philosophical reflection (i.e. on metaphors, equivocations and other marginal features of language) and playing with words, Derrida however is not merely playing a game, but trying to let the deeper logic of the text manifest itself, the logic which would anyway have revealed itself even without the opportune and economical ambiguities of pharmakon, hymen or supplement. Unfortunately, Derrida fails to specify in what way that would have happened. Here is where writing with the other hand starts, which consists in the radical questioning of univocal differentiation between the structure of language or text and the structure of thinking tout court, between the

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contingent and the essential. It cannot be ruled out that contingency and irrelevance are rooted in what we consider essential and relevant. When we treat philosophers’ writings as texts and not as statements or manifestations of certain stances, when we seriously approach their inadvertent and metaphorical language, new performative energies emerge in front of our eyes from the apparently constative language of the philosophical discourse. Metaphors are usually regarded as incidental elements and strictly differentiated from the basic and essential terms. And anyway, the essential content of the terms seems to be clearly distinguishable from the rhetorical form of the words. Yet according to Derrida, such demarcation is actually impossible. And this is so because it is impossible to find terms which would not be metaphorical. When, in Topics, Aristotle endeavors to philosophically define metaphor, he does it by resorting to the criterion of clarity and obscurity: “For a metaphorical expression is always obscure.”28 But, as Derrida claims, the criteria of clarity and obscurity are themselves metaphors: The appeal to criteria of clarity and obscurity would be enough to establish the point made above: that this whole philosophical delimitation of metaphor is already constructed and worked upon by ‘metaphors.’ How could a piece of knowledge or language be clear or obscure properly speaking? All the concepts that have played a part in the delimitation of metaphor always have an origin and a force which are themselves ‘metaphorical.’29 The language of philosophy marginalizes all products of “imagination” called metaphors and leaves them outside thinking. It does so with the help of its founding terms, such as foundation, theory, and concept, which are supposed to present what is non-metaphorical in the discourse, but they can accomplish the feat only through their rhetorical power. Thus they are metaphorical in themselves and cannot be subjected to any meta-metaphorical procedures (they “resist all metametaphorics”), i.e. their meaning cannot be explained non-metaphorically.30 Deconstruction’s double gesture should be particularly emphasized here. Deconstruction does not entail—as Jonathan Culler,31 an eminent specialist in deconstruction, notes—elimination of all oppositions: writing/speech, presence/absence, inside/outside, literal/metaphorical, in which the distinction between philosophy and literature disappears and everything vanishes in the general textuality, as Habermas wants to have it. On the contrary, the difference between philosophy and literature is crucial for the very enterprise of philosophy since philosophical reading, at the moment when it questions and undermines a philosophical text, starts treating it as a literary work pointing to the rhetorical elements in it and the power of the text’s “logic.” Deconstruction’s aim is not to abolish traditional philosophical oppositions or to achieve a kind of pan-textual monism, in which writing, absence, outside,

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metaphor, literature, or margin would become primary terms. Deconstruction of an opposition is a double-stage process and it consists not so much in cancelling the opposition as in dismantling and displacing it. In the first stage, deconstructive reading points to the metaphysical or ideological entanglement of an opposition by revealing its assumptions and the role it plays in the whole system of metaphysical meanings and by demonstrating how it vanishes in the very texts in which it is present. In the second stage, however, the opposition is maintained because an argumentation is applied which called it into being and because it is granted a different status and role to play in a given system. Differentiation of meanings into literal and metaphorical ones will operate in one way in the discourse investigating the functioning of language and it will operate in a completely different way when, in the deconstructive reversal, literal meanings are read as metaphorical ones, with the metaphorical sense merely forgotten or obscured and the metaphor itself not being a departure from the regular or proper sense. The opposition of writing and speech will mean one thing when both its elements are treated as two varieties of one, general protowriting, and it will mean an entirely different thing when writing is treated as an imperfect, technical record and representation of speech. We can obviously ask what purpose we should write with two hands for. Isn’t it a simple logical error to accept and not to accept at the same time, to use something and to combat it simultaneously? Isn’t the double gesture of deconstruction the proverbial cutting of one’s own throat? Answering these questions would take another paper, one rather difficult to write. I guess that everything depends on the consequences we would be ready to bear for embarking upon such a risky venture. Or perhaps we should not be calculating the risk at all? NOTES 1. Martin Jay, Songs of Experience: Modern American and European Variations on a Universal Theme (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2005), pp. 363–364. 2. The debate was documented in Text und Interpretation. Deutsch-französische Debatte mit Beiträgen von J. Derrida, Ph. Forget, M. Frank, H.-G. Gadamer, J. Greisch und F. Laruelle, ed. Philippe Forget (München: Wilhelm Fink, 1984). See also Dialogue and Deconstruction: The Gadamer-Derrida Encounter, eds. Diane P. Michelferder and Richard E. Palmer (Albany and New York: State University of New York Press, 1989). 3. Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Text und Interpretation,” Text und Interpretation…, pp.56–58. 4. Immanuel Kant, Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. Thomas Kingsmill Abbott (New York: Cosimo Inc., 2008), p. 9. 5. Gadamer, Text und Interpretation…, p. 58. 6. Karl-Otto Apel, Transformation der Philosophie, Suhrkamp, vol. II (Frankfurt/Main:

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Suhrkamp, 1973), p. 224. 7. Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Rhetoric, Hermeneutics and the Critique of Ideology: Metacritical Comments on Truth and Method,” The Hermeneutics Reader, ed. Kurt Mueller-Vollmer (New York: The Continuum Publishing Company, 2006), pp. 274–292. 8. Paul Ricoeur, Egzystencja i hermeneutyka: rozprawy o metodzie, trans. Ewa Bieńkowska (Warszawa: Pax, 1985), pp. 124–147. 9. Ibid., p. 140. 10. Hans-Georg Gadamer, „Frühromantik, Hermeneutik, Dekonstruktivismus,” Die Aktualität der Frühromantik, eds. Ernst Behler and Johen Hönisch (München: Padeborn, 1987), p. 254. 11. Philippe Forget, “Leitfäden einer unwarscheinlichen Debatte,” Text und Interpretation, p. 10. 12. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (London: Sheed and Word, 1975), p. xxv. 13. Gadamer, Text und Interpretation…, p. 108. 14. Gadamer, Truth and Method, p. 385. 15. Ibid., p. 112. 16. Gadamer, „Frühromantik, Hermeneutik, Dekonstruktivismus,” pp. 259–260. 17. Ernst R. Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), p. 76. 18. Gadamer, Truth and Method, p. 297. 19. Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Dekonstruktion und Hermeneutik,” Philosophie und Poesie, ed. Annemarie Gethmann-Siefert (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog, 1988), p. 7. 20. Jacques Derrida, Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1981), p. 98. 21. Ibid., p. 146. 22. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), pp. 269–316. 23. Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures, trans. Frederic G. Lawrence (Cambridge, Mass.: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1990), p. 189. 24. Paul de Man, Aesthetic Ideology, ed. Andrzej Warmiński (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), p. 37. 25. Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, p.189. 26. Ibid. 27. Jonathan Culler, On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism (New York: Cornell University, 1982), pp. 146–150. 28. Aristotle, Topics, trans. W. A. Pickard-Cambridge, Complete Works: the Revised Oxford Translation, vol. I, book VI, ed. Jonathan Barnes (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), p. 89. 29. Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), p. 252. 30. Ibid., p. 224. 31. Culler, On Deconstruction…, p. 150.

Four THE BEAUTIFUL ART OF COOKING Dorota Koczanowicz Die Kunst geht nach Brot.1 Gotthold Ephraim Lessing Man sagt: Die Kunst geht nach Brot. Aber ich sage: Die Kunst ist selber Brot, eine der Menschheit zu ihren geistigen Bestehen notwendige Nahrung.2 Hans Thoma I don’t think about art when I’m working. I try to think about life.3 Jean-Michel Basquiat ONE Eating is a basic and ordinary activity for us, but it may be and does actually happen to be something extraordinary. Passing from “ordinary” to “extraordinary”—this is the core of John Dewey’s ideas about art. Is this magic formula applicable to eating as well? Do we experience such a passage during exceptional culinary events? Can cooking be called a fine art? Can banqueting be a source of aesthetic experiences? Addressing these questions in my article, I refer to concepts formulated by Immanuel Kant, who in his Critique of the Power of Judgment determined standards of thinking about art which are still valid today. I discuss also the ways in which American thinkers, such as Martin Jay and Arnold Berleant, opposed Kantian aesthetics. In this context, however, it seems to me that the most fruitful idea of art is Dewey’s concept of art as experience. Nowadays, more and more people treat cooking as a domain which offers opportunities of self-fulfilment and can be a source of pleasure. Cooking ceases to be identified with routine and becomes instead a space of creativity and inventiveness. Gradually it is becoming acceptable to regard cooking as a creative activity, mastery of which requires predispositions, talent and practice. Essential in the process of preparing meals are the sense of proportion, harmonious fusion of ingredients and flavours and adequate selection of dishes following each other. What is it that determines the pleasure we derive from eating? Evidently, “taste” is the first, obvious answer that offers itself. However, we do not merely taste dishes; we also admire the way they have been prepared as well as the

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perfect proportions of colours, textures and flavours in them. Sometimes we are impressed by the master’s imagination, which has contrived unusual and surprising combinations. Novelty, nevertheless, does not always win acclaim immediately. As in the case of fine arts, the public sometimes need time to come to appreciate some solutions. A good cook must face the risk of the customers’ dissatisfaction because cooking does rely on tradition and excellence of workmanship. However, the best cooks must be open-minded and ready to experiment. Cooking is an element of culture and is subject to changes just as culture is. When tradition is the foremost value that a restaurant-owner endorses, the restaurant mutates into a culinary museum. A good cook is imaginative as well as innovative and has a sense of proportion. Of course we can ask whether and how culinary art is related to art spelt with a capital “A.” When we use such terms as “art of cooking,” “art of the table” or “art of tea-making,” do we merely speak metaphorically? Is it possible to find a language which describes the aesthetic status of eating, a language similar to the one used to describe, for example, paintings, and point to references which would enable us to discuss eating and cooking as a meaningful and profound aesthetic experience? TWO If we consider culinary art in the context of the aesthetic tradition, we inevitably doom it to exclusion from the discourse on aesthetics. This exclusion results from an ambiguity pointed out by Jay in Songs of Experience. He states that changes in the discourse on aesthetics have led to separation of art from religion and morality and have undermined our belief in the existence of a world of things inherently beautiful. It could have caused valorisation of the corporal, sensory reaction of the recipient. This has not happened, though. As Jay writes: The subject who emerged from this discourse was not, however, permitted to follow his fleshy desires and interests, but was instead understood in the tradition that culminated in Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment as inherently spectatorial, contemplative, and disinterested.4 Can such a “subject” derive pleasure from a good meal? Although Kant “[w]as not a sophisticated gourmet, he liked good food and first-rate wine. He also knew a lot about cooking so that Hoppel openly joked that Kant would certainly write a ‘critique of culinary art’ some day.”5 Such fourth critique did not come into being, but in Kant’s other books we find information on the philosopher’s ideas about eating and taste. His biographers tell us that until he bought a house in 1787, Kant would dine in eating-houses, or at his friends’ and acquaintances. So only when he was 63 could he repay their hospitality and invite them over to dinners. Then he could also select

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proper company and was not exposed to awkward situations like the one described by his biographers: One day—Borowski would recount—Kant left an eating-house, because there was a man there who, though sensible, spoke too slowly and pompously talked about trivialities. Kant hated such talk. For this and other reasons, he repeatedly changed eating-houses.6 He did not cook himself, but liked talking about cooking with women since he believed that woman belonged in the kitchen. He thought that every woman should acquire such knowledge in order to fulfil her life’s vocation in marriage. He advised that daughters should be trained in the art of cooking rather than in music because when their future husbands came home from work tired and hungry, the wives were more likely to win their love with good food without music than with music without food.7 The swallows of women’s emancipation clearly steered clear of Kant’s house. According to Kant, the experience of beauty involves distance and a disinterested imperative. The domain of taste, in its turn, involves contingency, lack of sensus communis, and, instead of distance, maximum unification. In his Critique of the Power of Judgment, Kant analyses types of our ability to experience pleasure. The source of the first type, called by Kant “the agreeable” (das Angenehme), is the body stimulated by impressions provided by aroused senses. As Jay comments: “Here the individual body with all its appetites and antipathies is the arbiter, not cultural or universal norm.”8 The norm becomes a primary factor in pleasures of the second type, that is “delight in the good” (das Wolgefallen am Guten), where pleasure is bound up with the need to do good. It has a utilitarian or functional aim. “In this case there is always a functional or utilitarian dimension to our pleasure, which is not an end itself.”9 The third type of pleasure corresponds to the first one insofar as the senses, and consequently the body, are significant here. This is where similarity between the two ends, however. Kant calls this third type “delight in the beautiful” (das Wohlgefallen am Schönen), and in his opinion it is the only form of aesthetic pleasure. Such pleasure excludes nevertheless any corporal satisfaction. It means experiencing pleasure in a disinterested way. …[O]ur sensation of the aesthetic object and its intrinsic properties or qualities need not coincide, as they must with an agreeable meal (food may look appetizing, but it must taste good to bring us genuine pleasure). Because of this distinction, we have no direct interest in the object, only in its representation or semblance.10

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Jay, however, leaves the culinary domain a certain hope of entering the aesthetic space. He writes: We enjoy an aesthetic meal, as it were, without having to taste and swallow the food, as in the case of certain variants of nouvelle cuisine in which visual more than gustatory pleasure, let alone actual nutrition, seems the main purpose of what is on the plate. It is the same disinterestedness that permits the transformation of the lust-arousing naked human form into the idealized, marmoreal nude and allows us to distinguish between pornography and high art….11 Yet we need to ask whether we can still speak of a meal if no “swallowing” is involved. Without “swallowing” is eating still eating? My answer is, “yes, we can,” and “yes, it is,” if we agree that a culinary experience is extremely complex and consists of a number of culturally processed sensory experiences. Such non-evident nature of both a culinary experience and the status of food can be vividly illustrated on the example of two poultry dishes. The 19th-century memoirs written in Polish landed gentry’s residences contain accounts of frequently amusing and surprising inventions of cooks. One of them is placing a whole capon in a big bottle. The trick demanded a lot of patience and skill. The secret consisted in skinning the bird so that the skin remained intact. The skin was then put into a bottle and filled with a mixture of eggs whipped with liquid fat and milk. When boiled, the mixture expanded and solidified, due to which the skin resumed the shape of a capon again. The idea of serving a false chicken roast was even more eccentric. The chicken was first given a lot of vodka to drink in order to lose consciousness and then singed over fire. Then it was ceremonially served as a successive dish during a sumptuous dinner and as soon as anybody tried to slice it, the sobered roast “resurrected” and ran away, to the amusement of the revellers. Such inventions were introduced not for the sake of gratifying the palate but in order to entertain guests. Let’s return to Kant, though. We don’t know whether he would be amused at the sight of a chicken running away from under the fork or whether he would approve of tormenting an animal for the sake of fun, but certainly he would praise the hosts for their efforts to entertain the guests since merriment, according to the author of Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, was an indispensible element of a successful banquet. And feasting is a profoundly human phenomenon; one can even say that banqueting in its turn is an indispensible element of humanity: The cynic’s purism and the anchorite’s mortification of the flesh, without social good living, are distorted forms of virtue which do not make virtue inviting, rather, being forsaken by the graces, they can make no claim to humanity. 12

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According to Kant, there is a difference between eating as a necessary activity which sustains the vital functions and banqueting which plays a number of various roles, with sustaining the vital functions being merely one of them. In his 1789 book titled Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (incidentally the last work published in Kant’s lifetime), he devotes a few pages to an analysis of social gatherings and to detailed advice supposed to aid a host in arranging a perfect banquet. For example, at the table there should be no fewer than three and no more than nine guests, the ideal number located between the number of the Graces and the number of the Muses. With more guests, one common discussion would not be possible, and discussions in sub-groups, according to Kant, spoil the atmosphere and have nothing in common with “…a conversation of taste, which must always bring culture with it, where each always talks with all (not merely with his neighbour).”13 In his house, Kant would not host more than six people at a time. There were usually three to five guests at his table, the number determined by the crockery Kant had at his disposal and the size of rooms available. Eating alone gives only corporal satisfaction. For eating to become significant, it must become a social event. Consuming meals in solitude can even pose dangers. Philosophers are particularly vulnerable to such dangers. Eating alone (solipsimus convictori) is unhealthy for a scholar who philosophizes; it is not restoration but exhaustion (especially if it becomes solitary feasting): fatiguing work rather than a stimulating play of thoughts. The savoring human being who weakens himself in thought during his solitary meal gradually loses his sprightliness….14 The philosopher’s blessing is conversation, which stimulates him. Kant appreciates banqueting, but ignores eating entirely. He states only that the meal should be good. At the same time he meticulously plans subjects of conversations and their sequence. Conversation at the table should proceed from relations through disputes to jokes. Relations concern recent events, news from letters and information read in the press. When this first appetite has been satisfied, the party becomes even livelier, for in subtle reasoning it is difficult to avoid diversity of argument over one and the same object than has been brought up, and since no one exactly has the lowest opinion of his own judgment, a dispute arises which stirs up the appetite for food and drink and also makes the appetite wholesome in proportion to the liveliness of this dispute and the participation in it.15 Arguing or disputing is an exhausting activity and dishes successively served at the table make those gathered blissfully idle, so naturally, according to Kant,

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DOROTA KOCZANOWICZ …thus the conversation sinks naturally to the mere play of wit, partly also to please the women present, against whom the small, deliberate, but not shameful attacks on their sex enable them to show their own wit to advantage. And so the meal ends with laughter. 16

Witticisms both please the other sex and amuse the company; however, these are not their only functions. Laughing loudly and good-naturedly aids digesting processes by stimulating the slackened organism. If we trace what Kant wrote about eating, we realise that what he saw as a crucial part of eating was a meeting of people, inter-human contact. What foods were served at his table is known only from his guests’ accounts. The guests would assemble in the host’s study at a quarter to one. Kant frowned upon those who were late since around one he would get very hungry, as dinner was his first and in fact last meal. The dishes served at Kant’s table were simple but tasty. The meal would start with a soup and tender roast beef garnished with English sauce. … The soup would be thickened with rice, cereals or pasta, and Kant would put some crumbled roll into his portion to make it even thicker. His favourite dish was bean- or pea-puree. Other dishes would include fish, butter, English cheeses, double baked crispy rolls, fruit, pastries, desserts, and of course good wine, usually light red wine. The usual portion was a small, quarterlitre bottle of wine per person, but some extra bottles were always at hand.17 Although eating has accompanied humankind since its very beginnings, when it entered the sphere of culture it ceased to be something uniform or obvious in terms of its meanings and values. The first banquet that we know of took place about twelve thousand years ago.18 At the banquet seventy-one roasted tortoises were served. The remains of shells blackened with smoke were found by archaeologists in the cave of Hilazon Tachtit in Israel. Scholars estimate that about 35 people could have fed on the tortoises. In the same cave, remains of the body of an old woman, possibly a shaman, were excavated as well. It seems that the tortoise meat was the main dish served at her wake ceremony. It is not the only banquet of old that we know of. In the vicinity of that cave, there is another one in which banquets were apparently held, too. A man’s bones and remains of three head of wild cattle were found in it. Undoubtedly a banquet also took place there because, as with the tortoises, traces of roasting and slicing can be detected in the animal remains. These ceremonies show an intimate relation between eating, religious ritual and ethics. Eating is not merely food devouring; it is a complex activity involving all societal and cultural references with their ambiguities.

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THREE Animals are my friends… and I don’t eat my friends.19 This quotation comes obviously not from Kant but from George Bernard Shaw. The German philosopher liked meat and his only worry about eating meat was that it should not be tough. He was particularly careful about it because most of his friends and he himself had problems with teeth.20 Kant excludes ethical questions from the realm of taste. We know, however, that the taste of meat is entangled in moral dilemmas. Art was aware of it long before the time of Kant. Moral ambivalence accompanying eating results from the fact that while still part of biology, eating enters also the symbolic and ethical realms. Eating is frequently associated with love and sex as well as with friendship, hospitality and bonding. One of the oldest ethical postulates commands people to feed the hungry and give drink to the thirsty. The power of appeal that these old ethical imperatives still have is recognised by marketing specialists. For example, one commercial encourages the buying of certain products, promising that some of the profit will finance meals for needy school children and exhorting buyers to “share their meal.” Such sharing and offering of food is the theme of “Hospitality,” a painting by Amsterdam’s Master of the Bodegon. This hospitality is, however, not free from ambiguity. The main figure in the picture, a man of quite an amiable face, stretches his hand holding a bowl with soup towards a stranger, a spectator. Yet the liquid in the bowl may not be soup but blood of one of the dead animals whose carcasses are scattered around. The price of hospitality is sacrificing the lives of “lesser brothers.” Eating is bound up with violence and death. Recently Poland witnessed a campaign against the inhumane treatment of poultry raised by the so-called battery farming method. Lovers of good food claim that eggs of stressed birds living in isolation from the sun and nature are not worth eating. Once, in New York, I bought a package of eggs with a letter attached to it from the hens, in which they described their happy life on an ecological farm. The eggs went into the making of a delicious omelette I had for Sunday brunch. Would the omelette have been any worse if it had been made of eggs laid by hens kept in oppressive conditions? Was its taste influenced by the letter I had read? I guess it is less important whether the letter itself was “genuine” or not. A culinary experience consists of many components and is extremely complex in itself. The proof of the pudding is in the eating, as an English proverb says. What is “eating” actually? Is gratification of taste buds its sole point? Surely what the dishes look like and what the social and cultural context of eating is must also be taken into account. Can the satisfaction provided by taste be separated from the aesthetic satisfaction? It seems that abstracting particular components making up a perfect meal is a pointless task. Even the most delicious dish can remain unappreciated if the way it is served discourages one from tasting it.

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Discussion of the aesthetic status of food features prominently in theoretical reflection. For example, Carolyn Korsmeyer in her Gender and Aesthetics devotes a separate chapter to the relationships between eating, cooking, aesthetic values and art. She concludes: I have argued for the inclusion of taste within the domain of the aesthetic but have not argued that food and drink should be considered art forms, especially if art is conceived along the lines of the fine arts. 21 Why is this so? Korsmeyer explains her stance in the following manner: The fine-art tradition is but one moment in the history of art, but it is one that emphasizes the autonomy of art and the contemplative distance between audience and artwork. Because of this emphasis, food simply does not qualify as a fine-art form in any recognizable sense.22 Even if Korsmeyer’s reasoning is logically valid we can still ask this question looking from another perspective. Why should we abide by the rigorous academic tradition? Why should we exclude manifestations of creativity in the kitchen from the domain of art? If eating is to be considered in the context of art, we need to refer to a theoretical framework which would show that poignant aesthetic experiences can have their source in common, everyday events. In this respect Berleant takes a far bolder position and proposes a radical reform in his Re-thinking Aesthetics: Rogue Essays on Aesthetics and the Arts: “Its central theme, that aesthetic value is pervasive and always present, challenges the Kantian axiom of its exclusion from the natural and moral realms and its independent jurisdiction in a separate domain.”23 In this way he critically challenges the Kantian tradition. Berleant asserts that postulates about the nature of art that Kant formulated were encumbered with assumptions from beyond the realm of the aesthetic. In his opinion, Kant’s theory is not applicable either to modern art or in fact to traditional art. Instead of aesthetic autonomy and impartiality, he puts forward a project of engaged aesthetics. Namely, art should not be treated as an independent object external to the recipient. Berleant stresses that art is continuous with experience, thus defining art as a quintessence and the most intense form of immediate experience.24 Perceived in this way, art exceeds the limits of the so-called fine arts. In the perspective proposed by Berleant, art embraces for example applied arts and handicraft as well as all other enterprises marked with “an element of human creativity,” including culinary art. Experience is the category central to the organization of Berleant’s reflection. He thus inscribes himself in the phenomenological tradition

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represented by Maurice Merleau-Ponty and in the pragmatist discourse on art as formulated by Dewey. FIVE As regards the issue analysed here, Dewey’s stance is of primary interest. Like Berleant, Dewey develops his theory in opposition to the Enlightenment tradition. Shifting the focus from the objective beauty of a work of art to the sensation the work of art produces, i.e. to experience, is convergent with Dewey’s general approach to art. As Jay puts it: No longer able to understand beauty as a function of intelligibility of an order created by beneficent―and very artistically talented―divinity, modern aesthetics had to rely on the subjective or intersubjective judgment of its human beneficiaries, whose sensual responses were intrinsic to the process.25 A recipient, an audience, materialised in the scope of 18 th-century aesthetics. Objective values were ousted by subjective sensations. The term aesthectica, introduced by Alexander Baumgarten, was associated with sensory pleasure and bodily experience. When the conviction of the divine origin of art … lost its plausibility, as it did with the disenchantment of the world abetted by philosophical nominalism and the scientific revolution, the door was open for the relocation of aesthetic value in the bodily responses―and judgments of taste―of those who experienced the work of art.26 These processes, however, would not have gratified Dewey. Discussing that, Jay reminds us of Dewey’s apprehensions occasioned by the risk he perceived of separating “the aesthetic” from “the artistic,” which in effect would lead to divesting experience of its creative aspect. Dewey was not satisfied with an approach that valorised experience but did so at the cost of turning a subject into a passive individual who, deprived of creativity, could only perceive and evaluate.27 In his concept of experience, Dewey abandons the vision of contemplative experience, in which the viewer and the object of art are clearly detached from each other. His is a notion of a bilateral relationship between a work of art and its recipient/audience. A work of art exerts influence upon a recipient/audience, but it is also in turn subjected to influence and shaped in the process of reception. No room is left in this relationship either for distanced contemplation or for the disinterestedness so emphatically postulated by Kant. Owing to Baumgarten and Kant, the Enlightenment witnessed the emergence of a new aesthetic discourse. As Jay succinctly puts it: “It was at this time, broadly speaking, that objects that had once functioned as ornaments of social and political power or were revered as sacred implements of religious

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worship were redescribed and newly legitimated in terms of artistic merit alone.”28 However, the “secularity” of art turned out to be merely illusory. Jay cites G. W. F. Hegel, who in his lectures on aesthetics stated that “…the corpses of dead cults could now be revivified in the guise of aesthetic objects.”29 In the course of time, public exhibitions and museums transformed into new temples. Dewey fervently criticises so-called “museum art,” which is dissociated from a natural context and becomes a fetish enclosed in a museum cabinet. The American pragmatist … hoped to transcend the distinction between the useful and ornamental in order to transfigure everyday life. The segregation of ‘fine’ or ‘high’ art in museums and galleries, abetted by the rise of capitalism, Dewey thus saw as largely pernicious….30 His concept of art as experience leads to democratization of art and spreading of art beyond the areas traditionally ascribed to it. Equally in the life processes of the individual and of society as a whole, Dewey perceives a profound connection to aesthetic values and art. He does not treat aesthetic experience as something specific, something isolated from other forms of experience. Rather, in his theory of experience it is suggested that it should be possible to add an aesthetic dimension to every human activity. “Art should be of the texture of life and nourished by life.”31 The notion of art understood as a condensation and improvement of ordinary experience carries with it, first, the conviction that there is an essential connection between art and life, and second, the assumption of an affinity between experience in general and aesthetic experience. “Experience understood in this way is close to the idea of human self-fulfilment in the course of life and struggle, and constitutes … art in an embryonic form.”32 Such experience has an aesthetic fulfilment and closure, which leads to its harmonious integration. Such experience happens when sensory impressions are smoothly fused with emotions, intellect and will. Experience is not other than nature, it is nature, one of her innumerable forms. In other words, ...the experience we are discussing here inevitably depends on the balance between the moments of activity and passivity, that is between active shaping and experiencing, because experience is like breathing: a rhythm of giving and taking.33 Dewey's aim was to interpret art so that it was not an esoteric affair but a widely shared and commonly enjoyed transaction. It is not easy to achieve complete harmony with one’s environment in the act of experiencing. In his Art as Experience, Dewey describes situations in which a human being undertakes an action, but proves too distracted, too little concentrated on the goal to consistently reach a satisfactory closure. Our lives abound in numerous experiences which are never fully developed, abandoned before the end or conducted carelessly. Eating can be a very prosaic activity

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which does not attract our attention. We can treat our meals merely as stages in metabolic transformations, but such an approach does not create room for culinary art. When we speak about cooking as art, we mean an effort invested in preparing food, the effect of which is not limited solely to „recharging life batteries,” but is extended to include sensations of pleasure generated by perfect combinations of tastes and flavours and a well-designed composition of products. The difference was portrayed excellently in the famous Babette's Feast. As Dewey postulates, even the most sublime art finds its essential pattern in the mutual relationships of a living organism with its environment. And according to Richard Shusterman, Dewey’s “somatic naturalism” consisted in underscoring the continuity between the normal human physiological processes, which take place in the natural human environment, and their more intense and concentrated variety, i.e. art.34 The naturalist concept of artwork, in which its primary model is “the process of life itself,” opens up the domain of art also for cooking and banqueting. SIX Food, crockery and kitchens have for centuries been objects of interest to artists. Initially they were treated as an addition to the main themes of the works. In the Baroque, they became an independent motif and theme in painting. In contemporary art a decisive turn has taken place: food and groceries have started to function not simply as a motif, but also as material of artworks. This phenomenon can be illustrated by works of such artists as Thomas Rentmeister (2007 untitled, a trolley in sugar), Philip Ross (mushrooms), and Sonja Alhäuser (Small Invitation, 2009, a sculpture in butter). The next stage on the way of merging kitchen and gallery is marked by performances of such artists as Rirkrit Tiravanija and Christine Bernhard (Archaeological Discovery, 2009), and Andrzej Dudek-Dürer (bread art). For Zeger Reyers the rearranged kitchen space serves as a location of artistic actions (Rotating Kitchen, 2009). This close relation between art and food is also confirmed by our linguistic practice which testifies that a good meal is something extraordinary. We speak of culinary art and call the best cooks artists. While gourmets agree that cooking is an art, contemporary theoreticians still have not reached any consensus on this point. Convincing the unconvinced is never an easy task. However, according to Dewey, [t]he function of art has always been to break through the crust of conventionalized and routine consciousness. Common things, a flower, a gleam of moonlight, the song of a bird, not things rare and remote, are means with the deeper levels of life and touched so that they spring up as desire and thought. This process is art.35

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To see art in a bowl of delicious soup or in a slice of splendid, delectable cake is not an easy thing. This task demands going beyond traditional theories of the aesthetic and searching creatively for new solutions the way artists do. “Artists have always been the real purveyor of news, for it is not the outward happening in itself which is new, but the kindling by it of emotion, perception and appreciation.”36 Not only theoreticians but also all those who are bold enough to treat eating as something extraordinary, as art, are in for an additional benefit. Their everyday experience will be enriched with aesthetic values which are potentially present in every „crumb of life” and, when called into being, make our lives more beautiful, fuller and better. NOTES 1. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Emilia Galotti, Werke, vol. 2, eds. Karl Eibl and Herbert G. Göpfert (München: C. Hanser, 1970), p. 130. 2. http://www.kunstzitate.de/bildendekunst/kuenstlerueberkunst/thoma_hans.htm, accessed 8 September 2012. 3. http://www.brooklynmuseum.org/exhibitions/basquiat/street-to-studio/english/forum_justice.php?page=3, accessed 8 September 2012. 4. Martin Jay, Songs of Experience: Modern American and European Variations on a Universal Theme (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2005), p. 168. 5. Stefan Kaczmarek, Immanuel Kant. Portret filozofa (Poznań: Wydawnictwo Naukowe Uniwersytetu Adama Mickiewicza, 1995), p. 56. 6. Ibid. 7. Ibid., pp. 79–80. 8. Jay, Songs of Experience…, p. 141. 9. Ibid., pp. 141–142. 10. Ibid., p. 142. 11. Ibid. 12. Immanuel Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, ed. Robert B. Louden (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 182. 13. Ibid., p. 179. 14. Ibid., p. 180. 15. Ibid., p. 181. 16. Ibid. 17. Kaczmarek, Immanuel Kant. Portret filozofa, p. 128. 18. Aleksandra Stanisławska, „Najstarsza biesiada: 71 pieczonych żółwi,” Rzeczpospolita, http://www.rp.pl/artykul/529649.html, accessed 1 September 2010. 19. http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/184-animals-are-my-friends-and-i-don-t-eatmy-friends, accessed 8 September 2012. 20. Kaczmarek, Immanuel Kant. Portret filozofa, p. 128. 21. Carolyn Korsmeyer, Gender and Aesthetics: an Introduction (New York: Routledge, 2004), p. 102. 22. Ibid., p. 99.

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23. Arnold Berleant, Re-thinking Aesthetics: Rogue Essays on Aesthetics and the Arts (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), p. viii. 24. See ibid., p. 93. 25. Jay, Songs of Experience…, p. 136. 26. Ibid., pp. 131–132. 27. Ibid., p. 138–139. 28. Ibid., p. 133. 29. Ibid. 30. Ibid., p. 163. 31. D. W. Gotshalk, “On Dewey's Aesthetics,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 23:1 (Autumn 1964), p. 133. 32. Irena Wojnar, „Sztuka – jakością życia,” intro. in John Dewey, Sztuka jako doświadczenie, trans. Andrzej Potocki (Wrocław: Ossolineum, 1975), p. xiii. 33. Ibid., p. 119. 34. Cf. Richard Shusterman, Pragmatist Aesthetics: Living Beauty, Rethinking Art (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2nd ed., 2000), p. 6; and cf. Jay, Songs of Experience…, p. 164. 35. John Dewey, The Public and its Problems (Chicago: The Swallow Press, 1954), pp. 183–184. 36. Ibid., p. 184.

Five EXPOSING EXPERIENCE AND FACING PHOTOGRAPHY Teresa Bruś There is a photographer in Poland who over the last few decades has collected an impressive, highly diverse body of photographs: the old, forgotten, damaged, lost, and trashed. He is not a meticulous and savvy, hard-core buying collector and appropriator. He is not looking for masterpieces, nor is he initiating new visions with the help of authentic quotations in the manner of Alain Jacquet or Andy Warhol. He does not use photographs like Christian Boltanski to construct memorializing installations. Jerzy Tadeusz Lewczyński looks for and preserves the old photographs marked by the touch of many hands. He brings them back to light, and exposes them in the harsh light of the published realm. The negatives, found everywhere and nowhere, in his attic in Southern Poland and in the streets of New York, have traces of the ethos of people who are gone. In post-auratic times, this nostalgic and lyrical regarding of photography, the practice he calls archeology of photography, is certainly a distinctive proposition. A man digging, Lewczyński proceeds by looking for treasures, like Walter Benjamin, chronicling his search for lost forms of life. The reward for caution and perseverance are “the images, severed from all earlier associations”1; with time these “precious fragments” illuminate understanding. There is a lot deposited in these images, but they are not mere sediment; they determine a present perception of things. Lewczyński’s engagement with photography, colored by the complexities of Polish culture, permeates difficult modalities and forms of experience. It is something that happens but also something that is sought after. It is neither solely personal nor utterly objective, it is neither passive nor active. As Martin Jay in his long history of Songs of Experience shows, there is always some new quality, some enrichment that experience produces. That is why perhaps it is impossible to share it and it is necessary to share it. Lewczyński delves in many territories to retrieve light—the brilliance, radiance, illumination that is energy and non-substantiation, an incomprehensible lightness of being. He finds them in even the most banal and poorest photographs. For Lewczyński, regarding these photographs is also embarking on a journey through many layers of matter to thresholds of disintegration, to some unspeakable frontiers expressed only with light waves. When Lewczyński picks up old, destroyed negatives from heaps of urban refuse, he is led to the mystique of the art of light. In the lands of lost meanings and non-being, he says he moves like “an explorer of unknown bays of

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a photographic ocean of human forgetfulness.”2 Lewczyński feels illuminated with the brilliance of ruined photographs, and he feels he illuminates lost life. He is enriched and transformed, a consoled man of experience. In a class I attended with him, he spoke of the need to handle them with extreme care, to look inside the photographs, to regard the faces in them. It is worth mentioning that his explorations have brought some real material discoveries. Based on an anonymous negative he recreated the life of a Jewish family from Sanok; he saved from destruction the photographic archive of his friend Feliks Łukowski, who had documented lives of people in Zamość region in 1940-1949 (about 400 works); he also dug out the work of a forgotten 19th-century Austrian photographer named Wilhelm von Blandowski. Lewczyński’s regard for photographic portraits of others is marked by his illimitable faith in a possibility of contact and connection, leading sometimes in most miraculous ways to identification. His pulling the negatives and us out of the past exposes these faces, illuminating what has been obscured. Jay, trying to rescue experience from depreciation, hopes that if we preserve the moment of the past this way, we preserve the chance of a different future.3 For Lewczyński, so passionately exposing the experience of the past, there are no insignificant photographs, no faces free from the immense charge of historic, artistic, and aesthetic values. Lewczyński has inspired my interest in the appearance of the human face and its possession in visual practices, which by definition are never integrating or consistent. Clearly the excess of experience and of images that defines modernity turns on tensions as soon as we try to subsume particular examples under general observations. Giorgio Agamben’s attempts accentuate the nuanced entanglements of the political and visual in the exposition of the face. He says that to grasp the face’s truth is to begin first of all to grasp a multiplicity, “not the resemblance but rather the simultaneity of the visages, that is the restless power that keeps them together and constitutes their being-in-common.”4 The face is a simultas, not a mere simulacrum; the face is a being together. Facing the face means looking at it and past it, skimming its apprehensible surfaces, sensing movements, changing focus but also reneging on the possibility of any clear understanding.5 Lewczyński’s accumulative project is a celebration of this paradoxical nature of the face. The encounter with the “light” of the other, with the face, always “holds more.” 6 As the visibility of some enigmatic interiority, the face reflects the traces of a cultural crisis of modernity. Photographic modernity put a new emphasis on the pseudo-individuality offered in the photographed face, but also on the fear of the assimilation and blending of the human face with the technological unauratic drabness. Exposed, enlarged, blown-up, doctored, the face entered the location of politics and has become an “object of a global civil war.”7 Media and politicians are determined to manage the face, aware of its “insubstantial character and the community it opens up.”8 That is why we feel

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compelled more than ever to be assured of the reality of our appearance. We isolate photographs from other things we consume, because we are desperate to recognize ourselves in them, because, says Agamben, we need to take possession of our appearance.9 More than ever, photographs animate us, they compel us to re-define our contracts with life. “Appearance, how we are seen by others and how we see ourselves, is what constitutes reality.”10 Hannah Arendt claims that there is always some transfiguration, some change required for the private to appear publicly. The private exposed in the public realm is the “deprivatized” and “deindividualized” private. Arendt says that life, “being among men,” or in the language of Romans inter homines esse, requires that assumption of appearance. Yet, she writes, there are those limit experiences removed from the world of others and the world of things that make the assumption of appearance impossible: “there are a great many things which cannot withstand the implacable, bright light of the constant presence of others on the public scene.” 11 The intense experiences of pain or death survive only in the realm of the private. They are incommunicable. Arendt does not believe they can be transformed into an appearance, a shape fit for the public realm.12 Deadness defines photographs more than other works of art; they retain nevertheless some remarkable order which, like experience itself, is neither true nor false. My illustrations in this essay are informed by very distinctive impulses instigating a relationship with the photographed face in the context of the experience of death, this impossible theme, this incommunicable effect. Contact with the photograph, this absence woven into our presence always produces contradictory animations and re-definitions of self-exposure and self-identity. Roland Barthes famously asserted the absence of death in society only to find it in the photograph, “this image which produces Death while trying to preserve life.”13 Itself mortal, the photograph, says Barthes, gives us “flat,” “asymbolic” Death. More emphatically, he says it is a “kind of abrupt dive into literal Death” and its certainty.14 We are fascinated with photography, with what Jay identifies, after Barthes, as death’s undialectical seizure. It is against consoling, it is against explaining.15 Facing the photographed face of another, the faces of others, yielding to their force is an experience and as such, at least potentially, it acts on the viewing subject seduced to a departure from himself. An encounter with the photograph as death creates a productive space which opens up to recognition of the meaning of a change, recognition of otherness.16 Walter Benjamin’s “most complex and lyrical song of experience”17 turns on essayistic autobiographical ambulation. It is marked by an acute physiognomic awareness and an intense fear of exposition. Benjamin, scrutinizing politically useful archives of serialized faces, chose not to take up photography himself, chose to conceal his own face. We never see his name, his physiognomy, or his face. In his wonderful autobiographical essays we do not really encounter the first person. The uncovering of his life, the detritus of his childhood, leads to the space of faces, reactivated on occasion only as accidental snapshots. Benjamin revisits

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momentarily his childhood, what Jay calls the “absolute experience” defined by a rare sense of unity between the subject and the object of this nostalgically collected chromatic world.18 The actual photographic portraits of Benjamin or references to them remain hidden. Benjamin finds himself dispersed in the metaphoric photographic practice of uncovering. His “saturnian” response to the decreasing communicability of experience, what Jay so lucidly analyzes as “most complex and lyrical” songs of experience, should be read also in light of his opposition to the mechanical reproduction of his own face. Benjamin was aware of what a powerful weapon photography could be in the state’s hands as a way of tracking its prey. Not showing his face, not even assuming it textually, he is hoping to save it from mortification. Facing himself in reticent, self-effacing articulations, Benjamin distrusts the actual photographic portrait partly because, most likely, his addressee would be not a feeling subject but a consumer of images. And indeed the “mercantile gaze,” activated by publishers of Benjamin’s texts who reproduce Benjamin’s passport photo and his last photograph taken by the police with disturbing consistency, proved him right. Benjamin laments the disappearance of the soulful portrait with its “synthesis of expression,” with its “silence” and “sharpness” occasioning a “fleeting togetherness,” “the incomparable grouping of people—whose disappearance was certainly one of the most precise symptoms of what happened to society in the second half of the century” when people did not yet “look out into the world as isolated and godforsaken.”19 Benjamin, like Eugène Atget, looks instead for “the forgotten and the neglected,” opening the space for a new faceless vision. J. M. Coetzee says it is prophetic of a new way of writing history “from below rather than from above.”20 Roland Barthes, on the other hand, in the anticipation of his own death, “total, undialectical death,” three years after the death of his mother, arrives at a crucial point in his life. To express the authentic experience of a profound sense of grief, he seeks for a photographic portrait of his mother. What’s most true and authentic about experience, Jay writes, can be tinted by the cultural patterns.21 Death does support portraiture and has done for centuries. Not surprisingly perhaps, Camera Lucida begins and ends with death and their main connection is the famous picture of his mother. And yet, the most important maternal exposure, the Winter Garden Photo, remains concealed from us. It is incommunicable. Other group photos in his impressive collection are these, but we do not see the face of the beloved mother. It resists clear containment. Acceding to the splendor of his mother, authenticating the body, Barthes discovers a “mad image, chafed by reality,”22 not the face but a hallucination. The radiant withdrawn seriousness of the absent photograph possesses clarity and brightness which is nevertheless invisible and without locus, unlocatable. She, who “accords with both my mother’s being and my grief at her death,”23 exists though in words only. The subject is diffused as soon as established, it is followed by other details, other images, it becomes sensation—something seen and felt. The face of the mother, “vague” and “faded,” with no colour or

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accessories “superadded,” the face revealing no “observation” with eyes promising essential luminosity, is evident and is inexpressible. The Winter Garden Photo is an image of a child: “I stare intensely at the Sovereign Good of childhood,”24 a form of experience which is neither true nor false but necessary in the process of reconstitution of oneself. Emerging from the borderline experience of pain, this radical form of subjectivity Arendt describes as beyond recognition of the outer world, Barthes decides to share at least a description of the most personal photograph. Photography allows him to return to the world of men and things. But we are not surprised that the face of his mother does not take on a shape fit for public appearance. Arendt again: “some things cannot withstand the implacable, bright light of the constant presence of others on the public scene.”25

In Benjamin’s words, this is an incomparable grouping of people. Mourning personal loss, we do turn to the personal photographs for their supporting functions, a seemingly real bond of identification. We should be mindful of the transformative relations between the subject and the object in photography, even if they do not allow any consistency. Certainly, we acknowledge that photographic images overpower all relations, that they threaten with their “absolute conquest.” They restrain our acts of perception, they restrain memory itself. They do not “prompt” us, as Geoffrey Batchen says, to remember people as they were, to remember “the way they moved, the manner of their speech, the sound of their voice, that lift of the eyebrow when they made a joke, their smell.”26 Yet despite the suspicion that the

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photographs replace “the unpredictable thrill of memory with the dull certainties of history,”27 despite the crisis of the documentary photography, we continue to rely on their supporting functions, on their meanings, especially in situations of incommunicable pain. In a poem called “Photograph from September 11” (2005), Wisława Szymborska wrote: The photograph halted them in life, And now keeps them Above the earth toward the earth.28 This powerful form of being in images came to my mind when I was looking at a press photograph taken in Warsaw by a journalist of the leading Polish newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza on April 17, 2010. Above the earth, above the gathered congregation of shocked and mourning Polish citizens, on a large black wall there are 96 blown-up black and white full-face portraits of those who died in the presidential plane crash in Russia which happened on April 10, 2010 at Smolensk. A large white cross is placed between a group of forty– eight photographs and the other group of forty–eight which include the portraits of the presidential couple framed in a ribbon with the colors of the Polish national flag. The portraits of the dead and the survivors face one another respectfully. This arrangement is clearly set up to honor “deeplyrooted” cultural value of standing in front of those we encounter, as Pierre Bourdieu sees such a configuration.29 The photographs, very realistic in their outlook, and the participants of the funeral ceremony are separated only by a large altar constructed exactly in the same place where in 1979 an important religious mass conducted by John Paul II took place, a fact which adds an additional dimension to this photographic event and which says a lot about the cultural specificity of national experience in Poland. Significantly, not the faces of the mourners, but the faces of victims appear to our eyes. We recognize that addressing these still faces is made possible by photography, which provides such a compelling memorial experience. This image of personal images is used as a strong vehicle of preservation in the most personal of acts, additionally receiving such a complex public exposure. Without captions, in the public arena, the silent faces of the unfortunate passengers of the TU-154 plane address the viewers. What do they communicate? What terms and depths of relationships do they generate? Photographs of these faces are displayed publicly together in a difficult, emotional context of collective trauma, to assist, to facilitate the experience of grief and pain. Together they create a site facilitating intimate apprehension of shared peaceful togetherness; together they eliminate traces of schism, creating thus a kind of illusory presence impossible outside of this image form. It has managed to sustain a determining effect on the viewers. We had seen the faces before on TV, always against a background of fierce antagonistic conflicts. Some commentators said they had

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become so exposed and so familiar that many viewers felt that these faces belonged to the Polish family domestic inventory. But they are no longer alive. We look and realize that what the photographs communicate, however, is not the simultaneity of their presence, but what Roy Burnett calls “transformative relation.” He says that: A photographed face is a face that has been photographed, which means that from the outset the viewer has to generate his or her own sense of time … The photographed face immediately exists at a different level from the face to which it seems to be referring.30 But faced with limits, with real death, we turn to more sentimental realism. We need some point of reference, something more than theories of insupportability of the realist beliefs in photographic truth. For survivors, these ceremoniously displayed images confirm what Ariella Azoulay calls the “civil contract of photography,” a pact which is an “agreement over certain rules among users of photography,”31 one without which “modern citizenship is invalid.”32 The presence of the photographs assures a momentary and seemingly real bond of identification in the work of mourning. This shared experience became a common culture, rare if disconcerting social climate, a source of kinship and connection which many Poles experienced very strongly over days of national grieving. On a basic level, the portraits of those who are dead and who are going to die serve as tools of identification and recognition of the victims. They are exhibited in a response to the public’s desire to know but also to initiate psychological healing. They counteract the impossible fact of death. Viewers “agree over the status of the photographed, and the possibility of a transition from the photograph to the photographed.”33 The viewers want to be granted “access to what is imprinted on the photograph,”34 to gain access to the structure of truth. The frontality mentioned earlier, that “extreme form of one’s relationship to others,”35 produces an air of “reciprocal deference”36; it presents an opportunity for exhaustive regarding of the faces, for creating a contact zone. Barthes recognized that the reading of public photographs is always directly a private reading. They are magnified, frontal, ceremonial, and static, they are coherent and, if we allow ourselves to face these faces for at least the two hours that the service took, we begin to see them not as faces in a crowd, “shamelessly predictable,/complacently replaceable” as if of “many/found unnamed in stripmined graveyards/and preserved so well that one/forgets that its owner’s gone”37 but as distinctive faces. These immobile images are placed in such a way as to claim for their subjects a space of participating citizens. The materiality of their faces seems to demand from us that we “anchor” in them and that through viewing, restore their lost citizenship. The civic space of gaze is a relational space. As spectators, as citizens of photography, we are baldly reminded of our responsibility for the sense of images, for rehabilitating the relation between the printed image and the photographic

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event. We need to look beyond the coherent linear frames; the religious décor leaves no doubts of its functions. The struggle over the human face is a struggle “whose object is truth, and it goes by the name of History.”38 Szymborska in her poetic consideration of a metaphoric photograph from September 11 does that very subtly. She focuses on the subjects in the photograph: Each is still complete, with a particular face and blood well hidden.39 And she decides that her response to that still fullness and death which is going to happen can be twofold: I can do only two things for them— describe this flight and not add a last line.40 Always writing against the “image fatigue,” Szymborska decides to secure premonition of immortality for its subjects in her durable poem. There she keeps them tangibly present. Not adding the last line is what Azoulay identifies as a position of civic duty. Watching is a skill and an obligation to that other. John Berger nuances this aspect of photography. In “Understanding a Photograph” he claims that “photography has no language of its own” and says we need to learn to read photographs as “one learns to read footprints or cardiograms. The language in which photography deals is the language of events.”41 Azoulay’s ontologico-political theory of photography problematizes a photograph as an object with threads reaching beyond its frames, threads which are external to it, and which should be reopened, renegotiated, overturned through viewing and watching.42 She expects that we will not only respond to the photographed figure but that we will create a relational space in which the citizenship of the still figures could be restored. Azoulay expects viewers of photography to sign a civil contract of photography. One by one, viewing the faces of the victims, struck by the absurdity of this catastrophic event, thinking of the extraordinary intimacy they must have experienced in the last seconds of their flight, we participate in the great explosion of the private into the public realm. We are challenged to anticipate the uncanny recognition of the memento mori. We sense the catastrophe which every photograph is but also, and most importantly, we need to consider how we bridge the personal fantasy with history, how we regard the faces for they are insubstantial. There are many modalities of experience, hence perhaps Jay’s postscript to his history of experience engages the figure of disruption, the photographic event.

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NOTES 1. Walter Benjamin, Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, ed. Peter Demetz, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Schocken Books, 1978), p. 26. 2. Jerzy Lewczyński, Archeologia fotografii, prace z lat 1941-2005 (Września: Wydawnictwo Kropka, 2005), p. 36. 3. Martin Jay, Songs of Experience: Modern American and European Variations on a Universal Theme (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2005), p. 338. 4. Georgio Agamben, Means without End: Notes on Politics, trans. Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarmo (Minneapolis: Minnesota Press, 2000), p. 99. 5. Ibid. 6. Lewczyński, Archeologia fotografii, p. 4. 7. Agamben, Means without End, p. 99. 8. Ibid. 9. Ibid., p. 93. 10. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1958), pp. 49–50. 11. Ibid. 12. Ibid. 13. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (London: Vintage, 1993), pp. 92–93. 14. Ibid. 15. Jay, Songs of Experience, pp. 389–390. 16. Ibid., p. 403. 17. Ibid., p. 314. 18. Ibid., p. 316. 19. Walter Benjamin, “A Short History of Photography,” Classic Essays on Photography, ed. Alan Trachtenberg (New Haven: Leete’s Island, 1980), pp. 204–205. 20. J. M. Coetzee, Doubling the Point: Essays and Interviews (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992), p. 64. 21. Jay, Songs of Experience, p. 20. 22. Barthes, Camera Lucida…, p. 115. 23. Ibid., p. 70. 24. Ibid., p. 71. 25. Arendt, The Human Condition, p. 51. 26. Geoffrey Batchen, Forget Me Not (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2004), p. 15. 27. Ibid., p. 15. 28. Wisława Szymborska, ”Photograph from September 11,” Monologue of a Dog, trans. Stanisław Barańczak and Clare Cavanagh (New York: Harcourt, 2002), p. 69. 29. Pierre Bourdieu, Photography: A Middle-brow Art, trans. Shaun Whiteside (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), p. 82. 30. Ron Burnett, Cultures of Vision (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), p. 46. 31. Ariella Azoulay, The Civil Contract of Photography (New York: Zone Books, 2008), p. 43. 32. Ibid.

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33. Ibid. 34. Ibid., p. 40. 35. Bourdieu, Photography…, p. 82. 36. Ibid. 37. Wisława Szymborska, “Snapshot of a Crowd,” Poems New and Collected, trans. Stanisław Barańczak and Clare Cavanagh (New York: Harcourt, 1998), pp. 122–123. 38. Agamben, Means without End, p. 93. 39. Szymborska, “Photograph from September 11,” p. 69. 40. Ibid. 41. John Berger, About Looking (New York: Vintage Books, 1991), p. 293. 42. Ariella Azoulay, “The Conquest of the World as Picture,” Afterimage. The Journal of Media, Arts and Criticism, 33:2 (September 2005), p. 12.

Six PHOTOGRAPHY AS A MEANS OF RE-PRESENTING THE PAST. CARING FOR MEMORIES Piotr Jakub Fereński Photography, as a complex of various constantly perfected techniques used for registering the visual dimension of reality, 170 years from its invention seems to be one of the most egalitarian practices of human production. The attempt to enumerate the categories and adjectives associated with the term ‘photography’ in a short essay like this is futile. There is obviously photography understood as an autonomous work of art, there is press, documentary, staging and subjective photography, but we also have, for example, underwater, astronomic and sociological photography. Often one comes across such contradictory types as professional and amateur photography, or even analogue and digital photography. Thus, obtaining relatively solid images of the surrounding world (usually by exposing a suitable matter to light by means of a certain optical system) remains not only a wide and diverse space of cultural activity, but also a highly democratic one. Photography has revolutionized our life in the sense that it has been given to all. One can say that we were “endowed” with it the same way we were endowed with memory. This universal availability is undoubtedly one of the most constitutive features of photography. The act of taking pictures is thoroughly pluralistic. It is reflected in the presence of photographic images in nearly all areas of private and public life. There exists no list of conditions that have to fulfilled in order to do photography, and there are no limits to lens application. We have taken and we keep taking photos at work and in our free time, in everyday situations, as well as during celebrations, while having fun and when we are overcome by sadness, in solitude and in the company of others, in the place we live, as well as during faraway journeys. We watch people and the results of their activities, landscapes, fauna and flora. In the human world itself, we observe various rituals, wedding ceremonies, funerals, birthday anniversaries, family events, and images related to traditions that testify to relationships and kinships, build ties with the past and preserve memories. However, we also look at the social-historical and political photographs of different state celebrations, peace rallies, strikes, freedom celebrations, and walls being torn down, as well as at images of lonely heroes stopping tanks, bloody images of death, and illustrations of the tragic fate of civilians—war’s

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greatest losers, who suffer hunger and wander towards unknown destinations. Then we watch how life revives, how streets, houses, temples and shops emerge from debris and from war and economic ruins, how city arteries pulsate again, and young green crops grow in the fields. The camera lens accompanies our entire existence, it penetrates into it always and anywhere we move. The availability of photography turns into the necessity of immortalizing. In this sense, it is better to speak about photography enthusiasts rather than amateur photographers, about the great need and passion for capturing reality in the frame, about the extraordinary desire to discover and render the true nature of things, and then to preserve it as a proof of existence—for remembrance. The subject matter of photographs seems to be everything that is “visible,” but frequently the first level of the so-called “empirical” reality refers to other realms hidden right beneath it. At the same time, next to the aforementioned universality, the most fundamental feature of photography is the lasting representation of what is absent and what remains inaccessible to sight. Presence and absence are naturally connected with the ordinary and radical experience of the temporality of being, and the lack or loss of photography (neglecting an object, a situation or an event) may result in a blank space in our memory, and in terms of testimony—in a lacuna of existence. This refers to both individual and collective memory, regardless of what either of these will (or will not) turn out to be. The space and time of total freedom become difficult to bear. Places and moments that relate to them demand a testimony to their truthfulness. Constant shifts between us, these places, their images and descriptions, trigger relentless efforts to prevent the loss of the experienced moments. What comes into play here is perhaps a concern for some part of our identity. Therefore, memory appears to be a unique “photographic album” which takes on multiple formats. By means of photographs we constantly create “identikit portraits” of various objects, phenomena and events, and the methods and objectives of this kind of activity belong to a broad spectrum of specialization. For example, we may be dealing with photography, which—in relation to memory—is treated as an archive. In fear of complete loss, the objects are systematically recorded, collected, catalogued, stored and displayed. This activity is frequently institutionalized. Photography may also resemble stocktaking. In this case, photographic activities consist in the most precise and careful recording of the selected objects of a given class or category. We want to record, capture, halt and keep some elements of the surrounding space “in stock.” They become ours. Such stocktaking may be both distanced and authorial. Photography can be linked to the foregoing practices, it can be somehow included in their range, but photography in the form of testimony or documentation transgresses them. For remembrance it strongly proves the real existence of certain people, objects and events and in this sense it turns out to be a document “as it is”—a certificate and a commemoration of being. Then,

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the photograph is not a copy or a duplicate or reality, but its preservation (prolongation) in the visual dimension, as well as a derivative of experience. At the same time, it seems that a photograph can be both an image that evokes places and moments of memory, as well as a place of memory itself. In the first case it presents things, persons and events which have contributed and continue to contribute to these places of memory—therefore it is of “indexical” character. In the second case, by “re-presenting the past,” in a way a photograph becomes an object of reference itself. The connection between photography and memory is particularly strongly manifested in grand historical tensions and the transformations they bring about. Wars and catastrophes that result in countless victims, huge damages, border changes, migrations, disruptions of social bonds and other “private” and “intimate” tragedies find their reflection in the frames of a camera image. The legitimacy of the “sacred verdicts of history” that divide those involved in conflicts into the winners and the defeated calls for substantiation in the form of an image. Suffering and death shown in photographs prove the rightness of the struggle that has been taken up and build the belief in the political and ideological arguments of one of the sides. The drama of war plunges into our memory particularly strongly by means of frames and freeze-frames—to refer to Susan Sontag’s words.1 And this single image seems to be the most basic unit of memory. In the dimension of photography that records the world plunged into the crisis of war, this freeze-frame defines inhuman evil, pain, injustice and despair, and obliges one to help, transform and renew. This refers to the entirety of warfare, both to the piles of victims and the sea of ruins. We believe the photographs, because there is nothing else left. The depicted objects and events pass, disappear irretrievably or are (for a variety of reasons) inaccessible (remote). We assume that photography is objective by nature, as the evidence of the camera, which stops time for us, even though we are aware that each account always bears its author’s signature. For Sontag, the fact that “photographs objectify,” means not only the transparency of the account of some reality, but also an alchemic transformation of events or people into something that can be “possessed,” and, as it seems, possessed above all in memory. Going even further, people do not so much remember through photography as remember and associate the photos themselves. Speaking more broadly, according to Sontag: [t]he familiarity of certain photographs builds our sense of the present and immediate past. Photographs lay down routes of reference, and serve as totems of causes: sentiment is more likely to crystallize around a photograph than around a verbal slogan. And photographs help construct—and revise—our sense of a more distant past, with the posthumous shocks engineered by the circulation of hitherto unknown photographs. Photographs that everyone recognizes are now a constituent part of what a society chooses to think about, or declares that

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The author of Regarding the Pain of Others, in the fragment of the book quoted above, devoted to the connections between photography and memory, unambiguously denies the existence of something which has been studied for several decades in Europe, especially in France and Germany, by successive generations of historians, sociologists, philosophers and culture experts representing various schools and research trends. We are talking about the notion of a “collective” or “cultural” memory. Sontag reserves the word “memory” exclusively for individual entities. Only an individual, a single human being in his or her specific existence can be a carrier of memories in their proper sense. What constitutes the rest are ideas that are created around, among other things, photography—these are some socially established narrations that are entrenched in our minds, also due to images. Is the American writer and essayist right? Certainly, a dispute about whether memory is merely individual, or whether it is more collective than individual is pointless. However, in order to enfeeble this “paralyzing dilemma” (as it was described by Paul Ricoeur), this fundamental question can be rephrased. The quoted French phenomenologist makes the point that the clash between the tradition of reflectiveness oriented towards individuality and the tradition of objectivity oriented towards the community takes place on two completely incompatible levels of discursivity and therefore proposes a reformulation of the question. Namely, one should ask: “to whom is it legitimate to attribute the pathos corresponding to the reception of memories and the praxis in which the search for memories consists?”3 Although it should be made clear from the beginning that neither this nor any other proposal shall satisfy (not to mention reconcile) the uncompromising supporters of egology and theorists totally preoccupied with collective subjectivism, one might perhaps wonder: how does it affect the relationship between photography, memory and culture? Rather than venturing further into the issue of the ontology of collective consciousness, let us posit another question: “who desires to remember and what is that he/she desires to remember?,” or perhaps, “who wants us to remember and what is that we should remember?” In one of the chapters of his monumental work Memory, History, Forgetting Ricoeur discusses the issue of using and abusing memory, of its excess and insufficiency, as well as the problem of various pathologies accompanying such phenomena. He refers to the links between memory and identity, which gain particular significance in the context of manipulations performed on memory. He writes about the frailty of identity and points to its

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causes, in particular: 1) dependence on time—past, presence and future, 2) confrontation with others perceived as dangerous, that is, real and imagined threats, 3) the burden of war, which underlies the formation of every community—what today constitutes glory, a cause for pride and calls for celebrations for some, to others remains a humiliation. Manipulation of memory occurs through something that is rooted between “the demand for identity and the public expressions of memory.” What Ricoeur means is the ideology and the apparatus it uses, and particularly “distortions of reality, the legitimation of the system of power, and the integration of the common world by means of symbolic systems immanent in action.… In fact, what ideology aims to legitimize is the authority of order or power-order, in the sense of an organic relation between the whole and the part; power, in the sense of hierarchical relation between governing and governed.” 4 On the symbolic level, the inclusion of memory into the scope of identity is carried out primarily by means of narrative constructions based on the selection of history, on making up foundational myths, commemorating sites (and moments) of glory, as well as by defining dangers. All this is enforced by official history, which is authorized, taught and learnt. It should be emphasized that memory abuses, or in other words, its “confiscations”— Tzvetan Todorov rightly warned—are not exclusively the domain of totalitarian engineering, but turn out to be “the apanage of all those enamored of glory.” This ritual lunacy of commemorating is frequently connected with positioning oneself as the greatest victim, which is accompanied by a demanding attitude—claiming various kinds of compensations, damages, contributions, benefits and liabilities. In the following subsection of the above-quoted work, Ricoeur steps onto a level he describes as “ethical and political” and, referring to Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics, introduces the category of “obliged memory,” which links the duty to remember with the duty to do justice to the memory of the past by way of recollection. Admittedly, the point of departure here is the analysis of the workings of the memory and the mourning, more distinct in the sphere of individual consciousness (or unconsciousness); however, when the author of The Conflict of Interpretations introduces the notion of “debt” [dette] into his discussion, he seems to be referring equally to individual and collective memory. This “debt” not only conveys the idea of guilt, it is inseparable from the notion of heritage. We are indebted to those who have gone before us for part of what we are. The duty of memory is not restricted to preserving the material trace, whether scriptural or other, of past events, but maintains the feeling of being obligated with respect to these others, of whom we shall later say, not that they are no more, but that they were. Pay the debt, I shall say, but also inventory the heritage. 5

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Naturally also in this case memory abuses may occur. They are a consequence of the misinterpretation and misuse of the idea of justice, which is then to serve the demands towards history and which manifests itself through constant reopening of old wounds, absolute commemorating, voicing threats and announcing punishments. Moving the above discussions into the visual dimension of reality, we can ask in what way the photographical presence of what is absent influences memory. Does it influence it in a significant way in the first place? And, if so, what forms of memory does it determine, shape, co-produce and build? Any attempts to answer these questions obviously confront us with the issue of memory attribution (that is the issue of to whom to ascribe the ability to possess memories or the potential of searching for memories), which was raised by Paul Ricoeur. This, in turn, leads us to the problem of commemorating. For the sake of clarity, it must be said that the aim of this argument is by no means a decisive, comprehensive and conclusive determination of the relationship between photography and memory (individual and collective). Of interest to me are above all the moments, conditions and practices within which images position the bygone reality towards the present day or the present towards the past. It is not necessary to add that very often pictures are “irrespectively” used to position this reality. Let us focus on one example. The problem of how historical representations are shaped on the level of image and what types and objects of manifestation participate in the formation of memory can be illustrated on the example of the city of Wrocław and its residents. To begin with, visual representations of space and space-related ideas, concerning a place whose history dates back to a thousand years ago, are not limited merely to photographs. The images of the constantly evolving urban landscape have been preserved in paintings, drawings and prints. Photography found recognition only in the second half of the nineteenth century, as the modern era continued to be formed. The development of the economy and the accompanying great industrialization, scientific and technological achievements and the unprecedented rise in population are factors which boosted the process of urbanization and contributed to the flourishing of the building industry. Progress in the area of production methods, accumulation of capital, the constant development of industry, the visible concentration of population in metropolises, the growing significance of urban planning, the application of new materials in architecture, and finally changes in lifestyle, transformed the image of European cities. What should be added to these phenomena are the reforms in the area of exercising power and the way they were influenced by the changes in ownership structure. Great planners, with their grand assumptions, could be found no longer only among urbanists and architects, but also among politically involved philosophers and social thinkers. In this context, the example of the German city of Breslau does not diverge much from the history of other urban centres in Europe during the last decades of the 19th century and

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the first decades of the 20th century. A developing city and its inhabitants, who (some more dynamically than others) head for progress; use the invention of photography in order to document changes in the cultural landscape, as well as the advancement of technology and the economy. The camera became the best (still not the only) tool to enable people not only to portray the technology, economy, urban space, architecture, politics and also lifestyles and behavioural patterns of the Breslau residents, but also to highlight and present their ideas about modernity, as well as related symbols and values that the Breslauers seemed to share. In this particular way photographic practice contributes to the building of the city's identity in its modern form. It is all about a creative effort, involvement in the arrangement of space and time, with a certain creation, but creation only in a sense that follows the thought of Paul Klee, who said that “art does not recreate the visible, rather it makes visible.”6 Lenses and frames establish frames for the reality (pointing to everything that is important and significant within this reality), contribute to the topography, testify and let us remember. As André Rouillé observes in one of his works, photography then becomes a machine that freezes rather than presents. It freezes forces, movements, intensity, density, the visible and the invisible; it is not about presenting some tangible reality, but about obtaining and recreating something that belongs to the visible (but cannot be seen).... The radically modern dimension of photography consists in that it is a machine for seeing and producing ‘captured images.’ To seize, capture, record, freeze—this is the programme of seeing that should be carried out thanks to the new quality image: a captured image that functions as a machine and determines the renewal of the document. 7 This was the role of photography in the second half of the 19th century and in the first decades of the 20th century. The elements that were then portrayed or— looking at them from a contemporary perspective—fragments and moments of reality, will later become the object of recollections. As it shall turn out, they will be one of the few possible points of reference to the past. The same photographs, frames, and pictures will again be brought into a game in which the identity of the city and its residents is at stake; into a kind of activity that consists in painstaking, arduous and meticulous arranging of a larger, perhaps a full picture from small fragments of distinctive shapes, forms and layouts. The extremely complex history of Wrocław seems to focus, as if in a lens, the history of Central Europe with its entire tragic wartime plight. It is a very dense matter, and sensitive to exposure. The city belonged successively to five different countries, changed its name numerous times and witnessed a number of wars and incursions of troops. However, it went through its biggest drama and turning point in the middle of the last century. In 1945 it was proclaimed a “stronghold” (Festung) and defended until the very last days of

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WWII. It was at that time that the city was significantly damaged (and turned into “a sea of ruins”). As a result of the new political division of the continent and the subsequent translocation of the borders, Wrocław’s population was almost entirely exchanged. The communist regime that gained power after the war, after reclaiming the territories situated in the east of the German Reich, spared no effort to familiarize the new Polish settlers with the land they were to inhabit and at the same time to strengthen and legitimize their power over the territory. The lands were called “recovered lands” in reference to the Polish presence in Lower Silesia 700 years before. The engineers of the postwar political system played the part of lovers of glory, emphasizing everywhere, particularly in the spatial and visual sphere, the eternal “Polishness” of the new territorial gains. This narration was based on a variation on the foundational myth of the first (“historical”) Polish dynasty that had ruled the land back in the Middle Ages, as well as on the selection, reactivation or erasure of certain events and historical processes and defining threats. In the case of these manipulations of memory, which were to crystallize a “new” type of identity rooted in values and symbols that we could—rather symbolically—call patriotic, the kind of photography that represents the past was not useful. Various other forms of plastic arts were used instead. After two decades, when the geopolitical situation became stable and when visible results in the field of renovation of the urban tissue had been achieved, the role of photography increased. An observable reorientation of policy towards memory took place. A photo album of the period, Wrocław 1945-1965, reads: After the war, it was possible to find many documents that proved the Germans guilty for the destruction of Wrocław, a city with a great, 1000year-old history. The retreating German troops left behind a burning desert. The planned destructive campaigns went far beyond the area of direct combat. Neither the historic buildings, works of art nor people’s possessions have been spared. The city, where until recently only the stones could speak Polish, became a blank sheet of paper. The civilian population was expelled on the orders of the Germans. The blank sheet of paper was to be filled by the Poles.8 We may still hear about the “Polish-speaking stones” here, but the final words referring to the “blank sheets of paper” seem to be crucial in the excerpt of the album introduction quoted above. After an unprecedented act of barbarism enacted by the Germans, the Poles, with a tremendous amount of effort, had to lift the city out of the debris, rebuild it, and save what was left from ultimate destruction. The book market saw the rise of publishing initiatives (similar to the one quoted above) that presented Wrocław “yesterday and today” and which were present on the market at least until the end of the 1970s. Their structure was straightforward. Photographs taken in 1945 were a reference to the memory of the ruins and the difficult living conditions of the initial post-war

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period. Next to images presenting nearly completely demolished residential buildings, churches, bridges and squares, pictures showing the same sites after splendid renovation were placed. The back parts of the photo albums were devoted to the achievements of modern architecture. The city was once again vibrant with life and developing dynamically. Thus, memory served to present the changes that took place over two or three decades from the end of the war. It was the memory of what was found—the beginnings, first impressions of this our/alien place, images that were confronted with the present and with the forecasts of the “glowing” vision of the future. It is difficult to determine to what extent the “policy” described above was effective towards memory. Similarly, the issue of when exactly the residents of Wrocław claimed the city to be “theirs” remains a subject of debate. Quite disparate dates and events are pointed to in this matter. However, that this change has taken place is witnessed by the emergence of a new form of memory, whose incredibly fast proliferation we can now observe. It is a memory of the city’s history as seen in the frame of the camera. The only memories and narratives the residents of Wrocław may have in regard to their city’s history are built on images dating back to the period preceding Festung Breslau. We depend on photographical memory, because we do not know any other city but the one present in the pictures. We are thus tracing images along with their signatures—and that’s what I would call praxis—which amounts to the search for memories. The city resembles a jigsaw puzzle: its many essential elements assume distinct shapes and are already quite evident in front of our eyes, but the entire image is still full of blank spaces. Sometimes these are merely small gaps, however frequently we see vast, unfilled areas. And so, we throw bridges across the reconstructions and ruins and stare at the instances of the past. We search for the origins of our heritage, as if we were indebted to what came before us. The obligation to remember is related not so much to guarding the material remains, as to a full inventory of the inheritance. It is impossible to explicitly answer the frequently posed question about whether Wrocław is a continuation of Breslau. Undoubtedly over the last twenty years, the attitude of the present residents towards the German past has changed. What has become particularly strong is the desire to learn about the history and culture of the present capital of Lower Silesia—about the life people led here in the past centuries, the world in which they worked and rested, prayed and entertained themselves, about the streets, the squares and parks they walked, the architecture they built, but also about the fates of individual families and about life stories. This by no means concerns only academic publications, works of historians in particular, or memoirs, journals or even fiction—short stories and grand novel cycles that otherwise have been making a worldwide career. What seems to be deserving of special attention are the activities of people fascinated by the city, its “friends,” enthusiasts looking for traces of the past in old attics or musty basements, as well as “ordinary” residents observing German inscriptions on their stoves or

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radiators in their homes, wanting to know more about the history of the city they live in, about the local neighbourhood and local buildings. The stones have stopped speaking Polish; the names and titles of the princes of the Piast dynasty and their heirs have begun to sound good also in German. What particularly strongly reminds one of the suffering are the empty spaces, mutilated architecture, and perhaps photos and descriptions from the period of Festung Breslau or shortly after. Emotions do not appear to be as intense as in the past. What is more, one could say, following Andrzej Zawada, that in “in the tendency of the city residents to avoid identification with the city and its historical complexity prevails the kind of interest in the past that does not involve the simplifying division into ‘our’ and ‘alien.”9 Streets, squares, parks, fountains, monuments, buildings, railways, trams, shop windows and the people—these are moments or objects of memory, the objects of the inventory and an inheritance. Naturally, the majority of such images of Breslau are found in photographs. The nineteenth century machine, the camera, records the changes that take place in the cultural landscape, the achievements of technology, the city's wealth; the lens becomes the witness and a companion of modernity; it portrays everyday life, as well as great events—it is everywhere. Today in our contemporary post-industrial society and in the era of visuality, new communication technologies, digitalisation, virtual mass media and means of expression have become invaluable for the praxis consisting in searching for memories, discovering, puzzling out (decoding) the key or peripheral cultural meanings and values. It is here that the validity of operations on memory is carried out—this is the area of their activation, a board with blank spaces, white and black stains in the history of Breslau. Again, what we are dealing with is the creative effort, involvement in the arrangement of space and time for the benefit of identity. This is not a reconstruction, but recollection of images. NOTES 1. Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Picador, 2003), p. 17. 2. Ibid., p. 64. 3. Paul Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), p. 93. 4. Ibid., p. 83. 5. Ibid., p. 89. 6. Paul Klee quoted by André Rouillé, Fotografia. Między dokumentem a sztuką współczesną, trans. Oskar Hedemann (Kraków: Universitas, 2007), p. 29. 7. Ibid., pp. 29–30. 8. Tomasz Olszewski, Ignacy Rutkiewicz, Wrocław 1945-1965 (Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Polonia, 1966), pp. 5–7. 9. Andrzej Zawada, “Kreacja zwana Wrocławiem,” Przegląd Polityczny, 100 (2010), p. 36.

Seven ABJECT SPACES, PRE-MODERN TIME AND A BAROQUE SCOPIC REGIME IN ANDRZEJ STASIUK’S TRAVEL ESSAYS Ewa Ignaczak 1. Introduction “The world gets used up, like an abraded map, from being seen too much,” 1 says the narrator of On the Road to Babadag pondering his instant longing for the landscapes that disappear along the roads he travels through East Central Europe. Yet his fear rests on flimsy ground, as the landscapes he sees are hardly known, far from exploited by the media, and still barely incorporated into the symbolic geography of united post-1989 Europe. If not equally threatening in the whole of Europe, gazing, a violent form of vision, “the noblest of senses,” in the Western philosophical tradition has been a contested part of modernity. As Martin Jay argues in Scopic Regimes of Modernity, this period and cultural formation “has been normally considered resolutely ocularcentric” as it has elevated vision to the position of its “master sense,”3 which has generated a host of metaphors of cognition pervading modernity.4 Sight’s hegemony and the proliferation of visuality typical of advancing modernity, in Jay’s analysis, has spawned three major regimes related to philosophical developments, conspicuous in fine arts and discernible in literature and culture at large: “Cartesian perspectivalism,” “Baconian descriptivism” and the multiply embedded baroque. And while critical discourse on vision has increasingly come to doubt its superiority, 5 contemporary cultural practices such as travel do heavily rely on vision, and some do no less than exploit gaze.6 The changing sites visited by the travelling writer, nominally European, are a rich repository of both cultural difference and sameness, born out of their longstanding peripheral histories. Space, landscape, different regimes of time, personal and collective memory, and pre-modern, periphery-of-Europe identity are the main themes that pervade Andrzej Stasiuk’s autobiographical prose collected both in On the Road to Babadag, 2011 [Polish 2004] and in Fado, 2006,7 in continuation of much of the writer’s work prior to them. On the Road to Babadag and Fado have received a highly positive welcome from Polish critics. The first was awarded the 2005 Nike Literary award for best book, which consolidated the author’s position in Polish literature and secured translation of part of his work into many languages. Set in

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postcommunist Europe, both books should be read against the background of cultural changes following the transformation of 1989. Stasiuk’s imaginary prose documents not only the postsocialist exposure of East Central Europe to the West but, most all of, an exposure of parts of East Central Europe to one another, an incorporation which often requires coming to terms with competing versions of history, with faces of modernity contrary to political promise and with what Przemysław Czapliński, writing about Stasiuk’s prose, terms the three unification myths.8 One of these mystifying narratives holds that East Central Europe is but relatively, in fact slightly, different from the old part, and of this myth East Central European metropolises such as Cracow, Prague, Lviv and Budapest are material tokens. The other two myths taken to task by Czapliński say that global capitalism will be harmoniously combined with the many local cultures, and that Western modernisation will be profitably traded for Eastern European traditions. All these three myths grow out of a centurieslong preoccupation with Poland’s place in Europe and should be helpful in coping with the country’s condition as a “suburb of Europe.”9 It is in this context that Stasiuk’s nonfiction should be read as a voice in the continued debate about two decades of political and economic transformation that has affected people and material landscapes in East Central Europe. With a few exceptions—notably Budapest—the sites visited by the writer have never been culturally central either in Europe or even in its regions, and most are obscure in both Western and East Central European symbolic geography. Equipped with power to produce space, or even whole continents,10 this prose symbolically constructs neglected spaces of East Central Europe. In Stasiuk’s venture into tourist-resistant regions he is no pioneer since alternative travel—antitourism—is by now a cultural practice, and one that also has its literary variety. Travel off the beaten track has become a recognised and even commodified practice and has entered the realm of art, or as Patrick Holland and Graham Huggan put it, “the rarefied sphere of ‘high’ literature.”11 What makes his work extraordinary is his ability to elevate travel text to an extremely high artistic level, and from a subject position sceptical of cosmopolitanism. In what follows in this paper, I will argue that this autobiographical traveller/narrator /author12 is not a cultural cosmopolitan who celebrates multiple centres13 but a peripheral one who fully identifies with a broad cultural centreless territory, and who redeems the provincial by aesthetic means. Stasiuk’s texts are a literary apology for periphery, outback, hinterland, province and other locations in common parlance characterised as “out there in the sticks.” His fascination and identification with these sites is most obvious in the recurrent tropes that represent two fundamental dimensions of the experience of travel: space and time. Both texts are intensely autobiographical, which is a typical characteristic of much contemporary travel writing;14 in On the Road to Babadag travel is no less than a pivotal narrative element, while in the reflexive essays of Fado it is just an occasional and rather unprivileged motif. What the two texts share are an episodic, nondramatic and nonclimactic structure, abundant descriptive layers,

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and a single self-conscious, bemused philosophical narrator who blends autobiography, fact and philosophical reflection, and who uses “the style that also mocks the road with items like thoughts appearing on the horizon.”15 Stasiuk’s texts confirm the contemporary condition of literature of travel which “[a]s the earth’s wildernesses get paved over, … increasingly emphasises the inner journey, often merging imperceptibly into memoir.”16 Or, to quote Daniel Kalder, a successful anti-traveller himself, we are granted a series of complex, polished essays and feuilletons about the neglected interstices, voids and wastelands of central and eastern Europe, particularly in the areas surrounding Stasiuk's home in the Carpathian mountains. Nothing much happens in these travel miniatures: Stasiuk meditates upon a car park in a provincial Polish town, attends a conference on a dead Serbian author, drives past a Gypsy settlement in Slovakia, or thinks about Pope John Paul II's decaying body.17 What follows in this essay will provide a fairly broad sample of his blurred genres and exuberant style and should give substance to his peculiar treatment of the landscapes of the recently capitalist East Central Europe. And for this anti-tourist-writer, capital cities, major beneficiaries of the change, turn out to be the least attractive sights, surrendering to obscurity and decay. Further, this essay will try to establish the scopic regime, or “ideal visual culture,”18 represented by the traveller to bizarre abject spaces ruled by premodern time. 2. Travel writing in the postmodern world Obscurity, that which challenges commodification, is exactly the quality that welcomes late forms of travel known as antitourism, specialised travel, or “existential” tourism.19 Not exploited to the same degree as many Third World countries, postsocialist spaces are very suitable for alternative forms of travel. Stasiuk’s narrator and Western travellers, however, are separated by significant differences. While in contemporary debates the traveller normally looks down on the tourist, Stasiuk’s narrator will toy with an idea of playing the tourist’s role but will ultimately give it up because it will make him feel like “an outsider.”20 This is the only moment when the issue of the tourist as a potential social self comes to the fore, and when it does, it is immediately discarded as unviable. The narrator, in autobiographical theory the writer’s historical/public self,21 uses travel as an occasion to discover and come to terms with himself. However, while the identity of the Western “traveller” depends strongly on denigration of the “tourist”22 since the “tourist” is everything the “traveller” is not (if only for lack of other diacritics), when travelling Stasiuk defines himself first and foremost as a writer, and never in opposition to the tourist. This is but one sign that Stasiuk’s narrator is free from the postsocialist complex.

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While Polish literature does have an established tradition of travel writing, and Ryszard Kapuściński as its modern icon, on the whole “a Slavic on the road” (to use Stasiuk’s own title of an essay in Fado) is not a phenomenon developed to the same degree as Anglophone travel, and is less entangled in critical debates. Travel writing in East Central Europe, especially in the unusual variety of an East Central European traveller visiting remote East Central European regions, is a relatively new phenomenon directly indebted to increased global mobility and diversifying tastes. Without running the risk of broad exaggeration, we may say that travel for tourism in Moldova, Albania or even rural Romania is relatively rare among East Central European citizens. Those who engage in tourism prefer to compensate for former Iron Curtain isolation and practice a form of travel inspired by idea of the Grand Tour, scoring the cultural highlights of Western Europe. Western tourists discovering East Central Europe, in turn, prefer places where cultural/civilisational differences are indeed relative, which in a way consolidates one of the unification myths on the one hand and the obscurity of East Central European provinces, beyond Prague, Cracow and Budapest, on the other. Apart from a relatively small niche of nature tourists, East Central European peripheries have indeed remained peripheral, which only reinforces their disappointment with this status well after the fall of communism. Symbolic reincorporation of these regions and countries is still an ongoing process and one that means various things at once: it can be virtual discovery (Albania, Moldova) or, more often, renegotiation of a place in Europe (Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Poland). Either way it means coping with its own difference often experienced as lacking or inferior. I hope to demonstrate that one original contribution of Stasiuk’s prose consists not in a defence of hidden fundamental similarities between East and West but rather in defending considerable civilisational and cultural/aesthetic differences that he sees along the East Central European roads. Stasiuk’s optic—which finds the sublime in the absence of beauty—enables the reader to take a look at cultural underdevelopment as an aesthetic advantage. A global study of travel practices sees them spread between the two extremes defined by movement towards or away from a centre, because of which they appear suspended between sociology of leisure and sociology of religion,23 with a broad variety of options in between. If we apply the phenomenology of travel offered by Eric Cohen, Stasiuk’s travel approximates several cultural practices of the Western world. It has characteristics of an experiential search for authenticity, of existential travel to an elected new centre and the earlier-mentioned experimental journey,24 all alternatives to conventional travel for leisure. All the three “elevated” forms of travel are experience-driven. It is worth noting that Western literary antitourism in Eastern Europe features such unusual works as Daniel Kalder’s recent autobiographical parody of the Grand Tour,25 an experiential search which centres on emptiness, nothingness and limits of boredom, and—like Stasiuk— is skeptical of buried affinities that bring people together.

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One of several contentious issues haunting experimental travel is the spectre of colonialism, arguably contaminating both the hegemon and the subaltern. Postsocialist countries are a complex case because political domination by the Soviet Union did not entail cultural hegemony in the Gramscian sense of ruling by consent, with Western culture enjoying virtual if only implicit hegemony.26 Logically, we might suspect Stasiuk of a Western bias, which would recreate the hierarchical view on the visited sites and which would account for his possible dismissal of the periphery. It is important to remember that the hotly debated questions in public discourse, of sources (genealogy) of culture, and of the genuine “authentic” roots of national identity, are contextual to the experiential world of this narrator. Finally, there is no agreement whether or how far postcolonial categories do exactly apply to postsocialist conditions of East Central Europe.27 Since East Central European modernity is such a contested territory, Stasiuk’s prose warrants special attention as an original and unabashed voice from the provinces, representing their cryptic identities, and enabling critics to reflect on the strength of Western cultural models with their centres and polarities. According to global travel critic Debbie Lisle, putting a few exceptions aside, modern travel inevitably falls into two categories: the ugly colonial one (represented by Paul Theroux) and the benign cosmopolitan one, which would be rhetorically more creative but ideologically no less complicit (Bill Bryson, Michael Palin). Both forms of travel are highly successful in commercial terms not in the last place; they skilfully address the largest, middle class reading publics, cornerstones of Western liberal democratic societies. In Lisle’s analysis, cosmopolitans are simply better creative writers or stylists, but are no less infected by the colonial mindset, playing smugly the role of “missionaries of liberal democracy.”28 Cosmopolitans only pretend not to be sedentary or locked in their worldview the way for example Theroux notoriously is. Lisle argues thus that Theroux’s “encounters with difference are already contained by a modern spatial ontology”29 which places the West at the centre, and that his literary travelogues serve to normalise inequalities. Generally, colonial and cosmopolitan travelling writers alike undergo aesthetic experiences, but when read against the grain their texts reveal a thinly disguised political apology for the world order that prioritises Western values, social order and rationality. Lack of literary innovation, anecdotal realism and a tacit appeal to middle-class readership through a repertoire of received cultural tropes betray this conservative ideology of the travel writer. Thus the cosmopolitan’s friendly smile accompanies his/her search for commonalities, or qualities favoured by the West (“natural beauty,” “picturesque ruins,” “idyllic rural scenes”), which Lisle argues excludes meaningful cultural difference. One typical narrative manoeuvre to make them attractive and commodifiable that but seemingly represents the indigenous consists in “recording landscapes through a poetic register.”30

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The question inspired by these critical findings will be the following: which sites does Stasiuk’s narrator visit, and does how his narrative represent them as a possible touristic commodity? 3. Abject spaces in “litanies of decay,” or towards a postsocialist sublime Stasiuk’s optic is focused on trivial events and small happenings, on scenes observed along the road. Some are more and some less unusual; like a snapshot of somebody caught unawares doing push-ups stark naked somewhere in a Romanian rural landscape. These are settings which urge the writer to “make a catalogue, an encyclopaedia of all these scenes and places, write a history in which time plays no part, a history of Gypsy eternity, because it is more enduring and wiser, than our governments and cities, than our entire world, which trembles at the imminence of its demise.”31 These landscapes, sites and sights are often symbolic, and so are forces of nature in places like the one where “the sun rolled down in the west like a cut-off rooster’s head trailing a ribbon of red.”32 Yet physical nature is not celebrated; it is rather the obscurity and decay of cultivated landscapes that make these regions special. Their obscurity is obvious to the narrator himself, once involved in a farce of mistaken identities, where another Pole confuses Slovak with Slovenian and Czech, as if to prove that the East is forever turned away from itself. East Central European landscapes where nothing looks the way it should are metaphorical landscapes. Those few points on the traveller’s itinerary that happen to have been penetrated by Western civilization (Slovenia, Budapest) are, by contrast, literal, which makes them inferior since they are devoid of “cracks in the scenery that imagination might slip into.” 33 Being civilised, these sites are sealed off from the perceiving self and preclude imaginary creation of space, and are indeed endangered by “being seen too much.”34 And so Budapest and Ljubljana lose in comparison to the countries like Romania which are “taken aback by [their] own existence,”35 feeding the artist a blend of material decay and abundant vegetation, populated by ghosts of writers and ethnic histories. These dilapidated spaces are a philosophical locus, “places where only potentials exist.”36 Sometimes these rich-in-meaning villages become metonymic of the entire Eastern Europe, as is the case with a remote Hungarian psychiatric hospital, which in the narrator’s eyes stands for the whole of his Europe. Even when, very rarely, the narrator will directly confess the forbidding character of the site, as he does in the Transnistrian Tiraspol, this mafia-ridden, wild capitalist, post-Soviet “diorama,” a place where no human being would like to stay, and where “everyone was expendable, a fifth wheel to affairs that were foreign, major, and murky,”37 his language will always betray his fascination with it. The narrator’s eye not only observes but genuinely relishes anonymity, overwhelming decay punctuated by mundane scenes and objects, rusty bicycles, rotten outhouses, simple relics of everyday life, junkyards, semi-deserted railway stations, the material history of communism that did nothing but consolidate

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longstanding local provisionality. In this universe, the materially humble displays its greatness through an unusual detail of material textures enabling a “proliferation of material referents,”38 far from unique in travel writing at large. Abject spaces reach us through a litany of decay spotted in “a graceful, relaxed clutter, ... the remnants of projects never completed, storage gradually turning into rubbish.”39 In his beloved Romania the act of observation challenges the fragility of objects “as if destroying this piece of dark-brown furniture by exposing it to the present moment.”40 Producing objects in his line of vision, the spatialised self has to grapple with an anxiety of their evanescence that may be leaving him the responsibility of being the last one to have seen them. Some sites are extraordinary through their timelessness, as somewhere in Moldova where something must have happened hundreds years ago yet without leaving a trace. In this space, the sacred often mixes with the profane, and so a church in the Romanian town of Roşia is a metaphor of “furniture in an ancient cave.”41 Some others defy a “normal” social order when they show that nature can be democratic, as happens in Budapest when rain falls on police cars in front of the parliament building. The traveller is indifferent to monuments understood in the conventional sense, the Hussite bed in Gönc or Greek ruins, and instead looks through an ethnographic lens at culture as a sum of small events and activities. This preference for the mundane explains why the whole of East Central Europe, across political borders, looks like a repository of similar places, an effect that Czapliński attributes to repeatability.42 Stasiuk’s pre-modern landscapes, while always populated, are characterised by “the same uncertainty of human presence.”43 This human space of rural Europe is often full of animals because for a pre-modern self a vital question is “what are we if we don’t have animals?”44 As sites of obvious human and animal life as well, these landscapes glorify the pre-modern. The experience of space is occasionally extreme and renders some views abstract when the “place is so empty, [that] you’re not sure whether you’re looking at a landscape or a diorama.”45 Landscape plays epistemological tricks on the perceiving self which “for those ten kilometres ... felt like [he] had found at last the seam of existence; ... beholding the world from the other side.”46 Shabby material conditions combined with beautiful nature do not tempt the traveller to claim the landscape through what Mary Louise Pratt calls a colonial “symbolic mastery of the discovered land.”47 Instead, he blends with the landscape and mixes with the human group, in an experience that reunites him with what he left behind at home, building a relationship indifferent to domination. Similarly, his fantasy of ruling “an empire with an unspecified number of provinces, an empire in motion ... driven by the idea of expansion, but also sclerotic, unable to remember its lands, its peoples, its capitals, so every morning it would need to start over”48 is no subaltern compensation but a subversive fairytale with no possibility of politics in it. It is in these passages that the travelogue probes the limits of nonfiction.

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Fuelled by physical movement, the descriptive layer of the narrative is a dialectic of emptiness and plenty ruled by memory. In a universe in which the future hardly ever comes, memory is like a constant exchange of banknotes, ceaseless division and change-dispensing, and accounting in the hope that the balance will be correct but where nostalgia and love guarantee profits. Sights of decay always have eschatological significance because already in his earlier work Winter49 the writer proclaims that “the world ends not with a bang but corrosion.”50 Dilapidated landscapes bear an ethical dimension, if we recognise the “same improvisation desperately trying to be permanent,” and “the silly heroism of a quotidian.”51 In their decay, these places are tokens of justice since aging is universal and befalls the old and the new alike, and in an uncanny way transport the narrator “against the current of time, towards primordial childhood.”52 This equitable decay somewhere in Slovakia, which affects Gothic monuments and a wooden shed alike, is an example of this evenhanded ethic too: “[t]he new joined the old in a just order, a liberté, egalité, and fraternité of matter.”53 Material impermanence leads the author to fear that in his favourite regions [m]eteorology and geology will join forces, ruling in a dubious coalition with history and geography. The permanent will seize the territory by the throat. The elements will resume their places Mendeleev’s eternal table, and no more tales, no more narratives will be needed to interpret existence.54 Once again, impermanence is humane since objects die together with people, facilitating the transition of both to nothingness or eternity. Aesthetically intensive and never beautiful, sometimes hostile, these places cannot be easily packaged for the Western traveller. They are magical in so far as they are where time plays its tricks on the perceiving self. 4. Cyclic time and future that never comes Stray occurrences peep from behind the homogenous material of the world. Time cracks and falls apart and, in order not to go mad, you have to continually recreate it. This fragility, this transitoriness, this impermanence of time is a characteristic of my part of the world. Time here never flowed in the steady, calm current found in the great metropoles. There was always something in its way. It divided, multiplied, twisted and turned back, entering intro strange relations with space, at times becoming entirely still, then disappearing.55 In the rural landscapes of East Central Europe not only material reality but also time is impermanent, with some places being archaically immune to modernity, as in Croatia where landscape is immanently resistant to change, a communist change no less so. In these sites the future is a figment of the

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imagination and the traveller sees only eternal present that inadvertently becomes past. A fascination with time that escapes history is clear in the narrator’s disregard for monuments but fixation upon decay as a natural process. Contemplation of decay is easy here since in these regions it is a cyclic form of time, also of natural seasons, that regulates life.56 In this part of Europe life is ruled by seasons and memory, and eternal present inadvertently becomes past without ever becoming conscious history. Collective memory holds that all things important happened only in the past. Stasiuk’s world resembles that of Mircea Eliade’s religious man who, unlike the modern historical, man cannot separate himself from the past but continuously relives and re-enacts myths “never allowing past events to become part of history.”57 Thus abject sites have a unique capacity to speak of time as tradition that civilization mystifies. Some of these abject places show where “[t]ime hasn’t yet started,”58 and others host past, present and future as there everything happens at the same time: That's Romania: gilded plafonds and moldings and a broken toilet. Romania is a land of marvels. I've been there maybe a dozen times and I still haven't had enough. Romania is a fairy tale. Past, present and future coexist there, and decay walks arm and arm with growth. The new is very much on the way, but the old survives equally well.59 Romania is the site of an eternal present: “[t]he present reigns in this place, as it always has,”60 and in Romanian marshes shepherds’ huts have a fully vegetable character that would leave no ruins ever. In these immobilised sites of an ideal once-upon-a-time or “it was always thus”61 past will never turn into future. Romania becomes a visual metaphor of modernity severely challenged, with time come full circle, and grazing cows among discarded machines, showing that modernity is losing out to timelessness. It fascinates the traveller through its uncanny continuity of forms of life and little or virtual lack of modernity, as it is among the mountaineers who live in “a present as old as the world”62 testifying that “man was fashioned out of clay.”63 The magical-realist landscape of Romania of “the unclear events, murky pseudofacts”64 reverberates with existential questions, especially the puzzle of origins. As a realm of contrasts, where the despair of suburbs goes hand in hand with “an unending abundance of time”65 which called into being villages carved in wood, Romania enjoys a special status. It is also one of the few places that arouse the traveller’s occasional interest in the conventionally monumental. For western travel writers infected with the evolutionary mindset, travels in spaces are travels in time.66 At its most benign, this modern sense of time generates nostalgia and romanticism, and usually, a sense of superiority. With Stasiuk, relegating the future to the realm of imagination, and free from the regime of the clock, periphery elevates ordinary sites to a level that is both philosophical and magical, where time is personified and wilful since in these places “tomorrow

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never arrives; it remains in distant countries.”67 And in this realm of the present, time “approaching from afar, is like air that someone else has already breathed.”68 In this world, cyclic time is the force that actively controls human action, always showing the upper hand in confrontation. Human attempts at counteracting it fail as any local attempt at killing time turns into inertia. Attempts at averting the curse of time and reaching something like eternity, such as the traveller undertakes in the Orhei monastery in Moldova, show time’s destructive power. In a Romanian provincial town time “was as palpable as the humidity in the air... [and] ate at the houses and ships, etched faces and landscapes, the glasses at the bar, the merchandise in the stores.”69 Time produces abundant waste and so a beach in the Albanian Saranda, inhabited by people who domesticated garbage and temporarily share this dump space with the inanimate objects, is one of those strangely harmonious landscapes where it is “persistent and heavy as a giant ox.”70 Finally, East Central European sites have characteristics of the sacred, preserved in the traveller’s memory in a “hopeless mantra of names and landscapes ... geographic prayer ... topographic Hail Marys ... litany of the map.”71 The writer’s intense preoccupation with abject spaces and pre-modern time regimes finds its fullest expression in the Gypsies whom the narrator traces everywhere along the road and whom he considers material proof of the limited attraction of Western culture; they are infinitely mobile and live beyond time. Gypsy history, their childlike consciousness, fully immersed in the present, deconstructs the binary between East and West, their locus being sometimes practically and metaphorically always beyond them and us. The paradox of the lasting Gypsy impermanence epitomises the writer’s denial of and resistance to “Europe.” Their portable countries and lack of interest in heritage becomes an ironical response to European civilization: “we reduced their humanity to an exotic image, they limited ours to the economy of their own survival”72; their treatment of time is Eastern in a concentrated form as “[t]hey had taken a shortcut here from the depth of times long gone, and they felt perfectly comfortable in the present.”73 5. Beyond “harmonising the differences”74 This universe of abject spaces and cyclic time is the realm of mythologised power, where imagination discredits democracy “because true power cannot, by its nature, be immanent; it would in that case resemble the most ordinary anarchy, though without all the entertainments and pleasures of anarchy.”75 In “Parody as a Continent’s Means of Survival,” Stasiuk explicitly theorises his skeptical attitude to cosmopolitanism, an idea signalled already in scattered form in many fragments of On the Road to Babadag: If we the West was parochial, then we practiced something that might be called pathological cosmopolitanism. We lived in our cities and countries in appearance only, because for us they were fictitious entities.

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They did not exist on and of themselves. Real life happened elsewhere, in the West. Our world was unreal. We had to make it so, because otherwise we would have had to despise it. Attempts to render our world more real resulted in sorry expeditions into an idealized past, or a hazy miraculous hybrid—the three-headed dragon of social equality, universal prosperity, and absolute freedom.76 Would the spaces in Stasiuk’s view yield a new, cosmopolitan map of alliances? It hardly seems a possibility because of the narrator’s intense identification with entire regions which blurs their boundaries. Disappearing political borders, which the narrator nostalgically even yearns to preserve, are absent from his literary vision. Borders do not matter symbolically any more when the landscape absorbs the self, making him dissolve his national identity in favour of a broader cultural belonging. And so in this travel, spatialisation and movement grow problematic since movement—while real in physical terms—is more than relative culturally. Travel, a benign drug that defamiliarises the already known, is nothing but a rediscovery of the already familiar from his homeland Carpathians, of “his” Europe. This intimate relation with an entire East Central European periphery thus elides the travelogue-constitutive difference between “home” and “away,” along with the binaries of “safe”/“dangerous” and “civilised”/“uncivilised” which have no more reason to exist in his broad landscapes of sameness. In this sense Stasiuk’s texts are far from typical modern travelogues “where values are discovered along the way, not imported.”77 This universe is hardly a cosmopolitan one which would celebrate multiple centres78 but rather one with a “heart ... in Sokołów,”79 and indifferent to metropolitan models. These spaces invite neither parodic nor nostalgic trips by those who would want “to be the last to see the land remote”80 but sooner those who are skeptical about the future. Stasiuk’s ocularcentric traveller enters them in a contemplative mood, but penetrates below surfaces, which repays him with experiences of a postsocialist sublime that he translates in ways akin to the baroque “madness of vision.”81 Abject sites, paradoxical repositories of bizarre plenty are a source of sublime greatness, which while “disdained by champions of clarity and transparency of form”82 has survived into late modernity in East Central Europe. This baroque vision thus enacts what Jay terms “a permanent, if often repressed, visual possibility throughout the entire modern era.”83 And if we agree that even though no scopic regime can effectively challenge culture at large,84 we can find some consolation in writing that liberates one from ignorance only if the narrator acknowledges his/her position in networks of power,85 and is also capable of formal innovation. In all these many ways discussed above, we see that his metaphorical travel prose deserves a special position in the development of this productive genre in crisis.

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1. Andrzej Stasiuk, On the Road to Babadag: Travels in the Other Europe, trans. Michael Kandel (London: Vintage, 2011), p. 11. 2. Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes. The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), p. 21ff. 3. Martin Jay, “Scopic Regimes of Modernity,” Vision and Visuality (Discussions in Contemporary Culture), ed. Hal Foster (Seattle: Bay Press, 1988), p. 3. 4. See ibid., p. 4. On distrust and contestation of ocularcentrism see Jay, Downcast Eyes.... 5. See Jay, Downcast Eyes.... 6. John Urry, The Tourist Gaze (London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi: Sage, 2nd ed., 2002). 7. Andrzej Stasiuk, Fado, trans. Bill Johnston (Champaign and London: Dalkey Archive, 2009). 8. Przemysław Czapliński, “Fado, Stasiuk, Andrzej,” Gazeta Wyborcza (October 13, 2006). 9. Jerzy Jedlicki, A Suburb of Europe (Budapest: Central European University Press, 1999). 10. Debbie Lisle, The Global Politics of Contemporary Travel Writing (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 201; Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes. Travel Writing and Transculturation (New York: Routledge, 2nd ed., 2008), p. 1. 11. Patrick Holland and Graham Huggan, Tourists with Typewriters. Critical Reflections on Contemporary Travel Writing (Ann Arbor: Michigan University Press, 1998), p. 205. 12. David Chirico, “The Travel Narrative as a (Literary) Genre,” Under Eastern Eyes: A Comparative Introduction to East European Travel Writing on Europe, eds. Wendy Bracewell and Alex Drace-Francis (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2008); Philippe Lejeune, “The autobiographical contract,” French Literary Theory Today. A Reader, ed. Tzvetan Todorov (Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982). 13. Gavin Kendall, Ian Woodward and Zlatko Skrbis, The Sociology of Cosmopolitanism. Globalization, Identity, Culture and Government (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). 14. Peter Hulme, “Travelling to Write (1940-2000),” Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing, eds. Peter Hulme and Tim Youngs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 87–101. 15. Agnieszka Macoch, “Blending Portuguese Nostalgia into Eastern Fabric: Stasiuk’s Fado,” Cosmopolitan Review, http://cosmopolitanreview.com/articles/41-reviews/170blending-portuguese-nostalgia-into-eastern-fabric-stasiuks-fado, accessed 25 July 2010. 16. Peter Hulme, “Travelling to Write (1940-2000),” p. 94. 17. Daniel Kalder, “In search of foreign travel books,” The Guardian (November 02, 2009), http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2009/nov/02/foreign-travel-books, accessed 10 September 2012. 18. Jay, “Scopic Regimes of Modernity,” p. 18. 19. Daniel Kalder, Lost Cosmonaut. Travels to the Republics that Tourism Forgot (London: Faber and Faber, 2006); Holland and Huggan, Tourists with Typewriters..., pp. 198–199; Eric Cohen, “Phenomenology of Tourist Experiences,” Defining Travel, ed. Susan L. Roberson (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2001). 20. Stasiuk, On the Road to Babadag, p. 3.

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21. Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, Reading Autobiography (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2nd ed., 2010), p. 72. 22. Lisle, The Global Politics of Contemporary Travel Writing, pp. 77–78. 23. Cohen, “Phenomenology of Tourist Experiences,” p. 47. 24. Ibid., pp. 38, 43. 25. Kalder, Lost Cosmonaut. Travels to the Republics that Tourism Forgot. 26. Cf. Leszek Koczanowicz, “My skolonizowani? Wschodnioeuropejskie doświadczenie i teoria postkolonialna,” Nowa Krytyka, 26/27 (2011). 27. Ibid. 28. Lisle, The Global Politics of Contemporary Travel Writing, p. 152. 29. Ibid., p. 150. 30. Ibid., p. 152. 31. Stasiuk, On the Road to Babadag, p. 210. 32. Ibid., p. 51 33. Ibid., p. 83. 34. Ibid., p. 11. 35. Stasiuk, Fado, p. 38. 36. Stasiuk, On the Road to Babadag, p. 161. 37. Ibid., p. 126. 38. Pratt, Imperial Eyes..., p. 213. 39. Stasiuk, On the Road to Babadag, p. 223. 40. Ibid., p. 154. 41. Ibid., p. 72. 42. Czapliński,“Fado, Stasiuk, Andrzej.” 43. Stasiuk, On the Road to Babadag, p. 173. 44. Ibid., p. 66. 45. Ibid., p. 175. 46. Ibid. 47. Pratt, Imperial Eyes…, p. 200. 48. Stasiuk, On the Road to Babadag, p. 222. 49. Andrzej Stasiuk, Zima (Wołowiec: Wydawnictwo Czarne, 2001). 50. Ibid., p. 27. 51. Stasiuk, On the Road to Babadag, pp. 220–221. 52. Ibid., p. 223. 53. Ibid. 54. Ibid., p. 196. 55. Stasiuk, Fado, pp. 8–9. 56. For a survey of experiential time as a cultural category, cf. Eva Hoffman, Time (London: Profile Books, 2009). 57. Anthony Aveni, Empires of Time. Calendars, Clocks and Cultures (London and New York: Tauris Parke Paperbacks, 2000), p. 66. 58. Stasiuk, On the Road to Babadag, p. 226. 59. Stasiuk, Fado, p. 36. 60. Stasiuk, On the Road to Babadag, p. 215. 61. Ibid., p. 217. 62. Ibid., p. 29. 63. Ibid., p. 23. 64. Ibid., p. 156. 65. Ibid., p. 213.

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66. Lisle, The Global Politics of Contemporary Travel Writing, pp. 204, 206. 67. Stasiuk, On the Road to Babadag, p. 67. 68. Ibid. 69. Ibid., p. 150. 70. Ibid., p. 98. 71. Ibid., p.143. 72. Stasiuk, Fado, p. 10. 73. Ibid., p. 10. 74. See Lisle, The Global Politics of Contemporary Travel Writing, p. 4. 75. Stasiuk, On the Road to Babadag, p. 54. 76. Stasiuk, Fado, p. 65. 77. Casey Blanton, Travel Writing: the Self and the World (London: Routledge, 2002), p. 29. 78. Kendall, Woodward and Skrbis, The Sociology of Cosmopolitanism, p. 39. 79. Stasiuk, On the Road to Babadag, p. 221. 80. Holland and Huggan, Tourists with Typewriters..., p. 204. 81. Jay, “Scopic Regimes of Modernity,” p. 16. 82. Ibid., p.16. 83. Ibid., p. 19. 84. Ibid., p. 20. 85. Lisle, The Global Politics of Contemporary Travel Writing, p. 269.

Eight SCOPIC REGIMES AND MODERNITY: HYPOTYPOSIS Roma Sendyka The essential point of reference for this text is the idea of scopic regimes as formulated by Martin Jay in his 1988 article Scopic Regimes of Modernity, published in the post-conference volume Vision and Visuality edited by Hal Foster. Both the colloquium (Dia Art Foundation, New York) at which the text was presented and the resultant publication are often seen as a motion that opened a new current in research on visual objects, most commonly known today as visuality studies or visual culture studies.1 For studies on literature or—more broadly—text, if these fields are to enter into the areas of reflection of new critical practices, it may be useful to explore the possibility of exploiting this critical idea for researching texts which—according to W. J. T. Mitchell, contain a verbal image in the form of metaphors and descriptions.2 With the two decades which have passed since the meeting in the Dia Art Foundation, attempts have of course been made to define literary scopic regimes in works concentrating on an analysis of prose, thematically linked to the question of observation,3 yet the most common object of this analysis has become the narrator, in connection with that element of construction which is the point of view, which can then be classified according to the typology proposed by Martin Jay. In order to be able to refer to the nature of the problem I will present in brief the idea suggested in Vision and Visuality. The term “scopic regime” derives from Le signifiant imaginaire (1977), a work by the French cinematologist Christian Metz.4 Metz uses the term to compare how we behave in the cinema and in the theatre; he is interested in two factors: the distance of the spectator from the object and the very existence of that object vis-à-vis the spectator. Metz does not define what a “scopic regime” is, and in one place uses the term “scopic arrangements” interchangeably: we can assume, though, that he is referring to a kind of interpretative paradigm of visual acts imposing itself on the viewer, formed by the combination of several forces created by the institution (cinema), its space (auditorium), its machinery (the camera lens), its schemata of presentations (e.g. the convention of actors not addressing the camera, thus permitting the viewer the impression of observing without being revealed), the general external perception conditions (the dark) and the equally determining the way of observing the internal primordial

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drives (scopophilia). Metz also does not explain why, of all the manifold potential terms he could use, he chooses one that suggests absolute subordination (“regime”), and therefore also a kind of oppression, violence or enforced formatting of the viewer through policies/formulas of visual acts formed to a large degree outside of him/her and irresistibly imposing themselves on the spectator. This decision is of course to a great extent compatible with the vision of the subject from Sigmund Freud’s philosophy, while another source may be the ideological background of all kinds of works published at this time containing the influential theory of Michel Foucault’s constantly disciplined subject. Incidentally, this “militarisation” of the discourse on the sense of vision, and—according to Foster5—tracks of “preying and taming, battling and negotiating,” as seen in Foucault, Jacques Lacan, and even Jean-Paul Sartre’s work, comprise a puzzling, “atavistic” common outline of these theories, in effect providing the image with a privileged, apotropaic character. It is therefore not only the act of seeing that is important, but also the system of dependence between the donor and the recipient of the look. The frame of that action also matters: scopic regime is a type of visuality but a ”culturally specific” one.6 In Jay’s view a scopic regime is a set of visual conventions determining our action of seeing: how and what we see. In other words it is dominant ways of seeing and organising visual culture. In determining the relation between the spectator and the viewed, scopic regimes are the basis of the distinguishing of an object, in this way becoming the basis of the distinction of what is knowable. Jay identifies three basic regimes: the first two are Cartesian perspectivalism (dominant in Western culture) and the art of describing (inspired by the suggestion of Svetlana Alpers in her book The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century).7 The competing model, especially for the first regime, but also the second, is a product of the baroque. The regimes weave a kind of plural net together rather than a distinct hierarchy, and are today available to us in combination. Their number is an open question: new models “are doubtless to come.”8 The first regime, Cartesian perpectivalism, dominated the modern culture of the West—its symbolic centre is the idea of linear perspective present in European culture since the Quattrocento with the philosophical foundations of Cartesianism, its effect the idea of an embodied, ideal, stable and centralised subject which is perfectly separate from its object: its civilisational consequence becomes the development of science and the technological revolution. Applying this “visual order,” Jay writes, has on many occasions led to later critical implications: “perspectival view” is abstract, mathematical, geometrised, cool, male: it suggests a rift between the viewer and his object; it assumes a withdrawal of emotional involvement, which immediately connects with the removal of the body as an element participating in the knowing and a deeroticisation of the subject which is knowing. But this price was worth paying: the Cartesian look allows the

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looking subject to gain more entitlements: the single all-seeing eye was after all that of God, who had all of creation in His hands. Cartesian perspectivalism was thus in league with a scientific world view that no longer hermeneutically read the Word as a divine text, but rather saw it situated in a mathematically regular spatio-temporal order filled with natural objects that could only be observed from without by the dispassionate eye of the neutral researcher.9 The second regime Jay distinguished was the “art of describing.” The designation of this “visual order” was inspired by the proposal of the Californian art critic Svetlana Alpers in her already mentioned work The Art of Describing. However metaphorically represented by Dutch still life, the regime seems not to dominate the Cartesian order, but offers, according to Jay, qualities which are a significant element of the later “forms of looking.” In place of the “rationalised, geometrised, fundamentally intellectual” model, it introduced empirical visual experience, with the philosophical patron being Francis Bacon. The “anti-mathematical” revolution would entail removing the need for establishing hierarchies, precise rules of proportion and the idea of similarity (representation). The radical proximity to the observed object distanced the divine perspective, and the darkening of the background rendered the effect of a “flat working surface,” according to Alpers. 10 The fragmentation of the field of view and the flatness and arbitrariness of framing in the Dutch view prepared European vision for the arrival of photography. Though both regimes seem to be in opposition according to the economy of rationalism and empirism, narration and description, Jay rejects the temptation of “scopic pan-conflict,” noting that descriptiveness, according to Alpers the central characteristic of this model, conditioned, like Cartesian visuality, practices of knowing, scientific discovery, and in effect, the success of European academic civilisation. A model which competes especially with the first, but also with the second regime, is a product of the baroque era, which brought about “the madness of seeing”—la folie du voir—using the term of the French philosopher Christine Buci-Glucksmann.11 Confrontational juxtaposition of the renaissance and baroque models has taken place in the history of art at least since Heinrich Wöfflin’s 1888 work Renaissance und Barock. For Jay, a symbolic object of this regime is an anamorphically distorted image requiring the intervention of a convex or concave mirror—revealing the conventionality of seemingly “natural” vision and the dependence of the sight organs on material media. The “trompe-l’oeil” device would inform the fallible operation of the human eye, and the tactile, tangible quality of the art of the time reintroduced the sidelined category of the body. An ideological correlate of this project would be the philosophy of pluralism of Leibniz’s monads, Pascal’s meditations on paradox, the mysticism of the counter-reformation,

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and interest in rhetoric revealing conventionalism and the “opaqueness” of the word. According to Jay, if we are to identify one regime which directly formats today’s visual experience, the baroque “madness of seeing,” with its predilection for representing the unrepresented, would be the closest thing to the visuality of late modernism. However, modern scopic regimes create mutually a kind of plural network rather than a clear hierarchical system. Appearing in historically determined moments, they did not cause the permanent replacement of their predecessor, so today they are available to us in a synchronous form. Their abundance is an open question. The transparent and functional typology proposed in Jay’s article is essentially—as we can easily note—a gesture of creation of interpretive tools from a knowledge base which we have long possessed. The idea that vision must be supplemented by interpretation, that “seeing” is useless without “knowing,” is according to Ernst Gombrich, who discusses these dependences in his influential book Art and Illusion (1959), a topic that has been known since Ptolemy’s Optics (c. 150 BC), and at least—closer to our time—since the medieval Arabic treaty by Alhazen (10th c. AD).12 Furthermore, in the Aby Warburg school there was a book which was clearly primal for Jay’s thought—I mean Erwin Panofsky’s work Perspective as Symbolic Form, originally presented in 1924, with its well known statement that “homogeneous space is never given space, but space produced by construction.”13 A similar intuition was contained in Lacan’s idea, four decades later (Lecture from March 11, 1964), of the “screen”: the intermediary between the object and the viewing subject, which at the same time protects that subject from a return look “from the object.”14 Foster explained l’écran thus: “The meaning of this last term is obscure. I understand it to refer to the cultural reserve of which each image is one instance. Call it the conventions of art, the schemata of representation, the codes of visual culture, this screen mediates the object-gaze for the subject, but it also protects the subject from this object-gaze.”15 The intuitions of Panofsky and Lacan contain a shared component, emphasised in Jay’s account: while visual observation is a physiological action, its apparent universality is in fact deceptive, since perceptive data are in fact always immediately modified, ergo, culturally constructed. In this sense looking differs from seeing as a cultural action. Vision, however, is—like language—before the subject. The act of perception always lands in the trap of the conventions of art, representative outlines of visual culture codes that existed for it before. In this article I am not interested in the practice of illustrating the formulae identified in Scopic Regimes of Modernity or in disregarding other “regimes”—this is a path which has already been followed by many commentators and critics of this text, beginning with Jacqueline Rose and Norman Bryson, discussing with Jay during the colloquium.16 I would like instead to ask of literature a similar question to that which Jay asked of visual arts: is the experience of the sense of vision captured in it in any

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conventionalised forms, and if so, what is the basic form and what are the possibilities of gaining power over this? My task is essentially easy, because a basic catalogue of established phenomena with a long tradition in the written word is provided by rhetoric (in which I agree with Barry Sandywell).17 It is from this source that I therefore select the essential figure of speech that refers to visual experience: description, but in its most condensed form, a clear statement coming from looking: I am referring to hypotyposis. 1. Hypotyposis Hypotyposis (Greek: ύποτύπωσις) connects two Greek words: ύπο [under] and τύπος [meanings include outline, pattern, figure, model]. The word literally means under-picture, ground; in metaphoric terms, then, it is the basis against the background of which the object of visual perception is produced. According to the classical concept of Quintilian this is a figure of thought which signifies a description revealing an object with such clarity that the listener has the impression rather of seeing the object being described (evidentia) than hearing the sound of words: “Forma rerum ita expressa verbis, ut cerni potius videatur, quam audiri.”18 Hypotyposis is related to, but functionally different from ekphrasis, which is determined by a separate and clearly defined subject (a work of art).19 A distinction between these two figures is also found by Adam Dziadek in his book Obrazy i wiersze.20 Here hypotyposis is considered close to ekphrasis, but is lacking in reference to a particular picture—it is rather a characteristic way of illustration referring to a certain tradition, general idea, atmosphere or current in painting (in some interpretations ekphrasis and hypotyposis are the same thing).21 Aiming for a more modern definition of hypotyposis, I refer to the book Les Figures du discourse where Pierre Fontanier gives the following recipe: “hypotyposis paints things in such a vivid and energetic fashion that in a way it puts them before the eyes and from the story or description creates a picture, painting or even live scene.” 22 In this sense, hypotyposis always “bears the condition of falseness,” as a contemporary commentator notes, and is a form of representation veiled and disguised as presentation, so that what the listener or reader experiences appears real and present, affective and effective because it seems not to be structured for persuasive purposes, and seems self-evident rather than requiring interpretation.23 I would like to stress a few issues here. The first is the reference to the vernacular form of social play in creating lively pictures. The ideal hypotyposis is a second of a potential film, and it is characterised by stageability, which immediately triggers the need for introduction of the

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person of the spectator (“The speaker places himself and his audience in the position of an eyewitness” 24). However, when “the speaker has made himself a fictitious eyewitness of his own imagination,” Lausberg continues, he has to initiate a range of linguistic devices in order to render the spectator a co-participant. The basic “modes of linguistic expression,” the figures of evidentia, are persona, loco, tempore, or “specification of the whole object,” “use of the present tense” and “use of adverbs of place which express presence.”25 The first definitional characteristic is characterisation: the objects of observation are specified by additional elements: nouns by adjectives, verbs by adverbs; the goal being maximum precision, accumulation of incentive data and an increase in details (distribution of the whole in sub-elements). The effect is on the one hand fragmentation of the object26 (so paradoxically the side of reference of the representation is weakened), and on the other intensity of the description: its own expressive forces become fortified. The tension, accumulated through the deepening description, is ever more unbearable—the closure of the description (a kind of huge retardation) is therefore seen by the reader as soothing, a solution, a fulfilment, and of itself becomes an act, an occurrence. The hypotyposis must therefore be closed properly, or alternatively resolved. It thus possesses a clausula. The next quality can therefore be directed to the device of actualisation: the apparent still frame, snapshot, is not eternally outside time. The basic time plane is now: grammatically, then, verbs are captured in the form of the present tense, sometimes in the function of the historical present. “Narration in the present tense lays two time planes on top of each other: the present of the description and the present of the reading”—wrote the authors of Vocabulaire de l’analyse littéraire.27 In other words, this is a translatio temporum, or technically speaking a metastasis.28 To attain the illusion of the direct presence of the reader in relation to the object being described (evidentia), a third action is required: removal of the narrator. In order to reach its proper level of intensity, the hypotyposis must be visible in the eyes of the reader who, from the start or gradually as the description is developed, is placed in the position of perceiving subject. An odd characteristic of hypotyposis—the last I will mention—is its obviousness: how it is (apparently) not open to interpretation. The hypotyposis (evidentia) is self-evident, self-sufficient, a-hermeneutic, the being itself, albeit forged with words. In order to examine the working of this figure and ask what the scopic regime it presents is, I will quote an example of a text from the time which interested Martin Jay in his book Downcast Eyes...29 This is perhaps one of the most beautiful realisations of hypotyposis in modern literature.

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2. Robinson Jeffers’s “Evening Ebb” Robinson Jeffers, “Evening Ebb”: The ocean has not been quiet for a long while; five night-herons Fly shorelong voiceless in the hush of air Over the calm of an ebb that almost mirrors their wings. The sun has gone down, and the water has gone down From the weed-clad rock, but the distant cloud-wall rises. The ebb whispers. Great cloud-shadows float in the opal water. Through rifts in the screen of the world pale gold gleams and the evening Star suddenly glides like a flying torch. As if we had not been meant to see her; rehearsing behind The screen of the world for another audience.30 I will not comment on the significance of the sea and water, the rock, the bird’s flight, the horizon—the complicated world of the poet, described brilliantly by numerous interpretators.31 Jeffers, a poet whose deep philosophical reflections have been analysed extensively, interests me here in the radically reduced scope of the technical skilfulness of his poetic craft. In his work cited above we find all the characteristics of the rhetorical figure of hypotyposis. The present tense is responsible for the actualisation of the observed scene (“fly,” “whispers,” “glides”); the past tense is introduced into the poem only for the atmospheric phenomena which create the background of the scene (“The sun has gone down, and the water has gone down”). We can even say that the time plane of the work is a radical present: „landscape reveals earth which is without history.”32 Characterisation takes place by use of the classical device of adding expressions (enumeration): “five night-herons,” “great cloud-shadows,” ”fly shorelong voiceless,” “weed-clad rock,” “opal water,” “pale gold gleams.” Further props are used here—the description is of the details of the landscape, transforming imperceptibly into the act of adding further decorations (the geographical location is not identified: it could be any of Jeffers’s favourite locations of California, Ireland or Greece). We have only a fragmentary knowledge of them: everything is in darkness, in which the eye only distinguishes a few items: herons, the rock covered in moss. The stageability of this poem is actually literal: the words rehearsing and audience are expressly used. We also find here the device of removal of the narrator: the basic form is the third person, the traditional grammatical form for narration of an objective observer. This is changed only by the word “we” in the penultimate line, also revolutionary from another point of view. It is here that the poem comes to an end. The hypotyposis is broken a moment earlier by the word suddenly, placing a radical barrier against further acts of perception. In an individual perspective, “Evening Ebb” also has its own particular characteristics, using hypotyposis to its own ends: the word “see” points to the

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sense of sight, and rather ex post facto gives the title to the series of expressions, causing numerous possible meanings to be placed around the subject of seeing as if around a magnetic pole. In the very visual poem we find ourselves paradoxically on the border of the visible, at the moment of nightfall (“the sun has gone down,” “opal water,” “cloud shadows”): we can in fact say that the darkness is dominant (which will turn out to be functional as a backdrop for the dark atmosphere of tragedy), the drawn curtain allowing through only flashes of light. Yet this light (“star like flying torch”) is the culmination of the scene for which the remaining props have turned out to be just a screen. The last two lines are not only a change of description into commentary, dark into light, indeterminate observer into observer united with the reader. The turning point is the third line from the end (“Star suddenly glides like a flying torch”), the moment at which the eyes look upwards: until now the observer has been looking low, by the water (“an ebb that almost mirrors their wings”); now, in the darkness, the head is suddenly raised. If we were to ask what scopic regime is preferred by literary hypotyposis, the first answer would be “art of describing”: the darkened setting of Jeffers’s poem makes it easy to juxtapose it with its Dutch predecessor. The flatness, tactility, fragmentation, and arbitrariness of the frame: all this justifies a straightforward correlation. To complicate, or just test this, I use the gesture of falsification: I look for the places where hypotyposis is rejected. The space of these searches is suggested by Jay’s aforementioned Downcast Eyes: the questioning of classic scopic regimes is undertaken especially in the art of modernism, where the avant-garde openly declared its mistrust of the privileged sense founding European, collective ocularcentrism. 3. Petals on a bough I would now like to quote a certain well-known description: Three years ago in Paris I got out of a ‘metro’ train at La Concorde, and saw suddenly a beautiful face, and then another and another, and then a beautiful child’s face, and then another beautiful woman, and I tried all that day to find words for what this had meant to me, and I could not find any words that seemed to me worthy, or as lovely as that sudden emotion.33 This is of course Ezra Pound, born only a year after Robinson Jeffers, recalling the event that was his incentive for writing the most famous poem of the Imagist school. This description is not a hypotyposis: all of the characteristics of this are missing, except perhaps for one: additivity – although mostly of a helpless nature (“and then another and another, and then”). The desire to express emotion, however (and thus a sensual experience, more bodily than rational), points to a desire for hypotyposis, which proves impossible. There is no such “right, beautiful” equivalent of words for this visual impression.

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“And that evening, as I went home along the Rue Raynouard, I was still trying and I found, suddenly, the expression.”34 The words did not appear—as Pound continues—but the pictorial equivalent, unclear colourful “splotches,” a “pattern,” “the beginning … of a language in colour.”35 The result is well known. .

The apparition of these faces in the crowd; Petals on a wet, black bough.36 The need to capture not the “picture,” but the “emotion” in the “beautiful words,” a need that is unrealised until the appearance of the possibility of using the new technique (“the pictorial equivalent”), that “desire for evidentia” (an emotive, affective figure of thought), is transformed into a very specific kind of verbal existence. From a technical point of view, this is another antihypotyposis, this time poetic: there is no stage, no viewer – in fact there is no “watching subject” at all. The picture appears itself, it is not “seen,” it becomes independent of the watcher. In this way it is “outside of time”—in this realisation we find no sign placing the picture “now” or “any time” at all. The space of characterisation is similarly reduced: we have no stageability, retardation, clausula; in effect the whole picture is so condensed that it may be a kind of “visual haiku.” In fact Pound expressly referred to this tradition (“Six months later I made a poem half that length; a year later I made the following haiku-like sentece”37), offering his philosophy of the “image,” which he defined as “that which presents itself as an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time.”38 It is worth adding that, in Downcast Eyes, Jay pointed to this very possibility (referring to non-Western culture) as a way to break down and extend the scopic regimes of the West. From this same book comes the intuition I use: questioning of classical scopic regimes takes place especially in modernism, where the avant-garde has revealed its distrust for the privileged sense which had founded European ocularcentrism. Pound’s poem is, according to the economy of inversion, evidence of how the constituent parts of classical hypotyposis have become the basis of the modern scopic regime organising literary description. These are: first, the presence of a watching subject with a causative ontological function: as Sartre and then Lacan argued, the gaze constitutes the object; second, currency— looking “happens,” and does not “last”; third: vision is temporal (this is where Lessing returns), and requires—as Mikhail Bakhtin would say—a chronotope, a connection of space and time; fourth, the hypotyposis is a “collection” of quality—in Pound’s work its additivity is replaced by “simultaneity.” For Pound, the observer is removed, the temporal plane is reduced, and collecting additivity is transported to simultaneous, fragmentary, “illuminated” presentation, whose function is disorientation. Voir ceases to be avoir: vision does not mean taking over its object.

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Of course, the hypotyposis model of description seems at first glance to be closest to the “art of describing” model as defined by Alpers and Jay, thanks to the lack of “frame,” darkening background, suggestion of tactility of objects. It seems to me, however, that one can find also links to the cartesian perspectivalism, with its emphasis on the constituting power of the gazing eye. Jeffers’s poem may feature the “Cartesian view” (everything finally turns out to be “the screen of the world for another audience”: for a new, external viewer watching from the privileged position behind the drawn curtain, behind the world accessible here and now), yet it is a view that is in a sense hostile, because it reveals a “beautiful” scene—but an illusion. At the same time the play of dark and light, the “suddenness” of the ending, is reminiscent of the baroque “madness of vision.” It seems therefore that the hypotyposis makes active use of various scopic regimes—all are active in relation to one another and remain in a peculiar state of homeostasis. This of course recalls the relations at work in a system of language, where the base elements determine each other without the need for exogenic relations “towards the world.” For this reason it appears that the observation of scopic regimes within literary works is interesting evidence of the intuition of adherents of the “pictorial turn” defined by W. J. T. Mitchell or Gottfried Boehm’s competing idea of the “iconic turn” (ikonische Wende): in hypotyposis pictures, albeit verbal ones, speak “their own language.” This is why the rejection of this language in Pound’s poem is still legible, as the revolution does not take place other than according to the obvious complementary economy of “binary characteristics.” If hypotyposis permits us to explain certain intuitions sensed within visual culture studies, it also opens up new problems: I am thinking here of small yet notable elements of the cited poems appealing to other senses (“ebb whispers,” “wet bough”), because how can we think “scopic regime” if it turns out that in fact “all media are polysensual?”39 Whatever, then, has been explained in the issue of the act of looking—also looking “in words”—will have to be transported to the next level, perhaps of unpredictable complication. NOTES 1. Martin Jay, “Scopic Regimes of Modernity,” Vision and Visuality (Discussions in Contemporary Culture), ed. Hal Foster (New York: New Press, 1988). 2. See W. J. T. Mitchell, Iconology. Image, Text, Ideology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), pp. 9–10. 3. See Karen Jacobs, The Eye’s Mind. Literary Modernism and Visual Culture (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001). 4. Christian Metz, The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema, trans. Celia Britton, et al. (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press 1982). 5. Hal Foster, The Return of the Real: the Avant-garde at the Turn of the Century (Cambridge, Mass.: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1996), p. 140.

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6. Jay, “Vision in Context: Reflections and Refractions,” Vision in Context. Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on Sight, ed. Teresa Brennan and Martin Jay (New York: Routledge, 1996), p. 3. 7. Svetlana Alpers, The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984). 8. Jay, “Scopic Regimes of Modernity,” p. 20. 9. Ibid., p. 9. 10. Alpers, The Art of Describing…, p. 138. 11. Christine Buci-Glucksmann, Le folie du voir: de l’esthétique baroque (Paris: Éditions Galilée, 1986). 12. Ernst Gombrich, Art and Illusion. A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 11th ed., 2000), p. 15. 13. Erwin Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form, trans. Christopher S. Wood (New York: Zoe Books, 1991), p. 30. 14. Jacques Lacan, “What is a Picture?,” The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1998). 15. Hal Foster, The Return of the Real. The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century (Cambridge, Mass.: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 4th ed., 2001), p. 140. 16. See Jacqueline Rose and Norman Bryson “General Discussson,” Vision and Visuality, ed. Hal Foster (Seattle: Bay Press, 1988). 17. Barry Sandywell, “Specular Grammar: The Visual Rhetoric of Modernity,” Interpreting Visual Culture, eds. Barry Sandywell and Ian Heywood (New York: Routledge, 1999). 18. See “Hypotypose,” Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, vol. 3, ed. Joachim Ritter (Basel: Schwabe, 1974), pp. 1266–1267. 19. Aleksandra Okopień-Sławińska, „Hypotyposis,” Słownik terminów literackich, eds. Janusz Sławiński, Michał Głowiński, Teresa Kostkiewiczowa and Aleksandra Okopień-Sławińska (Wrocław: Zakład Narodowy im. Ossolińskich, 3rd ed., 1998), pp. 205–206. 20. Adam Dziadek, Obrazy i wiersze. Z zagadnień interferencji sztuk w polskiej poezji współczesnej (Katowice: Wydawnictwo Universytetu Ślaskiego, 2004). 21. Michał Paweł Markowski, “Ekphrasis. Uwagi bibliograficzne z dołączeniem krótkiego komentarza,” Pamiętnik Literacki, 2 (1999); Albert Gorzkowski, „Ut pictura verba… zagadnienie unaocznienia w retoryce starożytnej i wczesno nowożytnej,” Pamiętnik Literacki, 2 (2001). 22. Cf. Michał Paweł Markowski, “Ekphrasis. Uwagi bibliograficzne z dołączeniem krótkiego komentarza,” p. 229; Dziadek, Obrazy i wiersze…, p. 77. 23. Sandra Logan, Texts/Events in Early Modern England. Poetics of History (Burlington: Ashgate, 2007), p. 15. 24. Heinrich Lausberg, Handbook of Literary Rhetoric: a Foundation for Literary Study, trans. Matthew T. Bliss, et al. (Leiden: Brill, 1998), par. 810, p. 359. 25. Ibid., par. 812, p. 361. 26. See Jean Mazaleyrat and Georges Molinié, Vocabulaire de la stylistique (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1989). 27. Daniel Bergez, Violaine Géraud and Jean-Jacques Robrieux, Vocabulaire de l’analyse littéraire (Paris: Armand Colin, 1994), pp. 119–120. 28. Lausberg, Handbook of Literary Rhetoric…, par. 814, p. 363. 29. Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes. The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).

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30. Robinson Jeffers, The Selected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers, ed. Tim Park (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2001), p. 298. 31. See Tadeusz Sławek, The Dark Glory. Robinson Jeffers and His Philosophy of Earth, Time and Things (Katowice: Uniwersytet Śląski, 1990). 32. Ibid., p. 13. 33. Ezra Pound, “From Vorticism,” Ezra Pound: A Critical Anthology, ed. John P. Sullivan (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1970), p. 51. 34. Ibid. 35. Ibid., p. 52. 36. Ezra Pound, Selected Poems of Ezra Pound (New York: New Directions Publishing, 32nd ed., 1957), p. 35. 37. Pound, “From Vorticism,” p. 54. 38. Ezra Pound, “A Few Don’ts by an Imagiste,” Modernism. An Anthology, ed. Lawrence S. Rainey (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2005), p. 95. 39. W. J. T. Mitchell, “There Are No Visual Media,” Journal of Visual Culture, 4 (August 2005).

Nine MODERNITY VERSUS POSTMODERNITY. VARIOUS ASPECTS OF THE PROBLEM OF PERIODIZATION Paweł Dybel No discussion on modernity can go on today without taking into account the context of postmodernity, no matter whether the latter is recognized as a legitimate inheritor or follower of modernity or as a kind of dubious duplicate. For, notwithstanding all the differences in the apprehension of the relationship between these two epochs (even if one calls into question this very differentiation), nobody today would question the fact that in the 1960s there began, in the leading capitalist countries, significant changes which affected various areas of the social and political life of their citizens. The most farreaching were the changes in the functioning of the economy, of state administration and in the role of the mass media, whose influence on the selfunderstanding of various groups in late capitalist societies was rapidly growing. All these changes resulted in significant qualitative transformations in the way of life in these societies and in the shaping of new rules of political competition and struggle. Yet, perhaps the most significant symptoms of these changes were the globalization processes that from the seventies spread to all continents. The problem, however, is how to diagnose these changes. Are they the result of the natural evolution of the processes that are typical of modernity and therefore is there no sense in treating them as the foretoken and manifestation of the new epoch, no matter what we would call it - postmodernity or otherwise? Or on the contrary, are they so significant that they justify the treatment of the period in which they take place as being, in many respects, different from modernity? And it is notable that the researchers who try to describe and diagnose this period from the nineteen-sixties to the nineties differ very deeply in their views on this issue. There are then, on the one hand, those who maintain that the changes that occurred in the societies of leading capitalist countries from the sixties to the nineties are the direct result of the processes typical for modernity (Anthony Giddens, Ulrich Beck, Jürgen Habermas).1 This allows one to speak of the second, late or fluid modernity that represents a sort of version of modernity. These researchers point to the fact that everything that was going on in the western societies during this period was only a sort of prolongation and intensification of the processes that had been taking place before. On the other hand, there are researchers who claim that it is precisely due to this intensification and various modifications of the processes typical of

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modernity that from the sixties onwards, in the functioning of the economy, of state administration and of the mass media, significant qualitative changes occurred (Jean-François Lyotard, Richard Rorty, Zygmunt Bauman, Jean Baudrillard, Gianni Vattimo2). And, what is more, these changes significantly reshaped the self-consciousness of late capitalist societies. This allows one to speak of postmodernity as an epoch that, although in many respects it shares with modernity many features, is at the same time entirely different from it. All these features play a different function in postmodernity, and consequently assume entirely new meanings. This results in deep transformations of the cultural self-awareness of late capitalist societies and in their way of life, as was mentioned above. The result of this is the emergence of a sort of “liquid” self-identity which is typical of many professional groups in late capitalist societies. 3 This peculiar way in which postmodernity relates to modernity signaled already by the morphological structure of this word; the prefix “post”—added to modernity. This implies that what is most characteristic of this epoch is simply that it comes after modernity and this “after” gives it its special value and features. This is to say, it brings with itself nothing essentially new but in a way flourishes in the shadow of modernity and, all the differences notwithstanding, is still influenced by it. However, the problem is that this “post”—or “after” could be understood in two ways. Either postmodernity is an autonomous epoch or period which has come after the end of modernity, or it is an epoch that brings modernity to an end while remaining its inherent part. It should then be conceived of as its ultimate fulfillment. Yet, this is still not the end of all terminological complications. For in each of these two cases the prefix “post” has two additional, different meanings that in a way oppose each other. The first meaning implies that postmodernity began when modernity came to its end and nothing new could flourish on its sterile ground. In other words, the coming to an end of modernity is tantamount to the end of human history. The only thing that one has to do then is to live in its shadow and duplicate endlessly its processes and ideas. If it has any sense it is in a way a degraded sense, a sort of caricature of the original. This sense can be produced only by a decadent consciousness which is deeply convinced that in human history there cannot occur anything essentially new and one has only to repeat the old patterns of behavior. But this “post” or “after” might in the first case as well mean that the epoch that comes after modernity—although it has no essentially new features—is nevertheless entirely different from it. And this is the second meaning. For all determinants of modernity, due to their intensified and modified form, play in it a different function and lead to deep transformations in the lifestyle in “postmodern” societies. This lifestyle relies on ideas and values that are often the exact opposite of those ideas and values which were typical for modernity. Therefore, the main task of a researcher who deals with this period,

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be it a sociologist, philosopher, anthropologist, theoretician of culture etc., would be the insightful recognition and description of all these changes. In the second case, post-modernity puts an end to modernity. It belongs, therefore, inherently to modernity, while bringing to its final fulfillment everything that has been programmed into its processes and ideas. However, also in this case, this relationship is to be understood in two different ways. In the first understanding, the process of putting an end to modernity means simply the direct continuation of its processes so that in them nothing essentially new appears. Therefore, there is no sense in speaking of the beginning of a new epoch, no matter whether one would call it “postmodernity” or something else. The second understanding assumes that this process of putting an end to modernity brings some essential changes with it: their results are the deep transformations of the way of life in late capitalist societies, which affect their self-consciousness. Therefore, it is legitimate on the one hand to conceive of this period as an inherent part of modernity and on the other hand to stress its particular character by calling it postmodernity. One can easily notice that all these ways of understanding the relationship between modernity and postmodernity overlap, so that it is impossible to separate them entirely from each other. Yet what is common to the first versions of these ways of understanding, in both cases one and two, is the tendency to relativize the difference between modernity and postmodernity or to put it totally in question. The tendency to point to the differences between them is common to the second versions of these ways of understanding, while it is more radically stressed in the first case. The fact that these four ways of understanding postmodernity overlap results mainly from the negative definition of postmodernity that is assumed in them. They deny postmodernity any essential positive features that would enable one to differentiate it clearly from modernity. Consequently, even the researchers who try to stress the autonomy of postmodernity in relation to modernity have huge problems in performing a clear-cut division between them. Many of them oscillate in their arguments between these four ways of conceptualizing postmodernity so that it is often difficult to classify their concepts unambiguously. The best example of this fluid attitude is the peculiar evolution of the views of Bauman who, in his early works, stressed the radical autonomy of postmodernity while in his later books he classified it with the term “fluid modernity.” But this is not the end of all the problems. When one takes a closer look at the way in which the representatives of the second tendency—Bauman, Lyotard, Rorty, Vattimo, etc.—understand the relationship between modernity and postmodernity, one cannot resist getting the impression that their argument is, in a way, self-contradictory. On the one hand, they maintain that postmodernity cannot be conceived of as an entirely new epoch—like romanticism in relation to the Enlightenment—since all its features are the result of intensification of the processes typical for modernity and of the

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particular configuration of its main ideas and values. On the other hand, what they actually understand by the results of this intensification and new configurations (or new functioning) of modernist ideas implies such a radical otherness of postmodernity in relation to modernity that all their common attributes appear as secondary and of little account. When, for example, Bauman, Vattimo or Rorty maintain that the basic ontological ideas and epistemologies of modernity—the cult of novelty and scientific progress, the assumption of one universal truth (or the search for it), the dominance of the scheme “subject—object” etc.—have been called into question by postmodernity, they imply that all these ideas are anachronistic today. Can we then imagine a more radical difference between two epochs than as it has been conceived here? What is more, although they all try to avoid using the word “new” as characterizing what postmodernity offers instead of the traditional metaphysical—ontological and epistemological—schemes, are not these proposals really “new” in the most radical sense of this word? Or to put it another way: are they not so radically different from modernity that even the word “new” is too weak to articulate this? If so, then instead of maintaining that there is a sort of continuity between modernity and postmodernity, one has to assume that there is on the contrary a real abyss between them. Perhaps the best example of this discrepancy in the argument is the way in which the relationship between modernity and postmodernity is conceived by Vattimo. On the one hand, in the End of Modernity he maintains that postmodern thought—as it has been foreshadowed and inspired by Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger—breaks with the typical European metaphysical assumption that there is any last fundament of being that should be recognized and laid down as the solid basis of human knowledge. And, at the same time, it does not propose any new fundament that would have been laid deeper than the previous ones, since this would imply that it remains within the frames of metaphysical schema typical for modernity. Instead, it stresses the contingent, finite character of human existence and maintains that any concept or theory of being is already its interpretation which is limited in its essence and could always be called into question by another one. Yet the question is, if this sort of calling into question of the basic metaphysical assumptions of modernity can be interpreted only as their particular “weakening,” does that lead to a postmodern model of “weak ontology?” Perhaps, on the contrary, this so-called weak ontology implies such a radical break with modernist metaphysics that it actually goes much further than any possible “new” ontologies would be able to do. One can say then that the postmodern weak ontology grows up on the ruins of the modern ontologies like a particular graft that on the one hand feeds on their miserable, wretched remains, yet on the other hand has assumed such an entirely different form from them that it seems to have nothing in common with them. What is more, in comparison with postmodern ontology as it has been conceived by Vattimo, all modernist ontologies look like

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anachronisms of a bygone epoch and their claim to represent the universal truth of being is not only unjustified but also naive and outdated. Another example: postmodernist researchers proclaim that postmodernity is an epoch in which history in the traditional modernist understanding, as the process of the permanent progress of human knowledge and self-consciousness, came to an end. Instead of this there is only ongoing repetition of the processes typical of modernity that develops according to the same rules, yet cannot be conceived of as ordered by the same telos of progressive emancipation. What is more, one cannot claim that there is one totalizing apprehension of human history that is entirely objective and universally binding. Consequently, there is not only one narration of historical events that is true and universal. There are, rather, many small narrations whose authors are conscious of the particular and contingent character of their point of view. As Vattimo stresses, in modernity it was taken for granted that the only narration of history that counts is the narration of the winners who put forward their point of view. Postmodernity points, on the contrary, to the fact that the same value could be given to the narration of history written by the losers who have a different view of the events.4 Actually, there could be many different views from which history is written and they should be regarded as equally justified. Consequently, we always have to deal with many particular narrations whose authors interpret historical events according to their own prejudices. If, then, one compares these two attitudes towards history it seems evident that they have nothing in common. What is more, the differences between them seem to run so deeply that they cannot even be put into the frames of a simple binary scheme: a positive term and its opposite. The two terms of this scheme are incommensurate; they simply exclude each other. What is more, since such critics of modernity as Lyotard, Rorty and Vattimo maintain that the totalizing claims of modern ontologies have their roots in the metaphysical tradition which began with Plato’s and Aristotle’s philosophy, this implies that postmodernity actually calls into question the basic ontological schemes which underlie this tradition. This conclusion seems to contradict one of the main points of Vattimo’s thesis in The End of Modernity concerning the relationship between modernity and postmodernity. According to him, the paradigmatic example of a particularly conciliatory attitude of postmodernity towards metaphysics is Heidegger’s idea of Verwindung of metaphysics (and the idea of Andenken). This idea implies that although one should question its basic ontological schemes, it is impossible to overcome metaphysics entirely, to throw it away, abolish it, etc. One has rather to get over metaphysics, to cover it again to recognize anew one’s place within/outside it. However, when we take a closer look at the way in which Heidegger realizes his idea of Verwindung of metaphysics in his later writings it is evident that all metaphysical schema undergo such a deep transformation that actually nothing of them remains. If they represent for him the indispensable point of reference, then first, the

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latter has only negative value, and second, it allows him to outline distinctly his own entirely different point of view. One could even say that, if the Heideggerian attitude towards metaphysics had been based on the idea of overcoming it or throwing it away it would not have been even half so radical and revolutionary in its results. According to Vattimo, one of the most significant forerunners of postmodernity was the German philosopher Arnold Gehlen.5 Already in his writings from the fifties he pointed to the fact that intensification of some processes typical for modernity leads to deep qualitative changes in the social and cultural consciousness. He maintained, for example, that the growing pursuit of novelty, which is the result of the reorientation of the economy towards consumption, has—paradoxically—as its effect the degradation of the notion of novelty. It actually becomes its own opposite. The growing trend in the buying of novelties every now and again changes into a monotonous ritual in which the synonym of novelty becomes the secondary attribute of things which have been served in an attractive package. The same could be said about introducing into cultural circulation new ideas, promotion of new authors and new singers, and the serving up by the mass-media of new sensational news etc. The trend toward novelty is changed here into a perfunctory production of illusions of anything that is new, an artificial affectation of consumers’ desires to buy more and more modern products, and offering them more and more dubious and trashy works of pop culture they have to relish. It reminds one of a typical situation that we know very well from the texts of Sigmund Freud and especially Jacques Lacan, in which the striving of the individual to experience the maximum of pleasure results, after it goes beyond a certain limit, in the experience of displeasure. This experience of displeasure then, accompanied often by the feeling of pain and disgust, cannot be treated as something new or as a “negation” in Hegel’s sense since it is simply incommensurate with the experience of pleasure. Analogously, one can say that the intensified repeating form of the processes typical of modernity brings about effects that are entirely different from those that prevailed in that epoch. Consequently, the modernist values and ideas become their own caricatures or they begin to signify something radically other than what they signified before. Another analogy that comes to mind is Freud’s well known formula of the “narcissism of small differences” which appears in his last book, Moses and Monotheism. He tried to explain by this concept the paradoxical fact of particular hostility of nations or the followers of religions to those others with which they have very much in common—like, for example, the attitude of Scottish people to Englishmen or Christians towards Jews. According to him, it is precisely these small differences in the common cultural heritage, language or concept of God and religious rituals that are the source of especially strong aggression that representatives of nations or religious groups bear towards each other. Freud explains this by pointing to the fact that these

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differences are experienced as particularly painful blows to their narcissistically inclined ideal self-image. In other words, the slightly different way of speaking of these other groups, their slightly different customs and their religious beliefs give them back a distorted and caricatured image of themselves which they cannot bear, for, in their opinion, only they speak correct English, have good customs, believe in the one true God, etc. On the one hand, then, this attracts them to each other since they often share with these other nations or ethnic and religious groups the same language and cultural origins—and therefore some essential ideas and values. Yet, on the other hand, precisely because of these common cultural and religious roots, the small differences between them in the understanding of the ideas and values they share become in their eyes so significant that they cannot tolerate them. They become a matter of life and death since they are like a horrible flaw in their ideal self-image. Therefore, the only solution is either to assimilate entirely these other nations or groups so that they will look like them or simply to get rid of them, either by degrading their social position and by depriving them of some basic civil rights or by simply exterminating them. I think that some aspects of this ambivalent attitude of attraction and hatred are recognizable in the way in which the leading postmodernist philosophers and sociologists like Lyotard, Vattimo, Rorty and Bauman conceive of the relationship of postmodernity to modernity, whose basic features I have pointed to above. On the one hand, they maintain that postmodernity is the natural product of the processes typical of modernity which have assumed intensified and modified forms and that this has resulted in significant changes in the self-understanding of societies in the leading capitalist countries. This way of arguing implies that the difference between modernity and postmodernity is to some extent relative. Therefore, it is not possible to draw a clear separation line between these two epochs. Although postmodernity is the unwanted child of modernity, who by its behavior and way of life represents the parents, it is nonetheless its legal inheritor. This argument could be called assimilative since its unacknowledged aim is to demonstrate that, all the differences notwithstanding, postmodernity is an inherent part of modernity. On the other hand, however, when postmodern philosophers and sociologists try—according to this assimilating perspective—to point to the separate character of postmodernity, they argue that the result of the major changes in social self-consciousness in this epoch is a total breakdown of the metaphysical horizon of modernity. Thus, all modern metaphysical ideas and values function in their argument like the proverbial fall guy who is accused of everything: various simplifications, dogmatism, anachronism and great ontological naiveté. This totally critical, degrading attitude is actually incompatible with the assimilative perspective they try at the same time to maintain. On the other hand, there are philosophers and scientists for whom the very term “postmodernity” is a sort of misunderstanding. They maintain that

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the postmodern talk about the breakdown of metaphysical ontology, its criticism of the concept and of the idea of objective scientific truth, etc., has no value and is only empty rhetoric. An excellent example of this attitude towards postmodernity is the well known book by Jean Bricmont and Alan Sokal, Fashionable Nonsense, in which they try to show that the way in which leading postmodern and poststructuralist philosophers refer to various modern scientific theories in physics or mathematics relies on a total misunderstanding of them.6 What is more, some postmodern theses on the ontological status of reality are in clear contradiction to what contemporary theories in natural sciences maintain on this issue. A similarly critical attitude is widespread among representatives of analytical philosophy, philosophy of science and cognitivism. They deny most postmodern concepts and ideas any value and maintain that they are not worthy of serious scientific discussion. I would call this attitude ‘exterminative’ since its aim is the entire intellectual and scientific annihilation of postmodernist sociologists and philosophers by demonstrating that everything they have to say is total nonsense. However, this annihilating/exterminative critical attitude also makes impossible any serious discussion with its advocates. Therefore, I would like to end these remarks with one critical conclusion. It concerns Vattimo’s thesis that postmodernity calls into question the fundamental metaphysical concepts of modernity while replacing them with a sort of weak ontology. I do not think that this thesis is false. Yet, when one reads such authors as Vattimo, Rorty or Bauman one gets the impression that the collapse of basic ontological assumptions typical of modernity is the predominant feature of a postmodernity conceived of as an epoch that opened up entirely new perspectives of self-understanding of societies that still prevail today. This implication of their argument is something I would like to question. Even if one acknowledges the significance of the deep changes in the selfunderstanding of late capitalist societies that postmodernity brought about, it seems that it was rather one of many intellectual tendencies in the period from the seventies to the nineties and not an epoch or period in itself. To defend this latter view, one would naturally have to argue that there were many cultural and artistic phenomena that corresponded with these changes, not to mention some original postmodern philosophical ideas and concepts. Yet I do not think that they were predominant in this period—to maintain this is to practice a sort of postmodernist mythology. The remarks of Vattimo in The End of Modernity where he demonstrates the significance of Nietzsche’s and Heidegger’s deconstruction of metaphysics for postmodernist projects as weak ontology are no doubt very interesting from the philosophical and geisteswissenschaftlich point of view. Yet we cannot forget that in such strict scientific disciplines as mathematics, physics, and the natural sciences and in some scientifically oriented philosophical currents and disciplines like logic, analytical philosophy and cognitivism, theories dominate that still rely on the general assumptions

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typical of modernist metaphysical ontologies. And it is very problematic whether the postmodernist “weak” ontologies like those proposed by Vattimo could be of any significance for their methodological procedures and research results. These “weak” ontologies mainly correspond to changes in the procedures of human sciences and the terminology of some philosophical currents or the changes in self-understanding of some enlightened and welloff social groups in leading capitalist countries. What is more, these postmodern ideas and values often co-exist with the traditional schemes of thinking that have their roots in modern metaphysical ontologies or even in pre-modern religious tradition. Therefore, the various forms of thinking in terms of fundamentalism—ideological, scientific, religious, political, national, pop-cultural (cult of pop-culture heroes promoted by mass-media) etc.—are not rare phenomena amongst the representatives of these enlightened social groups. What their self-consciousness consists of is not only various postmodern “liquid” identity forms—so impressively described by Bauman and others—but also the ways of thinking and behavior typical of modernity and pre-modern times. Perhaps this peculiar simultaneous co-existence of postmodern, modern and pre-modern “prejudices” is the most characteristic feature of self-understanding of the social groups mentioned above. NOTES 1. Cf. Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990); Anthony Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity. Self and Society in the Late Modern Age (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991), pp. 14–19; Ulrich Beck, The Reinvention of Politics: Rethinking Modernity in the Global Social Order, trans. Mark Ritter (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992); Jürgen Habermas, “Die Moderne. Ein unvollendetes Projekt,” Kleine politische Schriften (Frakfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1981), pp. 444–464. 2. Cf. Jean-François Lyotard, La condition postmoderne (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1979); Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, trans. Sheila Faria Glaser, (Ann Arbor: Michigan The University of Michigan Press, 1994); Gianni Vattimo, The End of Modernity. Nihilism and Hermeneutics in Post-modern Culture, trans. John R. Snyder (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991); Zygmunt Bauman, Intimations of Postmodernity (New York and London: Routledge, 1992). 3. Cf. Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity (London: Polity Press, 2000). 4. See Gianni Vattimo, The Transparent Society, trans. David Webb (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992). 5. Ibid., p. 28. 6. Jean Bricmont and Alan Sokal, Fashionable Nonsense. Postmodern Intellectuals Abuse of Science (New York: Picador, 1998).

Ten DIALOGUE, ACTIVITY, AND MENDACITY Leszek Koczanowicz In his book The Virtues of Mendacity. On Lying in Politics Martin Jay shows many complications which are connected with the phenomenon of lying. He is clear that in order to understand it we should overcome the simple opposition mendacity/veracity. All the more it seems that democratic politics, if we give up the illusion that it can become transparent and all-visible, is necessarily infected with some kind of illusion. Jay concludes his book with the wry remark: It is just a sober recognition that politics, however we choose to define its essence and limit its contours, will never be an entirely fib-free zone of authenticity, sincerity, integrity, transparency, and righteousness. And maybe, I hope it will be clear by now, that’s ultimately a good thing too.1 This statement is, I think, a consequence of Jay’s conviction that the political is not separate from other forms of human existence where of course mendacity and veracity have always been interwoven with each other. Politics cannot be thus a realm of pure moral principles as well as a domain of dirty tricks and means-for-ends strategy. Therefore, …the best that can be hoped for in politics is a utilitarian moral calculus, akin to the probabilistic casuistry that so outraged Jansenist and Puritanical rigorists, which weighs one transgression against another, and allows the politician consciously and courageously to take the weighty burden of getting his hands soiled for a higher cause.2 In my paper I would like to discuss this statement in light of two examples and two concepts of community and its ethics. The first example is Georges Bataille’s reflection on the political lie in the context of communist politics. He also as is well known develops a very sophisticated concept of community which is founded on the concept of experience. The second example is the pragmatist concept of morality which I analyze referring to John Dewey’s involvement in the Leon Trotsky case. From my perspective this involvement was motivated by the pragmatist concept of community as a community of action. Bataille touches the problem of the political lie in his short paper published in Critique in June 1948 in the context of the debate on communism.3 The relation to communism as is well known was a crucial and troubling thing

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for many French intellectuals. Bataille, who was also active in this debate, in his short text tries to develop his viewpoint from a broader perspective involved in the politics of lying. He starts from a general observation that lies are becoming more and more important as “[a]ction delays the drawing of weapons as little as possible: one hopes to convince before using force and finds an advantage in distortion, something silencing the truth.”4 But lies are in relation to freedom and justice and this relation reveals its ambiguous nature. Lies can be a natural weapon in the oppression of the weak, in the abuse of power. … Undoubtedly it is easy to object that lies easily occasion social constraint, that one does not lie to slaves, that the history of politics is that of an advance in the art of lying.5 But on the other hand, “[t]he political lie can be necessary in another way: it ruins not only free speech but free discussion where the ‘intellectual’ moves and encloses him or herself.”6 Lying, the political lie, is thus a tool to avoid oppression; therefore it is necessary in a society where some people are subordinated. The subalterns to survive in such a society have to adjust actually or apparently to the demands of their oppressor. Using lies not only shields them from immediate oppression but allows them to construct a deceptive world which can protect them at least partially from their oppressors. This politics of the lie has been developed in all class societies where as Bataille states, “one does not lie to slaves.” But of course he would like also to avoid the banal truth that the end justifies the means. He shows as well that the lie is poisonous as it closes off any decent communication between intellectuals. I think that the passage quoted is an indication that we should look at the lie as a result of a very complex social and cultural situation. Any evaluation of the role of the political lie should take into account this complexity. This double nature of lies enables Bataille to pass to the question of communism. From the beginning he warns: “…the question of the lie is posed in a debate that exceeds legitimate preoccupation linked to the exercise of thought.”7 He is sure that the conflict around communism is “the sharpest conflict in the moral history of humanity, because in the end it poses ultimate questions without refuge,” and, “[t]he encounter with communism, which is not only a system of ideas but generally the irruption of real force in the system of ideas, could have been accommodated by thought as a possibility.”8 Here I would not like to discuss at length the complicated relation of Bataille with communism and his notion of community, which is far from any Marxist’s idea. His biographer Michel Surya shows Bataille’s complicated, almost torturous relationship with communism as an attempt to escape from the alternative: either to praise bourgeois ideology or “to take the leap into death” which was what communism represented to him. The only way left open was to try to understand

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how the intractable, exhausted, coercive Soviet world was a world of slavery, a world where work was the only possibility, one that more than any had issued a blanket rejection of spontaneity, spending and extravagance.9 This world however bears the burden of a fatal historical necessity which cannot be subordinated to any moral judgment. This general standpoint makes Bataille note that lying is not exclusively a cognitive phenomenon; it has to be placed in the general context of the experience of ideological struggle and probably first of all in the context of action. Bataille was a part of the intellectual environment which, as Michael Scott Christofferson argues, took issue with Kantian ethics: In the influential writings of Simone de Beauvoir, Maurice MerleauPonty, and Jean-Paul Sartre, the postwar critique of Kantian ethics was not a total rejection of all it represented. Rather, these intellectuals had come to conclude from the wartime experience that, while the realization of Kant’s ‘kingdom of ends’ remained the goal of politics, it was naïve to believe that action true to Kant’s categorical imperative could achieve it. The existence of men of evil will (that is, collaborators and Nazis) acting contrary to the Kantian project rendered deeply problematic recourse to the categorical imperative as a guide to action. … They had to be combated. Liberty, as the history of Resistance indicated, could not be realized without at least the threat of recourse to violence. Good intentions were not enough; the years of war had offered ample illustration of their impotence compared to the actions of those who understood what was efficacious in a given historical situation.10 Perhaps from this perspective Bataille criticizes Marc Bloch’s expression that “[t]he lie, it is said, is the leper of soul” as “this affirmation made in general is unreasonable, because if it is the case, all action is leprous.”11 He clearly states: Those who speak of action speak of not lying. But those who act, and know how to act, lie to the extent that their lies are effective. Action is struggle and, to the extent that there is struggle the diverse forms of violence are unlimited, nor is there any limit, beyond efficacy, to lies. Every other way of seeing things is idealist and as such is the true leper of the soul: it is the incapacity of seeing right, the weakness that diverts the eyes for fear of being unable to endure.12 The question of lies seems not to be about sentimental truth-telling but rather about the results of ideological struggle. Bataille sees the political scene as the ropes where ideological enemies try to cheat each other in order to get the upper hand but of course this Realpolitik at some point has to find its ethical justification as he is of course well aware that politics is not only a game, it

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entails the question of justice, freedom, and equality to mention only the most important ethical problems involved. The lie is bad if the listener is wearied. An ideological expression does not intend isolated results; it intends to create a lasting link between those who speak and their listeners. In particular, if one intends to fight oppression and to establish justice, the efficacy of the lie is limited. But again it is a question of efficacy: the moral question cannot be posed.13 The moral question cannot be posed because the moral question situates itself in the domain of thought but the question of lies goes far beyond the cognitive or ethical dimension. This question entails the problem of the very existence of a human being and therefore: one would not know how to negate the role of autonomous thought in the development of man; one would also not know how to dissociate autonomy from this development, often purchased by cruel sacrifice: in principle, man identifies his destiny with that of his spirit. But if the question of communism has the importance that I give it, does it not belittle it by limiting it to the particular problem of the intellectual world? The communist question is elsewhere; it is intimate in other ways, and this puts in its place an external preoccupation that holds it to the naïve vituperation of lies. I think, on the other hand, that a formal protestation against principles that are fatal to thought paralyzes no less profoundly the movement of thought that will perform a rigorous application of these principles themselves.14 Even if we find from today’s perspective Bataille’s considerations naive and his political views extremely eccentric, we feel that he poses a grave question: how to relate tactical lies which are necessary in any serious action with the idea which underlies these tactical lies. Communism is perceived by Bataille as a response to the enslavement of man but on the other hand it is, in its historical form, the extreme reduction of man to thing. Man cannot be taken for a thing. And it is for this reason that he is a communist. (But it must be added: communism can initially complete, generalize the reduction of man to thing, and it is for this reason that man must fight communism to the death).15 The idea of Communism is split between its promise and its reality in the communist states; therefore we have to accept communism and fight it to the death at the same time. The leaders of Communism are, no doubt about this, monstrous liars but there is an unclear connection between them and their lies and the idea of communism which renders the very existential nature of man and

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human society. The ambiguity about the role of communism seems to entangle Bataille in risky analysis in which he has to carefully weigh the pros and cons of this formation and in the framework of this reasoning he puts the problem of the political lie. Lying is necessary in politics and at same time it is dangerous for intellectual exchange. But intellectual exchange has to surrender to something more profound which conveys the deepest level of human existence and this is expressed by communism. Bataille thus falls short of accepting Realpolitik as he seems to differentiate between different levels of political lie, placing it in the different instances of his concept of community. For this reason, although the leaders of Communism cannot be absolved from the responsibility for their lies, they still represent the idea of communism. This strange reasoning can probably be understood in the context of Bataille’s notion of community, which is never reducible to empirical bonds between its members. Therefore when he speaks about human action, political action especially, he seems to consider it as a kind of expression of profound, existential experience which has necessarily to lead to radical disagreement and strife, although as Edward Casey comments still there is a chance for a true community: “To enter a genuine communitas, one must pass over a threshold, a limen, of some determined sort, and by means of certain ritual.”16 Action including political lying is situated inside this deep concept of community and this situatedness provokes the problems that one can have with moral evaluation of political lies. This may be so, but one can claim easily that the community which exists here and now is a community not only of shared experiences but, and most of all, of shared actions, to use George Herbert Mead’s expression. Mead shows that in everyday rituals of exchange of perspectives we can “take the role of the other” and exceed the limits of our selves which in turn is a necessary condition for the emergence of the self and mind. This circular movement is a constitutive moment of society and at same time it is constituted in the social action. It assumes the division of the act into different phases which can be ascribed to different individuals. The ultimate unity of action is secured by what Mead calls “social objects.” As one of his contemporary commentators says: As the object controls the act, so the social object controls the social act…. By taking the attitude of an object I internalize its attitude towards me; in the case of society, by taking the attitude of the ‘generalized other,’ I immediately become able to exert a certain amount of (social) control over my acts. Social control is thus but a form of self-criticism—social conventions control our action as a result of our ability to take the attitude of the ‘generalized other’ through the ‘me.’ 17 This predominance of the social over the individual leads Mead to the statement that Objective consciousness of selves must precede subjective consciousness, and must continually condition it, if consciousness of

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LESZEK KOCZANOWICZ meaning itself presupposes the selves as there. Subjective selfconsciousness must appear within experience, must have a function in the development of that experience, and must be studied from the point of view of that function, not as that in which self-consciousness arises and by which through analogical bridges and self-projections we slowly construct a hypothetically objective social world in which to live. 18

Mead’s social psychology was accepted to a large extent by John Dewey and becomes an important part of his theory of democracy. Democracy from this perspective is not so much a system of institutions but rather a specific way of life or, using more pragmatist language, a set of habits. Therefore he claims: The idea of democracy is a wider and fuller idea that can be exemplified in the state even at its best. To be realized it must affect all modes of human association, the family, the school, industry, religion. And even as far as political arrangements are concerned, governmental institutions are but a mechanism for securing to an idea channels of effective operation.19 Thus he to some extent identifies democracy with community: Regarded as an idea, democracy is not an alternative to other principles of associated life. It is the idea of community life itself. It is an ideal in the only intelligible sense of an ideal: namely, the tendency and movement of something which exists carried to its final limit, viewed as completed, perfected.…The idea or ideal of community presents, however, actual phases of associated life as they are freed from restrictive and disturbing elements, and are contemplated as having attained their limit of development.20 And he concludes: “The clear consciousness of a communal life, in all its implications, constitutes the idea of democracy.”21 Communal life constitutes the idea of democracy but one can ask, to what extent the opposite statement is true: is democracy an ideal form of community life? It seems that for Dewey there is an intimate link between democracy and community which is not present in Bataille. At this point the pragmatists and Bataille take different trajectories in their view of the fundamentals of society, although Bataille, like Dewey and Mead, tries to get to the specific experience of the totality of community which is deeper than merely utilitarian interest. As Chris Gemerchak points out: If his early reflections on community actively promote the search for an alternative community as the site of unleashing heterogeneous forces creative of sacred value, he eventually recognizes the need for withdrawal or escape from social life altogether because it first levels

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and then sublates expenditure and communication to an instrumental function. Whenever expenditure, the negation of self, occurs in relation to a Sache it gets caught in the dialectic of self-mediation: the negation of self is reintegrated into the totality.22 Dewey also searches for the feeling of community but his investigation is directed by another goal. As Jay notes, Dewey’s belief in participatory democracy may be compared with that exaltation of political experience for its own sake we have seen in Hannah Arendt, but because of his faith in enlightened communicative interaction, indeed in the critical scientific method broadly understood, it never descended into dubious celebration of ecstatic self-immolation exemplified by Ernst Jűnger with his aestheticized politics of the sublime….23 If this is so, we have to pose a further question: how are lying and cheating possible in social life? To some extent Mead’s and Dewey’s pragmatism can be viewed as “inverted Machiavellianism” as they see the social as emerging from the necessary co-operation between human individuals. Utopian elements in pragmatism have been frequently observed but still it is not clear where their source lies. For sure it is not connected with the deep layers of the experience of human existence. In his polemics with Trotsky Dewey explains clearly which kind of absolutism should be rejected. Trotsky is guilty of absolutism which he apparently tries to avoid because he, like other Marxists, tries to deduce the means from pre-given ends. Orthodox Marxism shares with orthodox religionism and with traditional idealism the belief that human ends are interwoven into the very texture and structure of existence—a conception inherited presumably from its Hegelian origin.24 Communal life always has the potential of fulfilling the promise which is inherited in the very idea of shared action but on the other hand, the “empirical” life of the community is always full of distortions and falsifications. Democracy is the best system because it enables citizens through their institutions to act as scientists act to put forward hypotheses, to propose solutions and to verify them. Therefore to accept an ultimate truth is fatal for democracy, because this kills the very idea of free inquiry, but to give up the notion of truth is also dangerous because it can lead to abandoning any possible regulative idea for society to develop. But of course politics can be compared to science only with reservations. Social life is always full of emotions and never can be a domain of pure rationality. Democratic politics, as an embodiment of the process of communication, must include all features which are characteristic for communication including stereotypes, prejudices,

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and emotions. If you look from this angle at the political lie we have to locate this problem in the complexity of social interactions which make up democracy. However if democracy is mainly about communication, then, from the pragmatic perspective, we are interested mainly in what distorts the flow of information. Pragmatism is not interested in so-called absolute truth which could resolve all doubts in social life. Instead the pragmatist’s strategy is laboriously to remove obstacles which thwart free communication. I think that a good example of such an attitude is Dewey’s activity as chairman of the commission devoted to Trotsky’s case. In his opening statement he presents a clear description of his general attitude: The Commission has no illusions concerning the extraordinarily difficult nature of its task. It is aware that much important evidence is inaccessible because of the impossibility of extending its inquiries to Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union as it will extend them to other European countries. It is aware that a long, tortuous course of events is involved, every stage of which is beset by bitter controversy. But even were the difficulties more serious than they are, we should find ourselves unwilling and unable to take the defeatist position of those who proclaim in advance that any attempt to ascertain the facts upon which judgment must finally rest is doomed to failure. Speaking, finally, not for the Commission, but for myself, I had hoped that a chairman might be found for these preliminary investigations whose experience better fitted him for the difficult and delicate task to be performed. But I have given my life to the work of education, which I have conceived to be that of public enlightenment in the interests of society. If I finally accepted the responsible post I now occupy, it was because I realized that to act otherwise would be to be false to my lifework.25 In his classic film Rashamon Akira Kurosawa depicts the complicated problem of lying and truth. Different versions of the same story are narrated by the bandit, the samurai, the samurai’s wife, and the woodcutter. In fact each version turns out to be a lie and nobody can find out the truth about the crime. The priest who listened to all versions seems to lose faith in humanity. If this faith can be rescued it is only because of the woodcutter who decides to take care of the abandoned baby. This decision sheds new light on his story and even on the woodcutter’s stealing of the dagger. This complicated film invites various interpretations but what is important from my perspective is that it suggests that the link between lying and morality is probably more complicated than can be implied only by simple condemnation of every lie as a sign of rotten morality. This truth is obvious, even banal, when applied to everyday life but does it also apply to politics? The answer to this question depends, as I have earlier signaled, to a large extent on the definition of politics. Jay in his book on mendacity spends many pages discussing this question in the context of introducing the concept of the political. As is well known, Carl

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Schmitt and Hannah Arendt in spite of great differences in their views propose a clear delimitation between political activity and other spheres of social life. The idea of this delimitation takes the form of an area reserved for political activity called the political (le politique in French). The political became thus an autonomous domain with its own rules and norms including ethical ones. In fact in many manifestations of this approach the main postulate is the strict rupture between ethics and politics. This distinction is obvious if we accept the concept of the political. Ethics is rather a question of everyday life choices but in the political sphere we are obliged to use another set of rules of judging the conduct of the politicians. However as Jay indicates, this division is based on two controversial premises. “The first entails the claim that a transcendental notion of ‘the political’ can be discerned beneath all the various institutional forms and cultural practice that have been called political throughout history.”26 The second “is … the assumption that a boundary can be drawn between its domain and what lies outside it, a boundary that could more or less preserve its purity from external pollution.”27 I think Jay is rightly skeptical about this strict division between politics and everyday life and he gives several examples of “the porosity of the boundaries that have been erected by theorists between ‘the political’ and its various—and heteroclite—others, such as morality, science, the market, or violence.”28 But at same time Jay notes the opposite extreme perspective, that everything that is political is equally dangerous: as the totalitarian experiments of the twentieth century made manifestly clear, entirely effacing the boundary between ‘the political’ and its others, demanding private life be conflated with public, and expecting absolute transparency of citizens who have to reveal their actions, even confess their innermost thoughts, can be a recipe for disaster.29 But is there a third way between these two extreme approaches to politics? An ultimate answer is impossible as democratic society is always a question of negotiation. One of the main subjects of the negotiations is precisely the border between the private and the public, between the private and the political. However the fact itself that this border is a matter of negotiation confirms the standpoint that the division between politics and everyday life cannot be total. Therefore the same ethical dilemmas which appear in personal relationships can materialize also in the political, and one can apply the same criteria to both spheres. As we feel intuitively that total veracity is impossible and a totally veracious person would be a monster, so by the same token we do see the limits of truthfulness in politics. However as we would not like our friends to be habitual liars so would nobody like to be ruled by notorious hypocrites. We need always to find a way between these two poles. Therefore any attempt to create a universal model of the relation between ethics and politics is a sheer illusion.

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1. Martin Jay, The Virtues of Mendacity. On Lying in Politics (Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2008), p. 180. 2. Ibid., p. 176. 3. Georges Bataille, “The Political Lie,” trans. Stuart Kendall, The Obsessions of Georges Bataille. Community and Communication, eds. Andrew J. Mitchell and Jason Kemp Winfree (Albany: SUNY Press, 2009), pp. 203–208. 4. Ibid., p. 203. 5. Ibid. 6. Ibid. 7. Ibid., p. 204. 8. Ibid. 9. Michel Surya, Georges Bataille. An Intellectual Biography, trans. Krzysztof Fijalkowski and Michael Richardson (New York and London: Verso, 2002), p. 379. 10. Michael Scott Christofferson, French Intellectuals Against the Left. The Antitotalitarian Moment of the 1970s (Oxford and New York: Berghahn Books, 2004), p. 28. 11. Bataille, “The Political Lie,” p. 204. 12. Ibid., pp. 204–205. 13. Ibid., p. 205. 14. Ibid. 15. Ibid., p. 207. 16. Edward S. Casey, “Bataille: Discerning Edges in the Art of Lascaux,” The Obsessions of Georges Bataille…, p. 181. 17. Filipe Carreira da Silva, G. H. Mead: A Critical Introduction (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007), pp. 68–69. 18. George Herbert Mead, “What Social Objects Must Psychology Presuppose?,” Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods, 7 (1910), p. 179. 19. John Dewey, The Public and its Problems (Chicago: The Swallow Press, 1954), p. 143. 20. Ibid., pp. 148–149. 21. Ibid., p. 149. 22. Chris Gemerchak, “Of Goods and Things: Reflections on an Ethics of Community,” The Obsessions of Georges Bataille…, p. 71. 23. Martin Jay, Songs of Experience: Modern American and European Variations on a Universal Theme (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2005), p. 295. 24. John Dewey, “Means and Ends,” Their Morals and Ours. The Marxist View of Morality, Leon Trotsky, et al. (Chippendale: Resistance Books, 2000), p. 55. 25. The Case of Leon Trotsky, http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1937/dewey/ session01.htm, accessed 15 September 2012. 26. Jay, The Virtues of Mendacity…, p. 79. 27. Ibid., p. 81. 28. Ibid., p. 127. 29. Ibid.

CONTINUING THE DIALOGUE Martin Jay One of the great advantages of being an intellectual fox rather than a hedgehog, knowing, as the ancient Greek poet Archilocus put it, many little things rather than one big one, is that you make a less vulnerable target and a less defensive one as well. Without a coherent, all-embracing system or master idea to defend, you can be more relaxed about the responses to your work, eager to engage in conversation with constructive critics and learn from the unexpected ways in which they extend, develop or challenge your ideas. If you are not only temperamentally more like a fox than a hedgehog, but also professionally trained as an intellectual historian practicing the humble arts of commentary and contextualization more than the ambitious ones of theoretical invention, the result is even more felicitous. For you are inclined from the very beginning to appreciate the interdependence of intellectual work, the ways in which reasoning is an inherently intersubjective, communicative enterprise, not an isolated one practiced in the silence of your own thoughts. It was with these considerations in mind that I was especially delighted—as well as deeply honored—to be invited by Leszek and Dorota Koczanowicz to engage in a dialogue with their colleagues at the University of Wrocław in October, 2010, in which the broad theme of modernity was to serve as a common thread. Under any conditions, such an invitation would be welcome, but to receive it from a Polish university has a special meaning for me. I first visited Poland as a young student tourist in l964, but it was not until a decade later that I had a chance to interact with Polish scholars in Warsaw, thanks to an invitation by the distinguished sociologist of law Adam Podgórecki to speak on my early work on the Frankfurt School. Poland was, of course, a very different place in those days from what it is today in far too many respects to spell out now. I recall the atmosphere as both tense and intense, with recent wounds still raw and open, but also a palpable hunger for new ideas beyond the stifling pieties of Communist orthodoxy. It was also clear to me even then that Polish intellectuals were skilled at gaining access to the latest trends in Western thought, and were sophisticated and discriminating critics of what they had encountered. With the reintegration of Europe made possible by the fall of Communism, the exchanges between Polish and Western intellectuals became easier in all respects. Soon I found myself the beneficiary of invitations by younger scholars like Marek Kwiek in Poznań and Andrzej Szahaj in Toruń to visit their universities, and had a chance to sponsor extended visits by them to Berkeley in return. Fleeting contacts with eminent senior figures like Leszek

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Kołakowski, Zygmunt Bauman, Adam Michnik, Stefan Morawski and Czesław Miłosz, who had achieved great distinction on both sides of a now obsolete divide, reinforced my sense of the vitality of Polish intellectual life, even under the difficult circumstances of exile or internal repression. And, of course, the friendship I have forged with the Koczanowiczs over the years— this was my third trip to Wrocław and we have spent considerable time together in Berkeley—has only deepened my appreciation for the benefits of collegiality across the waters. There is, I should make clear, an added dimension to that appreciation, as it must be understood against the backdrop of my own familial history. As the descendent of immigrants from East Central Europe—Jews from Latvia and the Pale of Settlement—who came to America in the late l9th century, I have always felt a pull towards that part of the world, as well as a sober recognition that I may not have been alive had my grandparents not made the difficult decision to leave it behind. There are many ghosts for anyone with my heritage who returns to Central and Eastern Europe, many uncanny residues of anxieties and prejudices that inevitably inform the expectations accompanying such a “home-coming.” With each successive visit to Poland, however, the feeling of uncanniness has diminished, as Poland has increasingly become a “normal” modern country no longer as heavily burdened with the residues of its troubled past. Without wanting to trivialize the challenges it still faces or generalize hastily from only a very limited encounter with its current situation, I cannot avoid reporting a strong impression of growing confidence that the future will be distinctly better than the past, and not only in terms of economic development. Not the least important expression of this positive tendency is the waning of the truculently defensive, albeit easily understood, attitude of Poles who were quick to express grievances, often real, but sometimes imagined, against oppressors near and far or look for scapegoats within their borders. Reflective self-examination is always a mark of maturation, of an acquired equilibrium that bespeaks a certain overcoming of the fragility of more vulnerable moments in a personal or a national history. Under pressure, of course, such an equilibrium might well prove itself only temporary—I will let observers closer to the situation judge whether the response to the catastrophic airplane crash of April, 2010 means that or not— but my own admittedly limited experience suggests otherwise. What, however, does the testimony of individual experience really tell us? How does it contribute to a dialogue across cultures that focuses more on ideas than personal histories? It is perhaps not by chance that the very question of experience itself served as a stimulus to many of the papers that were presented at the conference. For it is hard to avoid acknowledging that even if we are seeking to focus on common problems and build a shared vocabulary to address them, we inevitably bring different experiences to the table. Moreover, if “experience” has as one of its major meanings learning from encounters with

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otherness, then an international dialogue is about as appropriate a setting for generating it as one can imagine. But in this particular case, the focus was additionally abetted by the happy fact that my attempt to make sense of the complex European and American discourses about “experience” had been recently translated into Polish by Agnieszka Rejniak-Majewska.1 As a result, several of the papers at the conference were directly or indirectly responses to that text. “Regaining Experience?” by Dorota Wolska not only provides an insightful summary of many of its arguments, but also follows the debate it engendered in America, judiciously considering criticisms made by Richard Bernstein, Colin Koopman, and Jackson Lears. Foregrounding a number of the conceptual tensions in the concept—between the subject and object of experience, between experiential immediacy and linguistic mediation, between holistic and modal versions of experience, between personal and shared experience—she concludes that it is precisely because of these unresolved issues that the term still does so much work for us in the humanities. And she adds the further insight that because it can serve as both a check on an objectivist scientific approach to social and cultural phenomena and a caution against the humanist hubris of radical constructivism, “experience” will remain a master term in the humanities for some time to come, no matter how much of a “crisis” we may discern in the capacity of modern men and women to have fully realized “experiences” of their own. Piotr Dehnel begins his discussion of the Derrida/Gadamer controversy by noting my evocation in Songs of Experience of the former’s suspicion of the metaphysics of presence that he sees lurking in a hermeneutic, communicative notion of dialogue. Although Dehnel then moves swiftly into a discussion of the debate itself on the level of language, the issue of experience is never fully left behind. For it is precisely Derrida’s charge against Gadamer that he too quickly identifies intersubjective, dialogic linguistic experience as itself a variant of the metaphysics of presence, based on a fantasy of perfect comprehensibility and successful communication. Gadamer replies that inherent in the experience of language as speech—and, of course, he differs from Derrida in giving speech priority over writing—is the desire to be understood, even if it is not perfectly realized. But rather than being a warrant for a fantasmatic unity of singular, consensual meaning, such a desire produces different results each time that writing regains its function as a tool of intersubjective interaction. Truth is produced by the dialogue, not recovered by it on the basis of an original meaning. Dehnel is careful not to present the debate as a victory for either side, which is especially wise if we ponder the ambiguities of experience, whether rendered via language or somehow prior to or beyond it. That is, to the extent that experience involves a fruitful encounter with something new, whether it be another person or an event, it can be understood, in Gadamerian terms, as the production of a truth that is more than a reproduction of what was there before the encounter. It involves the transformation, at least to some extent, of

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the person who undergoes the experience, which is more than the effect of a subjective will or a desire. But it also may entail—and here Derrida’s caution about the difficulty of perfect communicability is worth heeding—the defeat of an imprudent expectation, the wisdom of a lesson learned about the limits of what might be achieved, the sobering acknowledgment that not all hopes are capable of being realized. The dialogic moment in experience is crucial in the sense that it involves getting outside the boundaries of the self, but the new equilibrium that may be reached is never a final resting place, a place of full satisfaction and closure. The limits of satisfaction provide a helpful segué to Dorota Koczanowicz’s very stimulating essay on “The Beautiful Art of Cooking.” A moment’s reflection on the experience of eating reveals, after all, an endless dialectic of hunger and satiation, repetitive craving and temporary relief. But as Koczanowicz makes clear, the ordinary act of consuming food, which we share with all animals, becomes an extraordinary exercise in the context of human culture. First, it involves the mobilization of all the senses, not just taste, if to varying degrees. Not only is smell crucial to the eating experience, but often too are visual stimuli, touch and even at times hearing (try eating a bag of potato chips with the sound muffled). It is also at the crossroads of individual behavior and social interaction, as meals are normally shared with others, sometimes involving highly ritualized rules of etiquette and display. Eating is also a heavily charged site for the interlacing of material and moral concerns. Hunger and starvation, on the one hand, and gluttony on the other, are not merely corporeal phenomena, but often also bring with them a heavy cargo of moral issues. The consumption of food competes with sex and the disposal of corpses for the dubious honor of inspiring the most frequently tabooed human practices, whether for religious or nutritional reasons. It is, however, the interaction between eating—or more precisely, cooking—and the apparently separate realm of the aesthetic that most concerns Dorota Koczanowicz. As I tried to show in the chapter on aesthetic experience in Songs of Experience, the radical differentiation of the aesthetic in the l8th century, most extensively developed in Kant’s Third Critique, was never entirely successful. Nietzsche, Dewey, Marcuse, Shusterman and a host of other thinkers, as well as certain avant-garde artists, sought the reintegration of art and life. The culinary “arts” may be closer to crafts than “fine arts” according to traditional distinctions, but they force us to confront the inescapable interpenetration of direct somatic enjoyment (as well as the demands of self-preservation) with the more disinterested realm of aesthetic pleasure. Koczanowicz makes an eloquent case for taking seriously the “art of cooking”—and one would have to add the cultivation of the palate of the gourmet—as a locus of that reintegration of art and life sundered by the differentiations of modernity. But here too, if we acknowledge the vicissitudes of experience and its linguistic mediations—those encounters with otherness that sometimes

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succeed in producing new common horizons, but sometimes lead to bitter disillusionments—we have to recognize the limits of that reintegration on the culinary as well as more traditional aesthetic level. That is, the cultivation of taste in all senses of the word comes up against the difficulty of generalizability in such matters. The reflective judgments Kant thought of as characterizing aesthetic taste were made “as if” they were universal, but empirically they are always partial and either individually or culturally idiosyncratic. This is the case even more so in culinary matters, as anyone who samples the cuisine of a different culture quickly can attest. Despite the best efforts of my Polish friends, I am afraid I will never really be able to savor the flavor of pork schmalz. And so as a site of the dedifferentiation of aesthetic from everyday experience, the art of cooking exhibits many of the tensions that rend experience in its other forms. When we move to another sensually mediated experience, one that draws more on sight than taste, smell, touch or hearing, similar issues emerge. Teresa Bruś’s penetrating essay on “Exposing Experience and Facing Photography” begins with her personal recollections of Jerzy Tadeusz Lewczyński, who has pursued an “archeology of photography” by gathering old, forgotten negatives and bringing them out of the darkness into the light. Expressing not only a stubborn resistance to the ravages of time, providing some consolation for loss, the project also brings us, as it were, face-to-face with the dead, marshalling what might be called a utopian fantasy of defeating death without the trick of dialectical recuperation. For all their potential function as an impoverished, reified surrogate for real memory, photographs can also help us deal with the realization that the dead can never be revived, that full consolation eludes us. Bruś then fast forwards to a newspaper photograph taken at the memorial service for the catastrophic plane crash of April, 2010 in Smolensk. What most strikes her about this long-distance image of the ceremony is that we are confronted with a wall of faces of the victims, while the mourners are turned away from us. As a powerful response to a collective trauma, “together they create a site facilitating intimate apprehension of shared peaceful togetherness, together they eliminate traces of schism creating thus a kind of illusory presence impossible outside of this image form.” But at the same time, we know that the dead are not really present, that for all their consoling function, the portraits cannot relieve us of the knowledge not only of their mortality, but of ours as well. What she calls the “relational space” between the living and the dead is thus a space of both connection and separation. It impels us to honor them—restoring, at least metaphorically, their citizenship in our living community by observing what Ariella Azoulay has called the “civil contract of photography”—while at the same time knowing that we cannot restore their lives. The event captured in the photograph cannot undo the earlier event which it commemorates. Here too, experience reveals itself to be a torn fabric, however much we try to mend it.

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Piotr Jakub Fereński also ponders the complex relationship between photography, memory—of both persons and places—and the archive of the past that extends beyond personal and even collective consciousness. Although acknowledging that photographs provide frozen moments of a past that can be preserved—“captured” in the telling metaphor he borrows from André Rouillé—rather than simply remembered, he also stresses the importance of reinserting them in meaningful narratives. The results are not always supportive of the ones that are hegemonic. For photographs can not only serve as the illustrative building blocks of narratives, but can also challenge the ones that are conventionally accepted. Fereński turns to the delicate and still controversial history of the city of Wrocław itself as a test case. Few if any cities have experienced such traumatic ruptures as those forced on the former Breslau, which underwent not only a change of political, cultural and linguistic identity, but also a transfer of its actual population in the years after l945. With the passage of time and the growing sense of permanence of the transformation from a German to a Polish city, Wrocław has grown less anxious about acknowledging its history before l945. Here the photographic record, almost all that remains after the devastating end of Festung Breslau, can be mobilized to supply a virtual recollection of what preceded it. Less a handmaiden of memory than a corrective to willful amnesia, photographs can enter our experience not to reinforce what we have already accumulated in our peregrinations through the world, but to call it into question. As with many of the other examples of experience explored in the papers delivered at the conference, the one so movingly invoked by Fereński shows that encounters with otherness come in many different forms. If experience in one of its most frequent meanings is a journey—the German Fahrt that we still hear in Erfahrung—then the travel literature of those who make literal journeys is a rich source for those who want to make sense of how experience has changed in the course of history. Ewa Ignaczak turns to the remarkable travel narratives of the Polish writer Andrzej Stasiuk, who wandered through obscure regions—she calls them “abject spaces”—of post-socialist Eastern Europe’s least developed countries. Travel in the more elevated senses she describes has always opposed itself to commercial tourism with its packaged and sanitized encounters with pseudo-exotica. As Paul Fussell showed in Abroad, his probing analysis of British travel writing in the interwar era, it could often be motivated by a desire escape from a familiar world of routine and ennui (or disgust with an alleged “civilization” that had just descended into mindless self-annihilation). In the case of Stasiuk, “a Slavic on the road” as he calls himself, it seems to have been more curiosity about a world that had been submerged during the Communist era, but not entirely obliterated, a world that had always been on the periphery of the more momentous events that comprise the main narrative of European history. Fittingly, his own encounters with this world are not transformed into a coherent

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tale of cumulative Bildung, but rather remain episodic and unintegrated. Eschewing the standard alternatives of post-colonial self-reproach or cosmopolitan embrace of the humanity of the apparently “other,” he reports the mundane decay in places that have been left behind by history, places where no monuments to a heroic past are even imaginable. And yet, these abject spaces, Ignaczak convincingly tells us, are worth the effort to salvage them made in Stasiuk’s travel essays. For rather than understanding them simply as deprived sites with little historical resonance, she interprets them in terms of one of the alternative scopic regimes that competed with the hegemonic “Cartesian perspectivalism” dominating Western Modernity. That is, they can be understood as variants of the regime of “baroque reason,” most extensively explored by the French theorist Christine Buci-Glucksmann, which I adopted in my essay on “Scopic Regimes of Modernity.” Although only briefly developed, this suggestion is very tantalizing. Normally, we think of the baroque as connected to the Counter-Reformation and the rise of authoritarian modern states, where spectacle mystified and titillated a supine population. Buci-Glucksmann redescribed it in terms of a post-modernist experience of dazzling display and abyssal disorientation. Here, however, if Ignaczak is right, we encounter it in a realm of everyday life that defies easy reconciliation with a dominant ideology of progressive modernization, expressing instead what she calls a “postsocialist sublime.” Although more work would have to be done to flesh out this insight, it is intriguing to think of a kind of “baroque reason in pianissimo” that redeems the apparent decay of the landscapes visited by Stasiuk in unexpected ways. The relationship between scopic regimes and modernity is also treated in Roma Sendyka’s trenchant exploration of the notion of “hypotyposis,” the figure of speech that so powerfully expresses a visual experience that it has the effect of being something more directly perceived than indirectly reported. She cautiously extrapolates from the visual realm to the literary and poses the challenging question: can one discern discrete scopic regimes in the hypotyposis of modernist poetry? With the time to explore only two examples—Robinson Jeffers’ “Evening Ebb” and Ezra Pound’s imagist classic “In a Station of the Metro”—she nonetheless is able to discern moments of each of the different scopic regimes posited in my essay. In addition, Sendyka spies yet another, which comes into view, as it were, during the era of high modernism. It is the hypotyposis in which, as she puts it, “the picture appears itself, it is not ‘seen,’ it becomes independent of the watcher.” Here we have what Maurice Merleau-Ponty liked to call “pure monstrance,” a kind of showing without a subject for whom the display is intended. Without someone to look, the image loses its temporal dimension and achieves that simultaneity for which modernist aesthetics in its hostility to traditional historicist notions of development typically yearned. Overcoming the distinction between subject and object, it is parallel in a way to the device of

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writing in free indirect style or the middle voice, which has so fascinated students of realist as well as modernist literature. I have myself been very interested in this issue for some time, both in literary and visual terms, especially as it bears on the question of experience.2 So it was particularly gratifying to see it raised in Sendyka’s essay in an unexpected and fruitful way. Mentioning the presence of free indirect style and the middle voice in both realist and modernist literature alerts us to the perennially vexed question of how we periodize historical changes. Historians know two things for certain: first, it is impossible to operate without some sense of period distinctions to avoid anachronism and give our potentially infinite narratives some sense of boundaried temporal coherence, and second, no periodization can escape the reproach that it arbitrarily forces ruptures on what are in fact continuities. The paradoxes of periodization are perhaps nowhere as apparent—and certainly nowhere as explicitly thematized—as in the debate over the alleged transition from modernity to post-modernity, a no longer raging controversy recalled in Paweł Dybel’s contribution to this volume. More than three decades have now passed since the initial debate over alleged transition, and with the passage of time, it is now possible to sort out sine ira et studio various positions held by those on either side of the modernism vs. postmodernism divide. Dybel shows that the more extreme advocates of a radical epochal shift now seem to have exaggerated the extent of the differences between the two periods. Indeed, if the postmodernist critique of linear temporality and the ideology of progress is taken seriously, it could hardly have been otherwise. Virtually every defining characteristic of the postmodern temper was already latent in one or another variant of modernity, which seems far more liquid—to adopt Zygmunt Bauman’s familiar metaphor3—than its opponents once assumed. Still, as Dybel also shows, it was precisely the attempt to define a new period that ultimately exposed some of the complexities in the era we can still with some justification call modern. If increased reflexivity about those complexities is one of the defining characteristics of late modernity, which might be said to include what is called postmodernity, then perhaps nowhere is it as apparent in the discourse and practice of politics. The decline of totalitarianism, whose threat, to be sure, is not entirely behind us, has opened up for intensified questioning the premises and implications of its putative opposite, which we might broadly call “liberal democracy.” Without an explicit negation to define it, liberal democracy now struggles to expose its own unexamined premises and implications: is it dependent on secularized versions of theological premises? Is it able to operate without a firm theoretical foundation? Are the liberal and democratic impulses (or liberal and republican) fully compatible or in tension with each other? Is liberal democracy a universal model or must we take into account historical and cultural variations? Who exactly is the “the people” whose sovereignty is now taken for granted? What is the relationship between democratic will-formation and the rule of law? What is the role of democratic

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participation in a system that moves beyond the boundaries of the traditional nation-state, such as that of the European Union? One of the most vexed of these complexities is the uncertainty surrounding the issues of transparency and hypocrisy in the political realm, an issue I addressed in my last monograph, The Virtues of Mendacity: On Lying in Politics. In principle, democratic politics should value honesty and truth-telling above all else, promoting an accountability that allows the public to make rational decisions about the issues involved. For a long time, totalitarian systems were decried precisely because they fostered “the big lie” and were cynical examples of a politics of deliberate deception and mystification. But a closer look at the multiple implications of the political realm, as it has emerged in a modern world of differentiated spheres, muddies the waters, calling into question the simple dichotomy between democratic and totalitarian politics, at least when it comes to the issue of mendacity. Leszek Koczanowicz teases out further implications of my argument by examining two important examples that I did not consider in The Virtues of Mendacity. The first is an essay by Georges Bataille on “The Political Lie” devoted to Communist politics; the second John Dewey’s response to the Soviet trial of Leon Trotsky. Bataille acknowledges the use to which lies are sometimes put by the oppressed to escape the authority of their oppressors and knows that a rigorist and inflexible moralism—confusing politics with a pure Kantian kingdom of ends—is deeply problematic. But he also knows the cost of even a politics of resistance that relies on mendacity: the danger that the free exchange of ideas will become impossible. This threat, however, must itself be relativized if the goal of a genuine community ideally promised, if betrayed in reality, has a chance of ever being achieved. Dewey too, drawing on George Herbert Mead’s ideas of the priority of intersubjectivity over the subject, knows the value of community. But he recognizes an inevitable gap between an ideal community, the perfect democracy of transparency, integrity and trust, and its empirical double, which inevitably fails to live up to that norm. Without explicitly naming him, Koczanowicz invokes a paradoxical argument made most clearly by Claude Lefort, on which I also draw in my book: “to accept an ultimate truth is fatal for democracy because this kills the very idea of free inquiry, but to give up the notion of truth is also dangerous because it can lead to abandoning any possible regulative idea for society to develop.” In chairing the committee to evaluate the charges against Trotsky, Dewey, so Koczanowicz shows, knows that while the pure truth is unlikely ever to be known, the quest to find it is worth pursuing. He ends his essay with the cautious conclusion that in politics as in personal relations, we can tolerate neither a paragon of obsessive truthtelling nor a cynical hypocrite. Somehow we have to muddle through in an imperfect world in which no absolute principles can guide us clearly. In conclusion, I would only make explicit what my responses to individual papers have already suggested: rather than a confrontational

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polemic or dialogue of the deaf, this encounter with the “otherness” of my Polish colleagues has been an entirely productive experience. I could not have predicted which threads they would pull from the tangled fabric of my work, and am grateful for the new, collectively woven tapestries that they have begun to fashion. I can only hope that the weaving—or more precisely, the interweaving—will continue for many years to come. NOTES 1. Martin Jay, Pieśni doświadczenia. Nowoczesne amerykańskie i europejskie wariacje na uniwersalny temat, trans. Agnieszka Rejniak-Majewska (Kraków: Universitas, 2008). 2. See Martin Jay, “Experience without a Subject: Walter Benjamin and the Novel,” Cultural Semantics: Keywords of our Time (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998), and “Drawing in the Middle Voice: Joshua Neustein and the Search for Experience,” Neustein: Drawing in the Margins, ed. Meira Perry-Lehmann (Jerusalem: Israel Museum, 2012). 3. For my own response to Baumann’s work, see Martin Jay, “Liquidity Crisis and the Incredible Lightness of Modernity,” Theory, Culture and Society, 27:6 (2010). On the issue of periodization, see Martin Jay, “1990; Straddling a Watershed?,” Essays from the Edge: Parerga and Paralipomena (Charlottesville, Va.: University of Virginia Press, 2011).

ABOUT THE EDITORS AND CONTRIBUTORS TERESA BRUŚ is Adjunct Professor at the University of Wrocław, Poland. Her interests include poetry, visual culture, photography, and life writing. She teaches MA seminars on autobiography, electives on the poetry of the 1930s, and English modernism as well as survey English literature courses. Her doctoral dissertation focused on aspects of “profound frivolity” in W. H. Auden’s poetry. She is also a graduate of the International Forum of Photography in Poland. She has published on various aspects of life writing and photography. Her recent publications include “Essaying in Autobiography: Wystan Hugh Auden’s and Walter Benjamin’s Faces,” “Stride Over Spaces: Stephen Spender and David Hockney’s China Diary,” “Essay, Essaying, Essayistically and the Experience of Reading,” and “Photographic Portraits of the Mother in Roland Barthes and Tadeusz Różewicz.” She is the author of Life Writing as Self-Collecting in the 1930s: Cecil Day Lewis and Louis MacNeice (2012). PlOTR DEHNEL is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Lower Silesia (Poland). He is the author of Przyroda i historia. Studium wczesnej filozofii F.W.J. Schellinga [Nature and History. The Study of the Early Philosophy of F. W. J. Schelling] (1992); Antynomie rozumu. Z dziejów filozofii niemieckiej XVIII i XIX wieku [Antinomies of Reason. Essays in German Philosophy in the 18th and 19th Centuries] (1998); and Dekonstrukcja-rozumienie-interpretacja. Studia z filozofii współczesnej i nie tylko [Deconstuction-Understanding-Interpretation. Essays in Contemporary Philosophy] (2006). He is also the editor of the Polish version of The New Wittgenstein (ed. by A. Crary and R. Read), Krytyczny racjonalizm. K.R. Popper i H. Albert [Critical Rationalism. K.R. Popper and H. Albert] (1992) and the co-editor of Etyka-Wspólnota-Działanie [Ethics-Community-Action] (2000); Filozofia a pedagogika [Philosophy and Pedagogy] (2005), and Ludwig Wittgenstein: Konteksty i konfrontacje [Ludwig Wittgenstein: Contexts and Confrontation] (2011). PAWEŁ DYBEL is Professor of Philosophy at Warsaw University. His major research interests are hermeneutics, phenomenology, psychoanalytic theories, and political philosophy. He is the author of the following books: Dialog i represja. Antynomie psychoanalizy Zygmunta Freuda [Dialogue and Repression. Antinomies of Freud’s Theory] Warsaw 1994; Granice rozumienia i interpretacji. O hermeneutyce Hansa-Georga Gadamera [The Limits of Understanding and Interpretation. On Gadamer’s Hermeneutics], Kraków 2005; Zagadka “drugiej płci” [The Mystery of the “Second Sex”] Kraków 2006; Granice Polityczności [The Limits of Politics] (together with Szymon Wróbel) Warsaw 2008; Crumbs of Psychoanalysis, Kraków 2009; Malowanie ciałem. Merleau-Ponty’ego filozofia malarstwa [Painting with the

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Body. On Merleau-Ponty] Gdańsk 2011; and Oblicza hermeneutyki [The Faces of Hermeneutics] Kraków 2012. He is also the author of many articles in Polish, German, English and French, and scholarship holder of Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung, Thyssen Stiftung, DAAD, DFG, Institute of Sciences of Men, Mellon Foundation, The Kosciuszko Foundation a. o. PIOTR JAKUB FEREŃSKI, PhD, historian of ideas and philosopher of culture, is Assistant Professor at the Institute of Cultural Studies at University of Wroclaw. He is the author of three books, one of which is O pochodzeniu idei relatywizmu w amerykańskiej antropologii kulturowej [The Origin of the Idea of Relativism in American Cultural Anthropology] and numerous articles on the philosophy of language, the philosophy of science, and art. He is editor of the online journal k-h-g (culture, history, globalization), and cooperates with artistic journal Format. Currently he is concerned with the relations between photography and memory. EWA IGNACZAK is Assistant Professor of literature at Roosevelt Academy, International Honors College of Utrecht University at Middelburg, the Netherlands. Her latest research interests comprise life narrative, travel writing, literary theory and intermediality. MARTIN JAY is Sidney Hellman Ehrman Professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley, where he teaches Modern European Intellectual History. Among his works are The Dialectical Imagination (l973 and 1996), Marxism and Totality (l984); Adorno (l984); Permanent Exiles (l985); Fin-desiècle Socialism (l989); Force Fields (l993); Downcast Eyes (l993); Cultural Semantics (1998); Refractions of Violence (2004); Songs of Experience (2005); The Virtues of Mendacity (2010), and Essays from the Edge (2011). DOROTA KOCZANOWICZ, PhD, is the author of Doświadczenie sztuki, sztuka życia: Wymiary estetyki pragmatycznej [The Experience of Art and the Art of Living: Dimensions of Pragmatist Aesthetics] (2009). She also coedited Między estetyzacją a emancypacją. Praktyki artystyczne w przestrzeni publicznej [Between Aesthetisation and Emancipation. Artistic Practices in the Public Sphere] (2010), and Between Literature and Somaesthetics: On Richard Shusterman's Pragmatism (2012). She did research in John F. Kennedy Institute in Berlin and in Norway at The Wittgenstein Archives at the University of Bergen (WAB). Currently she is working on a project concerning relations between food and art. LESZEK KOCZANOWICZ is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Social Sciences and Humanities and Academy of Physical Education in Wrocław. His previous appointments include Wroclaw University (1977– 1997), Opole University (1997–2002), SUNY/Buffalo (1998–1999 and 2000–

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2001), and Columbia University (2004–2005) where he was Distinguished Professor at the School of International and Public Affairs. He is an author and editor of eight books and numerous articles in Polish and English. His recent books are: Politics of Time. Dynamics of Identity in Post-Communist Poland (Berghahn Books 2008); Lęk nowoczesny. Eseje o demokracji i jej adwersarzach [Modern Anxiety. Essays on Democracy and its Adversaries] (Universitas 2011); Współczesna filozofia społeczna. Eseje i rozmowy o etyce demokracji i społeczeństwie obywatelskim [Contemporary Social Philosophy. Essays and Conversations on Ethics of Democracy and Civil Society] (with Rafal Wlodarczyk) (GWP 2011). DAVID SCHAUFFLER is Adjunct Professor at the University of Silesia in Katowice, Poland. He received a BA from Oberlin College, an MA from New York University and a PhD from Nicholas Copernicus University in Toruń, Poland. He has published articles on Critical Theory, contemporary social philosophy, cultural theory, and various issues in American, British and Norwegian literature. ROMA SENDYKA is Assistant Professor at the Centre for Anthropology of Literature and Cultural Studies at the Jagiellonian University, Kraków. She is a theorist of literature and genres of communication, and works in the developing field of visual culture studies concentrating on the relations of visual and verbal representations. She has been visiting scholar at the University of Chicago (2011 – Kosciuszko Foundation), visiting assistant professor (2011 – Christian A. Johnson Endeavor Program, University of Chicago), was awarded in the Patterns Program (Erste Stiftung, Vienna); and is author of the book Nowoczesny esej. Studium historycznej świadomości gatunku [The Modern Essay] (2006). DOROTA WOLSKA, doctor of humanities, is Adjunct Professor in the Institute of Culture Studies of Wrocław University, Poland. Her areas of research and interests include theory of culture, philosophy of humanities, and aesthetics. Publications: Odzyskać doświadczenie. Sporny temat humanistyki współczesnej [Regaining Experience. Humanist Contention] (Kraków 2012), co-editor: Kultura i tragiczność [Culture and the Tragic] (Wrocław 2007); Aksjotyczne przestrzenie kultury [Axiotic Spaces of Culture] (Wrocław 2005); Geertz-lokalna lektura (Wrocław 2003), papers in „Prace kulturoznawcze” and „Teksty Drugie.”

INDEX Abbott, Thomas K., 52 Adorno, Theodor W., 30, 39–40 Agamben, Giorgio, 29–30, 33, 39, 70– 71, 77–78 Alhäuser, Sonja, 65 Alhazen, 106 Alpers, Svetlana, 104–105, 112–113 Althusser, Louis, 10, 12 Apel, Karl–Otto, 43, 52 Aragon, Louis, 20–21 Archilocus, 135 Arendt, Hannah, 32, 39, 71, 73, 77, 131, 133 Aristotle, 51, 53, 83, 119 Atget, Eugène, 72 Augustus, Caesar, 47 Aveni, Anthony, 101 Azoulay, Ariella, 75–78, 139 Bacon, Francis, 105 Baczko, Bronisław, 2, 7 Badiou, Alain, 13–16, 23, 25–26 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 111 Balibar, Étienne, 10 Barańczak, Stanisław, 77–78 Barnes, Jonathan, 53 Barnett, Stuart, 24 Barthes, Roland, 9–10, 17–21, 23–24, 26– 27, 33, 37, 71–73, 75, 77 Basquiat, Jean-Michel, 55 Bass, Alan, 25, 53 Bataille, Georges, 33, 36–37, 39, 125–130, 134, 143 Batchen, Geoffrey, 26, 73, 77 Baudrillard, Jean, 116, 123 Bauman, Zygmunt, 116–118, 121– 123, 136, 1242, 144 Baumgarten, Alexander, 63 Beaufret, Jean, 25 Beauvoir, Simone de, 127 Beck, Ulrich, 115, 123 Behler, Ernst, 53 Bell, Jeffrey A., 24 Benjamin, Andrew, 24, 26 Benjamin, Walter, 30–31, 69, 71–73, 77, 144

Bennington, Geoff, 24 Bergen, Véronique, 26 Berger, John, 9, 23, 76, 78 Bergez, Daniel, 113 Berleant, Arnold, 55, 62–63, 67 Bernasconi, Robert, 25 Bernhard, Christine, 65 Bernstein, Richard J., 7, 31–32, 36, 39–40, 137 Bieńkowska, Ewa, 53 Blake, William, 30 Blandowski, Wilhelm von, 70 Blanton, Casey, 102 Bliss, Mathew T., 113 Bloch, Marc, 127 Boeh, Gottfried, 112 Boltanski, Christian, 69 Bonndas, Constantin V., 26 Borowski, Ludwig E., 57 Bourdieu, Pierre, 74, 77–78 Bracewell, Wendy, 100 Brassier, Ray, 26 Braudel, Fernand, 9, 24 Breckman, Warren, 8 Brennan, Teresa, 113 Bricmont, Jean, 122–123 Bruner, Edward M., 39 Bruś, Teresa, 139 Bryson, Bill, 93 Bryson, Norman, 27, 106, 113 Buber, Martin, 34 Buci-Glucksmann, Christine, 105, 113, 141 Burchell, Louise, 26 Burke, Peter, 23–24 Burnett, Roy, 75, 77 Calegno, Antonio, 26 Cantor, Georg, 15 Caro, Adrian Del, 25 Carroll, Lewis, 11 Cascatio, James, 40 Casey, Edward S., 129, 134 Cavanagh, Clare, 77–78 Certeau, Michel de, 35 Chirice, David, 100

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Christofferson, Michael S., 127, 134 Claussen, Detlev, 30, 39 Coetzee, John M., 72, 77 Cohen, Eric, 92, 100–101 Cohen, Sande, 24 Cohn-Bendit, Daniel, 20–21 Colebrook, Claire, 24 Collingwood, Robin, 35 Condas, Constantin V., 24 Crow, Thomas, 27 Culler, Jonathan, 51, 53 Curtius, Ernst R., 47, 53 Czapliński, Przemysław, 90, 95, 100–101 Dante, Alighieri, 47 Dauenhauer, Bernard P., 24 David, Jacques-Louis, 27 Dehnel, Piotr, 137 Delacroix, Eugène, 27 Deleuze, Gilles, 11–13, 15, 24–26 Demetz, Peter, 77 Derrida, Jacques, 13, 14–15, 19–20, 24– 25, 37, 41–53, 137–138 Descartes, René, 26, 104–105 Dewey, John, 35, 55, 63–65, 67, 125, 130– 132, 134, 138, 143 Dilthey, William, 33–35, 39, 41 Drace–Francis, Alex, 100 Dreyfus, Hubert L., 25 Dudek–Dürer, Andrzej, 65 Dybel, Paweł, 142 Dziadek, Adam, 107, 113 Egged, Bela, 26 Eibl, Karl, 66 Eliade, Mircea, 29, 97 Elkins, John, 23 Elsner, Jaś, 27 Emerson, Ralph W., 35 Feltham, Oliver, 26 Ferber, Karl W., 34 Fereński, Piotr J., 140 Fijalkowski, Krzysztof, 134 Flynn, Thomas R., 24, 25 Fontanier, Pierre, 107 Forget, Philippe, 41, 45, 52–53 Foster, Hal, 100, 103, 106, 112–113

Foucault, Michel, 12–13, 24–25, 33, 37, 39–40, 104 Frank, Manfred, 52 Freud, Sigmund, 42–44, 104, 120 Fussel, Paul, 140 Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 30, 34, 41–48, 52–53, 137 Geertz, Clifford, 29, 38, 40 Gehlen, Arnold, 120 Geiman, Kevin P., 24 Gemerchak, Chris, 130, 134 Géraud, Violaine, 113 Gethmann-Siefert, Annemarie, 53 Giddens, Anthony, 115, 123 Girard, René, 32 Glaser, Sheila F., 123 Głowiński, Michał, 113 Goff, Jacques le, 24 Goldstein, R. James, 40 Gombrich, Ernst, 106, 113 Göpfert, Herbert G., 66 Gordon, Peter E., 8 Gorzkowski, Albert, 113 Gotshalk, Dilman W., 67 Grant, Iain H., 24 Greisch, Jean, 52 Haar, Michel, 25 Habermas, Jürgen, 6, 8, 27, 44, 50–51, 53, 115, 123 Hambourg, Serge, 9, 21, 27 Hart, Katherine, 27 Hedemann, Oskar, 88 Hegel, Georg W. F., 15, 24–27, 50, 64, 120 Heidegger, Martin, 13–15, 23, 25, 33–34, 41–42, 44, 50, 118–120, 122 Heron, Liz, 39 Heywood, Ian, 113 Hill, Melvin A., 39 Hlme, Peter, 100 Hoffman, Eva, 101 Holbein, Hans, 21 Holland Patrick 90, 100, 102 Hollward, Peter, 26 Hollywood, Amy, 26 Hönisch, Johen, 53 Hoppel, 56 Horkheimer, Max, 30, 40

Index Howard, Richard, 24, 26, 77 Huggan, Graham, 90, 100, 102 Hume, David, 33 Hunt, Lynn, 24 Husserl, Edmund, 31, 37, 41, 50 Ignaczak, Ewa, 140–141 Inwood, Michael, 25 Jacobs, Karen, 112 Jacquet, Alain, 69 James, William, 34 Jameson, Frederic, 17, 26 Jay, Martin, 1, 3–7, 8–9, 25, 27, 29–41, 52, 55–58, 63–64, 66–67, 69–70, 72, 76–77, 89, 100, 102–106, 108, 112–113, 125, 134, 144 Jedlicki, Jerzy, 100 Jeffers, Robinson, 109–110, 112–114, 141 Jephcott, Edmund, 77 John, Paul II, 74 Johnson, Barbara, 53 Johnston, Bill, 100 Jürgen, Ernst, 131 Kaczmarek, Stefan, 66 Kalder, Daniel, 91–92, 100–101 Kamuf, Peggy, 25 Kandel, Michael, 100 Kant, Immanuel, 11–12, 33–35, 42, 52, 55–63, 66, 127, 138–139 Kapuściński, Ryszard, 92 Kendall, Gavin, 100, 102 Kendall, Stuart, 134 Klee, Paul, 88 Kleinberg, Ethan, 25 Koczanowicz, Dorota, 135–136, 138 Koczanowicz, Leszek, 8, 101, 135–136, 143 Kołakowski, Leszek, 2, 7, 136 Koopman, Colin, 35, 40, 137 Korsmeyer, Carolyn, 62, 66 Koselleck, Reinhard, 29 Kostkiewiczowa, Teresa, 113 Kracauer, Siegfried, 30 Kramer, Lloyd, 7 Kurosawa, Akira, 132 Kwiek, Marek, 39, 135 Lacan, Jacques, 44, 104, 106, 111, 113, 120 Lansberg, Heinrich, 108, 113

151

Laruelle, François, 52 Lawrence, Fredric G., 53 Lears, Jackson, 29, 39, 137 Lefort, Claude, 7, 143 Leibniz, Gottfried W., 105 Lejeune, Philippe, 100 Lessing, Gotthold E., 55, 66, 111 Lester, Mark, 24 Levinas, Emmanuel, 41 Lewczyński, Jerzy T., 69–70, 77, 139 Liesle, Debbie, 93, 100–102 Locke, John, 33, 50 Logan, Sandra, 113 Londen, Robert B., 66 Lucy, Niall, 25 Lukács, György, 8, 27 Lyotard, Jean-François, 10, 11–14, 19, 23– 25, 36–37, 116–117, 119, 121, 123 Łukowski, Feliks, 70 Macoch, Agnieszka, 100 Man, Paul de, 50, 53 Marcuse, Herbert, 5, 8, 27, 40, 138 Markowski, Michał P., 113 Marshall, Donald G., 53 Marx, Karl, 10, 15, 25, 44 Mazaleyrant, Jean, 113 McDermott, John J., 35, 40 Mead, George Herbert, 129–131, 134, 143 Mendeleev, Dmitri, 96 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 33, 63, 127, 141 Metz, Christian, 103–104, 112 Michelferder, Diane P., 52 Michnik, Adam, 136 Millar, John, 23 Miłosz, Czesław, 136 Mitchell, Andrew J., 134 Mitchell, William J., T. 103, 112, 114 Montaigne, Michel de, 33, 36 Morawski, Stefan, 136 Morin, Edgar, 10, 24 Moses, A. Dirk, 8 Moyen, Samuel, 8 Mueller-Vollmer, Kurt, 53 Mullarkey, John, 26 Namier, Lewis, 23 Nancy, Jean-Luc, 15, 24–25

152

Index

Neaman, Elliot, 8 Nenstein, Joshua, 144 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 12, 25, 35, 44, 50, 118, 122 Nora, Pierre, 10, 24 Oakeshott, Michael, 35 Okopień-Sławińska, Aleksandra, 113 Olszewski, Tomasz, 88 Otto, Rudolf, 34 Palin, Michael, 93 Palmer, Richard, E. 52 Panofsky, Erwin, 106, 113 Park, Tim, 113 Pascal, Blaise, 105 Patton, Paul, 24 Paul St., 16, 26 Perry-Lehmann, Meira, 144 Pickard-Cambridge, W. A., 53 Plato, 27, 43, 47–50, 119 Podgórecki, Adam, 135 Potocki, Andrzej, 67 Pound, Ezra, 110–112, 114, 141 Pratt, Mary L., 95, 100–101 Prendergast, Christopher, 27 Ptolemy, Claudius, 106 Quintilian, 107 Rainey, Lawrence S., 114 Readings, Bill, 24 Rejniak-Majewska, Agnieszka, 137, 144 Rentmeister, Thomas, 65 Revel, Jacques, 24 Reyers, Zeger, 65 Richardson, Michael, 134 Ricoeur, Paul, 44, 53, 82–84, 88 Ritter, Joachim, 113 Rittre, Mark, 123 Roberson, Susan L., 100 Robrieux, Jean-Jacques, 113 Rockmore, Tom, 25 Rorty, Richard, 3, 7, 31, 36, 116–119, 121–123 Rose, Jacqueline, 106, 113 Ross, Philip, 65 Rouillé, André, 85, 88, 140 Rousseau, Jena-Jacques, 2, 7, 49–50

Rutkiwicz, Ignacy, 88 Rutschy, Michael, 29, 39 Sa’adah, Anne, 27 Sandywell, Barry, 107, 113 Santner, Eric, 26 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 4, 25, 26, 104, 111, 127 Sauerland, Karol, 34, 39 Schleiermacher, Friedrich, 34 Schmitt, Carl, 133 Scott, Joan, 31 Sendyka, Roma, 141–142 Shaw, George B., 61 Sheridan-Smith, Alan M., 25, 113 Shusterman, Richard, 65, 67, 138 Silva, Filipe C. de, 134 Simiand, François, 9 Simmel, Georg, 34 Skrbis, Zlatko, 100, 102 Sławek, Tadeusz, 114 Słowiński, Janusz, 113 Smith, Sidonie, 101 Snyder, John R., 123 Socrates, 49 Sokal, Alan, 122–123 Sontag, Susan, 81–82, 88 Spinoza, Baruch, 12 Spivak, Gayatri Ch., 53 Stanisławska, Aleksandra, 66 Stasiuk, Andrzej, 89–95, 97–102, 140–141 Stivale, Charles, 24 Sullivan, John P., 114 Surya, Michel, 126, 134 Szacki, Jerzy, 2, 7 Szahaj, Andrzej, 135 Szymborska, Wisława, 74, 76–78 Tawney, Richard H., 23 Theroux, Paul, 93 Thierry, de Duve, 9, 23 Thoma, Hans, 55 Tiravanija, Rirkrit, 65 Todorov, Tzvetan, 83, 100 Trachtenberg, Alan, 23, 77 Trask, Willard R., 53 Trotsky, Leon, 125, 131–132, 134, 143 Turner, Victor, 29, 39

Index Urry, John, 100 Vattimo, Gianni, 116–123 Voltaire, 23 Voparil, Christopher J., 7 Waldenfels, Bernhard, 39 Warburg, Aby, 106 Warhol, Andy, 69 Warmiński, Andrzej, 53 Watson, Julia, 101 Webb, David, 123 Weber, Max, 35 Weinsheimer, Joel, 53 Wellek, Rene, 34 White, Hayden, 16–17, 26 Whiteside, Shaun, 77 Whitman, Walt, 35 Winfree, Jason K., 134 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 31 Wöfflin, Heinrich, 105 Wojnar, Irena, 67 Wolska, Dorota, 137 Woodward, Ian, 100, 102 Wrathall, Mark A., 25 Youngs, Tim, 100 Zawada, Andrzej, 88

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VIBS The Value Inquiry Book Series is co-sponsored by: Adler School of Professional Psychology American Indian Philosophy Association American Maritain Association American Society for Value Inquiry Association for Process Philosophy of Education Canadian Society for Philosophical Practice Center for Bioethics, University of Turku Center for Professional and Applied Ethics, University of North Carolina at Charlotte Central European Pragmatist Forum Centre for Applied Ethics, Hong Kong Baptist University Centre for Cultural Research, Aarhus University Centre for Professional Ethics, University of Central Lancashire Centre for the Study of Philosophy and Religion, University College of Cape Breton Centro de Estudos em Filosofia Americana, Brazil College of Education and Allied Professions, Bowling Green State University College of Liberal Arts, Rochester Institute of Technology Concerned Philosophers for Peace Conference of Philosophical Societies Department of Moral and Social Philosophy, University of Helsinki Gannon University Gilson Society Haitian Studies Association Ikeda University Institute of Philosophy of the High Council of Scientific Research, Spain International Academy of Philosophy of the Principality of Liechtenstein International Association of Bioethics International Center for the Arts, Humanities, and Value Inquiry International Society for Universal Dialogue Natural Law Society Philosophical Society of Finland Philosophy Born of Struggle Association Philosophy Seminar, University of Mainz Pragmatism Archive at The Oklahoma State University R.S. Hartman Institute for Formal and Applied Axiology Research Institute, Lakeridge Health Corporation Russian Philosophical Society Society for Existential Analysis Society for Iberian and Latin-American Thought Society for the Philosophic Study of Genocide and the Holocaust Unit for Research in Cognitive Neuroscience, Autonomous University of Barcelona Whitehead Research Project Yves R. Simon Institute

Titles Published Volumes 1 - 226 see www.rodopi.nl 227. Sanya Osha, Postethnophilosophy. A volume in Social Philosophy 228. Rosa M. Calcaterra, Editor, New Perspectives on Pragmatism and Analytic Philosophy. A volume in Studies in Pragmatism and Values 229. Danielle Poe, Editor, Communities of Peace: Confronting Injustice and Creating Justice. A volume in Philosophy of Peace 230. Thorsten Botz-Bornstein, Editor, The Philosophy of Viagra: Bioethical Responses to the Viagrification of the Modern World. A volume in Philosophy of Sex and Love 231. Carolyn Swanson, Reburial of Nonexistents: Reconsidering the Meinong-Russell Debate. A volume in Central European Value Studies 232. Adrianne Leigh McEvoy, Editor, Sex, Love, and Friendship: Studies of the Society for the Philosophy of Sex and Love: 1993–2003. A volume in Histories and Addresses of Philosophical Societies 233. Amihud Gilead, The Privacy of the Psychical. A volume in Philosophy and Psychology 234. Paul Kriese and Randall E. Osborne, Editors, Social Justice, Poverty and Race: Normative and Empirical Points of View. A volume in Studies in Jurisprudence 235. Hakam H. Al-Shawi, Reconstructing Subjects: A Philosophical Critique of Psychotherapy. A volume in Philosophy and Psychology 236. Maurice Hauriou, Tradition in Social Science. Translation from French with an Introduction by Christopher Berry Gray. A volume in Studies in Jurisprudence 237. Camila Loew, The Memory of Pain: Women’s Testimonies of the Holocaust.. A volume in Holocaust and Genocide Studies 238. Stefano Franchi and Francesco Bianchini, Editors, The Search for a Theory of Cognition: Early Mechanisms and New Ideas. A volume in Cognitive Science

239. Michael H. Mitias, Friendship: A Central Moral Value. A volume in Ethical Theory and Practice 240. John Ryder and Radim Šíp, Editors, Identity and Social Transformation, Central European Pragmatist Forum, Volume Five. A volume in Central European Value Studies 241. William Sweet and Hendrik Hart, Responses to the Enlightenment: An Exchange on Foundations, Faith, and Community. A volume in Philosophy and Religion 242. Leonidas Donskis and J.D. Mininger, Editors, Politics Otherwise: Shakespeare as Social and Political Critique. A volume in Philosophy, Literature, and Politics 243. Hugh P. McDonald, Speculative Evaluations: Essays on a Pluralistic Universe. A volume in Studies in Pragmatism and Values. 244. Dorota Koczanowicz and Wojciech Małecki, Editors, Shusterman’s Pragmatism: Between Literature and Somaesthetics. A volume in Central European Value Studies 245. Harry Lesser, Editor, Justice for Older People, A volume in Values in Bioethics 246. John G. McGraw, Personality Disorders and States of Aloneness (Intimacy and Aloneness: A Multi-Volume Study in Philosophical Psychology, Volume Two), A volume in Philosophy and Psychology 247. André Mineau, SS Thinking and the Holocaust. A volume in Holocaust and Genocide Studies 248. Yuval Lurie, Wittgenstein on the Human Spirit. A volume in Philosophy, Literature, and Politics 249. Andrew Fitz-Gibbon, Love as a Guide to Morals. A volume in Ethical Theory and Practice 250. Ronny Miron, Karl Jaspers: From Selfhood to Being. A volume in Studies in Existentialism

251. Necip Fikri Alican, Rethinking Plato: A Cartesian Quest for the Real Plato. A volume in Philosophy, Literature, and Politics 252. Leonidas Donskis, Editor, Yet Another Europe after 1984: Rethinking Milan Kundera and the Idea of Central Europe. A volume in Philosophy, Literature, and Politics 253. Michael Candelaria, The Revolt of Unreason: Miguel de Unamuno and Antonio Caso on the Crisis of Modernity. A volume in Philosophy in Spain 254. Paul Richard Blum, Giordano Bruno: An Introduction. A volume in Values in Italian Philosophy 255. Raja Halwani, Carol V. A. Quinn, and Andy Wible, Editors, Queer Philosophy: Presentations of the Society for Lesbian and Gay Philosophy, 1998-2008. A volume in Histories and Addresses of Philosophical Societies 256. Raymond Angelo Belliotti, Shakespeare and Philosophy: Lust, Love, and Law. A volume in Philosophy, Literature, and Politics 257. Jim Kanaris, Editor, Polyphonic Thinking and the Divine. A volume in Philosophy and Religion 258. Michael Krausz, Oneness and the Displacement of Self: Dialogues on Self-Realization. A volume in Interpretation and Translation 259. Raymond Angelo Belliotti, Jesus or Nietzsche: How Should We Live Our Lives? A volume in Ethical Theory and Practice 260. Giorgio A. Pinton, The Conspiracy of the Prince of Macchia & G. B. Vico. A volume in Philosophy, Literature, and Politics 261. Mechthild E. Nagel and Anthony J. Nocella II, Editors, The End of Prisons: Reflections from the Decarceration Movement. A volume in Social Philosophy 262. Dorota Koczanowicz, Leszek Koczanowicz, and David Schauffler, Editors, Discussing Modernity: A Dialogue with Martin Jay. A volume in Central European Value Studies