Abstract
According to the famous statement by Robert Musil, ‘there is nothing in this world as invisible as monuments, attention runs down them without stopping for a moment.’ However, the moment when they suddenly become visible as the centre of intense social conflicts, it is difficult to believe they had been invisible for so long. This article analyses practices of contemporary iconoclastic gestures directed at monuments, examining the differences between recent iconoclastic acts in the United States and in Poland. Contrary to progressive anti-racist iconoclastic practices in the United States, the authors argue that the recent wave of attacks against monuments in Poland, connected to the state-sanctioned politics of ‘de-communization’, derives from a conservative vision of history and the public sphere. Drawing on Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s concept of ‘paranoid reading’, the authors show how the ‘de-communization’ project activates a particular ‘way of seeing’: paranoid looking, through which public spaces are turned into environments filled with objects that need to be suspiciously examined and assessed. The paranoid look works against the invisibility of monuments, aiming to extract objects from the landscape in order to further examine them in search of any suspicious elements – formal and stylistic features, more or less intelligible symbols and so on that will shed light on their under-acknowledged capacity for both culpability and criticality.
The deaths of monuments are sometimes eerily similar to their births. An elegant curtain, underneath which a shining object waits for its unveiling, is later replaced by its poor cousin: a piece of tarp or thick plastic foil secured by duct tape. These events from the lives of monuments often follow a surprisingly similar pattern in culturally and geographically distant locations. Take, for example, the two photographs below (Figures 1 and 2), showing critical moments in the existence of two monumental structures.
© Photograph: AgnosticPreachersKid, CC BY-SA.4.0. Reproduced with permission.
© Photograph: Magda Szcześniak. Reproduced with permission.
The two awry sculptures are captured against a picturesque background, and – perhaps because of the wind filling the covers, or the slick shiny surface of the tarps – they might even seem aesthetically pleasing. A project by Christo and Jeanne-Claude, for instance. In fact, the reason for their shrouding is that they were judged as particularly displeasing, though not for purely aesthetic reasons. The similarity of these photographs and the documented iconoclastic gestures is striking. However, their meanings and consequences for the state of the public sphere are radically different.
The black tarp obscures the view of Confederate General Robert E Lee, whose monument in Lee Park in Charlottesville, Virginia was erected in 1924 and veiled on 23 August 2017 after heated debates and protests. 1 The structure had been attacked previously: in June 2016, the phrase ‘Black Lives Matter’ was spray painted on the pedestal and, a year later, on the night before a planned Ku Klux Klan rally in defence of the monument, unknown protesters smeared the plinth with red paint leaving the sign ‘Native Land’. These events need to be seen as part of a larger process of attacking and dismantling monuments dedicated to Confederate soldiers: an enormous Robert E Lee statue in New Orleans in 2017; the Confederate Soldiers Monument in Durham, North Carolina in August 2017; the Silent Sam statue at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; confederate general monuments at the University of Austin, Texas in August 2017; four monuments to the era of confederacy in Baltimore, Maryland in August 2017; plaques honouring Robert E Lee in Brooklyn, New York; and dozens of others. 2 And these events also need to be analysed in relation to similar discussions about and actions directed against colonial monuments in South Africa, India, Australia and other countries. These mostly grassroots and activist efforts have placed the contested monuments in the centre of the field of vision. In this case, contemporary anti-racist iconoclasts refuse to keep ignoring histories of subjugation, slavery and prejudice, which the monuments constantly naturalize in the everyday landscape.
The blue tarp shrouds one of the first monuments built in post-war Warsaw – the 1946 Monument of Gratitude to Red Army Soldiers situated in Skaryszewski Park. It was covered up in April 2018 after it had been attacked with red paint by right-wing nationalist activists as an act of protest against commemorating and celebrating Soviet presence in Poland. 3 Although the set of gestures – splattering blood-red paint, spray painting politically charged symbols and slogans, or even disfiguring the structure with a literal iconoclastic hammer – is common for both described instances of iconoclasm, already here we see that the political identifications of the attackers can be situated on two opposite sides of the political spectrum. The covering up and ultimate dismantling of the second monument was also part of a wide and lengthy process, recently bolstered by the right-wing government through its ‘de-communization’ bill, introduced in April 2016. As a result of the bill, hundreds of street names have been changed and dozens of monuments and plaques, many of them dedicated to the memory of Red Army soldiers who fought in the Second World War, were removed from squares and parks in Polish cities and small towns: Warsaw, Szczecin, Stargard, Sejny, Lidzbark Warmiński, Legnica, Sanok and many others. However, due to the complex and ambiguous character of the Polish monument landscape, which we will later describe, the actual list of monuments ‘propagating communism’ and thus – according to the authors of the bill – unworthy of continuing to occupy public spaces, is difficult, if not impossible, to establish. The impossibility of coming up with a fixed definition of a ‘communist monument’ fuels uncertainty and generates a certain type of visual practice, which we will be calling paranoid looking. This particular ‘way of seeing’, prompted by government institutions and sources (documents, directives, media coverage), turns public spaces into environments filled with menacing objects. The goal of paranoid looking is to spot these previously overlooked objects in order to have them removed from the public sphere on the basis of their association with the idea of communism.
Naturalization of power
Designed as dominant and imposing structures, traditional monuments are meant to physically carve out space for the memorialization of chosen events and people – as such, they are also a performance of power, a visualization of currently dominant political forces and interpretations of history. The interpellation performed by monuments on subjects seeks to limit their reaction to one of affirmation or subservience. Not only, as WJT Mitchell (1990) writes, ‘memorials, monuments, triumphal arches, obelisks, columns, and statues [have] a rather direct reference to violence in the form of war and conquest’ and thus serve to ‘monumentalize violence’ (p. 886) but also monuments themselves seek to aggressively attack our senses and force us into submission. However, they frequently fail to achieve these goals. In an often – perhaps too often – quoted excerpt from the 1927 essay Monuments, the writer Robert Musil points to this curious failure: The most striking feature of monuments is that you do not notice them. There is nothing in this world as invisible as a monument. They are no doubt erected to be seen – indeed, to attract attention. But at the same time, they are impregnated with something that repels attention. Like a drop of water on an oilskin, attention runs down them without stopping for a moment … We cannot say that we do not notice them; we should say that they de-notice us. They withdraw from our senses. (Musil, 2006[1927]: 64, 65)
The appeal of Musil’s quote and its inevitable presence in almost every article on monuments – including this one – stems from its incisive observations about our relationship to monuments. Taking your daily journey from home to work, for instance, it seems plausible that, if asked, not only would you fail to recall all persons and events of commemoration en route, you might even struggle to come up with the correct number of monuments altogether. While this may be true, it also seems that Musil downplays the complexity of our relationships with monuments. First of all, he fails to recognize the heterogenous character of all public spheres, projecting a universal human subject with a stable and fixed identity, a subject whose relation to a given monument is bound to be the same as that of all other members of the society. Second, he assumes that the monument’s ‘impregnation to attention’ has to result in the subject’s obliviousness to the matters memorialized and thus is tantamount to the failure of the monumental medium, which ‘forfeits its capacity to play a role in [our] consciousness’ (p. 66), especially in ‘an age of noise and movement’ (p. 67). That said, could such an alleged indifference of the public to monuments actually be seen as proof of the efficaciousness of the monumental form? For what Musil describes as becoming invisible should perhaps be understood as a harmonious fading into the landscape. What he sees as ineffectiveness is in fact a naturalization of the monument and its values.
In fact, Musil himself falls into the trap of the apparent obviousness of the monumental landscape. While lamenting that we ‘do not have the slightest notion of whom [the monuments] are supposed to represent’, he casually adds that the only thing that a member of the public might recall is ‘whether [the monument is] a man or a woman’ (p. 65). This sudden gendering of the monument might strike us as odd. Presumably one would be hard-pressed to find many monuments devoted to women (apart from those representing mythological themes) in early 20th-century Vienna. All the statues further described by Musil are of men in different poses – strutting about, reading a scroll, riding a horse; in short, doing important things that tend to occupy the lives of great men. The fact that the author of Monuments, during his very detailed take down of the statue genre, does not notice this masculine character of monuments points to their power of naturalizing, creating a default backdrop of masculinity and activities associated with it: warfare, ‘rational’ inquiry, state power. If this power to naturalize exists, then monuments retain an essential productivity, albeit perhaps not in the way their creators had envisioned.
In light of this, anthropologist Michael Taussig’s (1999) statement that ‘with defacement, the statue moves from an excess of invisibility to an excess of visibility’ (p. 52) should be seen as a description of the iconoclast’s intention to make visible the discrete power of monuments. Here as well, as in the cases of historical iconoclasms, the attacker believes in the lasting power of the image, its potential agency and liveliness. By trying to destroy it, the iconoclast ‘vehemently and dramatically attempts to break its hold on him or her’ (Freedberg, 1991: 425). This complicated dynamic between visibility and invisibility manifests itself in the wave of iconoclastic actions, which have been recently carried out by anti-racist activists in the United States. Drawing on canonical iconoclastic gestures, those attacking monuments aim at uncovering the everyday discrete violence performed by statues of Confederate soldiers and generals who fought for maintaining slavery. Although coming from a distant past, though not as distant as it would seem, 4 these objects are active today. As artist Sharon Hayes (2018) notes in her recent answer to the October ‘Questionnaire on Monuments’, ‘the public monument does not simply reflect white-settler patriarchal power; the public monument exists in order to assert, sustain, and maintain that power’ (p. 66). Confederate monuments, writes Hayes, are not a thing of the past, pieces of heritage that deserve to be protected, they remain an active actor in the conservative struggle to uphold the ‘fictions of the white patriarchal nation-state’ (p. 66). While monument iconoclasm is certainly not the only tactic of dismantling racism – and one that is neither unambiguously effective nor carried out in an identical fashion 5 – the proponents of attacking Confederate monuments see it as a necessary step in the process of uncovering the structural racism of public spaces. The comprehension of the contemporary racist agency of monuments spurred a wave of enthusiastic opinions about the progressive potential of iconoclasm and its revolutionary and emancipatory tradition. And thus, drawing on historical monument struggles (from the French Revolution to post-socialist monument dismantlement), Nicholas Mirzoeff (2017b) writes that ‘the falling monument is a strategic way to interrogate and interpret white supremacy’ (p. 1). Tellingly, the crowd-sourced syllabus on monument iconoclasm initiated by the author of The Right to Look bears the title ‘All Monuments Must Fall’.
All monuments must fall?
Really, though, should all monuments fall? As Eastern European visual culture scholars, who have been observing the rising wave of ‘de-communization’ over the past two years and have witnessed the final dismantlement of the Monument of Gratitude to Red Army Soldiers described above (see Figure 3, one of the monuments on our daily routes we were able to name), we cannot help but be wary of Mirzoeff’s wholesale and indiscriminate call. While our goal is certainly not to discredit the iconoclastic acts of anti-racist activists around the world, by repeating Eve Kosfosky Sedgwick’s (2003) delicate italicizing and punctuating of Fredric Jameson’s call to ‘Always historicize’ (‘Always historicize?’, p. 125, emphasis in original), we’d like to point to the cultural complexity of iconoclastic practices. Must all monuments fall at this precise moment in history? What are we to do with the fact that, at the exact same time as racist monuments are being attacked in the United States, in our local context this slogan is uttered by nationalist and xenophobic political forces? In contemporary Poland it is progressives that rally in the defence of many monuments, or at least observe their dismantlement with sadness.
© Photograph: Justyna Chmielewska. Reproduced with permission.
The Skaryszewski Park Monument of Gratitude to Red Army Soldiers is one of many (approximately 500) structures erected in Poland between 1945 and 1989 dedicated to the memory of Soviet soldiers or to the ‘brotherhood in arms’ of the Polish People’s Army (Armia Ludowa) and the Red Army. Initially a grave marker on the park’s border, it was raised in 1946 on the burial place of 26 Red Army soldiers who died in the struggles for the Praga district during their armed fights with the Wehrmacht. In 1968, due to infrastructural works, the monument was relocated 50 meters deeper into the park, which made it less visible. After 1989, it rarely raised controversy and was not seriously considered for demolition. However, with the introduction of the ‘de-communization’ bill, during the drafting of this article in the spring and summer of 2018, it was frequently attacked with red paint and finally dismantled in October 2018 by the Warsaw Park Department. The history of this Monument of Gratitude to Red Army Soldiers in Skaryszewski Park is exemplary for the broader state of the Polish monument landscape and explains why it is mostly such ideologically ambiguous statues that are the main objects of current mandated ‘de-communization’. In the category of monuments built in the socialist era, the ‘gratitude’ and ‘brotherhood’ monuments were the most numerous. Markedly absent from the public sphere were monuments devoted to the international heroes of socialism, and even to post-1944 Polish socialist leaders. As David Crowley (2004) wrote in his description of socialist Warsaw: The debased vocabulary of the socialist city – lumpy statues of Marx and his brothers, Engels and Lenin, banners with empty slogans celebrating socialist life as well as tanks on moulding plinths and deserted military cemeteries. While Warsaw was invariably claimed as a socialist city of the first order, the visitor would be hard pressed to find many orthodox monuments of this kind, even during the height of the Stalinist megalomania. Although planned, the stone colossus in the image of Stalin was never erected. (p. 61)
This was true of other Polish cities and towns as well – only a few Lenins graced the Polish landscape, with no statues of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, and only one of Stalin, which lived a short life of 5 years, between 1951 and 1956 in the remote border village of Ustrzyki Dolne. This unwillingness to memorialize international communist figures, as well as Soviet leaders and revolutionaries, becomes clearer when we confront the basic paradox of the Polish socialist project. On one hand, the leaders of the Polish People’s Republic recognized the country’s dependence on the Soviet Union and emphasized this relationship through various proclamations of friendship (including an official amendment to the Constitution added in 1976). On the other, because of the long history of Russian influence in Poland (which included such events as the participation of Tsarist Russia in the late 18th-century partition of Poland after which the country lost its independence for 123 years, and the 1919–1921 Polish-Soviet war) the Polish People’s Republic government consistently used nationalist rhetoric and stressed such values as autonomy and self-determination as a way to legitimize the socialist project amongst Poles (Zaremba, 2019). The monument landscape quickly became one the spheres in which the government performed national autonomy. While Polish artists, poets, scientists, and activists – from Copernicus to Chopin, from Mickiewicz to Dzierżyński – were memorialized individually with the use of a traditional figurative monument structure, Soviet history was commemorated through monuments devoted to collectives (most often Red Army soldiers), as well as abstract ideals (Polish–Soviet friendship, cooperation, and brotherhood in arms) and processes (worldwide peasant and worker revolutionary struggles). Freed from the necessity of resembling a well-known individual, the latter monuments often combined large-scale abstract forms with smaller figurative symbolic elements and inscriptions.
At the turn of the 1980s, during the so-called post-socialist transition, the Polish monument landscape was thus in many ways less controversial than one would imagine, especially in comparison to other countries of the socialist bloc. Amongst hundreds of statues erected in the Polish People’s Republic only a few suffered from spectacular attacks, most were allowed to continue living in the new system, albeit sometimes deprived of straightforwardly socialist insignia and attributes: Red Army stars, sickles and hammers. As Polish art historian Sergiusz Michalski (1998) writes in Public Monuments: The removal of Communist public monuments in the former Eastern Bloc began gradually and somewhat hesitatingly after the opposition had gained power. There were few acts of spontaneous destruction … [Instead the removal] swiftly became the preserve of local bureaucracies. (pp. 148, 150)
Often carried out under the pretence of infrastructural development (building roads, construction of the Warsaw underground, landscape architecture) and under the cover of night, the few demolitions that actually took place rarely involved spectacles for local communities (Zaremba, 2018).
Paradoxically though, despite the relative absence of non-state led iconoclasm, images of the few attacks on monuments, as well as staged images of bringing down inexistent monuments, have since been used as illustrations of the process of post-socialist transition. Dynamically circulating in the public sphere already in 1989, it is as if iconoclastic imagery is to make up for the lack of an actual wave of iconoclastic attacks after the systemic change. Be it spectacular photographs from the state-initiated dismantlement of the Warsaw monument to Feliks Dzierżyński (the infamous first head of state security organizations in post-revolutionary Russia), showing the monument crumbling in mid-air due to its delicate sandstone filling (rather than due to the vengeful attack of people equipped with iconoclastic hammers), or the filmic disassembling of a never existing Karl Marx statue in the first scenes of Feliks Falk’s 1989 film Capital, or How to Make Money in Poland (Marx is carried through the air by a helicopter over a traffic jam, his flight interspersed with counter-shots of bored onlookers) – such images associated transition into democracy with acts of cleansing the public sphere of controversial symbols. In the first decade of the transition, these fantasies went so far as to envisage constructing monuments only for them to be toppled – such as in architect Czesław Bielecki’s proposal for the Museum of Communism which was to exhibit a gigantic Joseph Stalin head as if it had just tumbled to the ground.
For the radical, nationalist, xenophobic right-wing Law and Justice party, which came to power in October 2015, the presence of monuments and street names associated with communism (the process of conjoining particular monumental forms with communist ideology is far from obvious, and we will return to this) becomes crucial evidence that the revolution of 1989 never happened. Picking up on counter-narratives about the sham of the systemic transition, the new government focuses on material and immaterial heritage as the most visible and irrefutable proof of the long-lasting power of communist structures. It also reinvigorates the iconoclastic fantasy described above, the belief that a true change of power needs monuments that fall (as well as new heroes on pedestals). Tellingly, as academic Iwona Kurz (2017) has observed, the first decision of the new Head of the Polish public TV broadcaster (Telewizja Polska), appointed in 2015 by the Law and Justice government, was the removal of the image of Warsaw’s Palace of Culture and Science from the opening sequence of the main evening news program. The socialist realist Palace, opened in 1955 and for slightly more than a year bearing the name of Joseph Stalin (the dedication was revoked during the so-called Polish thaw, a destalinization process that began in mid-1956), has been the subject of iconoclastic fantasies of the Polish right since the change of the system (Murawski, 2019). Not able to actually demolish the 237-metre high building, home to offices, three theatres, two museums, a swimming pool, a university and many other institutions, the Head of Polish Television performed an act of substitutional iconoclasm, erasing a visual copy instead of the original. Although not nearly as spectacular, one cannot underestimate the power of this act, an intervention into a mediatized Polish symbolic landscape. As such, this act can be read as a prefiguration of the soon-to-be decreed iconoclastic law.
Writing about the role of iconoclasm in the French Revolution, art historian Dario Gamboni (1997) sets up a model of secular political iconoclasm: ‘Iconoclasm played a role at every stage of the Revolutionary process – to foster it, to incite conviction or fear, and to make the change appear and become irreversible’ (p. 32). Iconoclasm thus conceived becomes a tool for the current government in acting the part of revolutionaries, breaking away with Poland’s ‘shameful’ past and dependence on communist forces, located both on the inside (pre-1989 leaders, dignitaries, politicians) and outside (Soviet soldiers, politicians, and really all Soviet citizens). Their pseudo-revolutionary language of gestures and images is meant to propel the date of political breakthrough from 1989 to the victory of the Law and Justice party in 2015. 6
On 1 April 2016, iconoclasm becomes official state policy, not only legalized, but also imposed on local governments through a bill prohibiting ‘propagating communism or any other totalitarian regime’ amongst others through monuments, street names, and patronages of public buildings and institutions. 7 Although the bureaucratic machinery strives to rationalize the process – by projecting numbers, calculating costs and setting deadlines – it is impossible not to be struck by the concept of ‘propagating communism’, which lies at the heart of the new law, commonly referred to (also by state officials) as the ‘de-communization’ bill. The first component of this phrase – the verb ‘to propagate’ – attributed in the bill not to people but to inanimate objects, suggests a belief in their agency, their ability to act with specific intent. This belief should not surprise us, perhaps, given the assumption about the potential of images to exercise power as an affective pre-condition for iconoclasm as such. In order to attack images (and objects, including monuments) the iconoclast has to believe that they hold power. Furthermore, as WJT Mitchell (2005) has noted: ‘the iconoclast believes that the idolaters believe their images to be holy, alive, and powerful … Iconoclasm is not just a belief structure but a structure of beliefs about other peoples’ beliefs’ (p. 20, emphasis in original) Seen in this light, ‘de-communization’ itself rests upon a projection of a public, either already worshipping communist imagery, or a naïve public, ready to be ‘seduced and led astray’ (p. 19). Actually, the public’s relationship with socialist-era monuments and imagery seems much more nuanced and the defence or affirmation of attacked monuments does not necessarily entail enchantment. The public is often capable of differentiating between the political order (which they may or may not have supported) that commissioned the monument and the lives or processes commemorated by the monuments (Russian and Polish soldiers risking or losing their lives on the Eastern front of the Second World War). It can view histories inscribed in monuments as complex and ambiguous, not lending themselves to simple interpretations. But all nuances escape the formula of ‘propagating communism’.
The second part of the bill title is no less problematic. Why – we could ask – does the legislator choose the term communism and not socialism (the preferred self-description of the Eastern and Central European governments between 1944 and 1989)? A bit more ironically, we could also press the legislator about which theoretical definition of communism he or she follows, or which of the many opposing, often contradictory, factions of communist thought and practice does he or she consider most worthy of admonishing (presumably all of them)? Of course, the choice of the phrase and its inaccurate use has a long history within both local and global politics. As political theorist Jodi Dean recently reminded us, this potential of the term ‘communism’ to become a handy epithet was noticed by none other than Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in their 1848 Communist Manifesto.
8
After the famous quote about the ‘communist spectre haunting Europe’, Marx and Engels sarcastically ask: Where is the party in opposition that has not been decried as communistic by its opponents in power? Where is the opposition that has not hurled back the branding reproach of communism, against the more advanced opposition parties, as well as against its reactionary adversaries?
The tendency to use the word communism as a vessel, into which many types of negative meanings can be poured, a lexical shorthand for the complex – not always and only negative – lived realities in a wide range of countries (from the USSR through the Polish People’s Republic to the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and the German Democratic Republic), has been a permanent fixture in post-1989 debates. 9
It seems that not only in spite of the inaccuracy of the phrase ‘propagating communism’ but maybe precisely because of its imprecision, the term becomes a radically efficient generator of iconoclastic gestures in public spaces. From the time of its implementation, the ‘de-communization’ bill has allowed for the changing of hundreds of names of streets and other city markers. Dozens of monuments have already been removed. In accordance with one of Gamboni’s rules of revolutionary iconoclasm, according to which iconoclastic practices ‘make the change appear and become irreversible’ (Gamboni, 1997: 32), it would be difficult to imagine the return of fallen monuments to their original locations, even though some of them have not been destroyed but instead transferred to museums, state archives or cemeteries. The efficiency of the process, the possibility of translating iconoclasm into an attractive political narrative, is dependent on the speed of all these changes.
Paranoid looking
Taking into consideration the complexity of the Polish monument landscape described above, the virtual lack of obvious anti-heroes to demolish and the partial iconoclasm of the 1990s during which many monuments lost their obvious signs of ideological affiliation, the way to track down objects guilty of ‘propagating communism’ is to encourage a paranoid relation to previously accepted or unseen objects. The ‘de-communization’ project activates a particular ‘way of seeing’: paranoid looking, through which public spaces are turned into environments filled with objects that need to be suspiciously examined and assessed. It is as if the Polish ‘de-communizers’ encourage us to follow the well-known appeal from the era of the ‘war on terror’: ‘See something, say something.’ Just as objects and subjects are deprived of their mundaneness by our vigilant gaze and become (usually imagined) signs of a terrorist attack (a backpack becomes a bomb), the previously overlooked and familiarized monuments and plaques of Polish cityscapes are to be sought out by a watchful eye. The paranoid look works against the invisibility of monuments described by Musil (2006[1927]), aiming to extract objects from the landscape in order to further examine them in search of any suspicious elements – formal and stylistic features, more or less intelligible symbols, materials, or the content of often illegible or obscured plaques.
This is what happened in the case of the Monument to the Uprising (1955) [Pomnik Czynu Powstańczego] (see Figure 4) in the city of Opole, dedicated to the memory of the Silesian Uprisings of 1919–1921, designed by the recognized Polish sculptor Xawery Dunikowski. With a long and complex history, after 1989 the monument existed without controversy, only lately to become an object of discussion, after the detail of a sickle and hammer was spotted on one of its rear (and rarely contemplated) walls. As if repeating the famous Homeland Security slogan, a local official appealed to the general public: ‘Something has to be done, someone needs to decide, should we paint it over, or do something else?’ The article describing the ‘discovery’ was illustrated by a photograph of the front of the huge structure supplemented by a close-up of the scandalous detail from the monument’s back wall (see Pospiszyl, 2018). The paranoid look is thus attuned to detail, searching out the smallest and least visible elements and zooming in on them with earnest scrutiny. At the same time, however, it is a gaze prone to generalizations, appropriating all visual symptoms under a single interpretation. Such was the case of the attack on two neighbouring reliefs on one of the main streets of Poznań: one of them depicts a Red Army and a Polish People’s Army soldier, the other two 19th-century poets: Alexander Pushkin and Adam Mickiewicz. Since the Polish Romantic poet remained highly valued in the national pantheon till today, he seems to have been deemed suspicious and unworthy mainly because of his ‘bad neighbours’.
‘There is a hammer and sickle on the the Monument to the Uprising. Will it need to be demolished?’ The local government issues a calming statement. Source: http://radio.opole.pl/100,227233,na-pomniku-czynu-powstanczego-jest-sierp-i-mlot-
To flesh out the concept of paranoid looking, it is helpful to return to its theoretical inspiration: the brilliant and influential description of paranoid reading proposed by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (2003) in her essay ‘Paranoid reading, reparative reading, or you’re so paranoid you probably think this essay is about you’. Sedgwick coins the term ‘paranoid reading’ to describe the epistemological practices of contemporary progressive theorists, mainly from the field of Queer Studies, who are devoted to searching out hidden or not immediately visible tropes of non-normative identities and denouncing practices of repressing queer desires. The role of Sedgwick’s critique is not to eliminate such practices altogether, but rather to point out the fact that ‘they represent a way, amongst other ways, of seeking, finding, and organizing knowledge’ (p. 130). As an epistemological practice, paranoia directly influences (and limits) the types of knowledge that it can produce. Although clearly Sedgwick’s object of analysis and scope of intervention markedly differ from the subject of this article, her examination of paranoia’s main features strikes us as operative also in the context of Polish anti-communist iconoclasm.
Just like paranoid reading, the paranoid look of Polish ‘de-communizers’ ‘places faith in exposure’ (p. 138), assuming that the uncovering of a hitherto unnoticed meaning will inevitably lead to changes in social attitudes. In the Polish ‘de-communization’ process, acts of exposure are often carried out by the Institute of National Remembrance (Instytut Pamięci Narodowej, hereafter IPN) which not only prepared a list of common monument types that need to be dismantled, but also encourages citizens to notify the Institute in the case of any doubts and suspicions, so that a definite assessment of an object can be prepared. 10 The opinion of the Institute – issued as an official document – does not leave any room for negotiation, and is supposed to lead to immediate action and a change of attitudes towards the statue, previously not perceived as harmful. The decision to ignore the Institute’s recommendations is met with disbelief and frustration, as in the case in 2017 of an IPN official who, after learning that the citizens of Rzeszów value the iconic 1974 Monument to Revolutionary Action [Pomnik Czynu Rewolucyjnego] as a ‘piece of art and city symbol’ and want to keep it despite the negative assessment of the Institute, insisted that the locals still lacked enough ‘historical consciousness and knowledge [about] what the monument was devoted to’, and emphasized that ‘not knowing that something is a crime does not make one exempt from liability’ (see Bosak and Szopa, 2017).
When Sedgwick (2003) claims – in her five-part thesis on paranoia 11 – that ‘paranoia is anticipatory’ (p. 130) she refers to the boldness of the paranoid attitude, so deeply convinced by the validity of its interpretations that it seeks to foresee the future. ‘Paranoia requires that bad news be always already known, she writes, which results in a ‘complex relation to temporality that burrows both backward and forward’ (p. 130). In the case of the paranoid look of the ‘de-communizer’, this temporal entanglement manifests itself in the ‘pre-enactment’ of never realized futures of activists and politicians whose lives ended before the establishment of the Polish People’s Republic. So, although in the public debate the main focus is on post-Second World War communists who contributed to building the socialist state, much of the ‘de-communization’ practices concern pre-war communists, members of workers movements, anti-fascist organizers and active participants of the anti-Nazi underground. In March 2018, the Mayor of Zamość, a town in Eastern Poland, authorized the removal of a plaque commemorating the birthplace of Rosa Luxemburg, socialist philosopher and politician, executed in 1919 by the Freikorps paramilitaries. The internationally less well-known comrades of Red Rosa include: the 13th International Brigade, also known as ‘Dąbrowszczacy’ (a brigade fighting for the Spanish Second Republic during the Spanish Civil War, their name referring to Jarosław Dąbrowski, a Polish general who fought in the Paris Commune); Tekla Borowiakowa and Maria Wedman (textile workers and pre-war union organizers, both of whom died in 1943 Nazi concentration camps or in imprisonment); Adolf Warski (a communist organizer in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and victim of Stalinist purges in 1937); and Józef Lewartowski (a pre-war Jewish communist and creator of the Anti-Fascist Bloc in the Warsaw Ghetto who was shot by the Gestapo in 1942). In the eye of the ‘de-communizer’, pre-war sympathies with various communist and socialist organizations are sufficient proof of guilt in the post-1945 future, and the usually tragic deaths of these figures from the hands of those in power are not viewed as an excuse.
Even being world-renowned does not put you above suspicion, as in the case of IPN’s negative evaluation of radical filmmaker Dziga Vertov, an indispensable hero of Film Studies syllabi worldwide. The Institute’s opinion led to the removal of a plaque commemorating the life and work of the Cine-Eye manifesto author in his hometown Białystok. The stone plaque, sculpted in the shape of an unwinding film roll, was mounted on the wall of a local cinema in 2009 and removed in 2017 at the request of two Law and Justice City Council members, supported by the ‘expertise’ of IPN, according to which Vertov ‘used his film talents to promote a murderous system’ (see Bialous, 2017). This brutal unambiguity of paranoia is described by Sedgwick (2003) through psychologist Silvan Tomkins’ ideas of ‘strong affect theories’ which, while possessing a certain ‘conceptual economy and elegance’ are also characterized by a ‘powerfully ranging and reductive force’ (p. 134). Furthermore, paranoia is a strong theory of negative affects, seeking to ‘account for a wide spectrum of phenomena, which appear to be very remote, one from the other, and from a common source’ (Tomkins, 1962–1992: 433) and to render them as unequivocally negative. Anti-communist paranoid looking excludes the possibility of any positive interpretation of any part of life in the Polish People’s Republic, projecting an unambiguous vision of the past. Diverse social practices and struggles, accomplishments and communities are all subsumed by the wide-ranging supposed ‘common source’ of communism. Such is the fate of the Mother Pole monument (Pomnik Matki Polki) in Sejny, a tall and lean stone statue of a woman recently demolished because of its previous name, Monument of Gratitude, along with a relief of two soldiers and the sign ‘Brotherhood in Arms’ on one side of the monument’s pedestal. The affectionate nickname, ‘Lilka’, given to the monument by locals (supposedly after the name of a woman who posed for the sculpture), their angry and bitter reactions to the dismantlement expressed on internet discussion forums and in local media, as well as touching scenes of them bidding farewell to the sculpture (see Figure 5), point to the possibility of positive and complex relationships between people and monuments, especially perhaps in smaller communities where local inhabitants had participated in the monument’s construction, unveiling, and preservation.
Dismantled Mother Pole monument in Sejny. © Photograph: Helena Wysocka/Gazeta Współczesna. Reproduced with permission.
One could supplement Sedgwick’s five-part thesis on paranoia with at least one more feature: paranoia is never-ending. Although the ‘de-communization’ project presents itself as a to-do list with a finite and accomplishable end goal (‘it is estimated that approximately 560 monuments should be dismantled’, Jaworski and Niziołek, 2018), in reality the paranoid look is encouraged to operate endlessly. The specification of types of objects that are to be ‘de-communized’ has already been expanded by legislators to include further institutions (schools, hospitals, and cultural institutions for instance can no longer bear the names of persons associated with communism) and objects (memorial mounds, plaques, stones, inscriptions, etc.). The paranoid look is encouraged to jump from one object to another, to perhaps even come up with new types of suspicious entities and environments, ones that have not yet been discovered by the Institute of National Remembrance and maybe even ones which would not qualify for ‘de-communization’ under the bill. For the subject engaging in the practice of paranoid looking, with its negative attitude towards public space, suspicious and dangerous content can be located in aesthetic style, site, dates, categories and references. The material heritage of the socialist period, which constitutes the everyday environment of Warsaw and many other Polish cities and towns built or rebuilt after the Second World War, is rejected and envisioned as alien and dangerous. Public space itself is imagined as something to be purified, cleansed and decided upon through top-down directives.
The paranoid look becomes the main tool of this politics of cleansing. It rests upon a faith in the enlightening power of exposure which materializes itself in iconoclastic gestures. It scrutinizes the tiniest clues – whether a visual detail or a minor fact from the past of the investigated object (its author, founder, theme, protagonist, the occupied space). It searches for powerful objects capable of ‘propagating’ corrupt values and deluding naïve members of the public. It eliminates nuanced and ambiguous interpretations of history by promoting a reductive, binary vision of political identities and events. It performs a complex intervention into temporality by simultaneously projecting a ‘de-communized’ future and manipulating the past. While pointing to the future by indicating that there is a clear goal in sight, the paranoid look is engaged in a self-satisfactory, never-ending loop of suspicion. As such, the paranoid look, called into life by the top-down directive of ‘de-communization’, has far-ranging and harmful consequences for communal identity. By legitimizing an unequivocally negative interpretation of the socialist period, the ‘de-communization’ project suppresses alternative memories, emotions and genealogies. What are we to do with those members of the public who enthusiastically welcomed Red Army soldiers liberating their hometowns? Or whose families benefited from the project of upward social mobility facilitated by the post-war socialist state? Or those who received an education in one of the 1,417 new schools built by the socialist state in the 1960s as ‘monuments to the 1,000 years of the Polish State’? Or with the history of workers’ cooperatives, unique cultural practices and political tactics, including those of opposing the rigid socialist state? Erasing these and many other strands of history leads not only to promoting an unambiguous vision of the past, but also has profound consequences for the shape of the contemporary public sphere, as well as possible visions of and for the future.
‘A monument for every mortal/or no monument for anyone for fuck’s sake’ 12
On 27 February 2018, Charlottesville Circuit Court Judge Richard Moore ruled that the statues of Robert E Lee and Stonewall Jackson (see Figure 6), covered by the city authorities after the white supremacist march of 12 August 2017, needed to be unveiled. Citing a 1997 Virginia state law, which prohibits the removal or alteration of public war memorials, the Judge emphasized that ‘the irreparable harm here is based not on physical damage to the statues but, given the significant period of time that has gone by, on the obstructed rights of the public, under the statute, to be able to view the statues’ (Circuit Court file no. CL 17-145). The iconoclastic shrouding of the monuments is defined as harmful not because of the effect on the covered objects (as was argued by the plaintiffs), but because of its negative impact on the public, whose ‘right to view’ had been restricted. Although seemingly drawn from a progressive vocabulary, the phrase ‘right to view’ strikes us as suspicious, perhaps even the antithesis of Nicholas Mirzoeff’s (2011) ‘right to look’. Whereas the ‘right to look’ is always claimed from a particular – gendered, classed, raced – position and in relation to dominant powers, Judge Moore’s ‘right to view’ poses as universal. As in Musil’s (2006[1927]) Monuments essay, a universal and homogeneous public is envisioned and projected. The act of viewing, a right to which is guaranteed by law, is even seen as an outright beneficiary for onlookers: ‘Tourists, historians, artists, and students who come to see these notable statues, which are widely recognized as excellent works of art … are not able to when they are covered; their lost opportunity cannot be undone and so is irremediable’, claims Judge Moore (Circuit Court file no. CL 17-145). Although Moore seeks to differentiate the viewing public, he does so only superficially, by pointing to the most convenient, fragmentary classification and ignoring the context of much deeper differences between the conflicted publics, brought into view by iconoclastic anti-racist activists, who refuse to view these statues as ‘excellent works of art’ or as merely testimonies to the long gone past. Instead they seek to uncover the oppressive frameworks which aestheticize and naturalize these objects, making them part of ‘universal’ American heritage. One public’s ‘right to view’ is another public’s coercion into looking at. Or, to return once again to Musil’s musings, not everyone has the luxury of ‘not noticing’ monuments. In the case of the United States, with its history of slavery, segregation and contemporary structural racism, this luxury is simply not available to black and brown citizens. Reacting to this ‘overvisibility’, anti-racist iconoclasts use spectacular gestures to visualize an existing racial conflict, one that functions not as a rare and brutal exception, but as a structural feature of daily life and the basic premise of the organization of public spaces. Iconoclasm is thus a tool of reorganizing the public sphere, or as Jacques Rancière (2004) would say, the ‘distribution of the sensible’, granting voice and visibility to those subjected to everyday, overlooked racism through acts of rejecting monuments which naturalize and thereby perform racism. Not surprisingly, one of the sub-genres of iconoclasm, which has developed in the recent wave of attacks, are photographs of young black and brown men and women posing in front of toppled or defaced statues. Such is the image of two young black girls standing in front of a North Carolina monument of a Confederate soldier, a statue long called ‘Silent Sam’, with a sign asking: ‘Can you hear us now?’ (see Figure 8). Although we might be tempted to view all iconoclasms as succumbing to the logic of paranoia, a closer examination of discussions among anti-racist activists provides a much more ambiguous picture. The different gestures and tactics used by those who physically and discursively attack Confederate monuments – acts of toppling, but also organizing protests in front of monuments and circulating photographic documentations of these acts of opposition, adding signs and objects that add significant context to the monument’s reception (‘Slave owner’ or the KKK hood), but also designing ways in which the existing monumental structures could be transformed and turned into reminders of ‘how slavery and ideals that maintained and rationalized it continue to stand in our way’ 13 – are proof that anti-racist activists and thinkers engage in a process far more complex than the act of paranoid interpretation. Some of them, such as Titus Kaphar’s Monumental Inversions – delicate ‘distorted replicas’ of Confederacy monuments through re-creating moulds and re-working of existing sculptures – might even be interpreted as attempts at ‘reparative readings’ (Sedgwick, 2003, also see Trouillot, 2019).
© Photograph: Hawes Spencer. Reproduced with permission.
On 17 October 2018, in compliance with the bill prohibiting ‘propagating communism’, the local council ordered the destruction of the Monument of Gratitude to Red Army Soldiers, located in Warsaw’s Skaryszewski Park (see Figure 7). The only elements that survived the demolition were bilingual commemorative plaques, which are to be donated to the not yet existing Cold War Museum. The site of the monument has since been smoothed over and renovated, leaving no trace of the memorial. No consultations were organized, no discussion was instigated. As in the case of anti-racist iconoclasm, anti-communist iconoclasm is certainly a tool in the process of re-organizing the public sphere. However, the goal of ‘de-communization’ iconoclasm is the opposite of the one set out by anti-racist and anti-colonial activists. Whereas anti-racist iconoclasts seek to alter the ‘distribution of the sensible’ by redistributing the power to speak and to be seen and to be heard so as to include minoritarian and oppressed identities, the ‘de-communizers’ work towards limiting what is ‘sayable and visible’ (Rancière, 2010). The politics of erasing all symbols associated with the idea of communism and especially the Polish People’s Republic is in fact tantamount to silencing all alternative interpretations, emotions and memories of the period, as well as possible future returns to its professed and often practised values. Furthermore, this iconoclasm fails (not unintentionally of course) to point to any ongoing struggle; one would be hard-pressed to find in Poland victims currently persecuted by communists. Instead, it is a way of showing off the efficaciousness of those in power, their ability to both cleanse public spaces from unwanted elements and to populate them with new symbols of power, new monuments of heroes and events from the right-wing canon. De-communization, based on an imagined and purposefully vague vision of ‘communism’, interprets dissent as something alien to the harmonious national collective. Its goal is to strengthen the vision of an ethnically and politically homogeneous nation, whose enemies are always located on the outside – whether hostile armies, deceitful anti-Polish communists, or, from a different political discussion, non-Catholic immigrants and refugees.
© Photograph: Justyna Chmielewska. Reproduced with permission.
‘Can You Hear Us Now?’ Members of the Real Silent Sam Coalition in front of the Confederate Monument, 4 April 2012. © Photograph: The Real Silent Sam Tumblr. Reproduced with permission.
We recognize that ultimately the goal of progressive politics should be to demand, after socialist Chilean poet Nicanor Parra, ‘a monument for every mortal / or no monument for anyone for fuck’s sake’. The traditional monument tends to promote singular heroes instead of collectives, spectacular turning points instead of extended struggles, histories of majorities and not of minorities. Or, as Sam Durant (2018: 39) put it, ‘most public monuments and memorials are used to forget or cover up our past, not to remember it … to glorify the conquerors, to forget the conquered, to postpone recognition of genocide, slavery, segregation, sexism, and other atrocities.’ Through producing distance and hierarchy between the public and the elevated object, the traditional monument places the viewer in a position of submission. We need new subjects and formulas of remembrance. For now, however, the tactical role of progressives in Poland is the defence of some monuments in order to contextualize, enliven and visualize their complex and ambiguous histories so that history itself remains a subject of debates and a source of potentialities, instead of a closed-off sphere of regulated memory.
Footnotes
Notes
Address: Institute of Polish Culture, University of Warsaw, Krakowskie Przedmiescie 26/28, Warsaw, 00-927, Poland. [email:
Address: as Magda Szcześniak. [email: