Possible Worlds of the Pomarańczowa Alternatywa

The twenty-fifth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall provides an excellent background to consider how to think about what promised to be a possible world in 1989. Today, one must either blind oneself to the disastrous failure of the emancipatory endeavors prompted by liberal democracy, which took the form of the ethnic conflicts in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa; accept neoliberal politics as the only recourse and possible world; regress to a recurring utopian dream that it will be still possible to construct an isotopia, a chronotopia, a heterotopia, or a utopia; adopt a cynical distance when faced with a chunk of the Berlin Wall in front of the Westin Hotel on which it is written "Property of the Westin Grand Hotel. Damages to the Wall are not permitted"; or return to the need to reconceptualize history in a manner which could help in critically evaluating the past and the time of the "now" in their complex, often contradictory historical materiality. This essay, using the critical work of Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno, draws attention to the events in Poland between mid-1980 and mid-1989, which prompted a multitude of cultural and political phenomena of unprecedented representational heterogeneity hitherto underexplored. Using the streets actions of the Orange Alternative, it argues that theatre and visual arts during that period revealed the tension between the hegemonic lexicon of bureaucratic socialism, which was in the process of losing its power, and a new democratic authority, which did not or could not yet fully enunciate its operations and strategies. These happenings and street actions, which occupied a contested intellectual, emotional, and spiritual terrain claimed by the referents to the disputed ideology and power of the state and Solidarity/the Church, contribute to the discourse on possible worlds by resisting the course of the world and its reified residues, as Adorno would aver

Aesthetics · Art · Democracy · Hegemony · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Eastern European Communism and Reforms · History · Law · Polish Historical and Cultural Studies · Polish-Jewish Holocaust Memory Studies

• Post-communist Nostalgia

  Marija Nikolaeva Todorova, Maria Todorova et al.•Post-Communist Nostalgia•2010

  Incluir item

• The Essential Frankfurt School Reader

  Andrew Arato, Eike Gebhardt et al.•The Essential Frankfurt School…•1978

  Incluir item

• Notes to Literature

  Theodor W Adorno, Paul Kottman•Notes to Literature•2019

  Incluir item

• Ideology and Power in the Age of Lenin in Ruins

  Open Access•Andrew Wernick, Anthony Giddens et al.•Ideology and Power in the Age of…•1991

  Incluir item

• The AgitProp and Circus Plays of Vladimir Mayakovsky

  Open Access•Frantisek Deak•The Drama Review TDR•1973

  Incluir item

• Heterologies

  Michel De Certeau•Heterologies•1986

  Incluir item

• The production of space

  Henri Lefebvre•The production of space•1991

  Incluir item

• Successful icons of failed time

  Open Access•Dominik Bartmanski•Acta Sociologica•2011

  Incluir item