Stealing the spectacle

Polish nationalists burn flares to mark Independence Day in Warsaw, Nov., 2015. Far-right organisations march under anti-migrant slogan,'Poland for Poles,Poles for Poland.'Alik Keplicz /Press Association. All rights reserved.For some time now Polish public space has been systematically
filled with numerous xenophobic incidents. They are staged, with increasing
frequency, by radical nationalist, racist or outright neo-Nazi groupings who jointly
call themselves patriots. The membership in these groupings is rapidly growing.
Gradually, they are turning into a sizeable volunteer army resembling the
Hungarian Jobbik. As a result of the general elections in 2015, they have parliamentary
representation as well.

Revenge
of the oppressed?

In various formulations, the disturbing frequency of racist
incidents in Poland is usually explained away. Most generally, the growing
popularity of xenophobic and neo-Nazi ideologies amongst Polish youth is rationalized
by pointing to the economic conditions responsible for their many forms of
social exclusion: the adoption of xenophobic attitudes by a considerable part
of the Polish youth is allegedly a consequence of their exclusion from the
labour and consumer market, while membership in these extremist groups is
supposed to work for them as psychological compensation for this economic denigration.
Racist ideology is supposed to provide them with a vicarious repayment, achieved
by means of denigration of others whom they perceive as aliens or outright
enemies. In other words, xenophobia in Poland is to be understood as yet
another example of the revenge of the oppressed.

This explanation seems plausible, but it suffers from
two errors. One has to do with its economism, the other with its literalism.
The error of economist reductionism in explaining recent xenophobic events in Poland
is that it perceives their authors and actors only as disappointed consumers. Although
it may be adequate in individual cases, overall it is misguided and misleading.

For human beings are not only the products of the
circumstances of their social environment: they contribute to the circumstances
too. To paraphrase a well-known thinker, this economistic doctrine that people are
the products of circumstances and upbringing, and that, therefore, changed men are
products of other circumstances and changed upbringing, forgets that it is people
who change circumstances. People are products of conditions which are partly
produced by themselves. That is one thing.

The second is that the world created by people is not
composed only of material goods, access to which is open to them in unequal measure.
The human world consists also of symbolic goods which are also subject to
various policies of distribution, far from egalitarian. A new quality in Polish
xenophobia is that it is indeed adopted and propagated by disappointed
consumers; but the source of their disappointment is not the limited access to
material, so much as to symbolic goods. They are hungry not only for new
sneakers and stuff (or, like in the past, for Jewish houses, shoes and pillows),
but for public recognition. For this reason, the new Polish xenophobia cannot
be explained only by political economy, but also needs to be understood in
terms of political aesthetics.

Public
recognition

The contemporary culture of visibility imposes two
demands upon its participants: in order to be in contemporary society, one does
not only have to have the means of subsistence; no less important is to be
perceived as someone who can afford them. Contemporary culture is a culture of
appearance in which the objects of rivalry and consumption are not only material
goods but, increasingly, images and symbols. Images and symbols are a
precondition for a successful social existence, that is, an existence
recognised and acknowledged by others. The predominance of the culture of
visibility is responsible for the fact that images, or spectacle of various
kinds, have now become goods no less sought after than material ones. Ours is
thus a culture of demonstration and ostentation; it is a culture of spectacle.

Functioning in the regimes of contemporary societies
involves a continuous rivalry for goods both material and symbolic. In this
culture, the dominant mode of production is about the creation of images, the construction
of spaces for their functioning, as well as the distribution of those goods in
those spaces. Naturally, not everyone takes part in these processes to the same
extent. Rivalry over goods, material and symbolic alike, is shaped by patterns of
conduct propagated by the media. Despite the popularity of social media, these
processes are overwhelmingly influenced by the official public media. They
dictate, in the last instance, the contents and nature of the dominant message,
as well as the pattern of a proper, i.e. socially acceptable form of participation
in the public sphere and consumption of its symbolic goods.

Two
pictures of xenophobia

For several post-war decades, Nazi ideology and
symbols have been effectively banned from Polish public space. With the
liberal-democratic transformation of the country, and freedom of speech
associated with it, racist and xenophobic ideologies gradually revived and grew
in the recesses of society. Over the past few years, however, Poland’s xenophobic
groupings have found a way to use the official public media to propagate their
racist ideology nationwide, without incurring the heavy costs formerly associated
with it, and with impunity. They have learned how to highjack symbols and
spectacles produced and distributed by the official regime, and to turn them to
the service of their own cause. In other words, they fight the established
regime of visuality by deploying its own weapons: they are having a free ride,
and making the best of it.  

For, in a relatively brief period of time, a
significant reversal has taken place in Poland. The change may be illustrated
by means of two contrasting pictures of the same xenophobic groupings which
have been propagated by the Polish public media at different times. Around 2010,
after one of the brawls staged by soccer hooligans following a match in Warsaw,
Polish TV repeatedly showed swathes of neo-Nazi youngsters, having been
contained by the police, cuffed and lying face down on a sidewalk. Several
years later, however, the same media are not showing this humiliating picture
of the buttocks and shaven heads of neo-Nazis felled on the sidewalk, but, literally,
quite the reverse: their angry faces shouting patriotic slogans. A second aspect
of the reversal is a natural follow-up of the first: the media do not focus any
more on the coarse physicality of the members of the neo-Nazi groups, but on
the contents of the message they propagate. In this way the official media find
themselves serving, willy-nilly, as a megaphone for their racist ideology. Neo-Nazis
upset the present political governance of Polish public space, by turning the
ideology upon which it rests against the regime itself.

The nature of the transgressive acts committed by xenophobic
groupings in Poland has also undergone a significant transformation. They
cannot any more be likened to or equated with mundane banditry, quotidian
racism, or typical stadium violence. Currently, their actions are  aimed not at physically assaulting people of
different colour or religion; nor do they serve just to release their youthful frustrations.
But there is a new quality in the transgressive events that they stage, that may
be illustrated in the following way. If one paints a swastika on a wall, one
does it under the cover of night. If one physically attacks a person, one does
it with a face covered by a low hood or a mask. This is because such actions
are violations of the existing law. But when one defends the innocence of
Polish children or the chastity of women, or the memory of Polish patriots, one
does it walking tall and proud. For the defence of these values, even if done
in a way which violates accepted norms, is seen as a commendable thing. The
praiseworthy nature of those actions is inscribed in the ideology of the
existing regime of political correctness.

How
it’s done

The following examples illustrate how they do it. Some
time ago xenophobic groupings prevented a Member of the European Parliament, Daniel
Cohn-Bendit, from speaking in Poland. They argued that Cohn-Bendit had once
acknowledged being aroused by adolescents with whom he had been working decades
ago. His confession, made in an excessively frank interview, has been construed
as acknowledgment of paedophile inclinations. So they argued that a paedophile
does not deserve respect or public recognition as an authority. In view of the
fact that shortly before the incident the state authorities had announced a
stringent anti-paedophile policy, while the official media went on a rampage of
paedophile-bashing, it has become impossible to deny the xenophobes the right
to protest against the appearance of this politician, unless one is willing to risk
the accusation of excessive leniency towards paedophilia. Few would accept such
a risk.

Polish neo-Nazis openly express their negative opinions
about Muslims and refugees currently striving for safety in Europe. Politicians,
media moguls and Roman Catholic Church leaders are unabashedly talking about the
refugees “flooding” Poland as a result of the European Union’s decision to
allocate them amongst the member states. State authorities openly warn
of the danger of unknown microbes which might be brought to Poland by the
refugees. And racist incidents and pronouncements are becoming perceived as a legitimate
preventive action aimed at preserving the purity of the national substance and faith.
In view of all this, it is virtually impossible to counter these
racist messages: official pronouncements of the state and the church
representatives are being employed by racists as a demonstration of their
righteousness, and at the same time used as a shield from prosecution.

It does not happen too often to a sociologist, whose
business is to investigate social problems, to become a social problem himself.
However, this precisely is what happened to Zygmunt Bauman, a sociologist of
international renown. Some time ago he was vilified by a group of neo-Nazis at
a public lecture in Poland for his collaboration with the secret services of
the Soviet Union during the Second World War. No one, Bauman himself included, denied
that, as an officer of the Polish army established in the Soviet Union at the
time of war, he worked for an institution controlled by the KGB. Ever since the
beginnings of Poland’s political transformation, the official media consistently
denounce any pro-communist leanings as criminal in nature; nowadays this
includes also any pro-Russian inclinations. In such circumstances it would take
tremendous courage to defend Bauman, and to oppose the neo-Nazis who posture as
genuine defenders of Polish patriots murdered in a distant past by the
communist regime, once supported by Bauman himself.

Normalisation
and situationism

These examples
demonstrate the extent to which the political regime in Poland has created,
perhaps inadvertently, the ideological conditions which allow what was until
recently unacceptable and shameful, to be perceived as acceptable, normal and praiseworthy.
Xenophobic groups make skilful use of selected items of the dominant ideology, and
take advantage of a regime which, somewhat taken aback, realizes that it no longer
has any means to condemn or prosecute their racist ideology.

Racist groups profess
ideas not much different from those of the Polish political class. The
difference lies basically in emphasis and employment of novel techniques in
making their views public. The above examples also demonstrate that the
proper aim of racist actions is not, for example, to defend the innocence of
children, or the chastity of women, or the dignity of patriots. Their true aim
is a hostile takeover of the public space produced by public institutions and
media, along with their messages, so that they may put them to the service of
their own political purposes. In this way the overall interest of these groups is
being achieved: they are winning public recognition and are being treated
seriously by a system which until recently did not even deign to acknowledge their
existence.

In other words, Polish xenophobic groupings are successful
thieves of the spectacle staged by the
establishment. By taking over and instrumentally
deploying the ideological and
symbolic messages of the official regime, they have managed
to focus public attention on themselves, thus enabling themselves to appear in
the very media which, not long ago, did not bother to notice them. It is as if
the Polish radical right had been diligent readers of Guy Debord and the
radical leftist situationist movement of the 1960’s.

Against
literalism

As for the error of
literalism in interpreting the new wave of xenophobia in Poland – it seems that
xenophobic motivation is being treated by these groups mainly as a means and an
instrument for achieving public recognition rather than as an aim in itself. I
shall try to explain this by means of yet another example.

According to a well-known
folktale, the first wish the fisherman addressed to the golden flounder was to
turn the waters in the lake into vodka. In the second wish, he demanded waters
in the sea to be turned into vodka. When the golden flounder asked about his
third wish, the fisherman, already whoozy, blurts out: “Oh, give me a bottle of
vodka and bugger off”. This anecdote conveys an important truth about Polish
customs: the private organization of leisure in Poland is barely possible
without alcohol. (Inevitably, forms of entertainment which grew up around the
Polish mode of alcohol consumption have been reflected in popular culture,
especially fiction and film, past and present. It is worth noticing an
important shift in this terrain, though: during really existing socialism
heroes of the Polish cinema were usually workers and guzzled vodka, while during
really existing capitalism they are, as a rule, employees of advertising agencies
who permanently sip wine.)

The mode of organization
of public events in Poland displays an analogous addiction problem. It is impossible
to stage them without an appeal to patriotic and religious ideas and symbols. Just
as the fisherman cannot think of anything more desirable than an abundance of vodka,
the engineers of public life, similarly, cannot imagine public events without a
reference to patriotic, nationalist and religious symbols. No wonder, then,
that leaders of xenophobic groups, similarly, realize that for their purposes an
appeal to selected bits and pieces of the dominant ideology is most effective.
This is so for two reasons. Firstly, as in the case of an alcoholic, nothing
else comes to their minds. Secondly, no other ideology could be equally
effective. This shows to what extent we are all ensnared in the very same
ideological trap. 

It is likely that the majority
of the rank-and-file of Polish xenophobic groups actually do believe in the exclusionary
ideas they propagate. It is also likely, at least at the moment, that a
significant part of them, especially their leaders who engineer new forms of political
action, treat these ideas more as slogans to be shouted rather than injunctions
to be implemented. Xenophobic slogans are ideally suited for this purpose: until
recently a suppression of xenophobic ideology has been one of the pillars of
the official ideological regime which simultaneously suppressed its own repressive
nature. The cynical game of the neo-Nazis, who are currently winning recognition
for the transgressions they perpetrate, enables them to remind the established regime
that it has been repressive and oppressive, and demonstrates what it had been
repressing and suppressing. With both parties locking themselves into a deadly
feedback, the stability of the regime is undermined, and the more it is shaken,
the more attention it devotes to the source of its instability.

The peril in this
deadlock is that it resembles playing with fire in a munition storage. For it
is easy to predict that the next stage in the racist game will be testing how
far they can go. In view of the weakening of national and international institutions,
it is highly likely that they will go a long way.