Performative Democracy

Elzbieta Matynia

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317254331
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Politica

fresh appreciation of the events of 1989 as we approach their 20th anniversary in 2009 Performative Democracy explores a potential in political life that easily escapes theorists: the indigenously inspired enacting of democracy by citizens. Written by one who experienced an emerging public sphere within Communist Poland, the book seeks to identify the conditions for performativity-performing politics--in public life. It examines a broad spectrum of cultural, social, and political initiatives that facilitated the non-violent transformation of an autocratic environment into a democratic one. Examples of performativity range from experimental student theater, through the engaged political thinking of dissident Adam Michnik, the alternative culture, and the Solidarity movement, to the drama of the Round Table Talks (and their striking parallels in South Africa), and finally, the post-1989 efforts of feminist groups and women artists to defend the recently won right of free public discourse. The book argues that performative democracy, with its improvisational mode and imaginative solutions, deserves a legitimate place in our broader reflections on democracy. Matynia describes how two apparent miracles of recent history-that communism in Poland was brought down without violence and that apartheid in South Africa was ended without a bloodbath-were the results of hard work and a new approach to change that she calls "performative democracy." Matynia reveals amazing parallels between the drama of Poland's Round Table Talks in 1989 and the Truth Commissions in South Africa in 1994. Matynia describes how experimental student theater groups, though subsidized by a totalitarian regime afraid of any authentic public life, created little pockets of public space for free and meaningful expression that were augmented by uncensored underground publishing and further expanded by the Solidarity movement into a democratic society within the totalitarian state. Matynia describes in a personal way how in the 1970s student theater groups planted the seeds of an authentic public sphere, how underground publishers nurtured freedom of expression and social criticism, and how, after democratic elections, women artists in the 1990s fought to sustain the newly won right to free public discourse. Matynia traces in vivid human terms the democratic aspirations and practices that led to democratic change in Poland but went largely unnoticed by western media and policymakers.

1

Invitation to Performative Democracy

Quintus Ennius tria corda habere sese dicebat, quod loqui Graece et
Osce et Latine sciret.

—Gellius (17.17.1)

“Where are you from? Holland? … Oh, you’re from Poland. So how do you like it here?”

It was late summer in 1981. I had just arrived in New York on a scholarship at the New School for Social Research, with the precious passport I had received thanks to the recently liberalized policies during Poland’s Solidarity period. From the tone of that last question I could sense what kind of answer was anticipated. And I quickly began to feel a bit guilty that the city did not put me, a poor visitor from behind the Iron Curtain, into a state of awe, that my initial experiences were not as breathtaking as one would have expected, and that—perhaps—I was not appreciative enough of this amazing opportunity I had been given. Perhaps it was the late August torpor of a half-empty city and the fact that my English was minimal at best. Or perhaps I was still so absorbed in my life in Poland that I could not fully appreciate the cosmopolitan energy of New York, which would later turn me into an utter devotee.

Still, although I had arrived from a land of eerily empty shops, I could not avoid the feeling that I had just left the most exciting place on earth. Leaving Poland in order to broaden my scholarly understanding of sociology, I had reluctantly left behind the most marvelous dream come true, more thrilling even than a ticket to the U.S.A. New York’s soaring buildings, magnificent museums, stores with everything you could imagine—none of this could impress me at that time. For I had come from a place in which a once-excluded and silenced people had found the courage to talk to each other, through what sometimes felt like endless discussion, and had begun to rebuild their lives together on the principles of self-respect, dialogue, and the shared responsibility of all.

How in the world to convey to Americans—lucidly and without sounding naïve—the extraordinary kind of happiness that I had experienced day after day, and that I saw everywhere in Poland, and now missed? Is it even possible at all to communicate what that kind of public happiness is? Somehow the whole experience would not fit into existing molds. It eluded our own ways of knowing things. How to convey the minute discoveries, the details of otherwise big and tense events, the moments of transformative power not easily grasped when one is reporting events, facts, numbers? How to convey the overwhelming sense of friendliness, and the larger than ever context of friendship that one began to live in?

Imagine long late-night meetings, in a factory or at the university, often night after night, and picture everyone exhilarated. So exhilarated that we kept on talking at home, once those meetings were over, comparing notes on our discussions and on extraordinary people whom we would otherwise never have met, since we hadn’t even known such people existed. It still surprises outsiders to learn that beneath the veneer of socialist equality, and apart from the better-known division between those who belonged to the Party and those who did not, the Communist state had carefully maintained mechanisms that further divided and separated people. So that in these late-night meetings, still incredulous and a little anxious, we were reintroducing ourselves to each other—and on our own terms. This was a huge discovery: that we could do it without any powerful facilitator, on our own; and, most startling of all, that even while speaking publicly we were still in charge of our own speech.

I was at one meeting where workers invited poets because they wanted to hear the forbidden poems and to discuss with them how censorship worked, and how one could circumvent it. I attended discussions in which students and workers tried to figure out why twelve years earlier the workers—marshaled by the state—had condemned the students’ demands for freedom of speech.

So we were all there together, and we asked questions, and we learned from each other and began to think on our own, form our own organizations, and write our own statutes. We took pains to make sure that the procedures we were planning would be transparent and thus would make Poland more like any other “normal country.” And the next day we read in our homemade bulletins and newsletters about the arrangements we had just agreed upon, and what others had agreed upon in other parts of the country. What a perfect mechanism for disseminating reliable information—and getting almost instant feedback! We argued for hours, and then we voted and elected people whom we recognized as the best among us. This really was self-governance, we realized. But we still could not believe that we were actually able to talk about things in public, and to publish it, and that all of this was really happening. Yet it really was. We felt that we had begun to count—in fact, to be. It was an amazing feeling.

“And the most fascinating thing,” observed Seweryn Blumsztajn, one of the leaders of the Solidarity movement—recalling this extraordinary reemergence of self-respect and dignity during the sixteen months of the union’s legal existence—“was to see how people’s backs straightened up.”¹

I believe now that the reappropriation of language by the people and exercising freely the new nonmandatory speech were at the very heart of what was happening in 1980–1981. But in the rush by outside observers to cover the news—the protest strikes, marches, negotiations, Soviet troop movements—this verbal dimension of our experience was simply too subtle, too personal, too invisible, to be captured by the press, much less by television. The foreign language media especially were not a good vehicle for conveying or even grasping processes that were so deeply anchored in language, speech, and words. When translated, the impact of their native freshness was lost, and the subtle but significant differences between the old and the new use of language eluded reporters and political analysts. I myself realized only much later that this was a major reason for the difficulty in describing and explaining those times.

And so there I was in New York, wondering how to get across to friendly Americans the things that had been taking place back home for more than a year, things that were not part of the picture painted by American newspapers and television. It was not easy to miss the assumption, present in the voices of almost everyone I met during my first months here, that most of us arriving at JFK Airport had come with the intention of staying here forever. Why wouldn’t we? Well (and I tried not to sound arrogant), because some of us, no matter how desolate our home might seem to any Westerner, felt we had just left a time and place of truly tangible hope.

Four months later martial law was declared in Poland (“in the vital interest of the state and the nation”), Solidarity was outlawed, thousands of people were arrested and sent to internment camps, tanks entered the streets, and I was stranded in New York—temporarily, I hoped.

In Poland all the energies of the military regime went into tearing down the newly created independent public sphere—into destroying above all the very channels of social communication that had been the greatest source of society’s power. No mail, no phone connections within or out of the country, no intercity travel, no public gatherings…. Armored vehicles controlled the streets, emptied by an early curfew. For the people there, the declaration of “a state of war” (as the decree introducing the state of exception, or martial law, was officially called by the government), the use of sheer force against its own citizens, utterly exposed and delegitimized the system. But for the outside world, it only further obscured from view the creative ways in which the democratic project had been pursued there.

Before there was even time for the West to absorb what had been happening, the imposition of martial law prompted a quick paint job: the new language that had entered public life in Poland, so meticulously stripped by the people of any ideological coloring, was painted over with the familiar thick layer of cold war rhetoric. Now the Polish movement conveniently remained in the familiar mold, easily explained as just another anti-Soviet uprising crushed by force. Though books were written and films were made, the images of tanks and militarized police supplanted those of backs straightening up, and soon the attention of a sympathetic American public moved on. An opportunity was lost.

Still, a number of Western scholars continued to struggle with what had happened in Central Europe, and it was they who were the first to give it the name “civil society.” This phrase promptly moved beyond academia, entered the larger public discourse, and soon, embraced by American policymakers, assumed a conveniently generic life of its own, as if it represented a universally democracy-enhancing tool. Though not exactly a “paint job,” vague references to “civil society” paradoxically obscured the more specific, vital stories of real people and their distinctive ways of changing an oppressive state.

Most people in the United States also failed to appreciate that, although forced underground by the military coup, these very determined and committed people refused to resort to violence, focusing instead on ingenious ways of sustaining the banned media, the flying universities, semiclandestine cultural initiatives, underground publishing houses, and unofficial associations of all kinds. Through the accumulation of such seemingly “small things,”² sites where speech could be exercised, the people were able a few years later to make the regime talk with them after all and to agree to a peaceful dismantling of authoritarian rule: without a single tank on the street, without one bullet, without insurgents, and without prisoners.³

And yet again, mesmerized by the carnival taking place atop the Berlin wall, most people in America failed to notice that the birth of democracy in the region had been brought about half a year earlier through talk—specifically, the Round Table Talks between the regime and civil society. It was neither a miracle nor an accomplishment of foreign powers (no matter how important the influence of Ronald Reagan, Mikhail Gorbachev, or Pope John Paul II) but the gradual, persistent, and inventive work of citizens that led to that giant round table in Warsaw.

Blumsztajn’s poetic image of people’s backs unbending, the self-propelled movement that revealed how subjects had been transforming themselves into citizens, with heads held high, is one of the most compelling—even literal—expressions of an uplifting social experience that we have seen in the recent past.

But is it so compelling to Americans, I wonder, whose very history has evolved as a narrative of uplifting, entailing a kind of Yankee ingenuity in civic matters? Or is it that we Americans (speaking now as a devoted American citizen) have simply become so brashly complacent that we really do not need to know about the ways of others? Are we so impatient—since not all experiences are translatable into our own—that we do not want to bother to understand them on terms that are not ours? And how do we reconcile this with the fact that today’s America is increasingly made of people who, like the Roman poet Quintus Ennius, feel at home with two or more languages, have more than one heart, and therefore have at their disposal more than one way of comprehending the world?

As a person who over the past quarter of a century has grown a strong second heart—an American one—I would like to try to bridge the experiences of my two worlds, translating and contextualizing an unfamiliar stock of terms and experiences and thus helping to expand our ways of knowing.

When I ask, “What does it take for people’s backs to straighten up?” I am really asking about alternatives to violent solutions and to despair. What—in today’s world—are the conditions that generate dignity rather than humiliation, trust rather than suspicion? What are the hopeful alternatives? And what does it take for hopeful alternatives to spring up and take root?

* * *

I would like to invite you to visit with me some recent sites and narratives of what I consider this tangible hope, which I feel many in the West failed to fully comprehend at the time. I would like us to look closely at the self-making of democracy, a locally inspired—perhaps for some, even parochial—project, that I call here performative democracy. In this project local people talking to each other in public illuminate the reality around them and help to find ways of changing it. Activated by a newly arisen public realm, performative democracy creates the conditions for engaged conversation, negotiation, and ways of finding the middle ground—often startlingly new experiences in the lives of those involved. Though it is not just another name for direct democracy, it does indeed reduce the distance between elected representatives and the people, and brings the people themselves closer together, thriving as it does on a rich practice of face-to-face meetings and ceaseless discussions. These launch a process of learning, forming opinions, reasoning, and appreciating the value of compromise, and this is indeed transformative for those who take part.

Although performative democracy is hard to operationalize, one can observe instances of it in concrete situations and processes having to do with the forms and genres of speech, broadly understood, that constitute public action and bring about change. I must emphasize that I see it as a practice arising from a strong sense of being born free and equal in dignity and rights and of acting toward one another in a spirit of brotherhood—a sense that is so well captured in the first article of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. At the same time, it is a dimension of democratic practice that—although exercised through the conduct of reasonable citizens—is not alien to emotions, as it can be surprisingly warm-spirited, which it certainly was in the case of the Poles in 1980. With its eye on publicness, dialogue, and compromise, performative democracy is not a realm in which insular groups that exploit fear can feel comfortable—or generally those advocating illiberal arrangements. As I hope to show, despite its inherent drama, performative democracy can actually be a joyous and affirmative dimension of the political, yet one that self-limits its passions by necessarily framing them into agreed-upon forms, genres, and conventions.

But this emotional aspect of democratic life is naturally transient, and that is perhaps another reason why it has been overlooked by theorists and critics. A healthy well-functioning democracy may, after all, appear humdrum, colorless, and gray. Yet performative democracy represents a kind of political engagement—critical for any democracy—in which the key identity of its actors is that of citizens, and in which the good of society at large, and not that of a narrow interest group, is at stake. Such an engagement clearly resists the minimal view of democracy as an institutional arrangement for competing interest groups with their eye on the people’s votes.

Nevertheless, I would like to emphasize that what I call performative democracy captures only one dimension of democracy and is not in itself “qualified” to substitute for a well-functioning representative democracy with established mechanisms and procedures. Yet it brings out the richer texture of liberal democracy and makes it easier to see the prospects for democratic action in times of crisis: reviving the spirit of democratic polity when the system has become weakened by complacency, for example, or preparing the ground for a democratic order to emerge where there was none before. Exploring the possibilities both for peacefully establishing democracy and for reinfusing a jaded democracy with a heightened sense of public life is my main interest here.

I would like us to see how building democracy depends on prior societal initiatives, ones that are grounded in, and empowered by, local ways of knowing, and performed in the vernacular by local actors. I should add that in our journey there will be an unlikely couple hovering over my shoulder, two philosophers of dialogue, emancipation, and carnival, people with more than one heart, magnificent bridge-builders who experienced the darkest of times and who have helped me in thinking about this project—Hannah Arendt and Mikhail Bakhtin.

WHAT IS PERFORMATIVITY?

The concept of performativity is usually associated with J. L. Austin’s set of lectures on language, in which he discusses sentences that do not just describe reality or state facts but have the quality of enacting what they actually say. “There is something which is at the moment of uttering being done by the person uttering,” and such a “speech act” has more than just a meaning, as it has, above all, an effect, as Austin explains.⁴ Recognizing the importance of speech in the constitution of democracy, and the prerequisite of freedom of speech in the functioning of democracy, I would like to extend this narrow if not technical understanding of performativity beyond linguistics⁵ and insert into it the more textured social dimension of speech.

In the case of societies living under dictatorship, the conditions for performativity first occur when the long unused, action-oriented word transcends the private realm, when it comes out from hiding, squeezing itself out through the cracks into the open. And when it is first heard, it instigates the emergence of an undeniably public realm. Hannah Arendt most eloquently evoked what I mean by performativity when she said, “No other human performance requires speech to the same extent as action does.”⁶

Her key condition for the constitution of a public sphere is a “space of appearance,” that is, any public setting where people can come together and interact through speech. Such space was furnished for the early Solidarity gatherings by factories, universities, churches, and even state enterprises. It was there that the anonymous, impersonal, and “institutional” way of speaking was replaced by concrete, individual, and distinctive voices. Such voices, or speech acts, are the opposite of violence, “which is to act without argument or speech and without reckoning with consequences.”⁷

Such was the voice of Nelson Mand...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Invitation to Performative Democracy
• 2 Staging Freedom
• 3 The Public Matter
• 4 Citizen Michnik
• 5 Furnishing Democracy: The Story of Two Round Tables
• 6 Provincializing Global Feminism
• 7 EnGendering Democracy: Women Artists and Deliberative Art in a Transitional Society
• 8 Postscriptum on an Old Bridge
• Notes
• Index
• About the Author