Possible Worlds of the Pomarańczowa Alternatywa

Abstract

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.