Impressions from The 61st Annual Meeting of the RSA in Berlin, March 26–28, 2015. Part 2: Politics (wersja polska poniżej)

I wrote here before about contemporary politics vs. academic study in the field of early modern culture. It strikes me every now and then how often these seemingly distant areas intertwine. Recent Annual Meeting of the Renaissance Society of America supplied me with some new examples of this phenomenon.

One of them was the exhibition named ‘Das verschwundene Museum’ (The Lost Museum) officially accompanying the conference and displayed in the Bode Museum where the opening reception took place. Here Germany’s war losses were presented, together with issues of conservation and retribution of the artworks. This can obviously be considered as an example of modern-day German politics of memory, or at least of one of its currents – one focused on presenting the German nation as victims of war, without necessarily stressing their role in starting it. As such, the exhibition was not taken well by some of my Polish colleagues. While I agree that the chosen topic was not politically neutral, I do not sympathize with some of the opinions I heard during the reception which can be summarized as follows: ‘I don’t pity Germany neither for their lost artworks, nor for their civilian victims of war, as Germans did the same to us’. I couldn’t agree less. I am strongly against destroying any works of art, anywhere, as they all belong to common heritage of mankind. I am strongly against killing civilian population on purpose, anywhere and of any nation. I also expressed these opinions openly to my colleagues during the reception, being only surprised how quickly we switched to this quite heated exchange from discussing our studies on early modern era.

 

‘Das verschwundene Museum’ - exhibition poster

The issue of politics in renaissance studies came back in yet another form on the final day of the conference. A statement of junior members of the RSA was read aloud by professor Lisa Jardine. The anonymous authors expressed their concern that in the recent years only two women were invited to hold a key-note speech on the meeting. While the male-female disproportion was evident, reasons for it, in my opinion, may vary. For instance, in the earlier generations more men than women pursued academic career. Whatever the case, I did not join the audience in enthusiastic applause after professor Jardine had finished. I even regret that I did not stand up and say, as a woman, junior researcher, and, on the top of that, a person coming from Central Europe, that I never felt discriminated within the organisation. And also that I would like to be judged based solely on my academic achievements, rather than other qualities such as gender or perhaps yet other.

While the two events described above have seemingly little in common, they are both interesting as case studies of how politics pervade areas where one would rather expect to find a shelter from it.

Scholarship applications. Part 1: Rhetoric of success (wersja polska poniżej)

Fall of each year is usually the time of intense submitting scholarship applications to various institutions. In recent weeks, graduate students at my university were informed whether they received any support for the upcoming semester. Some applications are still pending. Surely, applying is a ‘year-round’ business for many students, but we definitely experience cumulation of this activity in October of each year.

There are applications consisting of mere facts about ourselves: publications, conferences, subjects taught etc. There are then applications where one is supposed to present their achievements in a descriptive manner. Sometimes one has to do both.

Personally, I am fine with the first type of application (facts). However, being convincingly enthusiastic about my own achievements, which is usually expected in a descriptive type of application, presents for me some difficulties. An example: explaining why some research is ‘ground-breaking’ and ‘fundamental’ for a given discipline belongs to a repertoire of commonplaces of a descriptive application. Although any junior scholar seeks interesting research topics, trying to achieve results as accurate and innovative as possible, one has to admit that ground-breaking character of these achievements isn’t always an obvious thing. Everyone knows that young researchers are still perfecting their research skills while working on some smaller topics. ‘Fundamental’ syntheses are usually written later in one’s career. And even if a graduate student has an exceptional research potential for his age, he still has no financial means to realise it: institutions set limits to funding a young researcher can apply for. This funding is sufficient to conduct a ‘good enough’, interesting project, but not – a ground-breaking project, which usually requires establishing and paying a research team. Ideally, a student should work in a team led by an experienced researcher. In humanities, however, at least in Poland, this kind of situation is still relatively rare.

So the rhetoric of descriptive applications tends sometimes to be at odds with reality. But even if it wasn’t, it would still be psychologically doubtful, especially for those who aren’t keen to flatter themselves openly.

 

'I refuse to award...'

'Scholarship awarded...'

What good are the humanities? – another attempt at answering an eternal question – part 2 (wersja polska poniżej)

Here is another set of arguments in favour of the humanities. In my last post, I wrote about the very subject of the humanities, that is – the human creation. Its worth makes also knowledge and investigation thereof worthwhile. Today, I am going to write about positive ‘side-effects’ of such activity.

The polemicists expressing their disapproval for the humanities represent most of the time a clearly defined yet often in a way subconsciously adopted ideological stance: one based on utilitarianism and materialism (‘How will you make a living?’, ‘Why should taxpayer’s money be wasted on such things?’, ‘What specific measureable benefits will it bring anybody?’) with its quantitative approach (‘At best, only few specialists will read your article’). Certainty of some such judgements suggests that they are often seen as dogmas rather than just opinions, ones of many, only particularly wide-spread nowadays.  

Values such as truth, goodness and beauty may be set against materialism and utilitarianism; this kind of alternative attitude is presented not only in the Bible teachings, but also in the major part of European philosophy. Also, it can be easily noticed that the quantitative criterion brings poor results when applied to cultural activity. The degradation of popular culture which we witnessed in Poland after free market economy had been introduced would form here a good example (of course free market doesn’t exclude good culture, but in this particular case the negative co-incidence seems quite obvious). A never-ending soap opera is emblematic of this new reality – the characters can only talk about their feelings and everyday life. Everything else – slightly more intelligent jokes, alluding to history or politics, distinct opinions, presenting experience different than that of painstakingly average people – might result in decreased numbers of viewers, who would be exposed to not getting something. The news are now produced in a similar fashion: they contain almost no informative content, the aim of them being primarily to trigger in the spectator shallow compassion and thoughtless laughter.

The very presence of the humanists in the society reminds of values different than commonly taken for granted. And it’s not just about some empty declarations – a humanist patiently chooses a salary that is comparatively low and hard to get (I’m talking here about current employment reduction at the universities and high competitiveness in applying for research grants) and does so only to commit to a ‘useless’ activity. Thus, he continually undermines the above-described dogma. His work reminds us also of variety of human talents, which, for common good, should develop naturally, rather than be suppressed by a stereotypical idea of a ‘decent job’. Saint Paul gives, in my opinion, the best description of different ‘gifts’ in his I Epistle to the Corinthians. Today, his rhetorical questions (1 Cor. 12, 29) could be replaced by some other ones, like: ‘Are all doctors? Are all businessmen? Should everybody study law? Should everybody start up a charity?’

The most conspicuous effect of this largely anti-materialistic choice made by humanists is teaching students. PhD candidates are not paid for didactic work they do. Nonetheless, they often invest a lot of commitment in it – all in good cause. This intellectual formation of students wouldn’t be successful, if the teachers didn’t occupy themselves primarily with thinking, reading and writing. Teaching and learning have to go hand in hand.

I’m writing here, of course, about some ideal of humanists’ activity. But just as charlatans shouldn’t make us doubt the importance of medicine, harmful as they are, so the existence of unwise humanists wouldn’t be a sufficient reason to reject all the humanities.

This book tells the story of people saving cultural property during WWII - their attitude should be a model for today's humanists

What good are the humanities? – another attempt at answering an eternal question – part 1 (wersja polska poniżej)

„Humanities departments cause only increased unemployment”, „And how will you make a living?”, „Do you want to teach children at school?”, „It’s useless”, „It must be quite pleasant to spend your life reading old books at the taxpayer’s expense” etc. Depending on the stage in his life, a humanist is faced with each of these remarks to various extent: if he earns no money yet – then he should think about his future unemployment (statement 1–2), or at best be prepared for taking a highly unattractive post (statement 3). If he already gets a small salary for what he does – then he is a parasite, living from decent work of other taxpayers (statements 4–5).

San Diego, 2013. The conference was taking place here, but I spent the taxpayer's money at one of the cheapest hostels in town.

 

Being a humanist who currently gets a small salary for her work, I will focus on the two latter charges. Answering them never seemed an easy task to me. Actually, I spent a year off my graduate studies working full-time for a charity, one of main motifs for this decision being my constant worry that the work in the academia, which I had undertaken, seemed useless and impractical. After being hugely disappointed by this charitable institution, but also thanks to better recognition of my natural inclinations, I decided to return to the university. But I still had no strong conviction that research work is important. For some time, I considered it to be a kind of entertainment, maybe a slightly more dignified one: ‘If people find pleasure in watching soap operas, why shouldn’t they enjoy listening to or delivering an interesting presentation at a conference?’ Now I think that, after all, the humanities mean more than sheer entertainment. But I hope that the story of my uncertainty in this matter will make the following argumentation more convincing.

Only very few people, I suppose, would agree with a statement that all cultural activity is useless. On average, the critics of the humanities have in mind only some part of culture, a part particularly useless according to them. The scope of ‘uselessness’ is limited in such polemics in a number of ways. Some suggest that useless are humanists dealing with earlier cultures, which can be seen as antiquated and out-of-date. Some claim that only really good culture is worth some attention, unlike the mediocre one (often an argument ad Shakesperium is raised in this context – ‘I’d understand if you wrote on, say, Shakespeare, but...’). Some agree that art is useful, because it can give people pleasure, yet investigating it has little sense indeed – this latter activity was invented for and by frustrated people, who themselves were not talented enough to become artists.

So let’s take these arguments one at a time. Culture cannot be judged as better or worse sole criterion of such judgement being era in which this culture was created. This kind of thinking is based on simplistic progressivism, which is quite easy to refute. People who lived five centuries or three thousand years ago were also people (see quote from Józef Mackiewicz here) and I see no reason why we should discriminate against knowledge and wisdom they shared. It seems impossible to decide who has ‘less’ to offer to us: Homer, Tolstoj or Picasso. I couldn’t possibly imagine human culture without any of them.

Also, the argument saying that some part of culture is more worth-while based on its quality seems tricky. For it is often the case that only intense studies and considerable commitment of humanists allow to single out these highest achievements of mankind, and this still with all sorts of different reservations. Experts are needed to identify an unknown painting found in an attic as a van Gogh’s masterpiece or to retrieve Norwid’s poems from decades of oblivion. Besides, the question about quality is simply not the only interesting question which can be posed by humanists in their research.

And finally: it was often scholars (in a very broad sense of the word), not only artists, who enabled culture to be passed down to future generations. No one I talked to about these topics supports, I hope, burning cultural property we (as mankind) witnessed during, let’s say, WWII. And it wouldn’t be wise to assume that something similar won’t happen again. Not only the history of 20^th century but also the whole known history proves that a gigantic effort of past generations – from working in medieval scriptoria to creating digital databases – was enough to save only some fraction of all culture from turmoil of wars and other catastrophes.

Ideology, Gallus Anonymus and the so-called ‘Regained Territories’ (polska wersja poniżej)

Why study early modern culture? I am often faced with this question, which seems to me indeed a lot more justified than an analogous one posed to specialists in contemporary culture. For it is plainly natural that we want to know more about things close to us and concerning us directly. Therefore, it seems, experts in the field of contemporary culture much more often study their favourite part of it, e.g. their favourite poet, who has been personally important to them in their lives. No wonder they want to dig deeper into the topic.

But why early modern culture? As far as I’m concerned – because it’s exotic. In the same way as the culture of Far East or India is exotic. Remoteness in time is linked to the same strangeness as remoteness in space; and strangeness is often appealing. But that’s not all. The older culture is a kind of asylum among research topics. I’m really glad that I don’t have to take a stance in contemporary disputes on issues historical, political or social, or at least I’m forced to do it to a much lesser extent than someone dealing with, let’s say, ethnic conflicts in the modern-day Ukraine. I consider it a privilege to always be able to say: ‘I have no opinion on that one’.

But, where there’s a will there’s a way. Numerous publications from after 1945 devoted to the old culture of Lower Silesia show explicitly that interpreting facts according to a given ideology is possible regardless whether these facts occurred, say, in the 1940s or five, or even ten centuries earlier. Here’s an example (concerning this time medieval period):

‘There was no weakening of studies on Gallus Anonymus after World War II, on the contrary, they only intensified after regaining by Poland the Western Lands, Silesia and Pomerania, where the major part of his chronicle’s action is set – and then thanks to the thousandth anniversary celebrations, which simply had to expose the oldest of our chronicles. «Gallus Anonymus is again near to us» (Stanisław Helsztyński) – this was rightly emphasized in the press of immediately after the war, in 1945, and the bibliography of recent twenty years contains a strikingly large number of articles devoted to Gallus in all sorts of papers and journals.’ (preface to Polish Chronicle by Gallus Anonymus, 7th edition, Wrocław 1999, BN I nr 59)

This quotation, carelessly repeated in each new edition of the Chronicle..., is a perfect example of a formerly widespread, but, sadly, still present phenomenon of attempting to compulsively justify that the above mentioned territories should belong to the People’s Republic of Poland (PRL). I will repeat what is already well-known, but I still find it worth mentioning. Every word in the formula ‘territories regained by Poland’, formula used here, repeated over and over again, and repeated even today, is false. For neither were these lands ‘regained’ – they were rather taken by force with no historical legitimization of such act whatsoever, which, as we know, was accompanied by savage treatment of Germans living there and throwing out civilians out of their homes; nor were these lands regained ‘by Poland’ – for no Polish authority ever took actions or made decisions in order to seize the lands. This decision was a classic example of Stalin’s policy of mass and often brutal displacements. Changing borders and, above all, displacement of people was fully arbitrary and was in this form unknown in politics earlier than that of the 20th century. Legitimizing such actions by invoking dukes from the Piast dynasty, ruling Silesia in the medieval times, is at best grotesque. But even the brutality of German occupation doesn’t justify anything of that sort. On the contrary, the victims should strive towards being as different from their oppressor as can be.

But even if we assumed for a moment that this whole propaganda story was true... what link would it have to Gallus Anonymus? None, of course. If what we read was dependent on factors such as shifting borders then Poles would have to quit reading Shakespeare and Dante, as authors that are not worthwhile for not being Polish enough. One could give some attention only to Hamlet, thanks to Fortinbras’s return from a Polish war.

The above described peculiarity of thinking is also present in the book historical research on Lower Silasia, the topic most interesting to me right now. Polonica – this word is represented far above average in catalogues, publications and master theses devoted to the topic. And why should it be? Why Polish books or those concerning Poland are more interesting than the German ones? I can’t think of any sensible reason. Of course, the term ‘polonica’ was not coined after WWII. It was an invention which allowed Karol Estreicher to limit an already enormous spectrum of his bibliographical research – it’s impossible to describe the whole world, after all. Later, however, this construct was used to overemphasize the importance of Polish culture e.g. in Lower Silesia which tendency resulted in negligence of the main-stream German culture as, for inexplicable reasons, less interesting.

‘Polish reader, used to Polish books being almost solely about Poles and Polish issues, may take against me both the choice of characters and of the topic which I found interesting. Yet in my view, other people, not only Poles, are also people. And the topic of the book was an attempt to describe some constellation of human affairs’. These words were written by Józef Mackiewicz in an epilogue to his novel Sprawa pułkownika Miasojedowa (The Colonel Miasojedow’s Affair), where the characters are mainly Russians. I also think in a similar way.

A meaningful order of languages in a menu of one of Wrocław's cafes today