Do not gaze into the pools of the past.
Their corroded surface will mirror
A face different from the one you expected.
———Czesław Miłosz, The Child of Europe (Reference Miłosz1973 [1946])“For half a century we passed them on the street without knowing who they were. Now we are showing their faces—the faces of the security service officers who served for the Soviet Union and the Communist Party, aiming to tame the society and harming Poland and the Poles.” These words frame the public exhibition Twarze Bezpieki (The faces of the security service) that took place in Kraków in March 2006.Footnote 1 During the rule of the right-wing government from 2005 to 2007,Footnote 2 the state-run Institute of National Remembrance (Instytut Pamięci Narodowej, henceforth IPN) organized a number of Twarze Bezpieki exhibitions in the public squares of cities and small towns across Poland. Each displayed on big boards the photographs of about a hundred former security officers previously employed in the place of exhibition so that the viewers could recognize their faces.
Exhibiting publicly the faces of the enemies or unmasking them in public arenas is not novel in history. It is no secret that the field of vision has been a topos of power. Show trials, public executions, and public spectacles of the criminal, condemned, or enemy choreographed for the eyes of “the people” are central to the performance of sovereign power. As Michel Foucault (Reference Foucault and Sheridan1979: 3–69) argued, it is where power constitutes itself as sovereign, aspiring to incorporate visually and viscerally the will of the people, their “curiosity” and “vengeance,” into its mechanisms of punishment. It implicates them as spectators complicit in the ceremony of violence that proceeds in daylight. While punitive practices might today largely operate in the dark of prisons away from public sight, the spectacle has not withered away. It continues to function, albeit in a different regime of publicity, secrecy, and the rule of law, and in technologies of media and mass violence.
Recently, many state institutions have been founded in Eastern Europe to nationalize memory and write a history of violence. This was not simply the return of the repressed. It was also meant to invigorate nationalist sentiments on the basis of sacrifice and victimhood, rejuvenate national sovereignty, and redraw the boundaries of the national body. Those who tracked down the “enemies of the people” were to come back as the treacherous enemies of the nation, such as the head of the first Soviet secret service Cheka, Feliks Dzierżyński. The demolition of his statue in Warsaw was a huge public spectacle, a performance of what would have been his “execution,” as Katherine Verdery has suggested (Reference Verdery1999: 3–9). Twarze Bezpieki exhibitions took place in this context. Using a language of justice and transparency, they associated the faces with cruelty, treachery, and crime; not just any crime, but above all what is called “communist crime” (zbrodnie komunistyczne).Footnote 3 These “infamous” people who “always enjoyed impunity,” as a local media report put it, “at least now ceased to be anonymous.”Footnote 4 Where evidentiary problems made it impossible to sentence them to prison through a criminal proceeding, the IPN chose to expose their faces in the open, invoking the older technique of “punishment-as-spectacle” (Foucault Reference Foucault and Sheridan1979) in the post-socialist context. If unmasking secret agents of imperialism was a popular activity in Soviet-type socialist regimes (Fitzpatrick Reference Fitzpatrick2005; Getty and Naumov Reference Getty and Naumov2010), the public exhibitions of the faces of ex-communist agents have drawn no less attention. What the viewers saw, however, was not the body of the condemned or a live execution of the criminal in flesh and blood, but rather the photographed faces of the former security officers—the faces of uniformed men in their banal, official appearance (figure 1). It was not the eighteenth-century France of Robert-François Damiens,Footnote 5 but rather the twenty-first century of Twarze Bezpieki that drew on the liberal discourse of transitional justice based on redemptive ideas of publicity, knowing the truth, exposing violence, and shaming perpetrators through legal and extralegal practices, including truth commissions and media activism (Hazan Reference Hazan2010; Scott Reference Scott2014).
Katowice Twarze Bezpieki Exhibition. Photo: Grzegorz Celejewski/Agencja Gazeta.
Curiously, the exhibitions stirred much controversy and prompted heated criticisms by many groups, including human rights activists and veteran dissidents who had been personally targeted by the communist-era security service. Was it a pursuit of justice or a call for public lynchings? A means to ensure public transparency and trust or a repulsive political pornography? A means to heal the wounds of traumatized society, localize guilt, and identify the “faceless” evil of communism or a political instrument in the service of anti-communist nationalists’ “moral revolution” (rewolucja moralna)? The exhibitions harbored many dilemmas and suspicions, as well as shattering surprises. As much as they revealed about past state violence and its aftermath, they also became the site of unexpected interruption and manifestation of effaced and displaced modalities of violence, especially capitalist violence.
In this article, I focus on these public exhibitions of the faces to explore the nexus of sovereignty, violence, and transitional justice in Poland's capitalist democracy. I am concerned with the social-historical conditions of nationalist appropriation of transitional justice into a state politics of sovereignty, based on the sanctity of moral purity and victimhood. I will trace these conditions within the broader tensions and contradictions of freedom and inequality integral to the making of post-socialist sovereignty and show how the figure of the (secret) communist agent, as articulated by anti-communist nationalism, expresses those tensions, facializing at once the unsettled legacy of the communist-era state violence and the largely “normalized” violence of capitalist transformation. But I also want to suggest a more general theoretical point about the theme of violence and transitional justice. By highlighting the relations between different forms of violence, I argue that, unlike how it is often studied, past violence, which is the typical object of transitional justice, must be approached in a dynamic and relational manner, with a focus on conjunctures—the ways different forms of violence become transformed, reproduced, or entangled across time and space. The legacy of communist-era violence must be understood not as fixed in the past or in isolation from present relations of power and inequality, but rather within the “general economy of violence” of post-socialist transformation.Footnote 6
The face lies at the center of this analysis. It is not only the main object of the IPN exhibitions, but the focus on the face also sheds light on the modes of communication, visibility, and representation employed by the IPN spectacles of justice and transparency. This line of inquiry also offers a comparative perspective on transitional justice. Curiously, the face as an object of study has received scant attention even though it has been commonly invoked by the global transitional justice discourse and practice, with phrases like “facing history or injustice” (Hinton Reference Hinton2011; Minow Reference Minow1999; Teitel Reference Teitel2013). The face, as a figure of representation or mode of appearance, is not easy to pin down. It has been historically entwined with the contentious moral and political questions of secrecy, guilt, and purity, as in, for instance, ancient and modern physiognomy. Indeed, Giorgio Agamben (Reference Agamben2000) suggests that the face could be conceived as the locus of political struggle and sovereign power aspiring to “take possession” or “control” of appearance. Consider the central place of the face in media spectacles of war, the advertisement industry, corruption scandals, and electoral campaigns.
We may link the face even more firmly to modern sovereign power. Thomas Blom Hansen and Finn Stepputat have succinctly described sovereignty as “the ability and will to employ overwhelming violence and to decide on life and death” (Reference Hansen and Stepputat2005: 1).Footnote 7 Drawing on comparative historical analysis of modern European and (post)colonial state formation, they suggest that sovereignty must be understood not as a finished product or state of power, but instead as a contingent effect of power, an aspiration for total control and supremacy over contending authorities, often in a territory. As such, sovereign power, they observe, is remarkably fragile and uneven in its constitution, unlike how it projects itself. To establish itself it needs to be constantly performed through rituals and ceremonies of violence directed against the bodies and populations it calls dangerous or contaminated. The logic of purification and expulsion, and the production of the disposability of certain forms of life, are common features of sovereign violence. The face plays a crucial role in this context. It is used to mark, memorialize, and represent the dangerous groups or enemies—for example, in the Soviet dehumanization of imperialist agents with deformed faces, or the use of Osama bin Laden's face in the U.S. “war on terror”—via which sovereign power aspires to establish itself and redraw the boundaries of political community (Butler Reference Butler2004; Foucault Reference Foucault and Burchell2015). Moreover, we can relate the face to Claude Lefort's (Reference Lefort1986) conceptualization of the symbolic structure of modern democratic sovereignty as the “empty place” of power, which in principle belongs to no one and can be occupied, albeit temporarily, by everyone who claims to rule. The invocations of the face appear to visualize that claim by giving a face to the subject inhabiting the empty place.Footnote 8
This is not to say that the face is a mere transparent instrument or contentless rhetorical device. In my analysis of Twarze Bezpieki, I am precisely concerned with what the faces do, in both the space of representation and the symbolic-material space of market squares; what the exhibited faces of security officers enable people to articulate, feel, and make visible, just as they silence and make invisible other things. I will use media reports, interviews, and other ethnographic material to examine social reactions to the exhibitions, particularly ways in which the faces mediate different and often conflicting desires about justice, equality, and secret knowledge, as well as fears of state repression and surveillance concerning both the communist past and the post-socialist capitalist present.
At the outset, let me highlight a caveat. It is often claimed that the people who have been critical of the IPN exhibitions’ or others’ pursuits of transitional justice must have something to fear regarding their own and their associates’ secret, compromised pasts (e.g., Nalepa Reference Nalepa2010; Zybertowicz Reference Zybertowicz2013). Notice that this is also the tired argument rehearsed by the conservative proponents of state security policies in, say, the United States about the “war on terror.” “If you oppose it, you must be hiding something.” A critical attitude is taken as a sign of secret guilt. But another common explanation of the transitional justice activities also personalizes the issue: the mainstream Polish media typically criticize the conservative nationalists who lead them, who they portray as incurably vengeful, irrational, and even barbaric. This is presented as being a cultural or civilizational problem. When the revanchist, “right-wing Bolsheviks” appropriate otherwise good transitional justice measures, it is said, they turn them into dangerous, counter-revolutionary security instruments (Michnik Reference Michnik, Grudzinska-Gross and Matynia2015). The framing of conflict in such culturalized and personalized terms is politically highly unproductive in addressing the problems of social exclusion and inequality, which provide a fertile soil for right-wing populism.
My analysis departs from these two positions, and instead situates Twarze Bezpieki exhibitions within the general economy of violence of Poland's transition, which is marked by the exercise of different and often interlocking forms of violence. I will develop this argument by focusing on the responses to the exhibitions, especially the event of the destruction of a Twarze Bezpieki exhibition in the city of Katowice by young so-called “hooligans.” I depart from the mainstream media's coverage of this destruction as pathological vandalism and use the event to explore the ordinary social world of violence in post-socialist Katowice. In this way, I offer a critical comparative perspective on transitional justice by highlighting problems concerning its entanglement with capital's violence and its appropriation into nationalist politics of sovereignty.
NATIONALIZING THE HISTORY OF VIOLENCE AFTER COMMUNISM
The majority of Twarze Bezpieki exhibitions appeared in 2006 and early 2007 in the public squares of cities and small towns in Poland. These included the capital Warsaw; the southern and western cultural and commercial centers Kraków, Wrocław, and Poznań and the deindustrialized, former working-class cities in the southwest such as Katowice and Bytom; northeast towns near Lithuania and Belorussia, like Białystok; eastern cities like Lublin and Przemysł by the Ukrainian border; and small towns in the center and villages on the Carpathian Mountains near the Slovakian border. The IPN organized these exhibitions during the rule of a coalition government formed by three right-wing parties: “Law and Justice,” the radical Catholic nationalist “League of Polish Families,” and the populist agrarian “Self-Defense.” This government aspired to build a new “fully sovereign” Polish nation-state and sought to implement several de-communization policies concerning school curricula and public space, and through a radical form of “lustration,” the screening process that discloses secret communist agents holding public office and bans them from doing so.
The IPN's exposition and representation of formerly secret figures of communism in the form of faces was not exceptional. “Facialization” of the communist past has been a common practice, especially among anti-communist nationalist groups that are heavily invested in rendering legible what they see as the “faceless evil” of communism. Integral to the moral cosmology of anti-communist nationalism, this facialization is also about defining and distributing guilt for the communist regime.
The reckoning with the communist past in Poland and Eastern Europe has taken many forms, shaped by both international and national factors.Footnote 9 While international transitional justice discourse has informed the conceptual framework of justice and transition, the political struggles for hegemony have turned that reckoning, including history writing and mnemonic practices, into a heatedly contested issue (Kopeček Reference Kopeček2008; Kula Reference Kula2011). As a particular set of institutions and technologies of peace-building, truth-making, and reconciliation, transitional justice emerged in the late 1980s and early 1990s with the demise of Soviet socialism and the ascendancy of the hegemony of neoliberal capitalism (Arthur Reference Arthur2009; Scott Reference Scott2014). While this indicated the dissolution of certain visions of social emancipation, it also registered the moment of a memory-boom. Like the post-military dictatorships of Latin America and post-apartheid South Africa, post-socialist Eastern Europe has become the object of much ethical reflection regarding the phenomenon of cruelty and mass violence. Eastern Europe was even designated as the “ethical heart of Europe” (Snyder Reference Snyder2009).
The employment of the transitional justice framework has had important implications for the normative evaluations of different forms of violence. It has reinforced the moral-political hierarchy established, or at any rate promoted, by liberal capitalist modernity, which calls certain forms of violence more legitimate, necessary, or civilized than others (Asad Reference Asad2007; Bourgois and Scheper-Hughes Reference Bourgois and Scheper-Hughes2004). This hierarchical order typically privileges “wartime violence,” characterized by its extraordinary, excessive, and spectacular quality, over “peacetime violence,” characterized by its ordinary, normalized, and everyday existence (Coronil and Skurski Reference Coronil and Skurski2005; Pandey Reference Pandey2006). Capital's violence, which involves the forceful creation and reproduction of class inequality, is often treated as peacetime violence; it is not only presented as necessary for economic growth but also treated as invisible. Such a normative ordering of violence eclipses much of our understanding of the complex and often perilous relationships of continuity or reproduction between different modalities of violence across time and space.Footnote 10
This categorization of violence has had crucial effects on the course and normative assessment of transition, and the reckoning with the communist past in Eastern Europe. While the everyday violence of capitalist transformation was normalized and considered necessary, communism was associated with a ruinous and excessively violent past. Where capitalism was placed on the side of peace and progress, communism was presented as a digression from the natural course of national history (Buchowski Reference Buchowski2006; Porter-Szucs Reference Porter-Szucs2014). In the same vein, issues of social justice, particularly class inequality, have been pushed to the margins of reckoning with the past, since they are associated with the now-debunked socialist ideology (Kalb Reference Kalb, Carbonella and Kasmir2014; Ost Reference Ost2005).
Twarze Bezpieki exhibitions need to be understood within this context. They operated as part of the dominant, anti-communist ideology of the new post-socialist republic, which has taken different forms, both liberal and conservative nationalist. The exhibitions drew on the moral and legal category of “communist crime,” which had been employed in some form across many East European countries.Footnote 11 Yet, the attempts to introduce the legal concept of “communist crime” in Poland met with much criticism from different groups, including veteran dissidents.Footnote 12 The category of “communist crime” was eventually accepted as referring to the crimes of the government and state functionaries (e.g., the killing of workers, students, and violent suppression of protests); crimes of the judiciary (e.g., the violation of law by judges, such as unlawful prosecution and judicial killing, especially the death penalties during the Stalinist period); crimes of the security services (e.g., falsification of evidence, causing bodily injury); and “organized crime” by the Ministry of Interior and Public Security (Wasserman Reference Zbigniew and Kuglarz2001).
Established in 1998 on the model of Germany's Gauck Authority, the IPN was given the mandate to document and prosecute these “communist crimes” as part of its general mission to prosecute “crimes against the Polish nation” (Dudek Reference Dudek2013; Pakier and Wawrzyniak Reference Pakier and Wawrzyniak2013). The IPN has been an exceptionally well-endowed state institution that exercises a variety of pedagogical, archival, research, and prosecutorial functions. Through public pedagogies of truth-making and memory projects like Twarze Bezpieki exhibitions, the Institute aims to nationalize the contested field of memory and fill in the blank spaces of suppressed Polish history. It also takes part in penal operations outside of or alongside the formal-institutional domain of courts by publicly condemning subjects and disseminating its judgments, especially when formal prosecution was impossible, for instance due to the lack of the evidence required for a criminal proceeding. Since 2007, the IPN has been checking the past links of thousands of public workers against the communist-era security archives it has vigorously guarded. However, the Institute quickly drew much antagonism, partly due to the highly restricted public access to those archives and “mysterious” leaks from them. Moreover, as historian Dariusz Stola has observed (Reference Stola, Miller and Lipman2012), the gradual monopolization of IPN by conservative nationalist groups became a grave concern for many people.
The IPN's pedagogical and mnemonic projects quickly became absorbed into the political struggle between the two blocs of power in the country: secular liberal groups that propagate a civic vision of nationhood based on equal citizenship and human rights, and Catholic ethno-nationalist groups that embrace a vision of nationhood based on common descent, blood, and religion (Porter-Szucs Reference Porter-Szucs2014; Zubrzycki Reference Zubryzcki2009). Until the early 2000s, the former bloc, led by liberal veteran dissidents and ex-communists, established its hegemony over the process of transition and reckoning with the communist past. Yet, the transition they led has been replete with contradictions. I will mention only three of them here. First, the rhetoric of freedom and equal rights they espoused encountered expanding social inequalities and vulnerabilities. “Shock therapy” was introduced in the early 1990s, and subsequent waves of neoliberalization rearranged state-capital-labor relations by privatizing and downsizing the state, offering incentives for foreign capital and “free trade,” and cutting public spending and state subsidies for domestic production. These policies that aimed to promote “competition” and discipline labor eliminated nearly five million workplaces between 1990 and 2005 and lifted the registered unemployment rate from almost zero in 1989 to 16 percent in 1994, and then to around 20 percent in 2003–2005 with particularly high rates of 35–40 percent among young people by the time the right-wing government that organized the Twarze Bezpieki exhibitions came to power (Hardy Reference Hardy2009: 119–20; Kowalik Reference Kowalik and Lewandowska2012: 10).Footnote 13 Since Poland's accession to the European Union in 2004, some two million people have left the country to earn a living abroad (Główny Urząd Statystyczny 2013). But the violence of capitalist transformation cannot be discerned only through these numbers. As I will discuss presently, one must also consider its effects on the embodied subjectivities of people, particularly the social experience of symbolic and material dispossession in the changing relations of class, gender, and ethnicity or race.
A second contradiction is that the ruling classes’ proclamation of regained national sovereignty confronted Poland's dramatic dependence on foreign capital, international institutions like the IMF, European legal regulations, and later NATO. The increasing force of neoliberal globalization, especially via Euro-American norms and institutions, in shaping the contours of political action and economic development undermined Poland's claim to sovereignty at a historical moment when it presumably had achieved it.Footnote 14 National sovereignty is a loaded aspiration in the history of Poland, which has been marked by devastating wars, episodes of partition and military occupation, and centuries-long cultural-political and economic dependence on Western European authorities and capital (Sowa Reference Sowa2008; Zarycki Reference Zarycki2014). But the perceived decline or “crisis” of sovereignty after 1989 became particularly sharp when it met with triumphalist proclamations that Poland had finally achieved independence and recovered her national origins.
The third contradiction emerged when the ruling classes entered into the Round Table agreements of 1989 to inaugurate a radical break with the past (the “thick line”), but this aspiration encountered the reality of legal, institutional, and human personnel continuities, including among members of the new “democratic” police. By following the “logic of compromise” and failing to involve different oppositional groups and ordinary citizens, the Round Table produced no common narrative of transition or process of reconciliation. This lack of “symbolic closure” of the socialist past arguably has made the foundation of the new republic particularly fragile and open to contestation, and its effects persist today (Kubik and Linch Reference Kubik and Linch2006, 15–18).
All these tensions and contradictions integral to the constitution of post-socialist sovereignty have provided right-wing nationalist groups with symbolic-material grounds on which to flourish. In contrast to the dominant bloc's celebration of the Round Table as the symbol of “peaceful” transition, the thriving right-wing opposition groups denounced it as a secret pact (układ), a treacherous beginning of the new republic. They denounced as promoting amnesia and amnesty the “thick line” policy and its vision of collective responsibility, according to which everyone was in different degrees complicit with the communist regime. In the same vein, the term “communist crime” gained a new meaning in their discourse. It came to refer at once to the past perpetrators of repression and coercion and to the ex-communists and their so-called liberal “allies,” including veteran oppositionists, who supposedly secretly steered and benefited from the capitalist transition by preying on the state, especially during the notoriously opaque process of privatization during the late 1980s and early 1990s (Dunn Reference Dunn2004; Eyal, Szelenyi, and Townsley Reference Eyal, Gil and Townsley2000; Staniszkis Reference Staniszkis1991). In the absence of a class-based, anti-capitalist critique and comprehensive reckoning with the communist-era state violence, contradictions of inequality and freedom and the demands for justice and accountability have become articulated with right-wing groups’ moralistic discourse on national betrayal and corruption (Kalb and Halmai Reference Kalb and Halmai2011; Ost Reference Ost2005). The uneven development and structural inequalities produced by capitalist transformation were blamed on the “anti-Polish” conspiracies of communists and their secret agents. For instance, a well-known study by political scientist David Ost described how the right-wing government of Jan Olszewski in 1992 referred to the economic hardships: “Olszewski supported the free market but claimed that in Poland it did not exist: the market was run by communists, and it was these bad individuals, not the turn to a market economy, that had caused the economic hardships angering workers” (Reference Ost2005: 71). At the heart of this narrative, Ost wrote, was the view that “‘good’ capitalism was endangered by ‘bad’ communism” (ibid.). Once the communists were purged, Poland would enjoy a spotless, “real capitalism.” Ost suggested that by embracing the utopian imaginary of “real capitalism” and blaming communism for all ills, right-wing groups not only engrained “market populism” among workers, but also obscured the roots of capitalist violence. This trend persisted well into the 2000s.Footnote 15
The communist agent has occupied a central place in the right-wing politics of sovereignty, and within that figure capitalist violence and the legacy of communist-era state violence have become deeply entangled. It embodies past and present ills and also the “secretly” negotiated transition and “secretly” accumulated capital and privileges, and it implies a shadowy, Moscow-based, treacherous network of alliances that is larger than life. During critical moments of economic recession and corruption scandals, right-wing nationalists usually trumpeted de-communization policies, through which they claimed to be building a morally pure and fully sovereign nation-state. In the Twarze Bezpieki exhibitions, the faces took center stage, representing and enacting the unaccounted legacy of the communist-era violence and its various metamorphoses in the present. For instance, when Catholic nationalist groups led a failed attempt at lustration in June 1992, they came to see that failure as another sign of secret pact between ex-communists and former oppositionists. That pact was represented by the image of a double face, half belonging to Lech Wałęsa, the legendary leader of the massive “Solidarity” movement of the 1980s, and the other half to General Wojciech Jaruzelski, the author of the martial law. This image is often used during protests to denounce Wałęsa's “secret” betrayals and links with (ex-)communists (figure 2).
From the protest by the house of Lech Wałęsa, 4 June 2012, “The Night of Change, 4 June 1992.” Photo: Łukasz Głowala/Agencja Gazeta.
Together with the Stalinist period, this later period of martial law, which formally lasted from 1981 to 1984, is a common reference point in public discussions on communist-era violence. It had enduring effects on the trajectory of the oppositional “Solidarity” movement. The martial law period led to the militarization of society and the fragmentation of oppositional groups and also to liberalization and privatization of the economy (Gökarıksel Reference Gökarıksel2017; Kubik Reference Kubik1994). It inflicted different forms of violence, from the killing of striking workers and suppression of protests to administrative repression, including layoffs of “rebellious” workers and tightened control of mobility. Well-known for his dark glasses and inscrutable, cold face, General Jaruzelski enjoyed impunity and the support of almost half of the adult population; though they had personally experienced the martial law, they considered Jaruzelski a patriot who saved Poland from a possible Soviet invasion (Kwiatkowski and Weber Reference Kwiatkowski and Weber2006).
The figure of the face has been common in the representation of secret communist agents in Polish and other Eastern European media. This type of representation took even more dramatic forms in radical nationalist imaginary, such as one in Poland that builds on the longstanding, infamous conspiracy theory about “Judeo-Communism,” which fuses anti-Semitism with anti-communism, and doubly excludes its target from the national body as a racial and political enemy. Consider, for instance, the front page of the radical nationalist weekly Kulisy, which specializes in unmasking secret communist agents and disseminating “discoveries” made through the former security archives (figure 3). The text at the top reads, “We are publishing the content of SB/security service files. The Jewish elite in Poland. They are the secret collaborators of the criminal security service. Judeocommunism. From the IPN archives.” The paper's focus is a theater director and actor, unmasked, according to the paper, as a Jew and a communist agent. This unmasking is represented with the transformation of the man's face, with his eyes turned red and his facial features given a sinister quality.
Front page of the weekly Kulisy (from the author's media archive).
There are other examples of this type of bestial or devilish representation of secret communist agents. For instance, the nationalist weekly Gazeta Polska depicted academics in a similar fashion in 2005 in the heat of a radical lustration campaign, which expanded to target about seven hundred thousand people, including many in media and higher education institutions. Many professional groups and civic initiatives opposed a radical lustration bill that was prepared at this time but was later struck down by the Constitutional Court. Notice again, in figure 4, the red and transformed eyes, nose, and ears.
Front page of the weekly Gazeta Polska, “Lustration at Schools” (from the author's media archive).
Such representations in anti-communist imaginary of communism as a devilish and diabolical beast are more common and powerful than they may seem. With the recent electoral victory of the Law and Justice party, the aforementioned weeklies, particularly Gazeta Polska, have moved into the political mainstream. Yet these representations also hinge on a globally shared idea of “evil communism,” with an emphasis on its inhumanity or bestiality, especially during the Cold War (Buck-Morss Reference Buck-Morss2000).Footnote 16 The face has been central to the visualization of that idea. It is said that the “faceless evil” of communism, as the influential right-wing journalist Bronisław Wildstein put it, has been corrupting the soul of the nation and individuals, leading to a chronic “escape from responsibility” that he observes in all segments of society, especially among the intelligentsia. Showing the face of that evil and naming the communist a “collaborator” (koloboracja), in his view, can generate a purifying effect on the persons and society at large, even if the process is painful (Wildstein Reference Wildstein2005). By promoting individual responsibility, this approach can heal the society that has been corrupted by communist indoctrination into diffused responsibility and collectivism.
The type of evil that Wildstein invokes is not only a trans-historical, theological evil, but is also closely related to Poland's national sovereignty. The “evil forces” unleashed by communism had been steered by Moscow, so when people betrayed their friends and family by “collaborating” with those alien forces they also betrayed their nation and the imagined all-Polish state. While this purification impulse lays the blame on that evil, it also feeds into the self-vindicating identity politics promoted by Polish conservative nationalists, based on a mythological victimization and martyrdom of the Polish nation (Mach Reference Mach, Mach and Niedźwiedzki1997; Zubrzycki Reference Zubryzcki2009). While this mythology reinforces a sense of national innocence and purity, it also prepares the ground to launch ferocious accusations of treason at those who point to Polish people's participation in mass violence, such as the Jewish pogroms of the Second World War (Tokarska-Bakir Reference Tokarska-Bakir, Sowa and Szyłak2009; Shore Reference Shore2014).
We should not underestimate the power of this anti-communist imaginary. While no massive purification happened in Poland, this does not mean that the potential force of this imaginary or fantasy of national purity—what Etienne Balibar calls “ultrasubjective violence” or “cruelty with a Medusa face”—diminished (Reference Balibar, Jones, Swenson and Turner2002: 143; Reference Balibar and Goshgarian2015). That type of violence, notes Balibar, requires that “individuals and groups be represented as incarnations of evil, diabolical powers that threaten the subject from within and have to be eliminated at all costs, up to and including self-destruction” (Reference Balibar and Goshgarian2015: 52). If this is indeed the logic of violence that is put into practice by ethnic cleansings and genocides in former Yugoslavia and other parts of the world, as Balibar suggests, one must pay close attention to its resurgence at different moments under the guise of historical justice and truth.
WE HAVE SEEN THEM BEFORE
Each Twarze Bezpieki exhibition stayed open for at least a month and displayed the photographs of around a hundred former security officers, often of high rank, who had been employed in the area around the exhibition. The Kraków exhibition, for instance, showed the photographs of Kraków security officers so that viewers could recognize them. These were juxtaposed with a brief of the officers’ careers, extracted from their personal files that the secret service had compiled to supervise its employees. An overwhelming majority of the faces belonged to uniformed men, hinting at the masculinized dimension of power exercised by the communist-era security service. Many of the elderly officers depicted on the boards appeared to have lived a life of stark reversals of fate and power. They had been imprisoned or deported to labor or death camps before or during the Second World War, mostly for involvement in leftwing movements. After the war some of them occupied key positions in the Stalinist-era security service and became the new jailers and patrons of violence.Footnote 17
The IPN presented the exhibitions as part of a limited pursuit of justice at a time of what it took to be de facto amnesty. The exhibition organizers were well-aware of the concerns of the families of the exhibited security officers, but for them it was a call of duty. The laws concerning the protection of individual privacy or dignity proved ineffective in the case of exhibited officers. In the rare cases where such individual rights were invoked, the public prosecutor noted no such violation and did not pursue the cases—the public interest in the exhibitions was more important.Footnote 18 By exposing the faces of the communist officers, the exhibitions would “educate” the public and call these “shameless” people guilty, many of whom had committed “communist crimes.”Footnote 19 Moreover, the faces were copied onto DVDs and special print catalogues of faces that mimicked the typography of secret police files were prepared and distributed by local IPN branches. The information that appeared in the catalogues looked as solemn and authoritative as the police files.
The exhibitions stirred up many contending views. While some criticized them harshly and accused the IPN of wasting public money, others thought them necessary. They gained remarkable publicity and instigated a great deal of face-reading. My account here is based mainly on media reports and interviews I conducted.Footnote 20 I focus on the reports that offer a more detailed sense of how the IPN framed the exhibitions and viewers’ experiences of seeing the faces. An elderly man at the Rzeszów exhibition, for instance, was reported to say: “This face tells me something. I recognize it. And the other one does not look strange, either (O, ta twarz coś mi mówi, poznaję. Ten też nie jest mi obcy). I came here to find out about the names and faces of those who had interrogated me. I still have things to settle with these people.”Footnote 21 In the opening of the Kraków exhibition, an IPN-affiliated historian assured viewers: “If evil took the form of human appearance, that would be the face of the security officers. For forty-five years these officers took part in the most deceitful apparatus of the communist dictatorship.”Footnote 22 Another IPN organizer of the same exhibition was more skeptical:
With this exhibition we destroyed the myth of physiognomy. Do these people look like thieves? No, they rather remind us of decent bureaucrats. But that is not what they are; we can immediately understand it by looking at their eyes…. These “undercovers” (tajniacy) have been among the wealthiest people. Of course, some of them died. But each has received 2000 PLN [about US$540] as retirement pension for working only fifteen years. They also pursued different interests. In 1989, when capitalism just germinated in Poland, they accumulated much more money than did an ordinary citizen.Footnote 23
The figure of the communist agent brings together different kinds of secrets, many of which concerned the “secrets” of capital accumulation and state formation. It has come to embody the worst of state communism and capitalism, giving a face to the entanglement of the unaccounted communist-era state violence and the effaced capitalist violence that found expression in the social anxieties over the privileges and illicit wealth accumulated and reproduced since the socialist period. The security officers have been seen as part of the communist-era ruling class (their “shield and sword”) that enjoyed special access to public benefits and services. The complaint about these officers’ undeserved possessions, privileges, and retirement pensions has been a popular theme of right-wing discourse, and was also voiced by some viewers of the exhibitions.Footnote 24 In the same vein, other IPN commentaries on the exhibitions stressed the “foreignness” of communist officers by pointing to their Jewish origins, their “Russianization” before or during the war, or their communist convictions; how they “felt and spoke Soviet.”Footnote 25
But the viewers’ responses to the exhibitions no less revolved around the decipherment of their neighbors. For instance, one elderly man from the Białystok exhibition said, “I found here the pictures of two acquaintances. I learned that they had worked for the state security, denounced people, and were not punished. This public stigmatization is probably the most humiliating for them.”Footnote 26 Not everyone was of the same opinion. Another visitor to the same exhibition said, “What is all this for? It is already the past. This exhibition is of no use to anyone. The young do not understand and the old need to forget.” Some of the young people I talked to about the exhibitions made similar comments and even likened them to obscene political pornography. Some well-known former worker dissidents also viewed the exhibition negatively. Władysław Frasyniuk, for instance, compared the Wrocław exhibition to the Soviet practice of exposing enemy faces in the press and asked when the IPN would organize a public shooting of the unmasked people.Footnote 27
During my fieldwork I noticed a fear the exhibited faces instilled in those who saw that men who had contacted them decades before had been secret service officers. Some were left wondering whether they might have been registered as a secret informer. Let me mention two examples. One is Witold (a pseudonym) whom I met when he was about to have his lustration hearing at the district court of Kraków. He was in his late seventies and a retired judge of a provincial town on the Carpathians. He told me how strange it was to see that the man who had been contacting him to gather information about the things happening at the court had actually been a prominent security officer. It was not that he was surprised to discover that fact; talking to those men from the Ministry of Interior, he said, was a common practice at the time. What astonished him was the current government's ability to publicly expose those men in public squares. My second example concerns a lustration court hearing that I observed. A retired security archivist named Joanna (a pseudonym) during her testimony told the court with notable disturbance about the moment she saw the face of the officer she had been in touch with. In a trembling, dry voice, she emphasized that she was only an archivist and never took part in any “operation” or interacted with “suspects” like that man had. Yet, seeing him defaced on a huge billboard seemed to transport Joanna to a reckoning that was incomprehensible to the court.
In a sense, the exhibitions seemed to have achieved some of their goals by performing the sovereign power of the state dominated by the right-wing government. The IPN spectacles of justice were a perfect site to discern how the right-wing project of sovereignty worked by showing the former state's secrets and, more importantly, by signaling that it was capable of doing much more. By taking on the longstanding historical aspiration of national sovereignty (which has been shared by almost all major political groups of contemporary Poland), the right-wing government claimed to resolve the “crisis” of sovereignty that Poland faced vis-à-vis neoliberal globalization and Europeanization. With the exposition of the faces, they also exposed the alleged anti-Polish conspiracy of people who had worked for Moscow and the communist state (which now appeared utterly foreign) and who had illicitly accumulated wealth and privilege. But the IPN exhibitions also highlighted how highly contested the right-wing sovereignty project was. Its claim to pursue truth and dispense justice for the “victims of communism” was heatedly criticized by many, including people who had been targeted by the communist-era security service.
How did the exhibitions produce such conflicting reactions? Part of this, I think, has to do with the question of who does what and in the name of whom, which takes us to the heart of representative democracy, particularly what Lefort (Reference Lefort1986) refers to as the “empty place” of power. The democratic government inhabits that place temporarily by claiming to rule in the name of the “people,” which it calls into being by invoking it (Laclau Reference Laclau2005). What matters is how this claim is made, through what forms of political action and rhetorical strategies. That is also why seemingly unrelated elements of a political struggle are indeed part of the broader struggle and understood as such by the relevant actors. The meaning of the transparency or justice pursued by the IPN exhibitions is not self-evident, but rather is articulated through other elements, with which it functions in its political-ideological discourse. This is one reason, I think, why many people did not view the kind of transparency projects the IPN organized in isolation, but rather saw them as part of the broad nationalist project of moral purification. In contrast to the IPN organizers’ claim, one did not see the exhibition in a “face-to-face” setting. There was no such unmediated “pure justice” of the exposition of the secrets or any abstract “ethical scene” isolated from ongoing relations of power and historical-political conjuncture.
But the conflicting reactions to the exhibitions also raise questions about the mode of presentation or exposition of the secrets and particularly the figure of the face. We have seen how the exposed faces of communist officers mediated the suspicions of betrayal, fears of repression, and desires for justice and equality concerning the communist past and post-socialist present. In what follows, I examine further this affective and mediatory role of the face, and focus on the following question, which so far has lingered in the background: what is it about the face that makes it particularly evocative and powerful, but at the same time makes shaming perpetrators and exposing their violence problematic or risky?
PHOTOGRAPHY AND DEFACEMENT: “LABOR OF THE NEGATIVE”Footnote 28
Exhibiting the hidden history of the former security apparatus and redeploying its artifacts of power to facilitate a break from the past may generate unexpected reactions. This may be partly because such exhibition and redeployment run the risk of mimicking what they are intended to overcome. While seeking to mobilize fear and hatred of the past, they also reveal the fragile constitution of the current ideological order of post-socialism.
The IPN spectacles’ reliance on the face may scarcely seem striking, since public defamation through defacement is a well-established practice historically. As is often noted, the face has long been entwined with questions of identity, honor, shame, and humanity. In the Polish language the word face (twarz) also conveys meanings related to those questions. One sometimes saves and sometimes loses face under difficult conditions, or when subjected to a test of truth.Footnote 29 Moreover, in Poland the face has in certain contexts become a highly loaded symbol. For instance, the “scarred face” of the Black Madonna may remind Polish people of “their historical suffering and their ‘miraculous’ survival as a nation” (Zubrzycki Reference Zubryzcki2009: 28). Indeed, many renowned Polish writers and scholars have drawn on the face to reflect on the historical tragedies of war and reconstruction (Miłosz Reference Miłosz1973); moral dilemmas of betrayal (Herbert Reference Herbert and Valles2008); ethical encounters with the Other (Tischner Reference Tischner2012); and the intersubjective, communicative space of the face, which may both fix one's identity and create a potential for becoming (Gombrowicz Reference Gombrowicz and Mosbacher1965). Likewise, in Eastern European literature on violence and Soviet communism, the face has been a critical site of power, truth, and collectivity (e.g., Grossman Reference Grossman and Chandler2012; Serge Reference Serge2014). Moreover, “facialization” of history—the representation of history as a series of faces—has a special valor in the historical discourse on the former East Bloc. While it draws on the popular phrases in transitional justice discourse such as facing history, it also indexes a will to render legible what has been considered the “faceless” totalitarian regime or, again, what Wildstein called “faceless evil” (Reference Wildstein2005). “Socialism with a human face” was the motto of the late 1960s efforts to renew and prevent socialism from becoming a bureaucratic machine, while the post-socialist facialization of history seeks to foreclose the possibility of a future socialism by memorializing the “communist crimes” in the form of criminal faces.
For centuries, the face has been thought to make visible what is invisible, reveal one's inner truth or guilt, qualify one's moral and social standing, and place one in a racial hierarchy as in ancient or modern physiognomy.Footnote 30 Facelessness also pointed to certain problems. The medieval historian Valentin Groebner (Reference Groebner2008) observed that when violence appeared indescribable, when it was exceptionally cruel, it was often called “faceless” and its victims were also “anonymized” as faceless. Certainly, a central element of the historical discourse on the face is the question of visibility and its relation to the secret. Located at the crossroads of visibility and invisibility, the face closely associates truth with visibility, transparency, or the exposition of the secret. Modern state apparatuses have capitalized on the seemingly “discerning” capacity of the face to identify secrets and capture the truth (Deleuze and Guattari Reference Deleuze, Guattari and Massumi2012). However, as much as it is a tool for fixation, a point of arrival, the face is also a point of departure. The movements that make up the face are so contingent and elusive that the face often seems at once “the mask and window to the soul” (Taussig Reference Taussig1999). As much as it tells us about the power that strives to make its subject population more transparent and legible, the face also points to the ever-presence of duplicity and illegibility, the “two-facedness,” which can be used strategically to divert the gaze of state agents (Nelson Reference Nelson2009). Turning the strategy of identification and capture back on the state itself, the pictures of the faces of the “disappeared” or victims of state violence have been employed in political protests around the world, including in Argentina, South Africa, Turkey, the United States, and Poland, to demand accountability.
Yet, unearthing perilous truths and bringing secrets into the open by exhibiting them is often marked by uncertainty and unknowability. This is not only because of the ambiguity of the face; uncertainty creeps in even when there is barely any room for spontaneity, with no actual face-to-face encounter between the former security officer and the spectator. The IPN had already attempted to fix the meaning of the photographs of security officers’ faces long before viewers ever saw them exhibited: they are the perpetrators whom one has seen on the street without knowing who they really are. The use of photography for this purpose is unsurprising. The eminent art historian Alan Trachtenberg wrote:
The face showed the person, traces of personal history and what lay inside: dispositions, desires, and inclinations. Photography encouraged scrutiny of faces for clues to meaning, signs of intentions: the medium seemed a second eyesight, capable of ‘fixing’ ephemeral facial gestures for close and even closer examination…. Understood as a picture with a tale to tell, the photographed face seemed a surety that persons were knowable in their visage, the image offering a surrogate for face-to-face sociality in an increasingly distended order (Reference Trachtenberg2007: 69–70).
However, fixing that meaning is no less difficult than unmasking the face.Footnote 31 Even when photography claimed to index reality and perform an objective “face-reading,” as physiognomy claimed to do, it failed on several points. It was not enough to take a picture of the face. The “harsh literalness” of the photograph, if unmitigated, would be misleading. “Because the camera portrays the false as truly as it does the true, the portraitist had to strive for a ‘natural’ (undissembled) expression of faces and bodies” (ibid.: 84). But this did not exclude the usage of artifice; many photographers built portrait studios, “surrogate theaters,” where the face could perform itself and be rendered truthfully as in a “natural” setting.
If photographs played an important role as a surrogate for face-to-face relations uprooted by modernity, what interests me here is how they function in IPN exhibitions as “surrogate theaters” or spectacles of justice. Far from being a procedure of justice shaped by citizens through their active participation, the spectacles of the photographed faces of the security officers were first and foremost a state spectacle of justice. “Punishment-as-spectacle,” as Foucault described it, condensed judgment and execution into the single moment of public torture. The publicity of the execution was necessary not only to prevent future crimes, but also to instill fear in the spectators who witnessed its violence. It was to make these spectators complicit in the violence. “Not only must people know, they must see with their own eyes. Because they must be made to be afraid; but also because they must be the witnesses, the guarantors, of the punishment, and because they must to a certain extent take part in it…. The vengeance of the people was called upon to become an unobtrusive part of the vengeance of the sovereign” (Reference Foucault and Sheridan1979: 58–59).
The IPN exhibitions do not involve the kind of physical violence and spectatorship that characterized the public punishments of early modern Europe that Foucault discussed. They operate under a different norm and regulation of publicity, transparency, and legal rights. Yet, they also aim to mobilize people's curiosity and vengeance and instill fear in the spectators. Their targets are not only the former security officers, but also those “out there” who are yet to be exposed. However, as in “punishment-as-spectacle,” there is no guarantee for the intended effect. The shame imposed on the criminal may strike back and become the shame of law's violence. The object to be destroyed may augment its haunting power in that very destruction. The secret that is exposed may reproduce its mystery in the act of exposition, and the face may grow “magical” qualities in the act of defacement (Taussig Reference Taussig1999). As W.J.T. Mitchell (Reference Mitchell1987) noted, the iconoclast is very much enveloped by the act of destruction, the dialectic of iconoclasm. Just as the spectacles of punishment of early modern Europe offered a site for different illegalities, popular protest, and the unpredictable reaction of huge crowds that gathered in public squares, the IPN was unsure how the exhibitions would be received. For one thing, they were well-aware of the widespread criticisms of the exhibitions, especially regarding the kind of justice they claimed to dispense. For another, the IPN was concerned with how to guard the exhibitions against the former security officers, who might be contriving to attack them.
Finally, an attack of remarkable magnitude hit the exhibition in Katowice, the city which was once considered the heart of socialism, famous for its rich coal mines, and now, or at least until recently, one of the abandoned cities of post-socialist Poland. It was March 2007, during the heat of the right-wing de-communization proposal, when the head of the IPN Katowice branch opened the exhibition with these words: “John F. Kennedy said that it is necessary to forgive enemies, but never forget their faces. […] We do not have here anyone who is morally innocent. Even though only some of them actually committed crimes, they were all functionaries of the system” (figure 1).Footnote 32
Ten days after this speech five people between the ages of sixteen and twenty-nine, one of them female, attacked the exhibition in the dark of the night. The exhibition was in the main market square in a relatively affluent area and displayed some eighty-four faces on huge boards. The police reported that it was pure vandalism. “Without any premeditation” the drunkard “hooligans” (as they were called) destroyed almost half of the exhibition, cracking sixteen of thirty-two iron boards and tearing even their corners and legs. The IPN spokesperson promised to finish repairing the damage within a week, until which the damaged boards would remain empty rectangles without pictures, transparent as a window. The media report mentioned in passing that while vandalizing the exhibition the “hooligans” had also shattered the windows of a few cars, including an expensive Mercedes parked nearby (figure 5).Footnote 33
Katowice Twarze Bezpieki exhibition after the destruction. Photo: Marcin Tomalka/Agencja Gazeta.
What is revealing in this defacement of the exhibition, which itself defaces the ex-security officers, is not just that the exhibition paradoxically augments the power of the secret that it attempts to expose. Nor is it just that the IPN's transparency project ended up generating more suspicions than revelations. Might the exposed officers themselves have hired these people? Or was it pure vandalism, meaningless violence, as the mainstream media and police suggested? I want to propose another interpretation beyond the conspiracy theories and the trivialization of the issue by reference to rampant alcoholism or hooliganism. No less revealing, in my view, is the windows of that expensive car that were destroyed “accidentally,” the car about which there is no secret except the “secret” of commodity fetishism and primary accumulation that Karl Marx famously discussed (Reference Marx and Howkes1992). What is also revealed here is the contradiction of the post-socialist capitalist transition, which at once promised justice and freedom for all yet at the same time deprived millions of citizens of the means to live a decent life, labeling them, in Zygmunt Bauman's words, the “collateral damage” of transition (Reference Bauman2011). I turn now to this contradiction, especially its subjective embodied effects and the kind of violence it germinates.
THE GENERAL ECONOMY OF VIOLENCE OF TRANSITION
I take this scene of destruction in Katowice as a point of encounter between heterogeneous forms of violence that are combined in a single, general economy of violence. This economy of violence pervades the social spatial environment of urban life and shapes the living conditions of the “vandals” and envelops their act of destruction. The scene of that destruction brings into focus the intersection of the violence represented by the communist-era security officers, the violence exercised by the state spectacle's exposition of them, as well as the violence of capitalist transition, which refers to the uneven, social effects of capital accumulation. These effects are manifest dramatically in the experience of symbolic and material inequality and dispossession, anxieties of betrayal and abandonment, and the upsurge of destructive and self-destructive tendencies.Footnote 34 I have thus far highlighted the problem of complicity and entanglement between the first two forms of violence: the communist-era state violence and the nationalist projects to convert, overcome, and settle accounts with that violence, albeit by deploying similar mechanisms of sovereign violence. This latter type of violence is animated by the imaginary of national purification, the fantasy of absolute national sovereignty that involves the expulsion of internal and external enemies from the national body and the aspiration for a total correspondence between the state and the nation.
As I have said, the figure of the face has been central to sovereignty politics. Political groups commonly invoke it to visualize themselves and their opponents, but the face is not simply a contentless, empty instrument. Its long history has been entwined with the moral-political questions of truth, visibility, guilt, and knowability. While this makes the face particularly useful for right-wing populist groups that rely on a highly moralized, nationalist imaginary (they typically define their opponents as morally corrupt enemies of the nation) (Müller Reference Müller2016), those moral-political questions are not so easily contained, and they linger even when the political power seeks to instrumentalize and “fix” the meaning of the face.
When the IPN exhibitions exposed the faces of communist-era security officers, the secret they exposed had many layers. They appeared to facialize not only the unaccounted violence of past state repression and coercion, but also the privileges and wealth that (ex-)communist officers had or were imagined to have accumulated since the socialist period. The thick narrative about their shady privileges and secret powers must have enchanted further the faces that the IPN exhibitions showed in grandeur. In this way, those faces came to mediate all sorts of fears and desires, communicating things that are at once wicked, corrupt, and attractive. This ambivalent effect, in my view, partly explains the attack of the young “vandals” on the Katowice exhibition. The so-called “accidental” destruction of the windows of the expensive car parked nearby supports this interpretation.
Yet, this focus on the scene of destruction has limited explanatory value toward understanding the social dynamics and the general economy of violence enveloping the destruction. I will not mimic the police work by focusing on the individual motivations of the faceless “vandals,” who were made anonymous by the media reports of their pathological and incomprehensible destruction (the police reported that the destruction had not been planned). Instead, I will explore where these young people may have come from, in search of possible sources of destruction that transcend their individual motives for destruction. The account of Maciej Durny, the organizer and security guard of the IPN Katowice exhibition, supports this line of interpretation. He recalled to me that after the destruction one of the boys later came to the IPN to ask forgiveness. These young people, Durny observed, knew little about either the exposed faces or the IPN's project. They were out that night drinking around the shiny market square in the grey landscape of Katowice. He told me several times that there was nothing extraordinary about this group of young guys (chłopaki), and such acts of destruction happened quite often. In the end, he said, the IPN decided not to take the case to court.Footnote 35
It is precisely that ordinary world of destruction that interests me here, the world in which the destruction of the exhibition was embedded. To make sense of that world, I want to draw on the Polish anthropologist Tomasz Rakowski's (Reference Rakowski, Lūse and Lázár2007; Reference Rakowski2009) ethnographic research on the embodied and psychic tendencies of destruction that are widespread among former miners and their families in the deindustrialized region of Śląsk, where Katowice is located. Rakowski focused his research on the nearby city of Wałbrzych. As in Katowice and other cities of the region, life there largely depended on employment in coal mines. The transition brought about the closure of many supposedly inefficient mines and generated a wave of newly deskilled and unemployed “surplus” people. Wałbrzych, Rakowski asserts, became a perfect site to study the “social trauma” of the transition (see also Wódz and Wódz Reference Wódz and Wódz2006). In response to the closures, ex-miners sought to utilize their skills by digging holes around the city. The children of the former working class also joined in this business of “illegal” or “semi-legal mines.” Soon the city witnessed to what Rakowski called “salvage fever,” the salvaging of objects found in the holes, some of which belonged to their recent, now literally underground history of employment (Reference Rakowski, Lūse and Lázár2007: 184). A “peculiar destructive environment” permeated everything, Rakowski noted, and he pointed out that this destruction was accompanied by repetitive, monological talk of self-destruction. This involved “blowing up” not only the ruinous worthless city, but also their disintegrating, sick bodies worn out by years of heavy work. “Who cares if my lungs blow up?” a former miner asked. As another put it, “I'll go down and be buried” (ibid.: 192).
Rakowski suggests that this violence registers the general void, the sense of abandonment, that characterizes the social life of the mines, as well as the bodies and psychologies of the former working class. This is the untold, corporeal dimension of capitalist transition. The self, as it were, lost its anchor in reality, and the distinction between inner and external worlds became fuzzier than ever. All of this prepared the subjective ground for the projection of secret enemies, fantasies of destruction, and a sort of “sadistic satisfaction” conveyed by them (ibid.: 201).
One does not have to fully agree with Rakowski's analysis to appreciate his perceptive account of these destructive tendencies, which can be observed in many other deindustrialized, post-socialist cities (e.g., Kideckel Reference Kideckel2008; Stenning et al. Reference Stenning, Smith, Rochovská and Świątek2010). Curiously, in another deindustrialized city near Katowice called Bytom, the same Twarze Bezpieki exhibition was also defaced. Some people scavenged the aluminum boards to sell them in the marketplace of salvaged objects. The dispossessed of the transition are subjected not only to different forms of destruction, but also to pathologization and cultural stigmatization by the mainstream media as being lazy, wastrels, or vandals. This type of blaming has a history that extends back at least to the communist era, during which political authorities used a similar language. But this cultural stigmatization in the context of capitalist transformation also must be seen as part of what Michał Buchowski (Reference Buchowski2006) calls the “internal societal orientalization” of the poor, the so-called “losers” of the transition. The poor were never just poor, but were also called uncivilized, redundant, and generally incompatible with Poland's new capitalism. They were rendered invisible by the pervasive violence of capitalist transition. Unlike the faces of the former security officers that were revealed in public squares, their faces do not elicit attention; on the contrary, they appear as an indistinct mass, the faceless damage of the capitalist transition.
The destruction of the Katowice exhibition Twarze Bezpieki can be understood as part of this generalized economy of violence that marks the deindustrialized cities and abandoned subjects of post-socialism. It is a type of violence that does not necessarily have a well-conceived political target or plan. It is, as it were, a violence without addressee, and not a revolt or resistance against capitalism or communism. The destruction, in my view, is better seen as “delinquent” violence symptomatic of capital's “indirect, delegated extermination” of human bodies by turning them into a disposable waste (Ogilvie quoted in Balibar Reference Balibar and Goshgarian2015: 56). This “ultraobjective violence,” to use Balibar's term, involves capital's transformation of human beings into things, or abandonment to their fate of the people who were made a surplus population. Such conditions of alienation, precariousness, and disenfranchisement, as is well known, provide a fertile soil for the growth of radical nationalist groups. That is also why the Polish sociologist Stefan Czarnowski's 1930s study of fascism and its social base among the youth recently enjoyed a revival in Poland within efforts to understand the effects of capitalist transition (Tarkowska Reference Tarkowska2013). Czarnowski developed the notion of “disposable people” (ludzie zbędni) in his study of how fascist groups propagating violence recruited marginalized people across social classes.
The actual destroyers of the Katowice exhibition may not identify with anti-communist nationalist groups. Yet, part of the allure of destruction, I think, has to do with the faces of the communist officers that appeared at the center of the performance of sovereign justice. Exposing their faces on the big boards at the city's main square, the exhibition paradoxically exalted them with grandiosity and they became objects of different sorts of energies and desires, in a way resembling Foucault's description of the illegalities that sporadically surfaced in the spectacles of punishment. If one of the aims of the exhibition was to show how the new state exacted vengeance on the public enemy, its counterviolence also became the breeding ground for different acts of violence. Thus, it may be in that subliminal moment of sovereign violence that we can grasp the magnitude of the “transgressive” violence of “vandals,” violence that is beyond utility or political end.
POSTSCRIPT: THE RETURN OF THE FACE
I have thus far focused on the IPN spectacles of justice and their destruction to explore the nexus of sovereignty, violence, and transitional justice. This analysis brings a comparative perspective to the global field of transitional justice. While transitional justice is commonly associated with “progressive” political and human rights activists who deal with the legacy of right-wing military dictatorships or the apartheid, as in South America or South Africa, I have focused here on what we might call the “dark side” of transitional justice, the sources and consequences of transitional justice's entanglement with nationalist politics of sovereignty and capital's violence. Certainly, the tensions and contradictions of privatized freedom, inequality, and dependency that are central to the making of post-socialist sovereignty, and give way to right-wing populism, are hardly unique to Poland or even to Eastern Europe; they mark the condition of many other peripheries of world historical capitalism and modernity (Kalb and Halmai Reference Kalb and Halmai2011; Pobłocki Reference Pobłocki2017). The IPN exhibitions were a part of the right-wing government's response to what it took to be a “crisis” of national sovereignty and the legacy of communist-era state violence. Yet, the exhibited faces of communist-era security officers did not deliver only the “message” the IPN intended, nor did this exposition turn out to be a straightforward pedagogy for the spectator citizens. Its complicity with the same kind of violence that it claimed to overcome stirred much suspicion. While the exposed faces appeared to be objects of desires for justice and knowledge, and of fear of state repression and surveillance, they also harbored other secrets. The (secret) communist agent, a key actor in nationalist cosmology, has come to embody the major tensions and contradictions of post-socialist capitalism, filling a role similar to other “magical” figures in different cosmologies of capitalism (Taussig Reference Taussig1980).Footnote 36 But one cannot speak of an even distribution of light across all of the secrets. While the communist officers’ exposed faces have made “evil communism” grandly visible, the faces of the “vandals” and “losers” of the transition, the so-called collateral damage, remain in the dark. The anti-communist imaginary not only displaces the social consequences and structural dynamics of post-socialist capitalism, but also jeopardizes the prospects for a critically engaged, more comprehensive reckoning with the communist past.
That is not simply a result of the actions of some ill-willed nationalists, obsessed with their entrenched anti-communism or blinded by capitalist zeal. This phenomenon points to a broader, theoretical problem concerning the moral-political hierarchies established between different forms of violence by transitional justice, and liberal capitalist modernity generally. These hierarchies eclipse our understandings of the complex temporal and conjunctural relations between different forms of violence. Employing a linear and homogeneous concept of time and a narrowly circumscribed, static notion of violence, they typically normalize the “peacetime” violence of capitalism and isolate it from the reckonings with past “wartime” or “illiberal” violence. However, the violence of capitalism and its cultural-political mediations can seriously shape or undermine seemingly unrelated pursuits of justice. Imposing a dichotomy obscures a more comprehensive understanding of the social sources and experiences of violence, which may then become the object of a right-wing sovereignty politics that employs the imaginary of national-moral purification.
The electoral victory of the Law and Justice party in November 2015 showed how that imaginary does not leave politics so long as the sources of disappointment with capitalist transformation are not effectively engaged. The right-wing government today, three decades after the dissolution of state communism, continues to make a great use of the language of de-communization. This language is intimately tied to its prolific discourse on treason and hideous enemies. As the government aspires to change the constitutional framework of the republic, de-communize the public space, and “re-polonize” the economy, law, media, and politics, it denounces its opponents as “communists and thieves,” “people with blood on their hands,” and “the worst type of Poles” who are almost genetically incompatible to be members of the Polish nation (Łętowska Reference Łętowska2017). The response has been a series of protests that continue today and are often attended by big crowds claiming to defend Polish democracy against what they see as a conservative authoritarian setback.
In one of those protests, in December 2015, participants held up an empty frame with the text “The Worst Type of Poles” and placed their own faces within it (figure 6). This mocking self-exposition had the image of the face of the leader of the Law and Justice Party, Jarosław Kaczyński, with the iconic dark glasses of General Wojciech Jaruzelski. The protesters thereby invoked the empty place of power and claimed another definition of the “people” beyond its ethno-nationalist iteration. This is the space of political struggle over truth and history, of communication indispensable to any democratic politics worthy of the name. For such communication to work, though, the common must be recovered from the entrenched liberal/conservative nationalist divide.Footnote 37 Instead of drawing out Poland's best or worst face, one may say, with Witold Gombrowicz, “Take pity on your faces, take pity on my face, for a face is not an object, but a subject, a subject, a subject!” (Reference Gombrowicz and Mosbacher1965: 65).
During the anti-government protests, December 2015, “The Worst Type of Poles.” Photo: Aleksandra Żelazińska.
