Governor Romney’s selection of Congressman Ryan as his running mate assured the re-election of President Obama. Will Milberg already explained this from the point of view of the politics of economics a year and a half ago, while I first suggested my reasons in my review of Obama’s 2011 State of the Union address and Ryan’s official Republican response.

Romney has now firmly identified himself with a true-believing ideologist. The Ryan – Romney budget proposals, empowered by Ryan’s ideology, will hurt the guy who wanted Obama to keep his dirty, government hands off his Medicare, and many more people who depend on social programs in their daily lives. Thus, Milberg was quite sure when the Ryan plan was announced that the Republicans were finished.

And even though the nation is very divided, ideological extremism, even when it is in the name of the core American value of liberty, turns people, left, right and center, off, as the Republican nominee for president, Barry Goldwater learned in 1964.

Ryan’s ideology is not completely coherent. It has three sources: libertarian thought, a fundamentalist approach to the constitution, and a narrow understanding of natural law theory and the theological foundations of modern democracy. He recognizes tensions between these positions, but it doesn’t seem to bother him or slow him down. He still moves from theoretical certainty to practical policy as a true believer, and he does it with a happy and appealing smile on his face, which would be quite familiar to Milan Kundera, as he depicted such smiles in his novels A Book on Laughter and Forgetting and The Unbearable Lightness of Being.

The Congressman’s libertarianism comes via Ayn Rand, revealed in a speech he gave to the organization dedicated to keeping her flame, the Atlas Society. He explained:

I grew up reading Ayn Rand and it taught me quite a bit about who I am and what my value systems are, and what my beliefs are. It’s inspired me so much that it’s required reading in my office for all my interns and my staff. We start with Atlas Shrugged. People tell me I need to start with The Fountainhead then go to Atlas Shrugged [laughter]. There’s a big debate about that. We go to Fountainhead, but then we move on, and we require Mises and Hayek as well.

But the reason I got involved in public service, by and large, if I had to credit one thinker, one person, it would be Ayn Rand. And the fight we are in here, make no mistake about it, is a fight of individualism versus collectivism.

In almost every fight we are involved in here, on Capitol Hill, whether it’s an amendment vote that I’ll take later on this afternoon, or a big piece of policy we’re putting through our Ways and Means Committee, it is a fight that usually comes down to one conflict: individualism vs. collectivism.

Ryan approaches the constitution as a libertarian and an avowed enemy of progressivism. He explained in an interview with Glenn Beck, which led Beck to become Ryan’s very strong advocate.

What I have been trying to do, and if you read the entire Oklahoma speech or read my speech to Hillsdale College that they put in there on Primus Magazine, you can get them on my Facebook page, what I’ve been trying to do is indict the entire vision of progressivism because I see progressivism as the source, the intellectual source for the big government problems that are plaguing us today and so to me it’s really important to flush progressives out into the field of open debate.

GLENN: I love you.

PAUL RYAN: So people can actually see what this ideology means and where it’s going to lead us and how it attacks the American idea.

GLENN: Okay. Hang on just a second. I ‑‑ did you see my speech at CPAC?

PAUL RYAN: I’ve read it. I didn’t see it. I’ve read it, a transcript of it.

GLENN: And I think we’re saying the same thing. I call it ‑‑

PAUL RYAN: We are saying the same thing.

GLENN: It’s a cancer.

PAUL RYAN: Exactly. Look, I come from ‑‑ I’m calling you from Janesville, Wisconsin where I’m born and raised.

GLENN: Holy cow.

PAUL RYAN: Where we raise our family, 35 miles from Madison. I grew up hearing about this stuff. This stuff came from these German intellectuals to Madison‑University of Wisconsin and sort of out there from the beginning of the last century. So this is something we are familiar with where I come from. It never sat right with me. And as I grew up, I learned more about the founders and reading the Austrians and others that this is really a cancer because it basically takes the notion that our rights come from God and nature and turns it on its head and says, no, no, no, no, no, they come from government, and we here in government are here to give you your rights and therefore ration, redistribute and regulate your rights. It’s a complete affront of the whole idea of this country and that is to me what we as conservatives, or classical liberals if you want to get technical.

GLENN: Thank you.

PAUL RYAN: ‑‑ ought to be doing to flush this out. So what I was simply tying to do in that speech was simply saying those first versions, those first progressives, they tried to use populism and popular ideas as a means to getting ‑‑ detaching people from the Constitution and founding principles to pave the way for the centralized bureaucratic welfare state.

In the Hillsdale Speech and the Oklahoma speech Ryan does indeed explain himself more fully. His way of thinking about contemporary problems is deductive. He starts with simple propositions about the world, liberty and the rule of law, and then based on these propositions he understands complexity in a way that is quite similar to Beck’s approach. Progressivism bad. Individualism good. The constitution is understood as a univocal document that supports one party, the Republican Party, and its present agenda. The Democrats and their leader, on the other hand, are seen as undermining the founding document. They are a cancer, not opponents, but enemies.

This is where Ryan parts company with Rand. Instead of her atheism, he believes that the American system is a manifestation of God’s will. This he strikingly demonstrated in his speech on Saturday, accepting Romney’s nomination of him for Vice President. He declared: “Our rights come from nature and God, not government.” The sentence passed without much notice. Red meat for the religious right no doubt. But I wonder whose God and why God, and whose account of nature? Is it that of sound biology and environmental science? Or is it the creationist account? This is scary stuff. And I think as Americans went in response to Goldwater, they will go as well with Romney – Ryan.

Perhaps, therefore, the Romney – Ryan ticket will try to moderate their positions. Romney’s politics is notably flexible. Ryan is the ideologue. Romney isn’t. But they will then be running not only against Obama, but also against themselves. Romney was for “Romney – Obama Care,” until he was against it, and now Romney and Ryan may try being against (or perhaps more accurately not completely for) the Ryan Budget after they were for it. As Milberg put it: Obama Wins!

An example of a memory project left undone: I remember talking to a visiting scholar from China. He was studying the Cultural Revolution with the American journalist and student of recent Chinese history, Judith Shapiro. He admired the Jewish memory work on the Holocaust and wondered why there was no similar work being done in China, confronting the atrocities of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. He asked me once: was there something about the Jewish and the Chinese political culture, or, at least, their distinctive collective experiences that explained these different approaches to collective trauma? The supposition was that to remember was to set one free.

Poland

Then there is Adam Michnik, Poland’s leading intellectual opposition leader in the 70s and 80s, and later after the changes of ’89, the editor of Poland’s major newspaper, Gazeta Wyborcza.  And also importantly for me a personal friend and a friend and colleague of many at my university, the New School for Social Research, a frequent visitor since he received an honorary degree from us at the 50^th anniversary of the University in Exile. He is memory worker, although he calls himself a historian. He uses history in special ways. He reminds his readers of something in the past and proposes it as a guide for future action, thinking between past and future, as Hannah Arendt would put it. Thus, in his classic essay “The New Evolutionism,” he remembers the so called Polish positivists of the 19^th century who proposed pragmatic reform over romantic revolt, and he remembers those who joined the communist system from Catholic parties and made small differences in the post Stalinist period. He presents such memories to his readers as he proposed in 1976 a new course of resistance to the communist system, remembering the failures of 1956 in Budapest and of 1968 in Prague. He proposes not revolution from below or reform from above, but reform from below for social change. He proposed a vision of change that anticipated, even guided, the action that became Solidarność and contributed in a significant way to the democratic postscript of the Communist experience.

And I also am very much involved in what I have called the enlightenment prejudice. In my work on the relative autonomy of culture as one of the definitive structures of modernity, I have posited a positive connection between collective memory and creative independence. I studied artists who remembered the past, a variety of artistic traditions, to establish their distinctive work apart from the orthodoxies of the old regime of previously existing socialism.  Solzhenitsyn used the officially available works of Tolstoy to create a new literary alternative to socialist realism (the post-Stalinist Lukacs not withstanding). Grotowski used Stanislavsky.  My beloved Polish student theaters drew upon the literary and theatrical imaginations of Witkiewicz and Gombrowicz. The inherited socialist and nationalist cultural traditions available because of official support for a dominant interpretation, the officially supported collective memory of the cultural past, provided the grounds for critical creative innovation.  One of my favorite quotes comes from Milan Kundera. It comes from his The Art of the Novel. He asserts “The novelist needs answer to no one but Cervantes.” (Kundera, 1988, p.144) His is an argument for a specialized collective memory as the basis for artistic creation. When this is enacted a significant support for cultural freedom is constituted. I have worked with this insight repeatedly in my comparative studies in the sociology of the culture.

With such observations in mind, why then the full title of this presentation, why am I presenting a paper not only for but also against memory, when collective memory is so important for human achievements that I deeply admire and have dedicated much of my career to studying? I now turn to some details, some small things, to explain.

It has to do with a complexity of the sociology of collective memory, much examined by specialists on the topic. I am just looking at this complexity from a different point of view, not only asking how we work to remember but also how we work to forget, understanding, as has been often been observed, that memory and forgetting are two sides of the same coin.

In order to remember together, we must forget together, pay attention to some things that happened by ignoring others. And sometimes, we need, or at least want, to change what is to be remembered and what is to be forgotten. This is what Michnik was trying to work on when he came up with his politically wise counsel: “amnesty without amnesia. It is also what happens in the various memory battles over controversial exhibits that reveal hitherto unexamined aspects of the past, as for example, Vera Zolberg has studied in the case of the controversies over Enola Gay exhibit at the Smithsonian. Or, as Robin Wagner Pacifici and Barry Schwartz, analyzed in their brilliant analysis of Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial. People go to the memorial calling a truce in a cultural war, forgetting their differences on the War, at least situationally. They remember together a shared, though differently understood, collective experience.

In the idea of amnesty without amnesia, Michnik wanted to pretend that it is possible to have it both ways: to both remember the injustices and suffering of Polish society under communist rule, and to avoid the problems of revolutionary justice. He wanted to forgive, but not forget.  There was a real practical problem with this. Poland is a complex modern differentiated society, meaning many different people, doing different things at different times. It is because of these differences that Michnik’s idea could not succeed.  It required concerted forgetting that he didn’t work on. Michnik, standing in a very privileged position in society, could come up with his subtle idea, and his informed reading public, both at home and abroad (including me), were persuaded. But when he acted following his idea and was seen by a broader, differently positioned public, the meaning of his actions was understood in very different ways. He presented his subtle position, but in his actions he appeared to the less informed, the less well connected, to just forget what happened, or worse, he seemed to want people to forget what happened because he was somehow implicated in the crimes of the past.  Beyond the political class, when he had his weekly meetings with his former jailers and publicly treated them with respect and deference, he appeared as one who didn’t remember and who was complicit in the injustices of the communist regime.

In a sense that was Michnik’s point. He wanted to act as if the wrongs of the past were forgotten so that the pressing problems of the present and the near future could be acted upon. Being too involved with the past would not allow for sensible action. Because he didn’t convince the broad public to willfully forget together in their actions, while they remembered what happened in the stories they told each other about theirs past, the problems of “lustration,” of purging those complicit in the communist regime, has haunted Poland ever since. Thankfully the party that was building its future around this theme of retribution has not too long ago lost in Poland’s parliamentary elections, and the progressive collective project of forgetting is again on the agenda.

Of course, I am being ironic using the phrase “progressive forgetting,” but only a bit. Looking closely at politics, looking at what I call the politics of small things, I have become very impressed by the importance of forgetting in developing a free politics. The politics of small things is a concept drawn from the political theory of Hannah Arendt and the sociology of Erving Goffman. When people meet and speak in each other’s presence, and develop a capacity to act together on the basis of shared commitments, principles or ideals, they develop political power. This power is constituted in social interaction. It has its basis in the definition of the situation, the power of people to define their social reality. In the power of definition, there is the power of constituting alternatives to the existing order of things. When this power involves the meeting of equals, respectful of factual truth and open to alternative interpretations of the problems they face, it has profound democratic capacity. As Hannah Arendt has theorized, it constitutes political power as the opposite of coercion.

Israel – Palestine

But each element of this conceptualization of micropolitics has to be worked on. It is in fact much harder than my simple formulation makes it seem. Meeting and speaking to each other, developing a capacity to act in concert is no easy matter for Israelis and Palestinians. There are the physical mechanics of occupation, which are meant to separate people, and, less apparent though no less significant, there are memory problems.

Consider scenes from Encounter Point a moving film about The Parents Circle, a Palestinian Israeli organization of bereaved families for peace. The film depicts the extraordinary side of rather ordinary people on both sides of the conflict. These are people who have lost love ones in the conflict, victims of wars, military raids, suicide bombings, terror of the state apparatus and of resistance organizations. The group members are dedicated to not having their loss used to justify a politics of retribution. It started in Tel Aviv, among a group of Israeli parents. It now has both Palestinian and Israeli branches, with the Palestinian group slightly outnumbering the Israeli one. The groups operate independently and also work jointly.  Getting together, a crucial part of their endeavors, though, is not easy. Travel restrictions make Palestinian movements within Israel proper difficult if not impossible. And Israeli citizens also are restricted in their movements in the occupied territories. In the film we see a group meeting in Jerusalem. What we don’t see are the obstacles and checkpoints that had to be surmounted for the Palestinians to take part. We are shown an attempt by the Israeli group to meet a group in the West Bank, and though they finally do get through, their difficulties are clearly depicted. It includes a postscript of the Palestinian host of the gathering being arrested as a terrorist, but released from prison thanks to his Parents Circle Israeli colleagues. Road blocks, checkpoints, official regulations and fear are the group’s immediate obstacles. But memory is a more profound one.

In the report of the Jerusalem meeting we see a discussion between two families who lost their daughters to the conflict, in an anti terrorist military operation in Bethlehem and in a suicide bombing in Tel Aviv. It is a quick empathetic conversation, casual, seemingly not of profound significance. But we see more outside the meeting. We learn that the family from Bethlehem had the bad luck of driving their late model car on a shopping trip on the same day a group of suspected terrorists were driving the same model. And when their car came into view of the Israeli army, they were attacked and their daughter was killed. We see the funeral, a full martyr’s ceremony, with aggressive nationalist, almost militaristic, rhetoric and with the father actively taking part. And we see the father, later, now a member of Parents Circle, as deputy major of the city. This is a moving sequence of events. The family, of course, has not forgotten the loss of their daughter, but in their actions, they are undermining a dominant way of remembering, trying to create another way, apparently with some success. Their Israeli counterparts do the same thing. We see the father who lost his daughter to the suicide bombing go to school groups and argue not only for peace and reconciliation, but also against the linking of memory and retribution. He may not convince, but he is, at least, opening up new possibilities. Both fathers know that as they work in their own communities, they make it possible to work together, and in doing so, they are creating new political alternatives to the logic of the central authorities, by redefining their situation and acting together based on that redefinition.  As I work on such politics of small things in Israel Palestine, formally named as an SSRC project “Micropolitics: Spaces of Possibility?” I am struck by the fact that working against memory, or, at least, “re-remembering,” collectively remembering in a different way, is a first act of establishing a space of possibility. This is the case in the many examples of alternative practices in the region, which I would be happy to discuss with you in the question and answer period. Representative of these in a highly dramatic way is a movement that Yifat Gutman is studying: an Israeli Jewish group that is working to remember, in Hebrew, the Nakba, the disaster, as the moment of Israeli independence is commemorated among Palestinians. As they describe themselves on their website: “Zochrot [“Remembering”] is a group of Israeli citizens working to raise awareness of the Nakba, the Palestinian catastrophe of 1948.” They go on to describe their goal: “We hope that by bringing the Nakba into Hebrew, the language spoken by the Jewish majority in Israel, we can make a qualitative change in the political discourse of this region. Acknowledging the past is the first step in taking responsibility for its consequences. This must include equal rights for all the peoples of this land, including the right of Palestinians to return to their homes.” Note how their project of coming together is pitted against memory. It is about remembering in a different way, re-remembering. It’s not a Jewish memory of the Jewish state, but a memory for an Israel for all its people.

The United States

“Re–remembering,” a notion Toni Morrison presented in her masterpiece, Beloved. She challenged the collective memory of slavery in America. When I read the book, it helped me to find my position on the ethical question of the relationship between poetry and atrocity, first opened by Adorno. I think Morrison revealed that necessity of poetry, the necessity of artistic imagination after horror. It makes an ethical political life possible.  More specifically for this presentation, Morrison has helped me understand how memory works, and how working against memory is so important. Her idea about re-remembering is exactly my point in this paper. So I will conclude with how what I have said thus far applies to the American experience, and specifically how it relates to the American dilemma, race in America.

We are living through extraordinary times in the United States, markedly more hopeful than our most recent past: a Presidential election campaign in which the likely victor will be either an African American or a woman. As I wrote these words, and as I now utter them, I am revealing the problems I wish to raise. Perhaps I should have said “an African American man or a white woman?” The former coupling, “African American or woman,” assumes the normality of the white man, the latter, “African American man or white woman,” seems to emphasize the masculinity of Obama and, it is my sense, especially, the whiteness of Clinton.  There is a dilemma here even revealed at the moment that the issue is raised. The politicians, the media and the public are struggling with the problem of memory and with the problem of forgetting. That is my point, and part of the struggle is to work not only on collective remembering, but also on collective forgetting, not only for, but also against memory.

How do we remember gender and racial injustices and also overcome them? This re- remembering, this for and also against memory involves tough work, work that occurs in and through interaction. When we remember the significance of race and gender, we are perpetuating their continued salience. But if we don’t pay attention, if we imagine that the significance of Obama’s and Clinton’s candidacies as being about two able people who “happen to be” a black and a woman, we don’t do any better. Clearly the moment that either of them becomes President will be of great significance beyond their personal qualities. I personally think that Clinton’s case is more complicated in that she is Bill’s wife, and for me less compelling (as many know about me). So let me discuss the issues involved more closely in the case of Obama and race.

(Written on January 23, 2008) Obama has faced a dilemma, he is running to be President of the United States, not the first black President. He needs to make appeals to the public that don’t draw attention first to race and our memories of what race means in America. His candidacy is reported in the press most often without reference to race. His opponents engage him in debate, also most often as if race were not central. All are working against memory, but it is not easy. Race matters in America and although acting as if it did not, does have situational effect, the effect does not last, because we remember.

After his surprising victory in Iowa, blacks came to realize that it just might be possible that white America might elect an African American, and started moving in his direction. Whites realized the same thing, and then suddenly the problem presented itself to the fore. It was collectively remembered. Nothing crassly racist, but Clinton, the former President, called the black candidate a kid. Clinton, the candidate, said odd things about the relationship between Martin Luther King Jr. and Lyndon Baynes Johnson. What these things meant, whether they were subtle attempts to use racial attitudes to diminish Obama’s legitimacy as a serious politician, is in the eyes of the partisan beholder, much debated in the media and by the public. In the rabid Obama camp that is my family, I (the author of The Cynical Society) am the only one that thinks that this may not have been an intentional political calculation.  I actually don’t know whom this helped, perhaps Obama in the short run in South Carolina, perhaps Clinton, in the long run, on Super Tuesday. But I am here not as a talking head, not as a race track handicapper.  Rather, I want to show how working against memory is an important part of political action — note how difficult it has been to work against the memory of race and racism in the campaign.

In South Carolina, the former President attacked the press, noting that his wife may lose this primary because of the African American vote and complaining that the press is being fed a line about the Clintons injecting race into the campaign. As the New York Times observed:

Mr. Clinton also suggested in public remarks that his wife might lose here because of race. Referring to her and Mr. Obama, he said, ‘They are getting votes, to be sure, because of their race or gender, and that’s why people tell me that Hillary doesn’t have a chance to win here.’

And a little further down in the same article:

Mr. Clinton said no one in the audience in Charleston had asked him about how race was being used in the campaign. ‘They [the Obama campaign] are feeding you [the press] this because they know this is what you want to cover,’ he said. ‘What you care about is this. And the Obama people know that. So they just spin you up on this and you happily go along.’

And after this, Clinton, Bill that is, made infamous comparisons between Jesse Jackson and Obama.

Yet, I still do not think that the Clintons are rabid racists, using the race card to prevail. And Obama is not a cunning advocate of black power. But as they compete in their little gestures and sound bites, in employing political tactics as usual, they reveal how race still matters, racism still exists, perhaps because, more likely it seems to me, despite, their own intentions. It matters as they appear, as they present themselves in a highly mediated social situation, and re-produce the collective memory of race in America. It is a memory worth fighting against.

To conclude with a general observation: there is power when people come together and speak and act in each other’s presence, developing a capacity to act in concert. How we manage to actually come together, recognizing each other as equals involves the difficult challenges of social interaction, working on a common definition of a situation, which often involves a re-definition. When the definition is drawn from the inherited collective memory, which is usually the case, (Erving Goffman structured his “frame analysis” around this), it is the dynamic force that constitutes memory, for better and for worse. Redefining in our actions makes re-remembering in creative ways a possibility. It makes it possible to overcome the looming repressive implications of memory. But this is a difficult political project that requires much more than Michnik’s beautiful formulation: “amnesty without amnesia,” whether this is on the European killing fields, in the lands of Israel and Palestine, or on the American campaign trail.

P.S. This project of re-remembering plays a key role in the re-invention of political culture, something which I developed in greater detail in my most recent book, Reinventing Political Culture: The Power of Culture versus the Culture of Power.

He never was a politician. He never wanted to be one. In this, he embodied the post-communist dream of an anti-political politics. Many, very many Czechs could not forgive him just that. When they put him at the Prague Castle, when they saw him in the legendary president T.G. Masaryk’s seat – they wanted him to play a statesman. And play he did, throughout his life he was a man of the theater. But he was a playwright, not an actor. As time went by, voices were heard that he is not fit for the position he holds. When people now say “he was an intellectual, a playwright, and a politician – in that order” it sounds more like a judgment than a description. Yet, little of that domestic criticism seemed to trickle through the borders of the Republic, and so the discrepancy between the international appreciation and the domestic disenchantment grew. Disenchantment is a good word. It was not Havel that changed. It was the Czechs who changed their expectations. He enchanted them with his charisma, his life-story and charm. And they (many of them) later did everything, to escape and deny that enchantment, as if they were ashamed of it. Inarguably, they owe him a lot. And so do the other nations in the region, because to our luck it was him and not any other former oppositionist that became the face of Central Europe in the early 1990s.

Havel appeared in Czechoslovakia’s public life in the 1960s as a writer – a young, avant-garde playwright. He was a declassed bourgeois, a descendant of a great Prague family. His grandfather – Vácslav Havel – was an architect, a leading representative of Czech modernism. His uncle Miloš established the famous film studios on the Barrandov hills. The father, Václav M. Havel, a friend of Masaryk’s, apart from building houses was also building institutions – the Czech Rotary and YMCA. If for the Czechoslovak Communist Party there ever was an archetype of a class enemy, it was him – the young blonde playwright, a frequent to the arty “Slavia” café. They wouldn’t allow him to study at the university; they expelled him from the economic school. However, already in 1963 the Theater on the Balustrade (Divadlo Na zábradlí), which would become one of his homes, staged his first play. And so, when he spoke out against censorship at the famous 4^th Meeting of the Czechoslovak Writers’ Union, which pushed the country towards the Prague Spring, he was already recognizable. When in 1968, he clashed with Milan Kundera on the issue of the “Czech fate” (the two writers would differ on many things since), he became an important figure of the country’s intellectual life. And he did not cease to be one even despite the repressions of the so called “normalization.” His open letter of 1975 to the party’s general secretary – “Dear Dr. Husák” – was an early symptom of the nascent Czechoslovak dissent – the morally anchored political opposition dedicated to the defense of human rights.

Although his works were not staged and disappeared from bookstores, the communist regime itself helped to preserve his popularity and public awareness. After the Charter 77 was published, Husák’s bureaucracy unleashed a campaign of hatred and slander known as the “Anti-Charter.” Soon afterwards, the public radio broadcast a piece entitled “Who is Václav Havel?” It is difficult to come up with an example of a worse shot-in-the-foot in the history of Eastern European communism. Those who had not yet heard of the Charter now were aware of it. Those who never heard of Havel, now knew, that he is an enemy of the system. For many that was the highest compliment and a certificate of credibility.

And so when along with other members of the Committee for the Defense of Unjustly Persecuted (VONS) he was sentenced to four and a half years, the defiant Czech bard Jaroslav Hutka dedicated him a ballad: “Havlíčku, Havle.” Playing on the proximity of the names, in the song Hutka replaced Havel with the 19^th century romantic Czech intellectual Karel Havlíček Borovský, who was banished and imprisoned by the Austrians, because his ideas about truth and law were too dangerous. The similarity of both figures was striking. Thus the domestic, Czechoslovak legend of Václav Havel was born.

Soon, however, it was outgrown by the international legend. In search for trans-border allies, the Workers Defense Committee (KOR) of Poland would seek to establish contacts with the Charter. Havel was symbolically put on the editorial board of the samizdat opinion periodical “Krytyka,” although back then he was still nearly anonymous for the Poles (his name – sometimes misspelled). The famous meeting of KOR and Charter representatives on a mountain trail at the Czechoslovak-Polish border in 1978 was a symbolic breakthrough. Rumor has it that Adam Michnik talked Havel into writing an essay, one that would later become internationally acclaimed as “The Power of the Powerless.” It is difficult to judge if that is true. If it is then (in no attempt to reduce the importance of his own writing), this would be Michnik’s greatest contribution to universal anti-totalitarian thought. For Havel, unlike Michnik or Jacek Kuroń, was always able to pinpoint a universal truth in an individual experience. Though he wrote about Czechoslovakia, he never wrote solely for Czechoslovakia. Perhaps it was his fantastic sense of drama that enabled him to see every issue, every conflict, and every choice from many angles. And most importantly – to find a way to very different audiences. “The Dissident” in Havel’s writing becomes a dramatis persona, which the reader observes and gets to understand. In the “Power of the Powerless” he was able to grasp the tragic condition of post totalitarian life, seemingly untranslatable for the Westerners, in the quasi-comic character of the greengrocer. In the same manner, he managed to build an intellectual bridge between Eastern European opposition and the Western peace movement in the extremely important, but somewhat forgotten essay “Anatomy of a Reticence.”

While his essays benefited from an uncommon profoundness because of their dramatization, Havel’s plays became more political, and thus unfortunately flatter. Timothy Garton Ash, the most important constructor of the Czechoslovak dissident-playwright international legend, made a note of that already in the mid-80s. It was the essays, as well as the incredible, thrilling and multidimensional collection of prison letters to his first wife, Olga, that secured a place for Havel in the global intellectual pantheon.

When in November of 1989 the citizens of Prague took to the streets to chant down the dictatorship, to jingle it down with thousands of key-rings, Havel naturally appeared at the head of the movement (the Civic Forum). And when the time came to chant for a new leader to the Prague Castle, the hundred-thousand-strong crowd in unison chose the playwright, whose plays were not seen in Czechoslovakia for twenty years, whose name was supposed to be erased from popular consciousness. “Havel to the Castle – Havel na Hrad!”

This is where a new chapter of the fairy tale begins, about the everyman Vašek, who became king (partly) against his will. Although already in the 1980s he was a western media darling, after he took office a true “Havelmania” erupted. Havel enchanted the world, led Czechoslovakia (later only the Czech Republic) and the whole region “back to Europe,” and singlehandedly built the image of stability and political culture of Central Europe (a concept that was close to his heart). Let us be frank. The fact that three Central European states joined NATO in 1999 and that the European Union let eight formerly communist countries join in 2004 was partly his accomplishment. This first political move, however, became something that many fellow-dissidents could not forgive him. When he assumed office, he wanted to play according to dissident rules, conduct diplomacy based on human rights, morality and truth. The turning point was probably the Bosnian War and the growing domestic tension in his homeland, inevitably sliding towards a divorce (back then it was not yet certain how “velvet” it would be). Havel bet on security, he bet on America. He believed that for certain higher values, such as freedom and human rights, it is worth to fight for – even armed. That is why he supported the bombing of Serbia, the war in Afghanistan and the invasion of Iraq. It would not be wise, however, to hold this against him. A majority of the former Eastern European oppositionists trotted down that path. But outside the mainstream, the anger and disappointment grew.

As a president, he never ceased being a dissident and an intellectual. He didn’t feel well in a world, where the motto “truth shall prevail” was at times only a sticker on a jar of filth. He quickly made enemies at home, in the Czech Republic. The greatest was probably the current president Klaus, whose entire political career is basically cast around the struggle with Havel and his ghost. Watching the thousands of mourners on Venceslas Square, the thousands of mourners accompanying Havel’s coffin back to the Castle, I guess now his ghost will be more powerful than ever. Even despite the fact that since he left office his political power declined further and further (in 2010 he gave a moral blessing of publicity to the Green Party, which didn’t even make it past the electoral threshold to parliament).

His 75^th birthday in October this year was a kind of festival of nastiness big and small. Many of them even below the region’s press culture average. The most pathetic of titles to my taste was “75 women for the 75^th anniversary”. Havel the womanizer. A very often heard allegation, all the more bizarre that we are talking of a not very prude country. The other allegation was that he drank too much – and that he didn’t treat himself seriously enough. Instead of a king, an artist on the throne – Rex Bohemiae in both meanings. Not a philosopher, not yet a jester – a writer.

Where did this popular antipathy come from? It is easiest to blame the “dissident complex.” Only a few hundred people signed the Charter 77. A few more took part actively in various forms of opposition, which in Czechoslovakia was much riskier than in the neighboring Poland. The dissidents’ legend, with their undeniable civil (and human) courage and a demanding, grandiose, almost highfalutin rhetoric of “living in truth” (Havel and Václav Benda built it on the foundation of the philosophy of Patočka, the Charter’s intellectual godfather) – all this was tiresome and even irritating for the “silent majority.” The antipathy was enhanced by the almost limitless international praise for the president, speaking in his serious, low voice with a characteristic “ahr.” And so the attacks were sometimes cruel and pathetic. “He plays such a smartass, and he cheated on his wife” or “just buried the first one, and now he gets another, younger one.”

All this is history now. Havel described a pessimistic vision of his own descent into oblivion in his last play – “Leaving.” Reality will be, however, different from the theater, because Havel was a man of a totally different format than the self-ironically diminished Chancellor Rieger. With the passing of Václav Havel closes an extraordinarily important chapter (or better – act) in the history or Central Europe. A “Dissident” with a capital “D” – a man for whose sake that word itself changed its meaning – is leaving the stage. His essays, although written under the post-totalitarian condition, show the way for individual’s actions in the face of the state and any other dehumanized system, in relation to certain immovable moral truths. A standing ovation, though with a heavy heart. The curtain falls.

The text first appeared in the Polish internet weekly  Kultura Liberalna on Monday, December 19^th.

For most of this week, we have been exploring the relationship between art and politics, a topic with which I have been deeply involved, both personally and professionally. We started with a discussion of political censorship. We debated the distinction between art and propaganda. And we explored how aesthetic interpretation supports hope. The power and limits of art were debated. Memory, unexpectedly, at least for me, was central in the discussion. I turned to the reflections of a novelist, Milan Kundera, on the obligation of the artist in my post exploring the special quality of art as opposed to propaganda. And now I turn to Kundera again in confronting memory, a problem that also appeared in Benoit Challand’s post on a discussion between his New York students and colleagues in Gaza City.

Kundera opens his novel, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting with a depiction of an impressive event. He tells the story of the Communist leader, Klement Gottwald, giving a speech in February, 1948, to an audience of hundreds of thousands. It was cold and the snow was falling heavily. Next to Gottwald was Clementis. Gottwald was without a hat. “Bursting with solicitude, Clementis took off his fur hat and set it on Gottwald’s head.” The propaganda department took a photo of the historic event, of the Party leader addressing the masses, marking the beginning of “Communist Bohemia.” “Every child knew the photograph, from seeing it on posters, and in schoolbooks and museums.” Four years later, Clementis was charged with treason and hanged. The propaganda section purged him from all history. He was airbrushed out of the photo. “Ever since, Gottwald has been alone on the balcony. Where Clementis stood, there is only a balcony. Where Clementis stood, there is only the bare palace wall. Nothing remains of Clementis but the hat on Gottwald’s head.”

In presenting this event, Kundera sets the theme of his book: systematic forgetting, amusingly depicted. Note that in Kundera’s story what is remembered is determined by the needs of the present. This is the position of Maurice Halbwachs, the sociologist who presented the classical sociological position on collective memory. But the past resists manipulation in surprising ways, something that particularly interested the great critical theorist, Walter Benjamin. Yet, in Kundera’s account, these are not just two general tendencies. Under totalitarian conditions “The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.”

This struggle is at work in the case of Judy Taylor’s labor mural, as we were able to consider it in the post by Vince Carducci, which was supplemented by photos of the work provided by the artist. Governor Paul LePage wielding his official powers, extending the unofficial power of the tea party, removed a memorial mural commissioned to remember highlights in Maine labor history. This is enforced forgetting, at one with the anti-union policies around the country today. Not only are specific labor unions under attack, there is an attempt to erase the memory of union struggles.

Yet, this controversy, from a sociological point of view, is complicated by the fact that every act of collective remembering involves forgetting as well. We pay attention to the moments in labor history that Taylor, with the assistance of a labor historian, chooses to depict, but we forget others that could have been portrayed. Michael Corey with local knowledge reminds us of this. There is a point of view in the work. It emphasizes labor management struggles and not cooperation. Other events point to a different story. The mural is a work that remembers and forgets. But, I wouldn’t call this propaganda, as Vince Carducci does, although I understand why he chooses to do so. The work illuminates from a position.

I am, though, more concerned with the special kind of forgetting and distortion as imagined by Kundera, suggesting that there aren’t just two political positions, each with its propaganda. LePage’s actions could have appeared in Kundera’s novel. It involves not just the human condition, as we remember some things, we forget others. But a more tyrannical condition, where forgetting is a force against memory, connected to a political project.

Art, unlike propaganda, is subtle and how it remembers and makes it possible for us to see things has more to do with metaphor and illumination than with facts. Thus, the story that Kundera tells in his novel, the fate of Clementis’s hat, is a work of imagination, though it is true as such.

Bridges are not novels. But when they are built in ways that don’t just get us from here to there (I think of bridges such as the Kosciusko Bridge in New York), they also tell stories, or at least they inspire us to tell stories. In a modest way, a few weeks ago in the wake of the Japanese catastrophes, two bridges on the old Rockefeller estate told stories to me, which I conveyed to you. More profoundly, Ivo Andric’s The Bridge on the Drina, told a story of hope which Elzbieta Matynia considered in her post this week. Althue Serre mistook artistic expression and imagination for a factual report, and in the process, dismissed the theoretical insight that art provides. He misses the vital link between memory and imagination.

How we remember as much as what we remember matters, in works of art and in everyday interactions.  When we talk to each other across political and cultural divides, we see things that we otherwise wouldn’t see. Benoit Challand’s class learned more profoundly about the political struggles in North Africa and the Middle East, by speaking to a group of Palestinians in Gaza. They heard first hand reports of a demonstration and its repression by those who were involved, or at least by those who were much more closely connected to the movement. In their conversation, the New Yorkers saw things that have been invisible to consumers of the mass media, including our great hometown paper (I say this with no irony intended), The New York Times. Those who took part in the discussion will not forget what those who observe Palestine through the media cannot even know.

“The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” But it’s complicated.

While Vince Carducci and I see the relationship between art and politics differently, we share a common judgment that art, or as Herbert Marcuse described it, “the aesthetic dimension,” provides an important way to think about and do politics in an informed fashion. Today I respond to Carducci. Tomorrow, I will post the third in a series on art and politics: the reflections by Elzbieta Matynia on how an aesthetic work, in this case the architectural form of a bridge, informs politics. -Jeff

Reading Carducci’s latest post, on the removal of Judy Taylor’s mural, “The History of Maine Labor,” from the state’s Department of Labor building, and his earlier posts on the art of John Ganis’s photography,  and his posts on the politically engaged art world in Detroit,  “The Art of Dead Labor,” and “Detroit and the Art of the Commons” brought to mind a remark by Milan Kundera and the artistic masterpiece situated at the New School, Jose Clemente Orozco’s A Call for Revolution and Universal Brotherhood.

Kundera expressed, compactly and vividly, his understanding of the art in the novel and all other artistic forms in his book The Art of the Novel: “The novelist needs to answer to no one but Cervantes.” The primary responsibility of the artist is to address the questions raised by those who precede her or him, to develop the artistic form, as many other issues along the way come up. Such issues may be addressed, including political ones, but the first obligation is to address the formal challenges of one’s predecessors. Ironically, Milan Kundera, this most anti-political interpreters of art, is a political novelist despite himself, author of such key politically significant works as The Joke, The Book on Laughter and Forgetting, and The Unbearable Lightness of Being. He witnessed the absurdity of the previously existing socialist societies, as he developed his ironic form with Cervantes on his mind. He and other artists from that part of the world didn’t ignore political issues, but in order to actually be an artist, form mattered – real art versus the art of officialdom, socialist realism. As I put it in my forthcoming book, Reinventing Political Culture, this involved the power of culture opposing the culture of power. In the relationship between art and politics, form is where the critical action is.

In Kundera’s understanding, Cervantes did not only invent the form of the novel in Don Quixote, he invented the modern. All novelists, all moderns in fact, have to address the questions that were first raised in this masterwork, either directly or indirectly through intermediaries, more recent artists and novelists. I believe such insight is crucial in trying to understand the relationship between art and politics in general and in specific cases of political controversy surrounding art. And this is so for great as well as lesser works.

Taylor’s mural is not propaganda, although it does favorably depict the heroic struggle of the labor movement. The mural does not have to be fair and balanced in its portrayal of unions and management. Rather, the artistic form honors. It was commissioned to do this work, and it does so. Governor Paul LePage ordered the removal of the murals from the Labor Department building after receiving an anonymous fax declaring that it was reminiscent of “communist North Korea where they use these murals to brainwash the masses.” I know socialist realism. I studied its aesthetic in the Soviet bloc. It was a politically mandated work, tied to a totalitarian power. I know this propaganda form, and Taylor’s work is not socialist realism. It is rather a gentle realism, like her paintings of the Maine coast. The work doesn’t trouble. It doesn’t agitate. Agitation is in the eyes of the tendentious viewer – in this case a Tea Party Governor and his anonymous fax sender.

Orozco’s frescoes present much tougher material. The work is a part of a larger artistic movement, of Orozco and the other great Mexican muralists, Diego Rivera and David Alfaro Siqueiros at the summit of the movement. These were broadly recognized masters of a popular artistic form. They served the Mexican Revolution, as they imagined and created an art audience which included the previously excluded. They also developed a distinctive art form, committed to a democratic polity, indentifying it with artistic innovation and insight. The New School Orozco expresses the artist’s progressive view of history with an odd mixture of mysticism. Heroes of the twentieth century are portrayed, some who came to be seen as villains, i.e. Lenin and Stalin. This turned controversial, but unlike the Rivera commissioned for Rockefeller Center, demolished for its offensive political content, previewing Governor LePage’s move, the work wasn’t destroyed. Rather, to the New School’s later shame, the offending images were covered with a cloth during the McCarthy era.

One mural depicts the promise of science and industry, another, the warmth of the home. The center piece, “Table of Universal Brotherhood,” presents a generic multiracial, multicultural group of men around a table, with a book. The other two murals present the sweep of history, the struggles of the Orient, the struggles of the Occident. Some Orozco scholars consider the work a formal failure: the artist experimenting with techniques which he later abandoned. Others note that it marked his last moment of revolutionary hope, followed by more brooding pessimism. For me, the continuing success of the work occurs when people enter the Orozco room.  They look around and if they have a moment, deliberate consideration comes naturally. It is a place where serious discussions occur when people take note, often interfering with a meeting’s formal agenda. It presents a living artistic challenge.

I had the honor to work with the New School curators, Silvia Rocciolo and Eric Stark, on an exhibit which highlighted this, Reimagining Orozco. The exhibit combined serious discussion about the work itself and the questions it raises, with artistic development inspired by the work, including an exhibition of the drawings of a featured artist, Enrique Chagoya. Chagoya answered the formal and political questions posed by Orozco and this facilitated a community discussion about the problems of times past and our times. The aesthetic dimension opened a public space.

It is the same aesthetic dimension which reveals in the removal of Taylor’s mural the Tea Party foolishness in Maine.