Re-Envisioning Solidarity: History, Agency, and the Politics of Performance

This essay examines the cultural work performed by Lech Wałȩsa's outdoor extravaganza that was staged in a rural area near Kraków on 14 May 1989, at a liminal moment between the waning of communist rule and the rise of a democratic polity in Poland. By "cultural work" is meant the ways in which performance functions not only as a mode of public (self-)presentation, but also as a venue through which performers can attempt to intervene in the historically contingent processes of constituting the value and belief systems of their culture. In this analysis, Wałȩsa's extravaganza serves as a cultural fragment (in Walter Benjamin's sense), chosen because its rhetorical and performative strategies are particularly revealing of underlying ideological tendencies and tensions at a critical (and much mythologized) point in postwar Polish history. This essay proposes to develop a conceptual framework that would neither confine the extravaganza within the cultural phenomenon known nowadays as "living history" nor classify it under the rubric of "performance of historical memory." It is argued that while this event was engaged in a negotiation with cultural memory, the negotiation itself was a polemic with, rather than a reconstruction or a reaffirmation of, cultural memory through performance. The extravaganza was, in fact, a manifesto—no less than a gauntlet thrown down.