Freedom and censorship in the post-truth era

ANNA ŁAZAR: We are meeting on the day when Europeans are voting for their representatives to the European Parliament to talk about freedom and censorship in the post-truth era. While the former two concepts, truth and censorship, have long been used, the term post-truth became most popular in 2016 as something that accompanies the rapidly growing acceptance of populism in the public sphere. Ralph Keyes, in his well-known 2004 book titled The Post-Truth Era. Dishonesty and Deception in Contemporary Life states that post-truth emerged from the emotions of the post-war generation of Americans who collectively recognised that their emotional truth and willingness to be associated with certain events are more important than facts. The book shows that half-truths and modified interpretations of events are a common practice. Today we are in the process of shaping a new global order and that is why we should be very careful in regards to everything that this concept encompasses.

The success of post-truth is not only a result of technological progress or our emotional hunger, which has emerged as a reaction to the deepening atomisation. Neither is it a response to our need to be a part of a community. It is also to be found in the weakening of the previous institutional ways of reacting which were regulating public debate in Europe, and Poland as well. Culture is one area where experimentation has always present. Here, artists break taboos and try to see humanity as it really is. The autonomy of culture has always been the subject of negotiations. However, now the need to defend seems even greater than before. In our country this is especially true in regards to the activities of the ministry of culture and the attempts to take away freedom from both the artists and the institutions. Freedom is never granted indeed; people need to reach for it on their own. 

EDWIN BENDYK: Let me start with a more personal experience and then I will move to the topic of post-truth, which leads to the questions about the future and the relationship between the institutionalised world of culture and the world which is emerging with the development of new technologies, which change the functioning of both culture and the communication process. The early days of the political career of Poland’s current minister of culture overlapped with the premiere of the play based on Elfriede Jelinek, stories from the collection titled Death and the Maiden which were directed by Ewelina Marciniak and staged in Teatr Polski in Wrocław. The artistic provocation was to take the play outside the stage. The key element in this regard was an invitation of porn actors from the Czech Republic to take part in the play, something the minister of culture was against saying that he would not support pornography in a cultural institution. He also called the marshal of the Lower Silesia Voivodship, which is an autonomous unit in the administrative division of our state and thus not subordinate to any minister, to ban play. The public morality was also defended by a nationalistic activist, a former Catholic priest, Jacek Mędlar who together with his supporters were blocking access to the theatre. But the question is: What really took place on the stage? Those of us who saw the play did not know whether the thing that was the subject of the dispute, that is the sexual act, really took place. There were strobe-lighting effects, the porn actors and… nobody knows. In the last TV programme titled “The Departure Lounge” which was anchored by Katarzyna Janowska, a journalist who after the programme lost her job with the Polish TV, we asked the director of the play, Ewa Marciniak, whether the sexual act really took place on the stage. The director said she did not know. All actors followed the script, but the porn actors were given full freedom and apart from them nobody knew what happened. We left the studio with a sense of a somewhat disturbed perception of reality. 

This story added an additional dimension to the fact that a minister cannot yet say: I will not give money for this or that. The minister is not a person who distributes public money, but an office which works within a legal framework. It is the law that determines how money is distributed to public institutions and what a public institution, which is an autonomous body, can do. Yet this is how the minister started his first term and continued it by using the brutal techniques of economic censorship: he withdrew the subsidy to the Dialog Festival, the Malta Festival and those who wanted to invite Olivier Frljić, the director of The Curse a play that was very critical of the Catholic Church and its role in Poland. Frljić’s name was put on a “blacklist” which is a mechanism known from the communist times and which indicate an informal ban to co-operate with a person whom the authorities wanted to punish in this way. Practically, it meant cutting off state subsidies to events with blacklisted theatres, authors or directors. Thus, we can say that traditional censorship has returned. The lack of legal justification for such activities has been already confirmed by the Polish courts. The Poznań Malta Festival, which also lost its subsidy from the state, won the case in court which ruled that they should receive their money together with the interest rate. 

What I am more worried about is not that much the issue of censorship, however the determined authorities are ready to use it, but what takes place in the area of communication; namely the media. What I have in mind here is the application of hybrid war techniques to the Polish society, which was quite visible during this year’s teachers strike. Using the media for warfare is an element of interstate relations at a time of conflict. However, when disinformation techniques are applied towards a society, we become powerless. An uncontrollable flow of communication on Facebook takes place because that is what we want. However, this platform is also subject to manipulation by external agents and provides space for disinformation to foreign powers in their cyber-war activities. In Poland you can clearly see Russia’s influences. 

The problem is more serious than our individual tendency, or lack thereof, to regard truth as an important category. The earlier mentioned definition of post-truth states that a correspondence between statements and facts is no longer of importance and the only truth that matters is the emotional truth. The latter is something we can associate with and something we feel good about. This trend is not a result of our personal experiences but of the development of new media, especially Facebook. 

Facebook and Google are gathering large amounts of information about their users as they are constantly learning from our online activities, increasing the potential of their internal rationality. These are for sure logical and rationally-thinking machines. When it comes to Facebook, we have still not reached what Jurgen Habermas called “communicative rationality”, that is the reaching of truth as a result of communication. Social media, instead, are profit-generating machines whose logic is based on financial gains and accumulation of capital. As a result, they are maximalising online activities to meet our psychological needs, and not those that are result from the political process or the functioning of democracy. Thus, we no longer need to force ourselves to a rational dialogue, as it is the machines that tell us what best meets our needs. We stop thinking as we are given ready clues with whom to interact to avoid cognitive dissonance. This is the new price. 

ALEX FREIHEIT: As a duet called Siksa, we do not have much experience with censorship because we operate in the independent sphere of art. We are outside the mainstream. Thus, when, for example, we give a punk concert in Belarus, we simply disappear right after it, as if there was no concert at all and as if we came to just visit our friends there. We operate outside institutions and we have chosen an independent form. However, there is also something which we call people-censors. We encounter them at our concerts when they approach me and try to take my microphone away after they had heard what I said about violence. This happened, for example, in Teatr Polski in Poznań. The form which we chose for Siksa is very much our own. It is solely vocals and bass. In the centre there is a teenager experiencing puberty, but on her own terms. Neither me, nor Siksa will sing so beautifully to be on the radio. It would not be me/Siksa anymore. But because we are not played on the radio, we have no experience with censorship. 

There are times, however, when we are our own censors. We come from Gniezno, which is a medium-size town. We live and work there as culture organisers. In Gniezno we have an independent outdoor community centre. Yet, it is not entirely independent because it receives money from the city and the National Culture Centre. It is called Latarnia na Wenei (Lighthouse at Weneja). Nonetheless, we made a decision not to do anything that is related to Siksa in Gniezno, with the exception of children’s songs. We make no concerts, no shows, no meetings promoting our book titled Natalia ist sex. Alex ist Freiheit.

We don’t have much experience with censorship as we do with threats. When I worked for the Museum of the Beginnings of the Polish State in Gniezno, my work phone number was published on the website and I was receiving telephone threats. People were coming to our concerts to provoke. This may have happened only a few times, but it did happen. The people who came to the concert thought that this disturbance was an element of our performance and nobody reacted when somebody tried to hit me. The conventionality of performances can be a difficult thing. When we receive an invitation from a cultural institution, we want to make sure that this institution knows who we are as we do not want to cause any problems. We made a conscious decision to opt for non-mainstream believing that we have the energy and strength for that. There are also wonderful people who tackle in the mainstream the same problems we do.

ANNA ŁAZAR: People often confuse your artistic identity, Alex, with a human being. Your pointing here to the separation between who you are on the stage and in everyday life. 

WOJCIECH LEMAŃSKI: What I will say may sound doctrine-like, but I want to remind one simple rule: my freedom ends where the freedom of another human being begins. We have tamed this rule and do not notice that along the way its modification has started to emerge in our space. Your freedom ends where I mark the border of mine. When I say “my freedom” I am personalising the church to which I belong. This church, however, when it talks about hurting somebody’s religious feelings marks the border not for itself, but for others – usually those who would like to make use of their freedom. This church does it in a very rigorist and aggressive way, using administrative bans and demanding criminal liability not only from some specific persons but whole institutions. It seems to me that those of us who associate themselves with the church, have their part in this change. Some part of the responsibility rests on us as well. Somebody in our name, without our objection, has marked the border of their, meaning institutional, freedom. Before the borders were marked by church doctrine and those who were deciding on being members of this institution, this community, was, in fact, accepting these borders. They were saying: yes, I am a free man, a free Christian, but these are the borders that I do not cross. In the meantime, in our quite homogenous Polish society, we have had developed some elements of freedom that do not fit within these borders. For some people this was surprising, for others provocative, and for others inspiring. Yet there were also some to whom they seemed shameful and thus required introducing some limitations, or a guardian such as the minister of culture who would be marking the borders of freedom for those who would like to express their freedom. I am presenting a perspective of a person who is not cutting off from the church, who reminds others the basic and fundamental teaching which is to be found in the Gospel, the meaning of life and teaching of Jesus Christ. This teaching, however, has little to do with marking borders. It is rather aimed at crossing them and reaching out while accepting other people’s freedom. That is why it seems to me that even people who are deeply integrated with the church are not doomed to this form of freedom limitation and censorship that we are witnessing right now or participating in today in Poland. This however, requires a deeper reflection from all of us and possibly calls for our discontent. 

ANNA ŁAZAR: That means that being part of a community does not automatically mean that we agree to censorship, but it rather increases our responsibility and criticism. 

ANDA ROTTENBERG: Without a doubt censorship is an important phenomenon. There is always somebody who marks the borders of our freedom and represses those who cross them. This is usually related with the intention to protect the right of a certain group which convinces the majority that turning some issues into taboos lies in everybody’s interests and usually gets the intuitive consent of the society to define which topics are taboo. I am not talking about taboos that characterise tribal life, from which we took the name. The area of banned concepts is usually manipulated by people who choose the criteria that fit them. Censorship was not invented in our century, nor in Poland. This is a mechanism that has been operating for many centuries now, just to remind you that even Socrates was supposed to drink the poison hemlock for corrupting the minds of the youth. During the Inquisition people could lose their lives for alleged heresy, there were indices of banned books, but these bans were limited to the territory of the authority of specific religions and denominations. What was banned by the Catholic Church could be published on Protestant-controlled territories. 

Everything remains relative as long as it does not breach the Ten Commandments (the Decalogue), which – all in all – was written for all people. When it comes to the Decalogue, there is a certain collective consensus that if somebody breaches it, this person commits a crime, and the problem that Alex Freiheit was talking about emerges. People start to feel a need to cry out what agonises them and at the same time an arbitrary decision is made stating that one should not talk loud about the problems, nor shout about them, because this is unpleasant. In addition there are obscenities used. A ban gets instituted, which is a result of a wide acceptance of the idea of a common good, even when somebody disturbs this good and later defends this disturbance with censorship. 

Under communism there was a codified system of preventive censorship. In other words, everybody knew what not to write. It was not nice, but at least it was clear who the censor was. In Poland censors were the people with the best knowledge of the life in culture. Censorship has yet ended with the system collapse. Now we have democracy written into our constitution and yet there is an increasing number of gestures that are made in the name of protecting the society against some kind of evil, in the name of some higher ideals, which are personally shared by the minister or a director of a museum. Thus, it is not only the church that has the reputation of being a censor as for example my exhibit was censored by the director of the National Gallery in Berlin. He did it not to hurt the feelings of the Jewish community in Berlin. Artur Żmijewski, whose work was censored then, said that it was very interesting that Germans who had built concentration camps on Poland’s territory and were murdering the Jews, were now telling us what art we should have in this regard. I moved this topic to the German context on purpose. By doing it, I wanted to show that such arbitrary – and actually illegal – censorship is not limited to Poland. It exists also in Russia, France and every denomination. Take the bloody reaction to those who were accused of presenting blasphemous pictures of the Mohamed – as was the case with Charile Hebdo. In Poland it may also not end with the protests in front of the museums or theatres and toxic substances or physical fights might also take place. I lost my job at Zachęta Gallery after many people felt offended in their religious views by an epoxy sculpture…

ANNA ŁAZAR: The sculpture titled “La nona ora”, authored by Mauricio Catelana, presents Pope John Paul the Second knocked over by an errant meteorite. In 2000 this sculpture was showed to Polish public at Zachęta gallery in Warsaw. 

ANDA ROTTENBERG: Here a classical association mechanism was used. The same one that is applied to actors who are assigned the same role in real life as they play on the stage or on the screen. The same is true for the sculptures and man-made figures which are identified with a real person whom they are meant to represent. Such associations, which are common at a certain level, legitimise the right to ban an exposition or pre-empt an artistic gesture for the sake of protecting the public against an imaginary scandal which was also the motivation of the director of the National Museum in Warsaw when he took down the famous work of Natalia LL, portraying a young woman eating a banana. The director explained the motivation for censorship with a letter he received from a young boy who wrote to him about his discomfort after seeing the art work. Grzegorz Gaudenwrote a book titled Lviv. The End of Illusion. A Story of the 1918 November Pogrom. It is based on materials from the Lviv archives which document its first day of freedom when the city was entered by the Polish army, and especially the Haller division. In the text we yet read that the first day of Lviv’s freedom actually started with the pogrom of Jews. Gauden admits that for him, a Pole, this is very painful. He added, referring to our romantic tradition, that Tadeusz Soplica murdered Jankiel. This does not mean that today’s narrative about independence will be changed, but that there will be new interpretations of it. However, before this happens I can imagine numerous polemics, acts of resistance, denial. The world of art is symbolic in nature. A public discussion that surrounds literary works or historical books which reveal some serious crimes shows that as a nation we are not a monolith. 

TOMASZ SIKORA: For me culture is an area of a permanent clash. Pierre Bourdieu’s theory on symbolic violence teaches us that objects can force their perspective on us. Those who are in power – politicians and institutions which represent certain ideologies, force their view of culture on people. As an artist, a musician, but also an organiser, I constantly face some kind of struggle in this area. When it is a minister who publicly censors something it is quite simple. As artists we can fight with a clear gesture against the violence we want to oppose. Things are different when gestures are invisible or very small but which nonetheless constitute symbolic violence and which can be found also among liberal politicians.

In large Polish cities, such as Wrocław, Warsaw or Łódź, there are culture departments that work very well. But when you look at them more closely you also see that there are many things there that limit culture. For example, we organise the Wrocław-Ukraine Festival and invite artists from Ukraine to show the art that we can do together. We invite music bands, actors with their performances and Ukrainian artists who received the Gaude Polonia scholarship. With them we wanted to organise a Polish-Ukrainian picnic at the Słodowa Island in Wrocław. Yet we were advised against it as apparently it was too dangerous. When we asked why it was dangerous to organise such a picnic and mentioned that the Ukrainians were planning to have their own picnic in the centre of the city, we were told that the nationalists will come and attack us. This is not paranoia but rather giving space to some presumed aggressors. It is better not to do anything, hide or go to the basement with something that the nationalists would not like. In Wrocław there are 100,000 Ukrainians, the same is in Kraków, and such are the reactions of the so-called liberal city authorities? We can criticise the current government for its policies towards Ukraine and the decisions that influence Ukrainian emigration and at the same time allow for such gestures? If one of us started working for the city authorities, maybe we would behave in a similar way? We don’t know. People who are in power should not be opting for comfort but represent the citizens and ensure that their decisions have a social dimension. 

Referring to the words of Edwin Bendyk about the hybrid war against the society, I wonder what will happen next. Whoever will come to power, what will they do with this tempting instrument? Wouldn’t the information war against the society contribute to the instrumentalisation of power, no matter who holds it? When I travel to Ukraine I can see wide areas of Russian influence which can be transferred to other areas in the world. I assume that many people know which websites not to read and that they are full of fake news and that they recognise the scale of this phenomenon. I assume that people also know that we get trapped in our internet bubbles, which in fact create our reality. We know what the consequences of the last Maidan in Kyiv.

In Wrocław we hold a series of Polish-Ukrainian talks where an author from Ukraine converses with an author from Poland. The first pair that we invited were: Yuri Andrukhovych and Olga Tokarczuk, then Serhiy Zhadan and Dorota Masłowska, Roman Kabachyi and Ziemowit Szczerek. Characteristically, during these discussions each of the Ukrainian guests stressed this need to seek freedom. They make these statements at the time when their freedom is threatened by Russia. We may not be experiencing this in Poland, as reality is very different if the frontline is not that close or the threat is not direct. 

JOANNA WICHOWSKA: I have a feeling that my personal artistic experience when working with the earlier mentioned The Curse I could refer to everything that was said here. Many of the topics discussed directly touch upon what took place after the premiere and what is still going on in regards to this play, the ways of our work and what we wanted to achieve talking about the Catholic Church in Poland. 

The premier of The Curse took place over two years ago, but its echo remains. The prosecutor is still conducting the investigation based on article 196 of the Polish Criminal Code which allows an accusation for offending religious feelings. Right after the premiere there was a massive attack on the Wrocław theatre, its actors, director of the play and the theatre director. This attack was the work of the clergy, some politicians, right-wing media and neo-fascist organisations. The theatre was besieged, the neo-fascists were throwing firecrackers and spilled acid in the foyer. The actors were attacked while the viewers were entering and leaving the facility with police escorts. I think we can describe this experience as traumatic. In all this, the theatre showed perfect demeanour: it did not succumb to pressure and did not apply censorship.

Oliver Frljić always works with institutions. I understand Alex who talked about avoiding mainstream and being careful while dealing with institutions, but I also think that we have public institutions so that the voices of the minorities are heard in them, also those that are considered controversial and provocative. Of course, in such cases the institutions are at risk of being accused of spending taxpayers’ money on some crazy stuff, but I am also a taxpayer and I willingly agree to spending my tax money on The Curse or Siksa performance. It is important that such art enters public institutions to check to what extent they can defend democratic principles. 

The Curse worked a bit like a catalyst and unveiled a serious social illness. Frljić, no matter where he works, always looks for collective wounds, puts his finger on them, working on a social taboo. In Poland the relationship between the society, politics and the church is such a wound and a taboo as well as the immense power of the church which is present on many different levels and which we, as the society, support and maintain. Our social illness lies in the fact that we have internalised the mechanisms of this power so deeply that we no longer notice it.

With Frljić we experienced censorship even earlier – during the work on Krasiński’s Undivine Comedy which was staged at the National Theatre in Kraków – when Jan Klata was its director. We touched on the topic of the Holocaust and the responsibility of the Poles for what happened to the Jews in Poland. Undivine Comedy is – as Polish literary specialist, Maria Janion, states it – a founding text of Polish antisemitism. It has been taught, without much criticism, in schools and has contributed to the raising of generations of Poles. It is rare that we ask a question what kind of hatred is accepted and positively presented in this text. Klata cancelled the play ten days before the premiere. This was a blatant act of censorship, not by a minister, not by the state, but a man who wields power on the level that is close to us. A person who, as director of the theatre, takes responsibility for the institution and artistic freedom. With the return of the mechanisms that we call self-censorship, we can change the whole area of culture. If we have internalised the bans and orders to such an extent that we lose our moral compass, which tells us that there are certain things that we cannot agree to, it means that we are awaiting death. 

ANNA ŁAZAR: To sum up uncompromising art should enter public institutions to check how they defend freedom, pay attention to the mechanisms of power, which we – in the end – wield and not somebody applies towards us. Serhiy Zhadan you just heard so much about the Polish problems…

SERHIY ZHADAN: In Ukraine we talk about freedom and censorship not only in the context of post-truth but – first of all – the hybrid war. We cannot ignore the context of the open military conflict which is taking place in eastern parts of our country. In this regards I would like to share three theses with you. 

First, as a Ukrainian writer who is operating in independent Ukraine, I can say that Ukraine has never had systemic, real state censorship in the area of culture. This is true even though majority of our presidents are perceived as dictators. This may be very strange and says something not that much about the dictators, but about culture as such. Of course, this was also because of the culture’s marginal position that it was not an object of interest of the state machine. It is also obvious that things in this regard have changed during the last five years of the military conflict with Russia. My second thesis that I would like to share is that I think a part of the Ukrainian society will not agree with my first thesis, namely the lack of censorship because starting in 2014 Ukraine limited the Russian cultural and information products on its territory. Some Ukrainians treat it as state censorship. This is for sure not a simple conflict but a very delicate and extremely sensitive issue. On the one hand, we are all talking about freedom, European choice, but – on the other hand – we have a very decisive information policy of the state which is aimed at defending our information space. The lack of clearness on this issue creates a large room for manipulation. 

The third thesis is that the five years of the war has led to a situation where social censorship has emerged in Ukraine. It was born on the Maidan where the society took upon itself the responsibility of the state. As a result, people would interrupt a concert of an artist who performed in the occupied Crimea or a speech at the international book fair of a Russian writer who is a Kremlin propagandist. Such activities go beyond the area of culture and enter politics. Consequently, we are seeing, on the one hand, a huge impulse of the society which wants to organise itself, but – on the other hand, a danger because the purpose of artistic gestures is determined by the ideology and allows some political calculations and manipulations. Thus, we have a record of social discontent and attacks on artistic activities driven by ideology and politics. It is understandable that all these cases generate highly emotional commentaries. When social problems, related to history or the church, are not discussed, but shouted out, we have separate monologues instead of a dialogue. We can agree that freedom and responsibility go together. I understand that in the post-truth reality, which we are talking about here, this phrase can be treated in two ways. In any conflict each side has its own image of freedom and responsibility. For some people, stopping a play or an exhibit which in his/her view offends national dignity is a sign of responsibility. These are very difficult and strange times when culture and art leave their niches and become an active part of our lives. This is not always very nice, or in accordance with the law, but it usually shows us, objectively, the state of the society and this is something which we should, in one way or another, take into account in Ukraine. 

Translated by Iwona Reichardt

Anna Łazar is an author of numerous projects focusing on contemporary Eastern European culture. For over decade she worked for Polish diplomatic service (Polish Institute in Kyiv and St Petersburg). She writes about literature and art.

Edwin Bendyk is a Polish journalist and writer. He works for the weekly Polityka where he is in charge of the science section.

Alex Freiheit is a Polish performance artist, founder of Siksa duo.

Wojciech Lemański is a Polish Catholic priest, a member of the Polish Council of Christians and Jews. 

Anda Rottenberg is an art historian, curator of many art exhibits and essayist. In the years 1993-2001 she was the director of the Zachęta Art Gallery in Warsaw.

Tomasz Sikora is a Wrocław-based musician and producer. He is a member of Karibo, a music band which since 2004 co-operates with the Ukrainian poet, Yuri Andruchovych.

Joanna Wichowska is a theater critic, curator, performer and a dramaturge.

Culture, debat, populism, post-truth