THE CULTURE OF CULT
1. Christmas is coming, and along with it – breaks from work, meetings with close friends and relatives, and also – reading and thinking. I do not know whether the new issue of “Tygiel Kultury” [ 10-12 (154-156) 2008) will be published before Christmas. I am sure, however, that reading it is obligatory, especially around Christmas time. For the magazine offers a series of articles devoted to the question of cult, which becomes – if we are to believe in the diagnoses presented in “Tygiel” – one of the more important defining elements of contemporary culture.
2. What is a cult? As Wojciech Prusowski writes in the article titled Kult w chrześcijańskim rozumieniu (Cult in Christian Understanding) the word itself “derives from the Latin cultus, which originally meant the care and concern about something. At present it denotes worship of a particular person or object. In the religious sense it means the worship and adoration of God and the things that are believed to be sacred.” The author provides an easy-to-understand explanation of the differences between the cult of God and adoration of Mary and the Saints. He also accurately points to problematic aspects of Polish religiousness, for example - sentimentalism, exaggerated attachment to services, the worship of Mary, patriotism, or fideism understood as the lack of deep reflection on faith and religiousness linked with blind trust in church authorities. It is hard to resist the impression that this valuable and well-written article touches the issues that by now have become only marginal with respect to culture. For at present the most important matter is an issue mentioned by Prusowski – the cult towards “a particular person or an object.” This, among others, comprises the cult of masculinity as described by Radosław Mirski (in an article Kobiety wyobrażone [The Imagined Women]), the cult of consumption (which is a title of a fabulous essay by Agata Winer) or the cult of self-knowledge (Lucyna Skompska writes about its aesthetic aspect in the column Od róż do liter [From Roses to Letters] devoted to the work of Ryszard Waśko).
3. To me the most impressive are the articles at the beginning and at the end of “Tygiel”, especially if they are read in the reverse order. I am thinking about two pieces of quasi-reportage about present-day Georgia by Wojciech Górecki (Ikona / The Icon) and Katarzyna Rawska-Górecka (Gori) and about the review by Alicja Piechocka titled Urania, czyli złudzenia intelektualisty (Urania, Or the Illusions of the Intellectual).
In her article, Piechocka carefully considers the book “Urania” by this year’s Noble Prize winner Jean-Marie Le Clézio which has recently been published in Poland. Le Clézio presents there a contemporary “nomad by choice” whose life’s strategy consists of functioning at the point where at least two different cultures meet and looking at them from the European perspective. All of that has as its aim building a bridge between cultures and also making Europeans aware of the social problems with which the inhabitants of various regions of the world have to deal. The author has transplanted this strategy onto the protagonists. Surely, this is the reason why Le Clézio’s writing is thoroughly realistic, almost documentary – or reportage-like. However, the reduction of dialogs and characters’ psychology on the one hand, and the greater amount of descriptions on the other, allows us to find “some distant echoes of nouveau roman in his work. Moreover, one can trace in the book the influences of Marcel Proust of Joseph Conrad. All that aside, it is hard to recognize Le Clézio’s prose as belonging to the world’s first class literature. There are too many faults when it comes to formal aspects. Schematic, propaganda-like language disturbs the reader too often. What is more, although there are the connotations to the so-called “engaged literature,” “Urania” does not contain “any reasonable suggestion for an alternate worldview. Daniel, the main protagonist, wandering through the streets of poverty, adores the inner purity of Lili and from time to time criticizes a self-righteous person, but this is the end of his involvement.” The fact that Daniel is a foreigner seems to justify his passivity and allows us to “throw off the burden of responsibility.” The black and white vision of the world presented by Le Clézio also constitutes a crucial problem. The exoticism of poverty conditions an unjust division into “our, Western wealth” and “your poverty.”
Le Clézio’s arid suggestion becomes dramatic when it is confronted with Georgian realities described by Górecki and Rawska-Górecka. It turns out that it is not the material but the spiritual poverty that constitutes the crucial problem of contemporary world and the remedy for it is very difficult to find. This poverty is well expressed by the Georgian cult of Stalin, who is placed alongside Jesus Christ, Muhammad and Confucius, and believed to be not only a national hero but also, above all, to be the “achievement of the whole mankind.” Georgian justification of Stalin’s crimes is terrifying: gulags are justified economically, Ukrainian Holodomor was caused by a simple bad harvest, and the crime of Katyn was lawfully conducted (according to Georgians, Stalin was not involved in it because – governing the country – he had more important matters than killing to deal with…).
In this context “the involved European”, as Le Clézio calls himself, turns out to be helpless not only in confrontation with the problems of different cultures but also with regard to problems generated by his own tradition.
4. The cult of family and the cult of subject occupy an important position among these problems. The first of them is described in “Tygiel” by Monika Wąsik (article titled Zbiorowa hipnoza, czyli o kulcie rodziny / Group Hypnosis, Or the Cult of Family). The author refers to the works of Alice Miller and presents the family not only as an environment of concern and care for a child, but also as a domain of violence, which aims at planting the conservative values of a given community in the child. The planting of “family scenarios,” or parental attitudes passed from generation to generation, results in a loss of individualism by the child replacing it with family identity instead. According to the author the family identity dominates over the individual identity also on the social level. A mature person is obliged to enter family life, in other words to play the role of a partner and then a parent. “Applying this order (…) guarantees a common social order and at the same time it guarantees that a person is accepted in the society. Therefore what is socially approved, turns out to be »natural« and righteous.” It is worth noting that it is on the level of planting of the “family scenarios” in the child that the planting of the cult of Stalin in the young Georgians happens (“old Arczil, a retired accountant, whom I met in a park in Tbilisi, tells his grandchildren that Stalin respected the working class: he came from a poor family and knew the life of a workman from his own experience. Arczil’s granddaughters call Stalin »uncle Soso«”).
So should the family, with respect to that, be subjected to harsher criticizm? I believe, not. In my opinion, it is rather not the family but the European cult of subjectivity that constitutes the real problem. Maybe it is time to realize that the “subject” and the “individual” do not exist, that they are only functions of a language existing on their own? And the Being can only be described in a multi-theory way, “that we do not come anywhere, and do not leave for anywhere – we are always in the world?” Maybe it is time to redefine (and not deny or reject!) our understanding of individuality and belonging to a unit such as a family, etc.? “Tygiel” and its part “notes for the exercises” titled O nieistnieniu czasu i podmiotu (Of Non-existence of Time and Subject) by Włodzimierz Gromiec will be helpful. In conclusion, let me thank the Editors for exactly this article. I have never met the author, but heard him “in the flesh” only once when he was participating in the discussion devoted to a “sadic” book by Bogdan Banasiak. I have heard about Gromiec, because he became a member of the philosophical environment in Łódź for good and is a legend in his own right. In the time before Christmas one should appreciate the “Tygiel’s” memory of the deceased philosopher. It is also worth listening to the words that he wants to tells us, now that he speaks beyond the time and space.
Marcin M. Bogusławski
Translated by Marta Barton
Discussed journals: Tygiel Kultury