MARIA PLICHTA

LOST FUTURES AT THE MARGIN

*This text first appeared in Kajet Issue 05

There is something arresting about this image of a mighty, golden-crowned sacral sculpture raising his arms over a supermarket somewhere at the periphery of a peripheral town in a country plagued by a sense of insecurity about its own self-perceived peripherality. At the risk of ascribing too much meaning to an architectural accident, I choose to see it as a possible symbol of the twin theologies that give shape to contemporary Poland, orbiting between the globalised religion of the Holy Free Market and the politics of nostalgia for a non-existent past, marked by a stubborn attachment to a pain-laced national identity deeply entangled with Catholicism. Welcome to Poland of the 2010s: a country of Jesus statues, an intense cult of the deceased Polish Pope, and a simultaneous deep internalisation of neoliberal principles. At the same time, contemporary Poland does not only find itself in a forever-longing pursuit to overcome the past in order to ‘be normal,’ but it also carries a deep resentment at having been robbed of a glorious past and a future that never seems to arrive.

Analyses of post-Soviet countries too often focus on the seemingly ‘backward’ expressions of nostalgic longing for a great past that never truly materialised. Such romanticisation of history can be easily dismissed as an expression of non-enlightened longings characteristic of semi-provincial countries that don’t know how to do ‘true democracy.’ This notion is both condescending and easily refutable: as recent political developments in the so-called advanced democracies demonstrate, the West might be just as susceptible to populist fear-mongering as Hungary and Poland are. Concurrently, this kind of conundrum bears similarity to the double bind in which post-colonial countries tend to find themselves: the inability to ever truly ‘catch-up’ to the course of (Western) civilisation and a simultaneous fetishisation of the liberal idea of progress.

This uncanny realm of nostalgia mixed with feverish affirmations of neoliberal principles is approached through an investigation of two impulses: one of nostalgic politics that can result in a traumatic attachment to painful history, and another one of an unquestioning embrace of the TINA doctrine: there is no alternative. On top of this, one can add the question of futurity and its perceived defeat in the popular discourse. An intermingling of nostalgic attachment to a historically constituted national identity and an embrace of the late-capitalist order as an inevitable fact of life are, however, by no means unique to Poland. As Svetlana Boym notes on the explosive potential of such a mix of nostalgia and politics,

the mourning of displacement and temporal irreversibility is at the very core of the modern condition. While claiming a pure and clean homeland, nostalgic politics often produces a ‘glocal’ hybrid of capitalism and religious fundamentalism, or of corporate state and Eurasian patriotism. [01]

The hybrid nature of the current state of affairs is central in the attempt to investigate the dual character of the titular lost futures, one of which seeks to retrieve the (not so) glorious past, while the other deeply embraces the ‘capitalist realist’ framework of no alternative to the present system.[02] The latter does not only narrow the horizon of possibility to an endless reproduction of sameness, but it also strengthens and perpetuates the current system by paralysing the imagination. In this way, society en masse is led to the widespread acceptance of the notion that there is no alternative; what is now is all that can ever be. 

A backdrop against which the particularity of the ‘Polish situation’ must be investigated is the notion of post-Soviet as the aftermath of the transition from Real Existing Socialism to Real Existing Neoliberalism. This metamorphosis inevitably informed the conditions of change that followed in Poland and the entire region. In her work on the meaning of the ‘post-Soviet’ category, Russian philosopher Madina Tlostanova writes about a region that has been, not particularly gently, nudged towards an unconditional acceptance of the ‘Western’ order of things: with the incentive of assimilation yanked in front of formerly communist states with the implicit promise of being able to move from a semi-peripheral position to the European bosom. Things are left unsaid and the catch-22 of this particular scenario might be that this process of ‘catching-up’ is not transitory but an incurable, chronic state of limbo; as Tlostanova writes, “the small steps along the endless ladder of modernity that ultimately led nowhere yet always enchanted with a desired but unattainable horizon” are all that there is.[03] How can a future be then attained when the present is caught in an endless, repetitive loop? 

Borrowing the phrase from Italian autonomist thinker Franco Berardi, cultural critic Mark Fisher has extended the theoretical conceptualisation of ‘the slow cancellation of the future,’[04] using it to capture a pervasive sense of being stuck in an endlessly protracted now, which is a result of what he perceived as an increasing stifling of both political and artistic imagination under neoliberal capitalism. This exhaustion seems equally, if not more so, present in both the post-Soviet context in general and the Polish one in particular. Here, a deep belief in capitalist theology pervades, exalting it as a universal project of the most optimal organisation of society and enhanced relations of power and production. This kind of blueprint rationale is striving to reach a state of absolute naturalisation and consequently the depoliticisation of the neoliberal mode of thinking, which is presented as inarguable; as a fact of life, not ideology. As Romanian philosopher Ovidiu Țichindeleanu writes, 

communism is closed in a totalising absolute frame, one of darkness and failure, separated from the ‘good,’ ‘civilised,’ and ‘efficient’ capitalist world through an ontological difference. This strange ideological ethical and economic line of thought hinders, fragments, and makes impossible the development of an alternative to the passive acceptance of the global capitalist logic.[05]

Eastern Europe is still haunted by the spectre of communism in its USSR-controlled totalitarian iteration, assumed to provide irrefutable proof of the inherent flaws at the core of the Marxist vision. This invariably contributes to the deep and pervasive sense that systemic change is inconceivable; that no credible alternative can be imagined, let alone achieved. The horizon of the possible is narrowed to an endless perpetuation of itself, and with each subsequent iteration, it breaches new frontiers in monitoring and disciplining its subjects through technological means of control and surveillance. One particularly uncanny example of this: an AI system that measures how frequently employees smile. 

“SMILE, YOU’RE ON STAGE NOW!” (Or, the strange case of a disappearing video)

Scrolling hazily through my neverending Facebook feed, I come across a clip that fascinates and horrifies me in almost equal measure. The PKO Bank of Poland, once a state-owned bank that was privatised in the feverish process of economic shock therapy that saw most of the state’s assets put on the market in the 1990s, released a promotional video heralding the implementation of a new AI system in some of its customer offices. Its purpose is to analyse the facial expressions of the bank employees in real time; more specifically, the goal is to measure the frequency of their smiles.

Confused whether this is some sort of hoax, I replay the clip endlessly; not because the idea is so outlandish, but due to its sheer uncanniness as a video. The clip, spanning barely a minute and a half, lies somewhere at the intersection of promotional and informative content. Perhaps in an attempt to avoid coming off as slightly too Orwellian in its top-down imposition of control, it is one of the regular employees—instead of a manager—who explains how the implementation of this system of algorithmic micro-governance apparently boosts morale and creates a more positive work environment. She also ascribes some of the positive changes in the workplace atmosphere to the presence of a yellow smiley balloon.

How does the system work, exactly? First step: there is a sensor perched atop each of the employees’ desks which monitors the minutiae of facial expressions in real time. Then, the data provided by the sensor is processed by an AI-driven facial recognition software trained to recognise smiling faces. There is even a reward system for keeping one’s face permanently contorted in an approximation of a smile: the more you smile, the more you contribute to a charitable cause! Therefore, refusal to do so isn’t merely against your own economic interest—it designates you as someone rude, unpleasant, and, worst of all, willfully non-charitable. You could be helping, it doesn’t cost a thing! All you have to do is smile.

In a complimentary interview entitled “Laughter means health, smile means profit” (the first part is a well-known Polish proverb), which explains the intent behind the video, Bartosz Rychlicki pre-emptively addresses the question of the positively dystopian implications of this measure of algorithmic control. Rychlicki is the CEO of Quantum.CX*, a start-up dedicated to, in their own words, providing services to “those who believe the world needs more kindness.” His idea on how to accomplish this lofty goal? Why, of course, by implementing smile-measuring software developed by Quantum.CX, which enables calculating a ‘kindness index’—meaning the percentage of smile time within the overall conversation time. He likens this utilisation of the AI facial recognition system to having a scale at home and using it to monitor fluctuations in weight. “Is a scale evil now? Because it measures the effects of the work we put in our body shape?”, asks Rychlicki, adding that he perceives the smile sensor to be a “humanisation of the assessment” of employees. How this digitised enforcement of obligatory cheeriness can be construed to constitute a humanising strategy escapes me, but if the technological monitoring is subtracted, the desire to control the employees’ appearance down to the minutiae of their expressions will not seem surprising to anyone with experience in service industry work. A sign seen in the employee corridors of the Grand Hotel in Amsterdam proclaiming SMILE, YOU’RE ON STAGE NOW! still haunts me. I do agree with Rychlecki that it is not the technology itself that is sinister, neither the scale, nor the AI system, but rather its deployment as a measure of enacting control over the employees’ expressions of affectivity, further contributing to a culture of performative, incessant cheeriness and superficial, dead-eyed kindness.

What is there left to do, other than think of Marshall McLuhan’s warning that “once we have surrendered our senses and nervous systems to the private manipulation of those who would try to benefit from taking a lease on our eyes and ears and nerves, we don’t really have any rights left.”[06] In this case, I guess it is appropriate to add mouths to the list. Panicked voices pontificating on a reality that is slowly turning into a Black Mirror episode constitute the most banal and unhelpfully technophobic of responses to developments of digital technologies. While I do not believe that the technology at work here is itself a harbinger of inherent doom, a lack of critical distance towards the underlying ideological mechanisms of its quintessentially capitalist deployment might create a special kind of smiling misery for the datafied selves behind and in front of the controlling screens. If this is the future, it seems to be marked by a depressingly unimaginative use of technology, which—had the pervasive acceptance of neoliberalism as an ideology been broken—could make it possible for other alternate realities to emerge.

A little postscript on the video saga: things can get even stranger. Seemingly overnight, the video vanished without a trace, no longer proudly displayed on the bank’s website or any of its social media profiles. With the uncanniness of the video further underscored by its sudden disappearance, I’ve embarked upon a recovery mission and kept encountering the same ghostly traces of the clip’s former presence. Here I would like to extend my gratitude to Twitter for its apparent preservation of deleted content. Amid a parade of blank screens proclaiming that “The video is unavailable. Sorry about that.” over a year after encountering it for the first time, I rediscovered it lurking within Twitter’s depths. Discarded by its makers, it floats about in digital wasteland. 

Rebirth through suffering.

Now, let’s go back in time to 2010, the year of the erection of Cosmic King Jesus. This year carries a particular significance in Poland’s recent past. On April 10, in thick grey morning fog, an aircraft of the Polish Air Force crashed near the Russian city of Smoleńsk, killing all 96 passengers on board. Among the victims were the then-president of Poland Lech Kaczyński and his wife, a number of Polish Government officials, members of the Parliament from both sides of the political spectrum, and relatives of victims of the Katyń massacre. The purpose of the delegation was to attend the commemoration of the 70th anniversary of the aforementioned massacre, which took place not far from Smoleńsk. If American modern history can clearly be divided on a pre- and post-9/11 axis, then a similar line can be drawn in the temporal curve of twenty-first century Poland. As journalist Michał Sutowski aptly points out, “despite the actual toll the disaster took being much smaller, the political and psychic wounds correspond to the traumas of failed uprisings and social projects.”[07]

There was life before Smoleńsk, and there is life—a substantially different one—after it. Even more than the crash itself, the media debacle that followed contributed decisively to strengthening the pre-existing division of the political landscape; for those associated with the conservative right-wing, it enabled the creation of a new national myth. For the liberal majority, this response constituted further proof of the right’s absolute irrationality and created an excuse to ridicule them as backward conspirationalists. For either group, the catastrophe could not merely be what it was: a tragically unlucky intertwining of circumstance and coincidence, ineptitude and misguided decisions; it had to be more. For many, however, this was an event that furthered the awakening of a conspiratorial impulse, or rather, a revival of conspiracist ideation. In a similar vein to the aftermath of the destruction of the Twin Towers, hidden meanings and theories sprung to life immediately; I would be hesitant to do what a lot of liberal media in Poland did at the time, which was to ridicule the impulse to search for meaning itself, dismissing it as symptomatic of the dark masses’ refusal to accept fact. Cultural critic Marcin Napiórkowski proposes that “the large majority of texts on the ‘Smoleńsk mythology’ [...] turns into something akin to kicking someone already on the ground and a narcissistic erotic fantasy,”[08] which, as he notes, does not change or does not even attempt to understand the situation, but rather contributes to cementing and perpetuating the pre-existing social divisions. This impulse towards conspiracy can be seen as a rather misguided but symptomatic attempt to simplify and make understandable a complex and illegible reality. As the ability to form a coherent semiotic chain of cause-effect propositions is severed, an impulse towards simplification takes over, creating far-fetched connections where there might be none. 

The conspiratorial streak firmly embedded in the ‘Polish soul’ feels compelled to respond to the seemingly fated circumstances of the catastrophe: the crash takes place in a forest close to Katyń, which becomes a site of repeated trauma, the mere fact that all of this happens in Russia raises suspicion, as do the circumstances in which the Polish delegation was split in two at the very last minute and took different means of transport... All these factors lend themselves to a conspirational reading which has been promoted by the conservative party Law and Justice’s leader Jarosław Kaczyński (no one other but the twin brother of the deceased president), and his deputy Antoni Macierewicz, who claim the crash was a political assassination. So far, Polish and international investigations alike have not found substantial evidence to back up this theory, but this has only led to renunciations of the investigations as part of a sinister cover-up. Thus, a catastrophe is elevated to a national myth which both unites and divides; or rather, unites precisely through division.

Philosopher Oxana Timofeeva provides a compelling argument on how trauma works, arguing that “both the history of the present and psychoanalysis teach us that at the beginning there was a traumatic event, or a series of traumatic events, to which our experience never stops referring.”[09] This seems particularly true in the Polish context as the defining feature of Polish historical and national consciousness, and self-identity is formed by an identification through trauma as the irrevocably binding link between the generation of Poles. Also on this matter, cultural critic Agata Pyzik points to what she perceives to be “an overdeveloped psychotic factor” that defines the Poles. We are bound together in suffering. Pyzik continues: “History is to us traumatology—we were beaten, enslaved, tortured, killed, humiliated. This traumatology becomes then a traumatophilia—if you tell us that someone has suffered more, like the Jews, we go into a competition of trauma.” 

Pyzik extends this line of reasoning: is there “a life beyond this ‘Christ of nations’?”[10] This is a notion with a long tradition and it encapsulates a sense of everlasting martyrdom. The explicit formulation of Poland’s fate as a messianic nation doomed to eternal suffering as atonement for the world’s sins was first articulated by a revered nineteenth century romantic poet, one of the ‘national prophets’ of the country, Adam Mickiewicz. These words still reverberate both in the halls of the Polish Parliament and the subconsciousness of many. The central ideological nodes underlying Polish romanticism were those of victimhood, suffering, and salvation. Suffering imbued us with a special value never to be attained by all those who cannot ever come close to the sacralised pain we have experienced. Such extreme focus on identity politics and finding meaning in suffering certainly made sense for Poles in the nineteenth century—a nation without a state, perpetually engaged in doomed uprisings and struggles against attempts to root out the national language and culture, who could only claim its statehood in such stubborn attachment. Real political impotence and fragmentation were countered by the imaginary of Messianic importance and predestination to greatness. However, the meaning of this attachment might currently serve a less productive and more harmful role; in the words of literary critic Maria Janion, “a nation that doesn’t know how to exist without suffering has to continue inflicting it upon itself.” In this traumatic bonding to a painful identity, she sees the source of 

the sadistic fantasies of forcing women to give birth to half-dead children, digging in the graves of the victims of catastrophe [referring to the exhumations of the deceased in Smoleńsk in an attempt to find answers that did not materialise], an assault on nature and even [...] a persistent attachment to coal-based energy, covering cities with smoke and threatening to bring about a civilisation crash.[11]

This perceived uniqueness of Poland’s historical suffering is clearly reflected in the results of a recent poll. The findings confirm that there is a consensus among Polish people that the painful past experiences of their ancestors know no comparison. 74 percent of respondents are convinced that Poland has been subjected to the biggest amount of suffering in world history; only 4 percent are sure that it wasn’t.[12] These results reflect a masochistic culture of preoccupation with traumas of national history; while it is undeniable that the history of Poland has been marked by its fair share of painful chapters, the prevailing certainty that the country has been subjected to incomparable suffering is misguided and points to a solipsistic preoccupation with national history to the exclusion of everything outside of it.

How to move beyond the deep resentment at having been robbed of a glorious past that might have never existed? Whether such strong attachment to these forms of reactionary consciousness is productive in any way remains questionable. How can these lofty notions of sacralised suffering, coupled with a belief in national predestination, be squared with the current reality of the global capitalist system of the ‘developed world’ that Poland is seemingly part of? How can these historical-moralistic notions of messianism mean anything after the end of history—or, at least, after the end of ‘grand historical narratives’? In the given frame of reference, it seems impossible to move beyond the exhausting dialectic of abasement and exaltation in the Polish public discourse. Perhaps this nostalgic condition of forever looking back in search of a lost greatness provides its own comforts, such as freedom from the anxiety of an undetermined future, because the horizon is always behind us? Any visions of the future that do not seem to fit in either of the dominant narratives are then neutralised and swiftly discarded, neatly subsumed into endless attempts to recreate a paradise lost.

*[Editor's note] According to LinkedIn, Rychlicki stopped working at Quantum.CX in 2021.

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Maria Plichta (1994) comes from Łódź, Poland. Upon graduating from the Cultural Studies programme at the University of Łódź, she moved to the Netherlands to do a Research MA in Media Studies at the University of Amsterdam. Currently, she works as a PhD researcher at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis.

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[01] Svetlana Boym, “Nostalgia and its discontents,” The Hedgehog Review, 9(2) (2007), 7.

[02] Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (London, UK: Zero Books, 2009).

[03] Madina Tlostanova, What Does It Mean to be Post-Soviet? Decolonial Art from the Ruins of the Soviet Empire (Durham, NA: Duke University Press, 2018), 4.

[04] Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology, and Lost Futures (London, UK: Zero Books, 2014), 17

[05] Ovidiu Țichindeleanu, “The Modernity of Post-communism,” in Genealogies of Postcommunism, eds. Adrian T. Sîrbu and Alexandru Polgár (Cluj: Editura Ideea, 2009), 125.

[06] Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994), 68.

[07] Michał Sutowski, “Ugotowani w smoleńskiej zupie” [Boiled in a Smoleńsk soup], Krytyka Polityczna (January, 2018). Online at: https://krytykapolityczna.pl/kraj/sutowski-ugotowani-w-smolenskiej-zupie/

[08] Marcin Napiórkowski, “Mit smoleńskiego ludu. Narcystyczne fantazje elit” [The myth of the Smoleńsk people. Narcissistic fantasies of the elites], Mitologia Współczesna, (January, 2018). Online at: http://mitologiawspolczesna.pl/mit-smolenskiego-ludu/

[09] Oxana Timofeeva, “The End of the World: From Apocalypse to the End of History and Back,” e-flux Journal, issue 56 (June, 2014). Online at: https://www.e-flux.com/journal/56/60337/the-end-of-the-world-from-apocalypse-to- the-end-of-history-and-back/

[10] Agata Pyzik, Poor but Sexy: Culture Clashes in Europe East and West (London: Zero Books, 2014), 312.

[11] Maria Janion, “List do kongresu kultury” [A letter to the congress of culture], Krytyka Polityczna (October, 2016). Online at: https://krytykapolityczna.pl/kultura/janion-szczerze-nienawidze-naszego-mesjanizmu-list-do-kongresu-kultury/

[12] Dominika Sitnicka, “Polacy wycierpieli najwięcej ze wszystkich narodów świata” [Poles have suffered the most out of all the world’s nations.], Oko Press (July, 2019). Online at: https://oko.press/polacy-wycierpieli-najwiecej-ze-wszystkich-narodow-swiata-tak-uwaza-74-proc-badanych-polakow/