Over the course of my lifetime, most of which I lived in the United States before immigrating to Europe, I can only vividly remember two other occasions when the word “revolution” was as a omnipresent in the popular discourse as it is on this day, a day when we anticipate—in the wake of the people’s revolt in Tunisia that deposed Zine El Abedine Ben Ali—the turning point in the Egyptian revolution that will oust Hosni Mubarak from the presidency and inaugurate political transformations with vast geopolitical and socio-cultural repercussions. Those other two occasions were the Iranian revolution of 1979 and the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989. The latter had greater impact on me than the former, due to family investments in the Polish Solidarity movement (I was the only kid in rural upstate New York wearing a white and red Solidarność tee-shirt to gym class), but also due to the proliferation of unforgettable slogans and images that accompanied the fall of communism in “the East” and have become anchored to the historical record. Memory is fleeting and it fades, and there were surely other moments these past several decades when revolution was a contemporary reality to contend with rather than something I studied hard at school or university. It goes without saying that my knowledge of these “historic” events of the late 20th century is entirely second-hand and my memories were largely generated by the ideological discourses of the US and European mass media and some educational opportunities, which served as correctives, rather than via any notable structural changes to my everyday life.
This is my final editorial for FORMER WEST and I was mulling over how to synthesize the state of research since the 1st FORMER WEST Research Congress, which focused largely on the cultural-political relevance of the year 1989, and up to the 2nd FORMER WEST Research Congress, On Horizons: Art and Political Imagination, but I’ve been constantly distracted from that goal because I am pre-occupied, as I am sure many of you are, with the events taking place in the Middle East and North Africa. Nothing I can say in this editorial space can do justice to what is happening on the ground, to the myriad, conflicting, uplifting and tragic reports from Tahir Square. The massive and widespread appeals for fair, just and democratic governance are manifestations of political imagination the likes of which were only speculated about in the 2nd FORMER WEST Research Congress in Istanbul, where much of the discussion turned around possibilities and impossibilities, the philosophical genealogy and political viability of the notion of the horizon. The work around the notion of a former West that has taken place in the year between the two congresses and that will occur over the next several years will be indelibly marked by what is happening now.
On the third day of the 2nd FORMER WEST Research Congress, which was dedicated to questions of Art and Political Imagination, moderator TJ Demos opened on what some interpreted as a pessimistic note: “we speak from the context of political disaster or the disaster of politics,” Demos said. The current state of affairs and the persistent courage of the Egyptian protestors in the face of Mubarak’s obstinate refusal to heed their voices, and of all such protests against tyranny, hopefully contradict Demos and gesture toward a potential response to one of his concluding and absolutely critical questions: “how can we speak the truth in a liberal-democratic milieu?”
As those who are not actively participating actively wait to see what happens next, one things is clear: unlike certain news outlets and politicians jostling for positions of influence at this crucial moment, art does not need to be diplomatic, nor should it be diplomatic, especially if it wants to speak the truth. At least that’s the word on the streets.