Is art political? One way of answering this question is to ask if art should have political content (if there should be politics “in” art) or if art should directly engage with social problems (if art should recognize its place “in society”). I’ve done some of that, but more often I’ve taken a different approach. In several essays, like one on the mechanisms of marionette theater, another on performance and what I call “anti-performance,” another on the continued political relevance of “old media,” and another on dialectics and storytelling, I’ve asked how art is itself a kind of socially organized practice, and how narrative is a part of political reality. These are also among the main questions raised in my book The Paradox of Authenticity: Folklore Performance in Post-Communist Slovakia.

The politics of folklore can seem like a simple thing. It might seem inherently nationalist (as it often appears to by Westerners studying Eastern Europe). Or it can seem inherently apolitical (as Eastern Europeans sometimes see it themselves). Or inherently left-populist (as North American folkies like me often prefer to think). I’ve been trying to complicate all those views, studying folklore as a medium of powerful but underdetermined political engagement.

Folklore is a certain kind of expression (lore) connected to a certain kind of social form (the folk). And this social form is connected to politics (in the form of “the people”). “The folk” is the people when it expresses and feels; “the people” is the folk when it demands the right to speak and to will and to govern. 

And then what happens if, following people like J. G. Herder, Maxim Gorky, and Jacques Rancière, we consider that the people or folk might also think, and even philosophize?

I started to approach this problem in my book The Paradox of Authenticity: Folklore Performance in Post-Communist Slovakia, in an article called “Who’s Afraid of the Big, Bad Folk?” and in two essays reflecting on the meaning of folklore in the present (“Folklore Was Always Already Gone” and “Folklore Lives! But…”).

I’ve been continuing in a series of articles on socialist concepts of folklore, from the “new folk art” of the interwar Czech avant-garde through postwar theorists of folklore in Communist-ruled Europe. I have more articles planned, including two already half-written, on Soviet mass spectacles and folklore festivals, and on the Czech Communist search for a philosophy based on folklore.

When I first came to post-Communist Europe in the year 2000, I couldn’t stand it, and I couldn’t leave. I couldn’t stand the terms of political discourse the made some things unimaginable (any world beyond free-market capitalism) and some things invisible (the proletariat as a social subject). But I was also drawn to this world, by the tragedies of its history, by its often-forgotten hopes, and by the amazing development of “culture” as an attempt to work through the problems of history. I kept coming back, and finally I moved here for good. 

I’ve been following the ongoing process of recategorization that now seems to be turning the post-Communist order into something else, as new things become visible and new ideas become imaginable, for better and for worse. I’m convinced that the best way to understand the developments of the present (rising nationalism and creeping authoritarianism) is by understanding the peculiar transformations that followed the Communists’ fall from power. And I’m convinced that instead of blaming the Communists for all the problems that have come since they dispersed, we would do better to ask how the problems of the present arose out of the contradictions of recent history, however deep their roots.

I’ve written a series of essays, including one on what I call “neo-aristocratic” tendencies in post-Communist liberal-conservative politics; one on the restrictive “ontology” of the post-Communist right; another that analyzes the ambivalent legacy of Communist-era dissent in Slovakia; and another that critiques the parallel legacy of dissent in the Czech Lands around the key year of 1989. In another piece, I look for the sources of uncritical post-dissident discourse in contradictions of dissident thought before 1989.

I’m working on a long-term book project to bring together theoretical essays that ask: How do societies delineate the borders of the political, what lies beyond those borders, and why might it be politically necessary to cross them? 

In another sense, I’ve been trying to explain to myself and to my philosopher colleagues what we do when we study folklore—that is, when we insist that there is political meaning in expressive practices that barely register in the public sphere, much less in the heights of power. Folklore, in my understanding, arises from the subversive recognition of what is imperceptible to a certain regime of reason.

The book will include a few things I’ve already published (but not all in English):

The Return of the People—Without the Social (published in Czech)

De-staging the People: On the Role of the Social and Populism beyond Politics

The Even Younger Marx: Anti-politics and Anti-civics (published in Czech)

Why Socialists Don’t Respect the Autonomy of the Private and the Political (On Axel Honneth’s Idea of Socialism) (published in Slovak)

The Civic and the Proletarian

Toward a Barbarous Philosophy (On the Diabolical Marxism of G. M. Tamás) (published in Czech)

György Lukács’s Archimedean Socialism

With a couple more texts to come.

My critical engagement with post-Communist reason led me to study the reasoning of Communists and dissidents before the great regime changes, in order to uncover possibilities that were foreclosed by the political direction and its accompanying ideologies following 1989. And that, in turn, sent me looking earlier, to the wide array of socialist ideas that have spread through Central and Eastern Europe since the 19th century.

In this project of unearthing half-forgotten ideas and reinterpreting the failures and unrealized hopes of the past, I was involved in the founding of a journal called Contradictions devoted to critical theory and analysis in Central and Eastern Europe, and in dialogue with the whole world.

More recently, I’ve co-founded a platform called Former East, to promote research and publishing on critical and emancipatory thought in Central and Eastern European history.

I’ve also co-edited a book on the Czech Marxist humanist Karel Kosík, a book of writing by another Czech Marxist humanist, Ivan Sviták, and a book on and by the Czech avant-garde Marxist Karel Teige.

As nationalism has risen around me, I’ve responded with polemical essays against the new right, against fears of multiculturalism and against conservative left nationalism. But I’ve also been looking to the past for help in reimagining an internationalism for the present.

That has led me to a new research project on what I call “borderlands internationalism,” which emerged in socialist movements outside imperial centers in late 19th-century Central and Eastern Europe. Like today, nationalism was on the rise, along with dark forebodings; but this was also a period of hope in progress, expressed most strikingly—and here the similarities to our time end—by socialism. Socialists in Central and Eastern Europe, because they faced nationalism daily, were compelled not only to declare their abstract support for internationalism, but also to justify it with concrete arguments and proposals. Maybe we have something to learn by critically reexamining what they had to say.

I’ve also reflected on the use and frequent misuse (in my view) of anticolonial discourse in Central and Eastern Europe, as I attempt to clarify the conceptual difference between the logics of colonialism and imperialism, or “coloniality and imperiality.”