Review: Dominik Bartmanski, ‘Matters of Revolution’
Review of Dominik Bartmanski’s Matters of Revolution: Urban Spaces and Symbolic Politics in Berlin and Warsaw After 1989 (Routledge, 2022), 207 pages.
Abstract
Matters of Revolution is a study of the urban and material cultures of Berlin and Warsaw during and after the fall of communism. Beginning with a meditation on ‘the Wall’, the analysis goes on to consider the role of urban space in the revolutions of 1989; as well as the nostalgia, desire for preservation and ritualised destruction generated by communist-era material culture and architectural icons. The book also offers an important set of reflections on cultural sociology and what it ought to entail given the material and spatial ‘turns’ in the social sciences.
Reviewed by Eduardo de la Fuente
This book provides an insightful analysis of the urban and material cultures of Berlin and Warsaw in the wake of the tumultuous political transformations of 1989. It takes these case studies as empirical reference points for a cultural sociology of the multiple entanglements – material, spatial, aesthetic, and affective – that are laid bare during periods of radical political and cultural change. The book is part of the Routledge Series ‘The Refiguration of Space’ edited by Martina Löw and Hubert Knoblauch, both of whom are based at the Technical University of Berlin.
The book begins with a meditation on the (in)famous Wall that formerly separated the two superpower blocs, and more concretely the everyday activities of Berliners. The Wall (whose capitalization indexes its iconic status) is presented as a ‘massive and brutally physical distortion of life in Berlin’, one which separated ‘families, friends, lovers, communities, neighbourhoods’ (2-3). Yet Bartmanski notes the irony that by physically separating Berlin into two halves, the Wall also ‘created shared meanings. It reduced the city to a special kind of island’ (3). The analysis of the Wall deftly interweaves past and present. The book narrates how, in 1963, French Vogue controversially featured a photo spread, involving the model Brigitte Schilling and two policemen to a backdrop of the Berlin Wall, by renowned fashion photographer Helmut Newton. This Cold War era controversy – which resulted in accusations of ‘tastelessness’ and in West German corporations withdrawing advertisements from the French fashion magazine – is used by the author to set the scene for a consideration of the Wall’s ‘translocal career [as] an icon’ (5). The Wall’s biography points to myriad symbolic projections and material entanglements that unfolded over time:
In the twenty-five years following Newton’s infamous feature, the Wall made not only local but also global history… Many significant speeches were made about or at the Wall. Many more pictures were taken and printed. The Wall seemed to have attracted those representations… it was perhaps the most visible and most palpable… [symbol of] political utopia transmogrified into a dystopian reality. (5)
Material culture analysis is central to this book. Matters of Revolution cites approvingly Roland Barthes’ (2009) analysis of cultural icons in Mythologies and the material culture perspective developed by anthropologist Daniel Miller (1987, 2005). Another reference point, and one less cited in contemporary sociological and cultural analysis, is the work of art historian and pre-Columbian scholar, George Kubler. The latter’s book, The Shape of Time (Kubler, 1962), inspires Bartmanski to think it is possible to analyse aesthetic objects without succumbing to ‘purely linguistic and purely formal approaches to style’ (42). Given the author’s own biographical and intellectual connection to the Neo-Durkheimian and Yale School of Cultural Sociology (the book revisits materials from the author’s PhD completed at Yale in 2011) it is not surprising that Matters of Revolution cites the work of Jeffrey Alexander (2003, 2008) on meaning and iconicity, Phil Smith (1999) on the ‘elementary forms’ of place, Victor Turner (1974) on ‘liminality’, and Clifford Geertz (1983) on the ‘sacred centres’ of society. Drawing on this intellectual lineage felt necessary because, ‘at bottom, the meaning-making thematized here happens at the intersection of [the] “numinous” spaces of capital cities and the liminal period of political revolution’ (30).
But Bartmanski has travelled a long way since co-editing the Yale School collection, Iconic Power (Alexander, Bartmanski and Giesen, 2012), or his Yale doctoral studies. The Yale School framework is complemented by material and spatial approaches that arguably were undeveloped in the Yale paradigm. In situating the book, the author says he has benefitted from engaging with the ‘Australian material culture scholar Ian Woodward with whom [he] wrote two books’ (xiv). The two books in question are Vinyl and Labels (Bartmanski and Woodward, 2015, 2020). Similarly, Bartmanski suggests that, in the intervening years since the PhD, he has increasingly drawn on the work of German sociologist of space, Martina Löw (2016) – the aforementioned editor of the series in which this book is published. Equipped with the notion that the city is an ‘experiential space’ involving shared meanings and embodied practices (xiii), the uprisings of 1989 take on a decidedly urban and phenomenological character:
[1989] was not the first nor the last time when it was felt imperative to show up at plazas, sit in on buildings, topple the monuments of oppression, and occupy and rename the streets. Why? Because minds on their own do not change things. Bodies in space do. (xi)
The focus on spatial matters leads Bartmanski to the insight that cities are contextures that ‘enable and constrain our action whether we are conscious of it or not’ (26). Contextures – a neologism combining material and spatial textures with the urban and political contexts such textures are interwoven with – shape the ‘spatial and temporal distribution of material values’ (27). Contextural thinking serves the case studies well because such an approach is better able to grapple with the fact that post-revolutionary urban forms can be encountered through responses that range from being seen as ‘symbolically polluted’ through to being the object of ‘nostalgic imaginaries’ (93). In this respect, the analysis covers one of the most intriguing aspects of post-1989 politics and culture in Central and Eastern Europe: namely, the ‘enduring relevance of seemingly anachronistic relics and monuments’ (11). Contrary to reductionist or binary readings of culture, Bartmanski is committed to ‘a fine-grained cultural empathy rooted in spatio-material awareness’ (7).
Why empathy? Because responses to revolutions don’t fall neatly into categories such as progressive or reactionary and the type of affective-temporal investments such categories connote. Intellectuals reacted to the events of 1989 by adopting everything from triumphalist ‘end of history’ explanations through to ones centred on ‘real socialism had never taken place’. Bartmanski seems to feel that a cultural sociology of politics can escape such binaries by showing us the complex attachments and sentiments change produces. One such complexity is the significant continuities between pre- and post-1989 urban imaginaries. What such imaginaries share is being ‘rooted in and responsive to similar cultural forms of material legitimization and symbolic politics of space’ (183). Thus, despite the contrasting ideologies of communism and capitalism, there were significant continuities in the ‘affective topographies’ of post-communist cities when it came to collective emotions regarding ‘car[ing] about their capital cities… as politically meaningful’ (183). One explanation offered is that ‘cityscapes are massive “hard drives” of collective memory’ (30); where collective memory serves as a type of ‘bridge’ (as Bartmanski terms it) between the past, present and future.
The case studies in Matters of Revolution are excellent, as are the book’s methodological and stylistic reflections. The case studies pursued in Chapter 4, regarding the recent fondness for East German Ampelmännchen traffic light icons and for Warsaw communist era neon signage, provided rich materials for analysing how the post-1989 context ‘enabled the discursive construction of the vintage value of [such] sign[s]’ (112). My favourite chapter, and the one that arguably best demonstrated the power of Bartmanski’s comparative style of material culture analysis, was Chapter 5: ‘The Death and Life of Great Communist Palaces’. This chapter focuses on two architectural icons from the communist era – Berlin’s Palace of the Republic and Warsaw’s Palace of Culture – and explores why despite both buildings been seen as constituting ‘“sacred mountains” of failed regimes’ only one was demolished in the post-1989 period. The divergent fates of these buildings are of interest to the author because both architectural icons ‘enjoy[ed] similarly prestigious status’ during the communist era, both were located in a central area of each city, and both faced competing calls for ‘preservation’ and ‘destruction’ (126-127). Employing a combination of contextural and material-agential explanation, the book shows the case for ritualistic destruction prevailed in the case of the Palace of the Republic (it was torn down in 2008) because: firstly, the site became central to the material-spatial symbolism surrounding a ‘new Berlin’; and, secondly, the physical presence of asbestos overrode competing narratives. The latter played the following role in the building’s demise:
The physical pollution of the [Palace of the Republic] engendered a new possibility to ‘blame the building,’ distributing responsibility for its demise from civic actors to the building itself. Asbestos… disambiguated the situation… it was capable of overriding most other ideological differences. (164)
If I have a quibble with Matters of Revolution, and it is a minor one, it pertains to Bartmanski describing the book’s style of cultural analysis as ‘post-paradigmatic’ (167). It is true the brand of cultural sociology on display is generous and open to a multiplicity of perspectives, ranging from sociology to anthropology, political science, cultural theory, material culture studies and spatial/urban analysis. But this reader felt that, rather than being ‘post-paradigmatic,’ Matters of Revolution enlarges what cultural sociology understands by meaning and by ‘sense-making’. The final paragraph of the book includes the following call to arms: ‘we are confronted with questions of sense-making that must account for all denotations of “sense”… It is a propitious time nowadays to open more space for space in cultural sociology, and to reconsider again the meaning of meaning itself’ (184).
As such, the message this reader took from the book is that despite the material and spatial ‘turns’, and the rise of nonrepresentational and nonhumanist social science sensibilities, meaning is not a concept we should discard lightly. But, as Bartmanski wryly notes, ‘Writing… involves seductive elisions on the part of the writer and seeing what one wants to see on the part of the reader’ (167). So, perhaps, the ‘post-paradigmatic’ lies in the eye of the beholder. Either way, this book serves to remind us why cultural sociology matters.
References
Alexander, Jeffrey C. (2003) The Meanings of Social Life: A Cultural Sociology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Alexander, Jeffrey C. (2008) Iconic Consciousness: The Material Feeling of Meaning. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 26: 782-794.
Alexander, Jeffrey C., Bartmanski, Dominik and Bernard Giesen (eds.) Iconic Power: Materiality and Meaning in Social Life. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Barthes, Roland (2009) Mythologies. New York: Hill and Wang.
Bartmanski, Dominik and Ian Woodward (2015) Vinyl: The Analogue Record in the Digital Age. London: Bloomsbury.
Bartmanski, Dominik and Ian Woodward (2020) Labels: Making Independent Music. London: Bloomsbury.
Geertz, Clifford (1983) Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretative Anthropology. New York: Basic Books.
Kubler, George (1962) The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things. New Have: Yale University Press.
Löw, Martina (2016) The Sociology of Space: Materiality, Social Structures, and Action. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Miller, Daniel (1987) Material Culture and Mass Consumption. Oxford: Blackwell.
Miller, Daniel (ed) (2005) Materiality. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Smith, Phil (1999) The Elementary Forms of Place and their Transformation: A Durkheimian Model. Qualitative Sociology 22(1): 13-36.
Turner, Victor (1974) Dramas, Fields and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Eduardo de la Fuente is Adjunct Senior Lecturer, Justice and Society, University of South Australia, a Fellow of the Institute for Place Management, Manchester Metropolitan University and a Faculty Fellow of the Yale Centre for Cultural Sociology. His work lies at the intersection of cultural sociology, social theory and the sociology of art/aesthetic phenomena. He finds himself increasingly writing about place and the textures of everyday life.
