The uncivilized society of Czechoslovak tramps.An exploration in proletarian fantasy
Abstract
rubrika: Studie
Full text
The uncivilized society of Czechoslovak tramps. An exploration in proletarian fantasy1 Joseph Grim Feinberg is article examines the relationship between the political theories of Central European dissidents and the social practice of “tramping,” aback-to-nature movement that was associated with oppositional politics and “anti-politics” in Czechoslovakia from the end of World War Iuntil 1989. e article reflects on the potential political significance of the tramping movement’s ideal of uncivilized society as an alternative to the dissidents’ concept of “civil society,” which began as acall for “antipolitical” transformation, and yet after 1989 became an ideological justification for explicitly elitist modes of liberal-conservative governance. e concept of “uncivilized society,” which can be drawn from the discourse of tramping, has parallels in contemporary autonomist calls for tactical retreats from oppressive modernity. e article concludes that the tramping movement’s emphasis on internal organization best distinguishes the movement both from East-Central European dissent before 1989 and from autonomism today. Keywords: back-to-nature movements, civil society, anti-politics, Czech tramping, Czech tramps, Czechoslovakia CIVIL SOCIETY AND OTHER ANTI-POLITICS Otramps and pirates; Owolves with worn-out faces; Osouls stalked by desire; Oproletarians of the ages! The wild distance made us drunk with exotic clouds of steamy gold, And our vagabond flag we hoisted on apole. e first verse of Tramps’ Heart, by Géza Včelička, early 1930s2 In the years before 1989, oppositional and countercultural movements in East-Central Europe were marked by acertain exodus from the realm of politics. Observers in the West took most note of the so-called dissidents, who they raised the banner of “apolitical” civil society against the state-centered administration of the Communist Party. In the formulation of Hungarian dissident György Konrád, the model dissident was “antipolitical” and simply desired to be left alone. But in demanding to be left alone, 1 Thanks to Susan Gal and William Mazzarella for their comments on earlier drafts of this paper; to the Anthropology of Europe Workshop at the University of Chicago; and to Dobrodruh (Gejza Legén) for his expert knowledge of tramping and of many other things. The work of revising this paper was supported by the grant project Unity and Multiplicity in Contemporary Thought, funded by the Czech Science Foundation (number 17-23955S) and realized at the Institute of Philosophy of the Czech Academy of Sciences. 2 Unless otherwise stated, the original language cited is Czech. Translations are my own. OPEN ACCESS
JOSEPH GRIm FEINBERG 31 the dissident rejected “the power monopoly of the political class” (Konrád 1984: 231) and undermined apolitical regime that demanded total political control. In Poland, Adam Michnik depicted dissidents in the more activist terms of what he called “anticipatory democracy” (Michnik 1976), as the bases of afuture democracy were laid in autonomous oppositional activity, represented most visibly by the independent trade union Solidarity, but also by institutions like the Polish dissidents’ “Flying University.” In Czechoslovakia it was Václav Havel who most eloquently championed “apolitical politics”: a“politics of people, not of the apparatus,” apolitics in which dissenters confronted “impersonal power” with “their own humanity” and sought “to make areal political force out of aphenomenon so ridiculed by the technicians of power— the phenomenon of the human conscience” (Havel 1988: 398). For him, as for Konrád, the hero of anti-politics appeared as the thoughtful, publicly moralizing intellectual; and it is worth noting that even in the intellectual opposition connected with Poland’s Solidarity, the ideal of working-class resistance was eclipsed in the course of the 1980s by an ideal of better-thinking, uncorrupted intellectuals (Ost 1990; Ost 2005). roughout the region, this sphere of activity separated from the state came to be known, especially in the course of the 1980s and 90s, as “civil society.” e term “civil society” was more widely used in Hungarian and Polish dissident circles than in Czechoslovakia, where it only became widespread after 1989. But even in Czechoslovak context the term came to be used retrospectively to refer to the spaces of relative freedom and opposition that had been known earlier as “underground,” “alternative,” or “parallel.” In asense, the notion of civility became canonized in what might be called “post-dissident” discourse, which presented the liberal democratic civil society that developed after 1989 as acontinuation of the dissident project before it. But acloser look at the variety of unofficial and oppositional activity before 1989 reveals that the ideal of aproper, “civil” society of moral intellectuals was not as monolithic at the time as it came to appear in retrospect. Awide array of nonmainstream practices did not fit easily into the model of an upstanding, rational, civil society that was theorized and popularized by the dissidents and, after the political changes of 1989, by former dissidents and their associates. Among the activities that were broadly understood by as subversive, there were brash avant-garde happenings and punk rock concerts, drug-filled parties and carnivalesque street protests,3 Catholic pilgrimages and gatherings of folk singer-songwriters. In the Czech Lands, and to alesser extent in Slovakia, there was also amovement called “tramping.” e tramping movement, like the oppositional movements around it, was based on atradition of anti-political politics. Unlike many of these other movements, however, and particularly unlike the activities of dissidents, tramping was amass movement with ahistory covering most of the twentieth century. Also unlike many of these movements, tramping traced its origins to an explicit criticism of labor and, through this, to aradically critical view of civilized, industrial society. In the years after World War I, as young Czech workers returned from the barbarism of war to the banality of factory life, agroup of them responded by deciding to take temporary leave of the modern industrial world. During their days off work, 3 On the more carnivalesque of these activities, see Kenney 2002. OPEN ACCESS
32 STUDIA ETHNOLOGICA PRAGENSIA 2/2017 they went into the woods, camped, played sports, and sang songs of adventure and romance. ey also abjured adult supervision, disdained hierarchy, and consciously inverted the bourgeois and national-chauvinist values that they saw as dominating their workday world. At first, participants in the new movement called themselves “wild scouts” (divocí skauti) in opposition to the respectable and conservative Scouting movement. But soon the young adventurers became more focused on the activities they admired than on those they opposed. “Wild scouts” took on the name of “cowboys” (cowboyové or, in later orthography, kovbojové), and then, inspired by Jack London’s memoir of his hobo days (London 1916), they became “trampové”—tramps. e movement grew rapidly and, by the late 1920s—to the consternation of its earliest adherents—was commercialized, as tramp songs gained popularity in mainstream Czech popular culture. Surviving commercialization, then repression by successive regimes, the movement experienced arevival in the liberalizing atmosphere of the 1960s and expanded from its strictly Czech roots into Slovakia; and after 1968, when Czechoslovak society reached new heights of rigidity and banality, tramping entered what some participants call the movement’s “golden age” (although the term “silver age” might be amore appropriate analytic term). After 1989, when the dissident ideal of civil society become hegemonic, tramping and its uncivilized ideals went through what most tramps describe as serious decline. rough these years, the movement’s attitude toward dominant society oscillated between one of explicit “political” opposition and one of overtly “apolitical” avoidance. e occasionally explicit politics of tramping, however, always maintained an uneasy relationship to politics as traditionally understood, while the tramps’ overtly apolitical activity concealed political significance that was well understood by those who experienced it. is paper, based on an analysis of published sources as well as personal communication with participants in the tramping movement,4 is an attempt to trace the continuities and discontinuities of the tramps’ apolitical-political history. Beyond that, however, the paper is also an investigation into the broader significance of tramp (anti-)politics in comparison with the politics of the dissidents, and with an eye toward other movements, in other places and times, that have attempted to change the world without being “political.” e dissidents’ forms of “anti-politics” and “apolitical politics,” as subversive as they proved in the context of authoritarian East-Central Europe, proved after 1989 to be compatible with new modes of domination,5 and this fact may be taken as awarning to other anti-political movements that may not wish to follow the dissidents’ path. e complexities of the tramping movement in the context of alonger durée of opposition in East-Central Europe may shed light on both the limitations and the potentiality contained more generally in anti-political approaches. 4 The primary research for this paper was conducted in 2006. Although the paper has been considerably revised in the years since then, it reflects the state of research on tramping at the time of its origin. It does not take into consideration the important work that has been written on the movement in the years since, including some by other contributors to this volume. 5 This process has been well described e.g. by Eyal, Szelényi, Townsley 1998 and Eyal 2003. OPEN ACCESS
JOSEPH GRIm FEINBERG 33 From acertain perspective, the dissidents’ conception of “alternative” or “civil” society appears open and inclusive. Although they put forth their own particular intellectual and artistic activity as an ideal image of dissent, they also depicted called for the creation of awhole “second culture” or “parallel polis” (Benda 1991), where almost any life activity—the authentic lifeworld itself (Havel 1988; Bělohradský 1991a)— could be re-created alongside official, politicized society. Nevertheless, this alternative society was conceived in such away that only acertain aspects of these activities appeared anti-politically relevant: above all, their facilitation of inter-personal morality. What the dissidents and post-dissidents posed against the sphere of political power was asphere in which individuals could feel free from external coercion, where individuals could act according to their conscience, without dissimulation,6 and where individuals could form direct social relationships, free from the “impersonal” bureaucracy of the state.7 is is the first point on which, Ithink, the tramping movement can offer acritical perspective on anti-politics and civil society. e dissident and post-dissident conception of civil society was also, implicitly, aconception of civilized society. e dissidents’ and post-dissidents’ framing of civil society privileged modes of behavior that happened to conform to the interests and manners of cultured elites, and which left awide array of social activity outside the frame of noteworthy behavior and meaningful discourse. Although the dissidents themselves criticized modern “civilization,” they did so against the implicit backdrop of amore civilized, early modern way of life. When Václav Bělohradský, an exiled Czech philosopher who heavily influenced the dissidents still in Czechoslovakia, wrote of “renewing public life” as aspace of autonomous, responsible individuals, he unmistakably evoked the early modern ideal of bourgeois publicness (Bělohradský 1991c: 135). Havel, more romantic, held up the image of an old farmer (Havel 1988: 384)—but the image was of an independent, landholding farmer, not alandless serf or awandering farmworker. It could be said that the Czech dissidents’ chief indictment of Communist Party rule was that the system did not enable its citizens to act as ideal, autonomous, responsible—bourgeois—citizens. e dissidents did not reflect on the ways that this ideal might be founded on an exclusion of the non-bourgeois from the public sphere.8 Precisely this principle of exclusion is brought to the fore in the activity of tramps. e figure of the “tramp,” sometimes banished from work and sometimes escaping it, in run through with lines of exclusion and of flight. Participants in the tramping movement, feeling excluded from the prosperity and democracy promised by 6 This was probably Havel’s most significant contribution to dissident thought. His chief criticism was not that the system was inherently immoral, but that it forced people to profess things they did not believe and to act according to amorality that they did not sure (See e.g. Havel 1991). 7 This aspect of civil society, frequently emphasized by Havel, was most fully theorized by Václav Bělohradský 1991b. 8 This is an argument frequently leveled at Habermas’s idealization of bourgeois publicness (see e.g. Fraser 1990). This argument has not been sufficiently brought to bear, however, on the discourse of civil society. OPEN ACCESS
34 STUDIA ETHNOLOGICA PRAGENSIA 2/2017 industrial society, attempted to transform this feeling of exclusion into an experience of freedom. ey laid aclaim on freedom from the society that excluded them, and they sought to occupy aposition where which they could stand partially outside society and criticize society from without. Out of an antagonism toward politics and labor, they established amass movement for apolitical leisure. In doing so, they approached and in some ways extended the rejection of politics that was present in classical anarchism (which had astrong presence in the Czech Lands before World War Iand likely influenced the tramps’ thought9). e tramping movement also prefigured more recent rejections of labor (e.g. Tronti 2010; Gorz 1982; Block 1986) and escapes or “flights” from capital (e.g. Deleuze, Guattari 1987; Sakolsky, Koehnline 1993; Moulier Boutang 1998). On asecond point, however, the tramping movement diverges both from the dissidents and from amajor tendency in leftist anti-politics. For the dissidents, civil society was to provide aspace for social relationships, but these relationships were understood, in an important sense, asocially. Havel called on politics to “return to its only proper starting point […]: individual people,” rather than any “‘positive’ model” of organization (Havel 1991: 180–1), and on one occasion an interviewer had to prod the future president five times before he reluctantly agreed to describe the social and political structures he envisioned in abetter society (Havel, Hvížďala 1990: 8–18). What came to be known as civil society, in other words, was thought of as an accumulation of relations between individual persons, not as asocial structure. When, after 1989, new social structures emerged that had little in common with the dissidents’ pre-revolutionary hopes, they generally saw no recourse but to denounce the personal integrity of individuals involved. ey had no clear structural alternative to propose. It is fair enough for critics of capitalist domination to fault the dissidents for accommodating to neoliberal capitalism, but it is striking that many critics of capitalism share asimilar distaste for social-structural analysis of their own movements. Amajor tendency in anarchist thought has long been to focus on the removal of dominant structures (state, capital), while assuming that free relations would naturally emerge in their absence. To acertain extent this tendency continues in post-structuralist celebrations of the indeterminate and deterritorialized (E.g. Deleuze, Guattari 1987), which accept the de-structured nature of contemporary capitalist society and eschew attempts to re-create order within it or against it. e tendency also continues in certain evocations of a“multitude” whose prime structuring principle is adeliberately under-defined notion of “the common,” which bears strong resemblance to the notion of an unstructured civil society. e tramping movement, by contrast, parallels adifferent anarchist tendency, one that focuses on the political structures internal to social movements, developing new modes of organization and positing them as more 9 It would, however, require further research to determine the extent of anarchist influence on tramp thought. The early tramping movement’s most immediate points of reference were drawn from its own historical moment, when anarchism as an organized movement had largely given way to the Communist Party and other socialist parties, while the anarchist ethos of an earlier generation of rebellious poets had been largely translated into new terms by the rising avant-garde (see Tomek 2002). OPEN ACCESS
JOSEPH GRIm FEINBERG 35 or less generalizable social alternatives. In the tramping movement, the creation of alternative power structures was not always central, but it was always present. Finally, the tramping movement poses atheoretical challenge in one further respect: it presents amode of cultural borrowing that has gone largely un-discussed in studies of oppositional culture in East-Central (not to mention Western) Europe: the iconography of uncivilized society, comprising images of marginalized people around the world, with aprivileged position granted to images of the American Wild West. e meaning of this iconography is distinct from that of other, more frequently studied Western symbols in Eastern Europe, such as jazz or rock music, which seem to present the West unambiguously as acarrier of progressive modernity (e.g. Mitchell 1992; Szemere 2000; Ostendorf 2003). e tramps’ celebration of the wild West—of hoboes against bourgeois, backwoodsmen against city-dwellers, Indians against settlers—presents amore complicated picture, in which the West offers simultaneously the prestige of progress and progress’s flipside, in aWestern-tinged (and, thus, implicitly modern) alternative to dominant modernity. But neither can the tramps’ vision of uncivilized society be properly understood through the theoretical lenses developed for the study of analogous cultural borrowing from colonized societies, especially in North American context. Unlike White Americans “playing Indian” (Deloria 1998) or performing Blackness (Roediger 1991; Lott 1993), and unlike colonizing European elites fantasizing about their newly won territories (as provides the focus for much of Christian Feest’s volume on playing Indian in Europe; Feest 1987), tramps’ connections to European colonialism were always tenuous. eir relationship to the oppressed the people whose culture they borrowed was indirect, mediated through their understanding of colonialism as the work of other European and American societies.10 is relationship is, to be sure, problematic, and not least because of the tendency for the relationship to be misrecognized by people familiar with the Wild West in North American context. But this relationship should be understood with its own set of terms. IMAGINING (UN)CIVIL(IZED) SOCIETY In Barcelona we shake hands; in Paris again we meet; We swing through the freshest air under Canadian trees. On diamond mountain glaciers, through Tibet we climb, And on our backs we sleep in Neapolitan dives. e second verse of Tramps’ Heart In developing its specific symbolism, the tramping movement drew on Hollywood Westerns and North American adventure novels that would be familiar to most North 10 Christopher Frayling is unusual among scholars in examining the role of the Wild West imaginary for people not closely implicated in the exploitation of the Wild West, but his case study provides only limited parallels with the case of tramps (see Frayling 1998; see also Mariani 1987). OPEN ACCESS
36 STUDIA ETHNOLOGICA PRAGENSIA 2/2017 Americans, in addition to Wild West narratives filtered through European eyes such as those of German novelist Karl May. Tramps began to dress as cowboys and Indians, then as ragged hoboes and “Canadian” woodsmen in flannel shirts. ey took on tramp nicknames like “Johnny,” “Mary,” and “Grizzly.” ey renamed the river valleys and train lines where they tramped, with the Vltava becoming the “Great River” (Velká řeka), the Kocába becoming the “Snake River” (Hadí řeka), and arailway along the cliffs over the Sázava River becoming the “Sázava Pacific” (Posázavský pacifik). When tramps founded their first regular campsites in the Bohemian (and later Moravian and Slovak) woods, they gave these “settlements” (osady) names like “Rawhide” and “Liberty,” they built totem poles to mark the territory, and they elected “sheriffs” (šerifové) as their symbolic leaders. When they played and sang around their campfires, they gradually replaced more common local instruments like accordions with guitars, and later with harmonicas and banjos. And beginning in the 1960s, inspired by the North American folk revival, tramps expanded their musical repertoire to include American-style folk music, country music, and bluegrass. e American West, however, was not exclusive in its hold over the tramp imagination. e men of the West were joined by sailors and pirates, Latin American peasants, Pacific Islanders, and tribal Africans. Cacti in one song could be followed by jungles in another; “Tramp Settlement Alaska” (Trampská osada, or T.O., Aljaška) might be visited by the denizens of “Tramp Settlement Hawai’i” (T. O.Hawai); protagonists might travel, in asingle verse, from cosmopolitan metropoles to remote northern forests to Himalayan glaciers, then back to the dubious comforts of aEuropean barroom floor. All this fit into asingle project: in the words of tramp historian Bob Hurikán, “to bring the romantic into today’s age” (Hurikán 1990: 10). e tramps’ romantic ideal (“romantika”), then, was an outward-looking romanticism. Like romantic nationalists, tramps felt ill at ease with the banality and cold rationalism of modern urban life; but they sought inspiration far away from home. is distance, more than anything else, gave coherence to asymbolism that was far removed from any concrete local reality—as tramps made even less effort than Hollywood or Karl May to faithfully portray the lives of the people and worlds they represented. Asheriff might preside over acamp of hoboes, playing Hawaiian guitar beneath atotem pole, without evoking any sense of inappropriateness among fellow tramps. On the contrary, the intense mixing of symbols suggests that the mixing itself was essential to the iconography’s effectiveness, as the combination of disparate parts served to evoke adiversity of imaginable adventures, maximally contrasting with the banality experienced in workaday life. Within this diversity of images, nevertheless, the West occupied aprivileged place. Images of cowboys, Indians, hoboes, and woodsmen far outnumbered images from the rest of the world, and notably absent were figures of the primitive and adventurous that could have been taken from Central or Eastern European tradition. Tramps favored the West in their imagery, but not from the prestigious, modernized West. ey favored its most outcast, primitive, and wild elements. e tramps’ evocations of the Wild West thus mirror and derive from Westerners’ own fascination with those uncivilized spaces whose conquest and civilizing provide the backdrop for Western modernity. Nevertheless, the tramp imagination OPEN ACCESS
JOSEPH GRIm FEINBERG 37 would be misunderstood if seen solely from this perspective. Although tramps would have been familiar with along-standing discourse that presented Czech culture as aleading civilizing force in Eastern Europe—which thus implicitly justified Czech dominance over the multi-ethnic territory of Czechoslovakia and made Prague into acultural center even for Slavs father to the east and south—tramps significantly chose not to fit their symbolism into this discourse. While cultural movements contemporary with tramping romanticized wandering Roma, Pagan Slavs, Hussite rebels, or Ruthenian bandits in the Eastern reaches of Czech hegemony, tramps chose figures that would not be associated with Czechness or the Czech-run state, and they explicitly rejected the national chauvinism that they saw in the Czech Scouts. ey imagined spaces that they would never claim belonged to them or to their state, nation, or race. ese were spaces that they could only claim by claiming their part in humanity as awhole, as fellow outcasts who together have rights to the whole. is variety of lumpenproletarian internationalism was not without its problems— among other things, it is worth considering whether tramps’ position at the center of Europe made it easier for them to imagine their proletarianism as universal, while the outcasts of more marginal global regions were continually relegated in the public eye to the position of particular local cultures. But these were problems specific to the tramping movement, not derived directly from the colonial situation of the West. Tramps’ internationalism might be called abstract. It was based on an idealization of international others rather than on international communication or collaboration. Lacking personal contact with their others, tramps relied largely on stereotypes, many of them inaccurate and potentially offensive. It would be imprecise, however, to interpret this as an ordinary case of dehumanizing an oppressed other. Tramps envisioned themselves in solidarity with the people they represented—an attitude which, according to one tramp, “had deep roots in the soul of Czech people, who always sympathized with oppressed peoples and with Indian tribes fighting against the numerical superiority of ‘whites’” (Berka 1991: 99). But this solidarity remained asymbolic solidarity, whose symbolism was significant for the symbolizers rather than the symbolized (who could hardly be aware of the symbolizing). e figures of the tramp imagination did not represent specific social groups and their social conditions but rather general principles relevant to tramps—adventure and romance, the primitive, the marginal, the distant. e principle of distance, in particular, influenced the meaning of all the other principles. e backwoodsman signified distance from the urban world. e pirate signified distance from the law. e hobo signified distance from labor. e West signified distance from the provincialism and familiarity of East-Central Europe. e Wild West signified distance from the civilized West. Setting out from their own, very modern forms of exclusion—the exclusion of exploited workers from bourgeois society, later supplemented by the exclusion of ageneral population from Party dictatorship—the tramps generalized the principle of exclusion and inverted the values attached to it. While the dissidents imbued their ideas of a“parallel polis” and a“civil society” with an aspiration for inclusion, the tramps turned the principle of exclusion into aprinciple of freedom from exclusive society. OPEN ACCESS
38 STUDIA ETHNOLOGICA PRAGENSIA 2/2017 THE SOCIALITY OF (UN)CIVIL(IZED) SOCIETY And he who sits down by the fire of our primitive camp May for the first time understand the heart of tramps. Acup of bitter grog then rocks us off to sleep, And in the morning we are waked by reddened skies’ soft gleam. e third verse of Tramps’ Heart e tramps’ hardy internationalism was, nevertheless, tempered by akind of localism. Although tramps showed little interest in the human culture surrounding the physically places where they “went on the tramp,” they showed great interest in these places as they were re-signified in the tramp imagination. Tramps combined an ideal of rootless wandering with an ideal of community rooted in the concrete sociality of tramping. ese competing ideals are expressed, for example, in the third verse of Včelička’s “Tramps’ Heart”, which thematically shifts from “the wild distance” to “our primitive camp”. e appeal of distant glaciers and forests is clear to anyone, but only “he who sits down with us” can truly understand what lies within tramps’ hearts. Us now comes to the center of the song. Musicologist Josef Kotek has noted aparallel shift in the history of tramps’ song repertoire, which in the movement’s early years focused almost exclusively on adventure in foreign lands (with titles like “Sailor’s Lullaby,” “Venezuelána, adios [sic],” and “On the Zambezi River”), but which by the late 1920s began also to evoke tramps’ own life, with lyrical descriptions of the surrounding countryside, of love for other tramps, of tramp settlements and tramps’ wanderings (Kotek 1995: 177). In the postwar period this tendency grew still stronger, as evidenced in songs like “Our Gang” (“Naša parta”): When in our settlement the fire burns, Immediately it draws people in with its shine […] Our group will never betray the mountains; Every weekend we travel to the settlement […] Nothing bothers us there; Nothing can get in the way of our freedom.11 e song highlights the campfire’s role as aritual center for the community. It evokes nature, but “the mountains” in this song are neither those of an exotic land nor those of the nationalist symbolic landscape (for instance, no place names are given); they form aspecifically tramp landscape, to which “our group,” will remain faithful, because it is agroup of friends who return, week after week, to the renew their claim on space. Unlike the dissidents’ civil society, which was assumed to be democratic more or less by default because it was free of structures of external domination, the society of 11 “Naša parta,” by Alexander Kollárik / Bob from the “Utah” settlement in Slovakia. Ihave taken the text from Kronika slovenských trampských osád, an informally published CD-ROM distributed among Slovak tramps. OPEN ACCESS
JOSEPH GRIm FEINBERG 45 It was moreover during this period that the tramping movement helped give birth to another semi-autonomous cultural movement, which eventually spread its influence beyond the sphere of tramping, and which is widely considered to have played akey role in fomenting opposition to the regime. is was afolk singer-songwriter movement, many of whose leading performers came out of the tramping movement and who, through tramp music, found their way to such critical North American folksingers as Pete Seeger, Joan Baez, and Bob Dylan. e Czech and Slovak folk song movement rivaled the dissident movement in importance and certainly eclipsed it in numerical participation, engaging abroad public of urban youths in large festivals and concerts, and popularizing alarge number of socially critical songs that would, in the course of the 1970s and 80s, be heard around campfires and other social gatherings across Czechoslovakia. is movement’s songs, much more than the literary and artistic works of the dissidents, were well known and widely recalled by the masses of demonstrators in 1989. Singer-songwriter Karel Kryl who, from his position of exile in Germany, rivaled Václav Havel as one of Czechoslovakia’s most influential oppositional figure, is said to have spent time among tramps (who called him “Kájus”) before he fled the country in 1969 (Kriss 2004). Significantly, many folk singer-songwriters came from the industrial working class,16 and although they did not usually adopt explicitly proletarian attitudes, they consistently presented themselves with aplebeian, everyman imagery that drew heavily on the social-semiotic constructions of tramping. POLITICS IN THE DISTANCE Iknow, you accursed distance, and you must know it too, You dazzle the eyes only, and you break the heart in two. And when somewhere afire burns, aflame in quiet night, Iwill remember our old settlement for one last time. e fourth and final verse of Tramps’ Heart In the aftermath of 1989, it was dissident and post-dissident civil society, rather than the uncivilized society of tramping and movements related to it, that provided ahegemonic ideology for the founding of anew democracy. e concept of civil society was used to strengthen aspecific and limited ideal of citizenship, in which intellectual elites formed acivilized, moral vanguard against the perceived dangers of demagoguery. is model, which was only implicit in dissident theory, took an increasingly central and explicit place in emerging liberal-conservative, anti-populist ideologies, which valorized the rule of elites and delegitimized various modes of public engagement that were deemed uncivil. In contrast to the dissidents’ ideal of responsible citizenry, tramping expressed ideals that had been historically denied civility and citizenship. And while civil society was oriented toward state politics, albeit from the perspective of citizens participating in government from the outside, tramping pos16 See e.g. the list of singers origins and occupations in Plachetka (1991). OPEN ACCESS
46 STUDIA ETHNOLOGICA PRAGENSIA 2/2017 ited asolidarity between non-citizens and partial citizens who had limited access to civic participation. Tramping, however implicitly, raised the possibility of an alternative mode of public engagement, in which the boundaries of the civil and civilized would be questioned, and in which voice would be given to that which is excluded from the society of the civic. “e wild distance made us drunk […]” e “accursed distance […] dazzle[s] the eyes […] but break[s] the heart.” e fantasy of tramping appeared painfully unreachable; yet it was repeatedly reached in the community around the campfire. e fantasy of tramping was unreachable, but the possibility of imagining it was conditioned by the equal unreachability of the joys of modern life. e anti-politics of tramping lay in the articulation of these two unreachable distances—the promised happiness of bourgeois and Western civilization, and the wild adventure of the uncivilized— through the reachability of tramp practice. Like other anti-political movements, tramping involved afundamental rejection of dominant modes of state and party politics, which were always already distant from tramps, who did not have aplace in them to express and press for their desires. Parties and the Party claimed to represent them, but these representations did not correspond to the tramps’ experience of alienation from the ideals that civilized society posed. At the same time, however, tramping involved asecond mode of distant politics, asecond politics of representation. In tramp fantasy, political principles played themselves out in aparallel world of representations, where the subjects and objects of tramp desire were brought together, given asymbolic solidarity of proximity. Against arepresentativeness of substitution, in which political representation makes citizens disappear as active subjects, the tramps posed arepresentativeness of desire, in which desired things were assembled on aplane beyond power politics. e representers were not placed politically above the represented; nor were the represented given power through or over the representations of them. Representations were, rather, mixed in afield of political indifferentiation. Power struggles, to be sure, could be represented on this plane (Indians against colonial armies, hoboes against upstanding citizens), but the meaning of these struggles was translated into aunified message of abstract solidarity—not so much with these particular struggles as with the principle of distantiation from dominant politics—and into amessage of abstract desire—not so much for these particular people or lives as for freedom from boring and oppressive society, which opened space for further particular desires. ese two distances—from rejected politics and from differently politicized objects of desire—were then grounded in the nearness of the tramp community. It was the form of this community that determined the form of tramp anti-politics, positioning the movement against existing political entities, articulating its desires as shared demands, and showing that even the wildest imagination is socially organized. It was this communal organization that could hold up its imagined world as acriticism of actually existing society, calling for aliberation of leisure from labor, and channeling shared desires for systemic transformation. Tramps’ organization, moreover, offers further evidence that the fragmented and precarious margins of society can organize themselves at all, finding that elusive element of the “common” that has OPEN ACCESS
JOSEPH GRIm FEINBERG 47 lately been championed in radical politics (e.g. Hardt, Negri 2004; Raunig 2002) but has been less adequately explained. While many of today’s anti-political thinkers favor deterritorialization and the de-structuring of stable social forms, the tramping movement met the process deterritorialization (from national space) with adual reterritorialization: of the spaces of fantasy and of the re-christened spaces of tramp practice. Like in the post-structuralist and autonomist tradition, the moment of deterritorialization is ambivalently embraced as both acondition of social exclusion and as aprinciple of autonomy. But the tramping movement would reappropriate the territories opened by its conditional banishment from the civilized world. e wild distance would be overlaid by afamiliarized territory of desire: ahome for those who have no home, asociety of the uncivilized. OPEN ACCESS
48 STUDIA ETHNOLOGICA PRAGENSIA 2/2017 APPENDIX Figure 1.Facsimiles of State Security documents. Above: “Organizational structure of the tramping movement.” An attempt is made to sketch out ahierarchy, but multiple lines of connection and influence cut across the lines of vertical integration. Below: “Organizational structure of the former Scouting organization.” Here the picture of hierarchy is unambiguous (Reproduced from Cuhrová 2002: 152). OPEN ACCESS
JOSEPH GRIm FEINBERG 49 LITERATURE II. Tábornický kmen socialistických skautů. 1931. Skauting atramping. Vážné slovo tvůrčí kritiky vokamžiku kritickém. Prague. Altman, K. 2000. “Trampové amoc (kproblematice postavení trampského hnutí ve společnosti od počátku dvacátých let do současnosti).” Český lid 87 (3): 223–238. Beer, F. 2008. --atys na Němce střílel, dědo? Českoněmecký Žid mezi komunismem anacismem. Prague: Paseka. Bělohradský, V. 1991a. Přirozený svět jako politický problém. Eseje očlověku pozdní doby. Prague: Československý spisovatel. ———. 1991b. “Krize eschatologie neosobnosti.” Pp. 61–125 in Přirozený svět jako politický problém. Eseje očlověku pozdní doby. Prague: Československý spisovatel. ———. 1991c. “Člověk bez skrupulí.” Pp. 126–136 in Přirozený svět jako politický problém. Eseje očlověku pozdní doby. Prague: Československý spisovatel. Benda, V. 1991. “The Parallel Polis.” Pp. 35–41 in H.Gordon Skilling, P.Wilson (eds.) Civic Freedom in Central Europe, New York: St.Martin’s. Berka, M. 1991. Posázavský Pacifik. Praha: NADAS. Black, B. 1996. “The Abolition of Work.” Pp.236–250 in H. J. Ehrlich (ed.) Reinventing Anarchy, Again. Edinburgh, Scotland and San Francisco, Cal.: AK Press. Brčko (Zd. Dočkal). 1991. Údolia nestíchli. Dejiny trampingu na Slovensku. Bratislava: Tramp Club. Bren, P.2002. “Weekend Getaways: The Chata, the Tramp, and the Politics of Life in Post-1968 Czechoslovakia.” Pp. 123–140 in D.Crowley, S.E. Reid (eds.) Socialist Spaces: Sites of Everyday Life in the Eastern Bloc, Oxford, England: Berg. Cuhrová, L. 2002. “Dvacet let ve stínu. Malá kapitola zdějin českého skautingu.” Pp. 145–174 in M.Vaněk (ed.). Ostrůvky svobody. Kulturní aobčanské aktivity mladé generace v80. letech vČeskoslovensku. Prague: Ústav pro soudobé dějiny. Deleuze, G., Guattari, F. 1987. AThousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Deloria, P.J. 1998. Playing Indian. New Haven: Yale University Press. Eyal, G. 2003. The Origins of Postcommunist Elites: From Prague Spring to the Breakup of Czechoslovakia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Eyal, G., I.Szelényi, E.Townsley. 1998. Making Capitalism Without Capitalists: Class Formation and Elite Struggles in Post-Communist Central Europe. London: Verso. Feest, C.F. (ed.). 1987. Indians and Europe: An Interdisciplinary Collection of Essays. Lincoln, Neb.: University of Nebraska Press. Fraser, N. 1990. “Rethinking the Public Sphere: AContribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy.” Social Text (25–26): 56–80. Frayling, C.1998. Spaghetti Westerns: Cowboys and Europeans from Karl May to Sergio Leone. London: I.B. Tauris. Gorz, A. 1982. Farewell to the Working Class: An Essay on Post-Industrial Socialism. London: Pluto. Hadži. 1930. “Politika atramping.” Tramp 2 (24): 2. Hardt, M., A.Negri. 2004. Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire. New York: Penguin. Havel, V. 1988. “Anti-Political Politics.” Pp.381–398 in J.Keane (ed.). Civil Society and the State. London: Verso. Havel, V. 1985.. “The Power of the Powerless.” Pp. 23–95 in J. Keane (ed.) The Power of the Powerless: Citizens Against the State in CentralEastern Europe. Trans. P. Wilson. London: Hutchinson. Havel, V., K.Hvížďala. 1990. Disturbing the Peace. Trans. P.Wilson. New York: Knopf. Hurikán, B. (J. Peterka). 1990. Dějiny trampingu. Prague: Novinář. Kenney, P.2002. ACarnival of Revolution: Central Europe 1989. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. OPEN ACCESS
50 STUDIA ETHNOLOGICA PRAGENSIA 2/2017 Konrád, G. 1984. Antipolitics: An Essay. San Diego: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich. Kotek, J. 1995. “Lidovka atrampská píseň meziválečného období.” Hudební Věda 32 (2): 158–181. Kriss (K. Vašičková). 2004. “Čí je potlach?” Dostavník times. Krutina, V. 1971. “Strana amládež.” Pp. 128–134 in V.Holá, R.Vyskočova (eds.). Zápasy KSČ očima pamětníků. Prague: Svoboda. Kuzma. 1930. “Generace.” Tramp 2 (26): 4. London, J. 1916. The Road. New York: Macmillan. Lott, E. 1993. Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class. New York: Oxford University Press. Mácha, Z. (ed.) 1967. Kronika trampské písničky. Prague: Panton. Mariani, G. 1987. “‘Was Anybody More of an Indian Than Karl Marx?’: The Indiani Metropolitani and the 1977 Movement.” Pp.585–598 in C.Feest (ed.) Indians and Europe. Aachen: Herodot. Michnik, A. 1976. “The New Evolutionism.” Survey 22. Mitchell, T. 1992. “Mixing Pop and Politics: Rock Music in Czechoslovakia Before and After the Velvet Revolution.” Popular Music (11): 187–203. Morkes, F. 1977. “Trampské hnutí ve Středních Čechách.” Střodčeský historický sborník 12. Moulier Boutang, Y. 1998. De L’esclavage au salariat : Économie historique du salariat bridé. Paris: Presses universitaires de France. Ost, D. 1990. Solidarity and the Politics of AntiPolitics. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Ost, D. 2005. The Defeat of Solidarity: Anger and Politics in Postcommunist Europe. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press. Ostendorf, B. 2003. “From Liberating Modernism to Subversive Reeduction? The Impact of Jazz on European Culture.” In Americanization— Globalization— Education, ed. Gerhard Bach, Sabine Broeck, and Ulf Schulenberg. Heidelberg: WINTER. Plachetka, J. 1991. Dokud se zpívá. Praktický průvodce po portovním parnasu (přehlídka pětatřiceti písničkářů). Plzeň: Západočeské nákladatelství. Raunig, G. 2002. “Transversal Multitudes.”, RePublicArt (September). Online at http:// republicart.net/disc/mundial/raunig02_ en.pdf (accessed 6 October 2017). Reidinger, M. 2007. “Islands of Bourgeois SelfRealization in aSea of Changes: ACentury of Czech Cottaging.” Dissertation, University of Virginia. Rejzek, J. 2015. Český etymologický slovník, Praha: Leda. Roediger, D.R. 1991. The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class. London: Verso. Sakolsky, R.B., Koehnline, J. (eds.). 1993. Gone to Croatan: The Origins of North American Dropout Culture. New York: Autonomedia. Svojsík, A. 1924. “Bílé otrokyně vcentru Evropy.” Národní listy, May 17. Szemere, A. 2000. “‘We’ve Kicked the Habit’: (Anti)Politics of Art’s Autonomy and Transition in Hungary.” Pp. 158–180 in D.Berdahl, M.Bunzl, M.Lampland, A.Arbor (eds.). Altering States: Ethnographies of the Transition in Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union, ed.: University of Michigan Press. Tomek, V. 2002. Český anarchismus ajeho publicistika 1880–1925. Praha: Filosofia. Tronti, M. 2010. “The Struggle Against Labor.” Online at http://operaismoinenglish. wordpress.com/2010/09/29/struggle-againstlabor/ (accessed 6 October 2017). Waic, M, Kössl, J. 1992. Český tramping 1918–1945. Prague and Liberec, Czechoslovakia: Práh and Ruch. Joseph Grim Feinberg (b. 1979) is an anthropologist and social theorist at the Philosophy Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences. His work addresses the history of critical social thought and the politics of popular culture in Central and Eastern Europe. His book The Paradox of Authenticity: Performing Folklore in Post-Communist Slovakia is due out in 2018. OPEN ACCESS