Łódź is an unobvious city, at once beautiful and repulsive—painting Oficyna by Tomasz Zjawiony from the collection of Jakub Krzysztofik
photo: Jakub Krzysztofik
Let me return again to Byung-Chul Han's social vision and apply his conceptual and logical apparatus to the juxtaposition of 19th century Łódź and 21st century Łódź. The society of early exploitation capitalism and the „society of fatigue” of late „surveillance capitalism.” I'll do this using the example of Łódź's fiber workers. As Marta Madejska aptly pointed out, our city has an avenue of fibers, but no street of fibers. These heroic women bore the burden of responsibility for their families, their wikt and welfare and the upbringing of their children for several generations, working in factories and second shifts at home. Their voting, public or social rights were nonexistent, both in the 19th century and in the communist era, which is quite recent. But this is not a feminist or political tirade on a patriarchal society. That's what capitalism was then, and then our native communism. Meanwhile, it was they, so dominated and humiliated by the social conditions in which they lived, who were capable of radical and courageous protest in the 1980s. On July 30, 1981, it was the women, fiber workers with children in their arms, who took part in the hunger march. These overworked, poor women, despite the fact that they lived in a neglected, backward city, halfway through the 19th century, despite the communist government and the omnipresent surveillance of the security service, were capable of courageous protest. They had the courage and the will and the strength to express dissent. In this sense, they constituted individuals who possessed a limited but nevertheless freedom, or, as Nietzsche would have it, free will. Meanwhile, what is the social situation in the 21st century city? Byong-Chul Han draws a pessimistic diagnosis of a digitally enslaved, tired society of challenges. This society has seemingly unlimited freedom and is devoid of any compulsion to act. Unlike the enslaved fibbers, it is liberated from the Foucaultian panopticon of disciplined surveillance and oppression. However, as Han aptly notes in analyzing contemporary social relations, the 19th- or 20th-century apparatus of exploitation, coercion and oppression has been imperceptibly replaced by the digital apparatus of the achievement society: „the coercion of success.” The former prisons, mental hospitals and factories that gathered the outcasts of that society: criminals and slave laborers, have imperceptibly disappeared from the agenda of the pressing problems of urban communities, spending the sleep of the minds of the city officials, policemen and politicians in power. Today, in the space of cities, countless office buildings, banks, shopping malls or fitness clubs have appeared in place of the former symbols of power over the individual. And who is the outcast and waste of today's society? Han's diagnosis is mercilessly accurate and true: „the society of achievement,” instead of criminals, slaves and lunatics, produces depressed patients and losers. Today it is no longer the twelve-hour work system that is the problem. The problem is the fiction of the eight-hour work system, and the demand to shorten the working day is simply an outright mockery of the caviar left. In fact, today we work twenty-four hours a day and are wrapped up in the imperative to „succeed.” The principle of multitasking, so popular in corporate and political management, combined with the pressure to succeed and the fear of being a failure, leads to the annihilation of the individual and his death from exhaustion. The disappearance of the apparatus of power causes coercion and freedom to melt into a single digital machine for self-exploitation. The democratic self-governing mechanisms that control the city are beyond the perception of choice of the individual who lives in the city. It is capable of agreeing to anything in exchange for the promise of easing its painful existence. Free choice becomes unnecessary ballast for an individual exhausted by incessant work enslaved to a new invention of coercion: the mortgage. It has no time for reflection, contemplation or analysis of the situation. Both urban-dwelling individuals and city managers live under the constant pressure of unrealistic schedules, unfulfillable promises, exceeded budgets over which hangs the sword of interest on the unpaid loan. No, the problem of the modern city is not smog or fossil fuel pollution of our atmosphere. People no longer die en masse from lung disease as they did in the 19th century. A few are getting sick and dying. I am not underestimating the issue, but this problem will be solved in less than ten years, and effectively. Today, people in cities are dying from overwork and depression. In addition, powerlessness and impotence lead conscious individuals who do not agree with reality to self-recrimination and self-aggression, which Scruton accurately calls paternophobia. We hate our country, our city, ourselves and other people. We are unable to live up to the self-imposed goals we have „democratically” imposed on ourselves. That's why I didn't call my ten-point proposal for the modern city a „plan for cities” or a „project for urban regeneration” but DecaPhrmakos—a ten-part diagnosis and prescription-cure for each of the barriers-diseases facing the modern city. And the fiber artists of Łódź? From this perspective, they appear to me as women who are free, independent and in control of their own destinies.
