ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the atmosphere of the Polish mid-socialist period and the role language played in creating a doubled reality. In 1968, the repression of the youth protests and the anti-Semitic media campaign discursively expelled “revisionists” and “Zionists” from the Polish socialist society. The scale of the “March” mechanisms of delineation and othering are analysed at the examples of contemporary documents and retrospectives. The mid-socialist atmosphere was marked by anxieties about belonging to the “proper” group. This resulted in a sort of autoimmunitarian “minusivity”—a term borrowed from Ryszard Kapuściński—affecting society, which was pointedly documented in Wiesław Jażdżyński’s novel “The Case.” Under the circumstances of a growing logocracy based on propaganda newspeak, the gamble about information and interpretations became crucial. The struggle over words and their relation to reality reflected in contemporary statements and artistic production. Marek Piwowski’s film The Cruise lends itself to explore the takeover of communication by verbal scripts to avoid affectation at all costs, signalling at the same time the divergence of the corporeal reality from the verbal level.
