Technology of Dissidence: Action, Passion, Gaze

Abstract

The article applies a constructivist approach to the idea of dissidence and the ‘figure’ of the dissident. Its first thesis is that it is not only action (i.e. expressions of dissent), which is constitutive of dissidence, but also the price paid for non-conformity: being censored, marginalised, repressed, exiled, even murdered. Therefore suffering (passion in the Christian sense) is no less important than active dissent. The second and main thesis is about the crucial role of the recognition, i.e. ‘gaze’ – from outside, through transnational contacts and presence in Western media, and from inside, in the local dissident publicity (insofar as it existed). These ideas are employed to make sense of the Bulgarian debate on dissidence in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

Memorability of Romanian dissidence: Ordinary people, secret files and artistic remediations

“…Facing the communist regimes’ forms of repression and mechanisms of control, people in European countries produced various forms of response. The understanding of both repression and resistance are still fuelling the discussions related to the communist past (Ciobanu, 2021; Koleva, 2019). Studies on Romanian resistance to the communist regime alternatively refer to general concepts such as opposition and dissidence, or they refer to the collective aspect of different resistance acts – armed resistance, protests, riots and so on.…”

“…However, we argue that in many cases specific dissent movements or, more often, individual acts articulated some solutions by not fully rejecting the rule of the regime, but by more narrowly improving different aspects of society and politics. Following Daniela Koleva’s (2019) assessment, we propose that not only is the expression of dissent (an action) definitory for it to be considered such, but that there must also be a desire for the act to have an impact – for there to be an acknowledgement of the consequences of the act. We argue that in the Romanian case the Western ‘gaze’ and the acknowledgement of dissent inside and outside the communist regime represented the defining element of the radical critique of the rule associated with dissidence.…”