O ograniczeniach teorii semiotycznej w badaniach późnego PRL-u na przykładzie Semiotyki Solidarności Pawła Rojka

Abstract

The article analyses the limitations of the semiotic approach to the studies of late socialism in Poland through the critique of Semiotic of solidarity: an analysis of the discourses of the Polish Unites Workers' Party and the Independent Self-Governing Trade Union Solidarność in 1981 written by Paweł Rojek in 2009. This paper questions the assumption made by Rojek about the historical continuity of the Russian ancien régime and Soviet modernisation project as supposedly constituting the same system of intelligibility. There is an alternative approach of reading the discursive relationship between Eastern and Western bloc through the genealogy of discursive practices instead of the duality of two semiotic systems as described by the Tartu-Moscow Semiotic School. Finally, the article assesses the applicability of Rojek’s interpretation of Solidarity as belonging to the ternary system and the Party as belonging to the binary system.