Imagined Secrets, Invisible Service , Presentation at a conference on the Memory of Everyday Collaboration with the Communist Regimes in Eastern Europe
Ferenc Hammer (Budapest, Eötvös Loránd University)
Imagined Secrets, Invisible Service
My ... more Ferenc Hammer (Budapest, Eötvös Loránd University)
Imagined Secrets, Invisible Service
My research aims to reconstruct some of the key features of the cultural field that defined the work of the secret service in the personal projections, motivations and strategies of the vast majority of society in Hungary, which had minimal or no personal or direct experience with the operations of the secret service in 1960-80. Though with their focus on interior affairs, branches of the secret service had predominantly devoted their general interest to actors and scenes that had represented some sort of security risk, the perceived or rather imagined work of these largely invisible operations by the whole of society was instrumental too in the operations of the state security forces. Perceptions of the secret service – often based on unsubstantiated beliefs and gossip –served latent functions for the secret service, enabling them to reach their goals by nurturing feelings of intimidation, secrecy, and isolation. I draw materials for this study from two sets of sources. Firstly, I assess available original documents and secondary literature regarding the operations of the secret service if it had any explicit goal or intention to cause such latent effects in the society, a process that would be somewhat in line with prevailing contemporary popular visions regarding the authoritarian power and its proverbial effects on society: invisible control, paranoia, brain washing, etc. Secondly, I will conduct interviews with people who were old enough to have personal memories of the era but who had no personal encounter with the secret service themselves. Though I’m fully aware of the methodological obstacles in analyzing recollections today of a period 30 or 50 years ago, with the help of these interviews (and also using personal memoires and secondary literature) I’ll reconstruct some of the defining principles of the operations of the secret service in the eyes of those who had no personal experience with them. My study will contribute to a more nuanced understanding of a crucial aspect of the operation of the state in the post-1956 period in Socialist Hungary.
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Talks by Ferenc Hammer
"..egy adott hírkészítő műhely által művelt pártatalan és hiteles tájékoztatás:
• nem tudja orvosolni a médiaszabályozás anomáliáit,
• nem tud művelt, kritikus és a morális kérdésekre érzékeny médiafogyasztókat alkotni,
• képtelen független és szolidaritásra képes médiaszakmát létrehozni,
• mindig sebezhető lesz a politikai napirendekkel szemben,
• nem tud sokszínű és kiegyensúlyozott médiapiacot létrehozni,
ám meggyőződésem, hogy tudatlan vagy cinikus, ha valaki azt gondolja, hogy ezek szerint a pártatalan és hiteles tájékoztatás pusztán a szórakoztató semmilyen-tájékoztatás vagy a pártos ámítás egyszerű alternatívája, azaz hogy a pártatlan és hiteles tájékoztatás csak egy vélemény a sok közül."
In my presentation I’d highlight the most important methodological and conclusions of my research that I conducted in the past years on jeans wearing in Socialist Hungary (in the period between 1956 and 1989). One of my sources were about 150 first-person narratives in which their authors wrote me in detail the story of their first pair of jeans. Respondents had not received instructions concerning anything „expected“ form or content of their reflection. Due to this methodological choice of mine, the narratives I have received show a great variety in their length, style, type of reflection, or textual craft. The point of my presentation is that material and symbolic analyses of denim jeans (a slippery cultural field, due to high marketing use of the discourse on „what jeans really meant“) can truly benefit from „crowdsourced“ contributions of a user community. The most valuable import from the first-person memories has been those small, virtually unobservable items in the user narratives which could become only visible to inquiry when they were repreated, for example the expression of a vague bodily affect when putting on the jeans the first time. Another important element of this kind of analysis is related to nonverbal elements in these memories, such as a touch, smell, a bodily posture, a manual skill, or further forms of „incorporated memory“ (Connerton) and the status of these „memories“, or rather, re-enactings in the process of the analysis of the given artifact.
In these studies, somewhere beyond the broader connections, tiny details grow sharper: the freedom and longing represented by a pair of jeans, the supportive—or critical—attitude toward the politico-economic system shown by a board game, the near mythical status of the men who crossed borders in their trucks, and the cultural attitude that bred opportunities for free, critical thinking and artistic expression within the Kádár regime. The period that is studied here extends from the 1950s until the 1990s. Through professional literature, interviews, and personal experiences, the reader is taken into the realm of the social sciences, where the terrain is no longer that of the museum and its collections of artefacts, but where the culture of ordinary objects nonetheless serves as a showcase for work-a-day life, one that illuminates the object-centere world of ordinary days, leisure time, and the process of consumption. (Excerpts from Zsófia Frazon’s introduction)
Imagined Secrets, Invisible Service
My research aims to reconstruct some of the key features of the cultural field that defined the work of the secret service in the personal projections, motivations and strategies of the vast majority of society in Hungary, which had minimal or no personal or direct experience with the operations of the secret service in 1960-80. Though with their focus on interior affairs, branches of the secret service had predominantly devoted their general interest to actors and scenes that had represented some sort of security risk, the perceived or rather imagined work of these largely invisible operations by the whole of society was instrumental too in the operations of the state security forces. Perceptions of the secret service – often based on unsubstantiated beliefs and gossip –served latent functions for the secret service, enabling them to reach their goals by nurturing feelings of intimidation, secrecy, and isolation. I draw materials for this study from two sets of sources. Firstly, I assess available original documents and secondary literature regarding the operations of the secret service if it had any explicit goal or intention to cause such latent effects in the society, a process that would be somewhat in line with prevailing contemporary popular visions regarding the authoritarian power and its proverbial effects on society: invisible control, paranoia, brain washing, etc. Secondly, I will conduct interviews with people who were old enough to have personal memories of the era but who had no personal encounter with the secret service themselves. Though I’m fully aware of the methodological obstacles in analyzing recollections today of a period 30 or 50 years ago, with the help of these interviews (and also using personal memoires and secondary literature) I’ll reconstruct some of the defining principles of the operations of the secret service in the eyes of those who had no personal experience with them. My study will contribute to a more nuanced understanding of a crucial aspect of the operation of the state in the post-1956 period in Socialist Hungary.
Read more: http://memory-of-everyday-collaboration.webnode.hu/events-calendar/
Create your own website for free: http://www.webnode.com