Polish Cleft National Habitus and Its Politico-Legal Accommodation in 1989 and 2015. Polishness As a Reproduction of Hysteresis Effect.

The paper proposes to inscribe the post-transition Polish state building process from 1989 and the attempt of its reversal by the Law and Justice government in 2015 in the context of accommodation of Polish cleft national habitus. Drawing from theories of Norbert Elias and Pierre Bourdieu, the author argues that the national habitus as such is, in fact, always plural and to some extent, characterized by a lag, a hysteresis between the state norms (the field) and social norms (habitus). However, inherently plural character of national habitus postulated in this presentation does not presuppose that plural dispositions are incorporated in the we-image of the nationals. On the contrary, the case of inner normative antagonism in national dispositions will be exemplified by cleft national habitus – modelled on cleft habitus described by Bourdieu in a class context, where a quest toward purification of plural habitus becomes ideologically crucial in national identity-building. The latter occurs in response to strong hysteresis in national figuration and is reproduced through Don Quixote effect dislocating the national experience of social time.

It is therefore not so much the lack of containment between new state norms and national norms that is bound to backfire into particularly strong anti-state national radicalization, but such a cleft social disposition in which the attempts in isolating ‘Polishness’ from any influences of former state-building is especially legitimate. The author presents a sociogenesis of the Polish cleft national habitus and the analysis of the recent mass national mobilizations – the one in 1989 and in 2015 that were both characterized by negating the previous state building as not truly national and not sovereign enough. The nationalist state project of 2015-2023 will serve here as a case study through which a paradoxical institutionalization of the hysteresis effect on the state level will be illustrated.