Instytut Historii Sztuki <Posen> [Hrsg.]: Artium Quaestiones (15.2004)

ANTYUNIZM LEONA CHWISTKA

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tion, various types of reality should be constructed and distinguished one from
another according to specific criteria, contrary to the henological metaphysics and
common prejudice. For instance, individuals must not be naively replaced with our
ideas of them, since this may lead to social evil (e.g. burning witches at the stake).
That point was particularly important in the era of growing antisemitism and va-
rious totalitarian, pseudo-scientific illusions. Distinguishing between the criteria of
reality and avoiding ominous semantic substitutions was, in Chwistek’s opinion, the
main foundation and economy of common sense, and, by the same token, the ultima-
te instance of a just social order based upon the principle of consequence.
However, deconstruction of Chwistek’s texts and biography (unfortunately, his
philosophy of common sense did not save him, a leftist intellectual, from a naive
belief in the good intentions of the Soviet communism after Poland’s defeat in 1939)
demostrates that he did not always practice what he preached. The best evidence of
his fault is his artistic doctrine oîzonism (Pol. strefizm), which seems to be continuo-
usly oscillating between common sense and quiet folly. In the 1930s Chwistek di-
scovered the latter to be the main source of artistic creation. As it turned out, his
radical program from the 1920s, when he endorsed the theory of plural reality and
its plural formalization (stylization) in art, gradually turned more and more diffu-
cult to put into practice. What proved most troublesome was an inevitable problem of
metanarration and the question of the status of voice, which simultaneously argues
for keeping many separate realities apart, to make the concept of reality noncontra-
dictory, and allows them to mix (sic!), which brings into being new realities, implying
a creative moment, but also pointing to a danger of contradiction. Chwistek con-
ceived his zonism as a kind of metasystem encompassing various formalizations
(stylizations) of reality in art. By the same token, it could not eliminate contradic-
tions among different systems of reality, the formal properties of which were suppo-
sed to be integrated by the key concept of zone. In Chwistek’s doctrine, this concept
is related to building any kind of order. In the first place, zones help us gain some
orientation in the matter of the still indefinite reality. They derive from the primary
schema which operates in the reality of imagination, and the very principle of zone
ordering is undoubtedly the basis for primary ideas of the self-contradictory every-
day speech, which must be criticized and constructed by the common sense, introdu-
cing fundamental hypothetical-deductive concepts of the theory of knowledge.
This is how we reach the aforementioned paradox of the irreducible oscillation
of common sense and quiet folly in which the recommended legitimacy of the con-
structionist method of common sense, the basis of Chwistek’s theory of the plural
reality, is cancelled by the automatism of the zone ordering of matter. Assuming,
according to the practice of deconstruction, the problematic status of metalanguage,
one may ask a question concerning the location of the voice when it speaks about
various types of reality (or perhaps only of its zones?), such as (1) things and per-
sons, (2) physical objects, (3) impressions, and (4) imaginings whose axiomatic ver-
sions as systems of propositions (the so-called propositional functions) are contradic-
tiory, since such is, after all, the rationale of the theory of plural reality. Following
deconstruction, one must ask a question about the status of this voice - is it logical
or rhetorical? Does it produce constative or performative statements? A deconstruc-
tion of Chwistek’s theory indicates that even though he attempted to separate com-