Ioana Macrea-Toma

One of the most ardent political-cultural struggles in the former communist states is the evaluation of the moral profiles of some of their leading intellectuals. It is not my task, however, to inventory cases or take sides. The aim of the present project is to question the revelatory dimensions of the data used in the “battle of the files” and also to reconstruct the history of how such data has been symbolically invested with classificatory authority. I therefore attempt to enhance a meta-critical approach to the classifying and documenting of “resistances” as well as of “truthful” behaviors under communism by investigating the practice of “observing”, “monitoring”, and “commenting” of “deviances” by external and internal critical agencies during the Cold War. 

The methods used are the selection of cases of mutual counter-reporting, and, afterward, the analysis of their representational and data organizational system (the reconstruction of the information processing, the mapping of the social networks involved, and the interpretation of the underpinning ideological taxonomies). If the files of the former Security Police emerge as a self-evident case of systematic surveillance, the broadcasts and analyses of Radio Free Europe appear as a counter-story within the vast operation of reporting and labeling socially or civically “disturbing” actions and/or persons. Two observational tribunes thus share as target a space inimical to the circulation of information, therefore mobilizing an intricate system of gathering news and documenting issues, while developing a taste for insidious detection of “cases”. One of the purposes of my research is to analyze the epistemic anxieties of such archival enterprises, based on the paradox of individualizing disorders while depending upon a network-based pool of information. The current campaigns of delimiting vertical attitudes from collaborative ones rest on the ensuing incongruent endeavor of individualizing guilt by resorting to interlinked and interdependent data.