New News

I have been tagged by the proliferating educator meme. I will respond to this soon.

But, first, something briefer. Getting regular and relevant news is one of the challenges of studying the contemporary social/cultural/political phenomena of a country other than your own. Of course the intertubes have helped everyone become an instant (surface level) expert on all manner of arcane stuff. Access to news has, perhaps, never been greater -- even if much of it is just re-written press releases and unreflective reportage, there is a glimmer of news in there. But this all comes to naught if your area of interest speaks a different language; Google translator only gets you so far. Getting news from Russia, Germany and other places East is a continuing quest.

The English version of Der Spiegel is useful, their regular email newsletters keep pumping information down my intertube pipe daily. There was the much more old school (pure text! webpage frames!) German News translations via email, although this has recently shut down.

Russia has presented more difficulties. The Cold War winds are still blowing in much reporting of Russian politics and society. A certain judgement of 'backwardness' is still there in the arched eyebrows of many Western journalists. (And, to be sure, peniscopters aren't a regular occurrence in many other countries' politics, but that's arguably to everyone else's detriment.) In which case getting some less coloured material becomes an important task.

Window on Eurasia is a blog run by Paul Goble. He provides a set of three comprehensive articles each day. Often these are drawing from reports translated for the first time, which is invaluable. He (re-)reports regularly on new statistics and analysis about the population in post-communist Russia and elsewhere. Goble may have his own political pursuits -- "promoting Baltic independence and the withdrawal of Russian forces from those formerly occupied lands" -- but the reports don't seem unfairly tilted by this interest. He's currently working at Azerbaijan Diplomatic Academy, but has worked as an academic in Estonia and in the US public service. This included a stint in the CIA and Radio Free Europe (America's radio service into Soviet territory), which obviously needs to be borne in mind. (In related news, Radio Free Europe's research department is to close. A sign of political convergence? The propaganda for free markets and 'liberty' now too orthodox to be worth budgeting for?)

A scan over Goble's pieces in recent days yields some interesting material: "Kremlin’s Ties with Religions Said to be Strengthening ‘Archaic’ Elements in Each," "Russia’s Poor – Fewer in Number but Further Behind the Wealthy," "The Red Army Did Not Liberate East Europeans or the Russians Either, Moscow Commentator Says".

The latter, referring to the removal of the Soviet memorial in Estonia (see image above), presents the intriguing thesis of Igor Dzhordan:

Dzhordan’s core argument is as follows: The Soviet political system was based on “an institutionalized civil war. The USSR was the geographical-political form of the state of the civil war.” And consequently, when the CPSU was overthrown and the USSR dissolved, these were “the most important steps toward the end” of that civil conflict.

Consequently, after 1991, there was the promise of “civil peace” in which “force would no longer be the foundation of social life. But then Vladimir Putin created “a post-modernist cocktail,” in which thre was “(almost) the tsarist coat of arms and (almost) the Soviet hymn and in which the MVD traced its roots to Benckendorf and the FSB to Derzhinsky.”

Such a compound state needed some things from the tsarist system and some from the Soviet one, Dzhordan says, and one of the things it needed from the Soviet was “the myth of liberation,” the idea that the Soviet Red Army “liberated” Eastern Europe and thus justified the use of force at home and the Communist mission abroad.

Such a myth, of course, would have been “impossible” to insist upon “if it was not based on something real, on the genuine experience of a grandiose people’s war, which ended with a victory over Hitlerite Germany.” But the “integral” quality of this myth represents “its weak side.” One cannot allow any part of it to be challenged, or the entire myth disintegrates.

While one can no doubt argue against this analysis, it's an argument that wouldn't be possible without access to sources of news and debate inside Russia and its former satellites.

DDR Montage

Hopefully the silence is not awkward. I've been busily preparing two papers, one of them on 'insecurity' in post-communism, the other on some post-unification films in Germany. Bits and pieces from both might appear up here. Meanwhile, get your dance/trance on:


Classicists may prefer:


John Waters and Christoph Schlingensief fans may prefer:

Eagleton on Žižek on Everything

Two names already invoked on this here blog: Terry Eagleton reviews Slavoj Žižek's latest book of tenuously linked paragraphs, In Defense of Lost Causes. I haven't read it yet. But seems like it might contain some interesting arguments on the 'usefulness' of communism today. Which might have something to say about the nature of some nostalgia.

Žižek's already rehearsed some of these arguments, if not in full then at least by implication: the redemptive potentialities of communism's ideological edifice, which is not the same as the system which delivered the purges and the prisons and the phone tapping and the.... In the Parallax View, for instance, the 'eternal return of the same' invoked by Nietzsche is re-interpreted by Žižek: not the one-dimensional 'past as it was' (objective history), but the past with all redemptive potentialities intact. And in his review of The Lives of Others, he suggests that this is why there is more nostalgia for communism than there is for Nazism: communism had a much more positive set of politico-ethical ideas than Nazism -- and it's this program which people yearn for, not the grey totality of really-existing socialism.

This is all, of course, open to dispute. But I'll get the book and read the thing first.

(pic via Flickr, thanks to Andrew for Eagleton link)

The non-rational and ambiguity?

There are other more substantial posts waiting in the wings -- checking themselves in the mirror, brushing their shoulders off, preening their hair -- but a passing observation...

I think the appeal of Castoriadis clicked when I read this article abstract:

Neither Habermas nor his communitarian and poststructuralist critics sufficiently explore the non-linguistic, playful, and performative dimensions of contemporary public spheres. I argue that the approaches of Castoriadis and Touraine can inform a theoretical understanding of the history and current resonance of this public sphere of performance. Their concepts of the social imaginary, the autonomous society, and subjectivation highlight the role of fantasy, images, individualism, and other non-rational factors in late modern public life. (From the Imaginary to Subjectivation: Castoriadis and Touraine on the Performative Public Sphere by Tucker, Kenneth H., Jr in Thesis Eleven, Nov 2005; vol. 83)

Other non-rational factors in late modern public life. Snap! Memory or, more particularly, nostalgia is a non-rational encounter with the past -- and with the present. It follows no logic, other than, perhaps, this very shapeshifting rascal: the paradigm of non-rationality. It can be experienced in Proust's involuntary memory or the willful voluntary reminscience of pulling a family photograph from out of the draw. In both, however, the tracks of logic aren't traceable -- memory doesn't work by deductive or inductive argument but in fragments, frustrating as these are to analyse.

Castoriadis's imaginary fits more neatly with this than the dry circuits of Habermas. This is precisely the problem I've had with Habermas (the crypto-liberal, as my housemate put it the other night) and Beck (the crypto-liberal, if I may extrapolate). While doing well on describing various factors in the conditions of life under post/reflexive/cosmo-modern (Western) societies, they both fail to acknowledge the realm of ambiguity fundamental to human anthropology -- at the general level and particularly at the current conjuncture. Call it the social scientist impulse. Life, though, doesn't fit into a table, graph or series of bullet points. Much to no one's chagrin...

No doubt the lack of engagement with these non-rational factors is partly the very difficulty of talking about them in the academic argot. The strut and pose of the academic journal, monograph and conference loses its shimmer when one introduces doubt, uncertainty and ambiguity into its movement. A sign of weakness, it's whispered.

The nascent field of Memory Studies, for all its many faults (as spelt out by Radstone, Klein, Kansteiner and others), seems in its better moments to want to address this drive to will away ambiguity. Of course we must generally retain something like the apparatus of rationality and reason if we want to convey something to a reader -- as Habermas himself argued in his "performative contradiction" criticisms of Adorno and Horkheimer's Dialectic of Enlightenment -- but the point is to acknowledge the unknowability of certain things, the ambiguity of certain feelings, the strangeness of certain impulses. That sounds vague. And it is. But the will-to-explanation, as we might call it, seems like a stiff, macho academic pose. Memory is fuzzy. That is the challenge to academics everywhere engaged in saying something useful and enlightening about it. Castoriadis and other thinkers interested in the subject and imagination offer some nice ways of confronting this challenge.