Our dear Hungarians, refashioned...

...by a fellow Australian transplant from Europe. I always find it invigorating, energising and generally exciting -- I'm a nerd -- to come across a thinker clearly engaged in their project, passionate about articulating ideas/concepts and measured in their appraisal of 'the literature'. In this case, the cool blast of European wind comes from Johann P. Arnason, another academic -- like Agnes Heller -- who once found their antipodean place in the humanities department of La Trobe University.*

I had been vaguely aware of him before now. I've read some of his contributions to the debate about the theoretical viability of something called "Communist Modernity." He's edited and contributed a commanding breadth of material to the social theory journal Thesis Eleven, while a 2000 article by Wolfgang Knöbl in that journal ("In Praise of Philosophy: Johann P. Arnason's Long but Successful Journey Towards a Theory of Modernity") argues for Arnason as a social theorist of modernity, one worthy of challenges to Giddens, Castoriadis and Habermas. Arnason has written both philosophical and sociological works, ultimately weaving the two together in what has been described as "macro-sociology". It's his 1993 book, entitled The Future that Failed: Origins & Destinies of the Soviet Model, which has really interested me over recent days. It's one where the empiricism of the study meets philosophical acumen, a series of his own insights poking through the historical outline of both Soviet society and thinking around that society.

The blank library "due date" slip and pristine condition of the book I'm reading tell a story of neglect. As does the necessity to import the book via interlibrary loans, my home university library lacking its own copy.

For all that, it fell into my possession at the correct time. I say this for two reasons. Firstly, with my own recent slow attempts at teasing out some conceptual distinctions, Arnason came along to clearly draw up some helpful lines of demarcation. The questions I was puzzling over are in the realm of differentiation and integration. A large part of the introductory chapter of The Future that Failed is dedicated to precisely this problematic, as I explore below. Secondly, he navigates between the work of Castoriadis and Dictatorship Over Needs (which is itself an often uncited deployment of Castoriadis' ideas), the very two frameworks which I've been seeing as increasingly likely to be those which will be guiding work in the relevant chapters of my thesis. He also introduces some names -- Touraine, for instance -- not commonly heard in these circles. And, on a rather more minor note, the very title of Arnason's book gets at the question of Communist historicity -- that emphasis on the future, the forever radiant golden horizon -- I argue is important to the notes of nostalgia recognisable in the post-communist remembrance of Communism.

So what does Arnason have to say? Well, if his 24 pages of survey can be distilled down further to a survey paragraph or nine, it would look something like this. Arnason is at pains to disentangle the Soviet model as a "social regime" from the movement which "rose to power in some states but failed to achieve its global aims." This, for him, is important because "the impact of the regime -- its built-in aspirations as well as its structural transformations -- on the movement which it controlled was more decisive than the traces left within the regime by the movement that had paved the way for it." This is the long view, obviously. Not localised to the time of the revolution, but Soviet Communism taken as a whole. While the study of the movement is important and the origins of the regime leave their mark, as he readily admits, the stress here is placed on the system of government and society developed by that regime. This is more useful for me as it tracks the regime through its various modulations, highlighting those relevant points of continuity. "The focus is, in other words, on the Soviet model as a social regime (in the broad sense suggested by Castoriadis, i.e. a comprehensive institutional pattern) with global ramifications and universal pretensions; its ability to absorb and instrumentalise the legacy of a social movement, as well as to control or at least influence a whole spectrum of movements outside its domestic arena, is only one aspect of a more complex picture, and not the most directly relevant to the present discussion."

For Arnason, the Soviet regime is one laden with imperialist designs, which I spell out more below. Of most interest to me is his argument about the matters of integration and differentiation.

"Differentiation" here refers to those attempts at distinguishing the social field. Perhaps the most common of these is the tripartite formula which splits into economic, political and cultural components. This is the one Arnason deploys in the book, but not without heavy qualification. For one, he gives accounts of: the Habermasian conception of three cultural spheres ("cognitive, moral and aesthetic"), as well as his system-lifeworld argument; the Giddens analysis of "institutional clusters"; Weber on the internal conflicts of modernity; Castoraidis on the fit of capitalist development, cultural premises, imaginary development, democracy and the autonomous society; Touraine on the state as "complex actor"; Marx's flawed conceptual apparatus (that is, overdetermining the economic realm) with the large holes darned by his critical followers from Wallerstein to Lukacs to Durkheim to Weber; Elias on state-formation as a multi-dimensional process. Arnason isn't just name dropping. He's situating his analysis in a field of other candidates, foregrounding his theoretical decision as a rational fit rather than an arbitrary pluck. An awareness of these other accounts allows him to see the shortcomings of a crude tripartite divison, it affords him qualifications to bolster the trans-functional account he provides -- and will use in the rest of the book.

The autonomy of the economic and the political sphere can only be articulated on the basis of cultural contents, i.e. patterns of meaning that are specific to each sphere and conducive to its far-reaching but necessarily incomplete separation from the broader cultural context. These built-in cultural orientations can, in turn, function as sources of further differentiation: the arenas of conflicting interpretations, rather than domains of unequivocal and uncontested principles. Finally, the cultural constitution of economy and politics as separate spheres is accompanied by different projects of reintegration. This last point -- integrative models as roots of conflict and differentiation -- will be of particular importance for the following discussion.

The point is that "the overall configuration of the spheres lack the unity and coherence of a system, and each sphere is too autonomous and multi-faceted to be reducible to a subsystem." A dilemma, then? One way lies an all-too-neat system, the other lies sub-systems too large to fully be considered "secondary." Each of these spheres tends to "constitute itself as a world in its own right and project its logic onto the social field as a whole." (Which can be seen reproduced not least in the different analytic orientations of academics: sociologists, economists and culturalists.)

What's more, though, hiding all the folds forecloses rupture or irruptions or eruptions or disruptions. The importance remains -- politically and theoretically, as Castoriadis and Touraine would argue -- to leave space for radical creativity, for aporia. Analysis of the social field needs to be concerned with its "specificity, autonomy and historicity." Ultimately, Arnason argues, the three-way division, despite its shortcomings, is the most useful way to articulate these elements of social reality, leaving space for creativity and change.

Integration refers to the way a unifying framework brings these three spheres into co-ordination. It's another thorny matter. We don't, for instance, start our mornings in the economic sphere, proceed to the political sphere by lunchtime and dally in the cultural sphere by sundown. We're in all three at once, but might predominantly be in one (or two) more than the other. The neatness of the splits is a theorist's conceit. But, by the same measure then, to describe these three spheres as a coherent, seamless "system" is to totalise them beyond any recognisable reality. Arnason again does the work of reviewing the literature on this front. He argues that the influential Parsonian view of integration in modernity is too total. "Modernity is, in a very fundamental sense, less integrated and less integrable than some of its most influential interpreters have assumed." What's more, he argues, these overly unifying accounts often smuggle in a normative dimension, suggesting that the tensions and contradictions of modernity will -- and can -- be overcome. Marx, in this way, offers an account of utopian integration.

For Marx, the diversification of the relations between humans and the world is an important part of the civilising role of capitalism, and post-capitalist humanity will pursue the same goal in a more conscious and co-ordinated way. At the same time, Marx has his own version of a constitutive principle of modernity: the continuous and self-accelerating growth of the productive forces. This interpretive device allows him to link the analysis of the capitalist version of modernity to the prognosis of its self-destruction and the project of a post-capitalist alternative.

For Arnason, the Soviet model strives for a radical de-differentiation of the spheres -- where politics, economy and culture sing the same song. This is what others have described as totalitarianism -- the totalising control of the social field -- but he largely resists this appellation, but not without outlining his reluctance.

He argues, in turn, that to understand the Soviet model, we must see its position in drawing on "alternative currents" of Western and non-Western modernity.

It may be argued that the very peculiar characteristics of the Russian tradition, which combined a peripheral position within the Western world with some attributes of a separate civilisation and was shaped by a historical experience that further enhanced both aspects, were conducive to the equally distinctive mixture of a refusal of Western modernity with a claim to outdo it on its own ground and to prefigure its future.

This is where Arnason gets to an account of the Soviet system's imperialism, something that's not particularly fashionable these days. If Dictatorship Over Needs glues together continuist and "rupture" accounts of Communism (which it does by holding a clutch of, more or less, unvarying features in one hand as it goes about describing the historical twists and variations and changes in the other), Arnason goes back even further. That is, to the socio-historical ground for the Russian revolution: the tsarist empire of Russia, one of three prevalent Eastern European empires coming into the twentieth century (+ Ottoman and Habsburg/Austro-Hungarian). While aiming some well-placed blows at the general and overplayed traditional/modern distinction (I enter as evidence the section which my marginalia summarised with the phrase "Hobsbawm smackdown"), Arnason comes to settle on the idea of "imperial modernisation." In this respect, the Soviet state -- or any centre so described (he also mentions Communist China, which was influenced, of course, by the prior development of the Russian-Soviet imperial model) -- is marked by four interconnected factors. Arnason argues that the origins and transformations of the "totalitarian project can [not] be understood without reference to this background." These four matters, then, are fundamental to his argument: "the interplay of empire and revolution must be analysed in connection with the long-term process of state formation and its socio-cultural underpinnings."

1. The imperial centre has its structure and symbolism modified by the process of modernisation...
   
2. ...Yet the framework and vector of those changes is also determined by imperial structures and strategies.
3. Tension and conflicts result from this combination (1 + 2), reinforcing the "disintegrative potential of modernity," resulting in "crises and collapses that differ from other types of modern revolutions."
4. Post-revolutionary developments and the resultant power structure reflect the "persistence of the imperial syndrome."
   

The point, then, is the continuity of certain imperial designs right through the tsarist and Communist eras. This became the site of many problematics, as he outlines in a sentence large enough to require its own postcode, pastry chefs and tourist maps.

[My] argument is that the most serious problems faced by a modernising empire were related to new forms and dimensions of differentiation in the global as well as the domestic arena; the post-revolutionary rebuilding of the imperial centre went hand in hand with the development of a new and much more extreme form of integration, but the totalitarian logic of this model could -- in the long run -- neither absorb nor accommodate the plurality of socio-cultural spheres, and the result was a process of decomposition which ultimately led to the collapse of the centre and the fragmentation of its internal and external periphery. Although this prolonged process of imperial breakdown, reconstruction, fusion and fragmentation obviously limits the autonomy of social actors and the scope of social conflicts, the latter aspect cannot be left out of the picture. It was a social revolution that destroyed the old order and paved the way for the Soviet model. But the forces that mobilised for collective action, their ways of pursuing their goals and articulating their interests, had been shaped by pre-revolutionary developments.

This isn't to say, by way of parallel argument, that a revolution today would unquestionably re-form itself into the image of a free-market liberal democracy. But Arnason is stressing the un-readiness of the immediate post-revolutionary elites to do root-and-branch reform of the imperial institutions. This, combined with the vision articulated through Trotskyist worldwide projections, suggests the ultimate swing toward a military obsession. (A military obsession, of course, which put the military "front" of the formation largely beyond the reach of the crippling bureaucracy and party, all of it making such a muddle of of day-to-day existence: its "bombs-before-butter policies," in Castoriadis' nice phrase.) This is socialism with Russian characteristics.

I'm not yet entirely convinced of this argument. The rest of the book will spell it out in further detail, I'm sure. But I'm becoming aware of the argument about this kind of Russian exceptionalism and the way it can sneak in something like Orientalism in Eastern Europe. Maria Todorova spells this out in a recent contribution to the Kritika journal ("Does Russian Orientalism Have a Russian Soul?"). She goes so far as to ask the question, in this commentary, about whether Sovietology, as the study of Russian Communism, does not have Orientalism marked into its very heart. She does similar things in Imagining the Balkans, a book I'm yet to read but which, I understand, applies the Saidian insights to the east of Europe. It takes Said's insights, but argues differently. In the H-Net review, a few reasons for this separation are spelled out: "The Balkans are concrete, whereas the notion of 'the Orient' is vague and intangible"; "Orientalism is a refuge from the alienation of industrialization, a metaphor for the forbidden--feminine, sensual, even sexual. Balkanism, on the other hand, is not forbidden or sensual. It is male, primitive, crude, and disheveled"; "Balkanism is a transitional concept, something not quite non-European, not a final dichotomy"; "Orientalism posits Islam as the other, whereas Balkanism deals with Christian peoples"; "Balkan self-identity is itself created against an oriental other". Another reference here might be Larry Wolff's Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment in which the "barbaric" condition attached to Eastern Europe is put in its proper historical context, its quite specific emergence. In all cases we are dealing not just with mere discourse but with a series of attitudes that have delivered structural and economic effects. Zizek once played with this notion of exoticism, chiding the Western Left for its condescending attitude to the East (or Yugoslavia or Slovenia, more specifically) -- see the start of his article, "Eastern European Liberalism and its Discontents," for instance.

All of which is to say both Arnason and Dictatorship Over Needs seem to be invoking "backwardness" (the phrase DON uses throughout), which is, erm, a touch problematic if it describes anything other than purely relative objective conditions.

(* For overseas readers, perhaps imagining La Trobe as a powerful global drawcard, it ought to be noted that, despite some evidently wonderful academics, La Trobe University is largely considered a "second-tier" university in Australia. In Melbourne, it'd be put behind the University of Melbourne and Monash University. Melbourne is the sandstone institution, minutes from the CBD and well into its second century. Monash is the post-war concrete monolith out in the Eastern suburbs. Deakin Uni, another second-tierer with some wonderful academics, is also dispersed across the outer metro area. La Trobe, too, is a good car/tram ride away from the CBD. The history of tertiary education in Australia ought not be recounted here, lest to say the "tier" distinction is largely a self-perpetuating cycle of perceptions. Discursively produced, one could say. Yet it produces very real economic and funding differences -- and very different attractions for students. Melbourne Uni has high entry scores because of the demand to get there, which is because of perceived exclusivity, which is because of the prestige, which is because of the high entry scores and on...until the whole thing doubles back on itself and everyone's going there because everyone else is going there and parents tell their friends at the deli about their daughter/son with a little glow of pride and the funding's going there because it's highly sought after, which is because....)

Leninade

Leninade. A Lenin statue in Seattle. Amazing. Even Laura Bush thinks so (note: the real Laura Bush may not think so). Nice diversions, now business...

Kiwi sociologist Chamsy el-Ojeili has penned a very considered and measured review for the most recent issue of Thesis Elven. Its title is wonderfully obstinate and pissy: "'No, We Have Not Finished Reflecting on Communism': Beyond Post-Socialism." The quoted part of the title is pulled from Lefort's new (in English, at least) Complications: Communism and the Dilemmas of Democracy (Columbia University Press, 2007). It is one of the books under consideration, alongside: Sebastian Budgen, Stathis Kouvelakis and Slavoj Žižek (eds), Lenin Reloaded: Toward a Politics of Truth (Duke University Press, 2007); Cornelius Castoriadis, The Rising Tide of Insignificancy (The Big Sleep, 2003); Cornelius Castoriadis, Figures of the Thinkable (The Big Sleep, 2005); Filip Kovacevic, Liberating Oedipus? Psychoanalysis as Critical Theory (Lexington Books, 2007). And many others besides; the bibliography runs to five pages. El-Ojeili handles the various tasks well, managing to be both critical and able to give an evenhanded overview of those works with which he disagrees. There's a lot that could be pulled out of this. For one, I think Castoriadis is a much more interesting thinker than most acknowledge -- which certainly emerges from this review. His latter work absolutely cannot escape the tag of pessimism and "impossibilist," as el-Ojeili puts it, but it still carries that same core concern with the politically productive capacity of the radical imaginary.

What I want to focus on here, though, is el-Ojeili's most stinging comments. They're directed toward Lenin Reloaded, a book I too am deeply suspicious of -- if not wearied by. I'll quote his comments at length, because I think they're worth following, rather than picking over. I think his comments are relevant to my work on nostalgia, as I see two motivations at work in the entire Reloaded book: petulant political iconoclasm and high-toned nostalgia. (Oh, 1917! Oh, revolution!) Like all nostalgic reveries, it's not as easy to write off as that. There's some wonderful thinkers involved, and they're not all wilfully misguided. There are glimmers. But the entire project seems like a waste of critical energies. At the present conjuncture, is a resuscitation of Lenin -- a "Weekend at Vladie's" -- truly what we need?

Without a doubt, this more assertive, reconstructive mood is in evidence in the Budgen et al. volume, which is brimming with intelligence, decisiveness, and energy, despite being wrong-headed in just about every imaginable way. In the introduction, Budgen, Kouvelakis and Žižek insist that the name ‘Lenin’ is urgent today, given his determination to intervene in the situation, to adopt ‘the unequivocal radical position’ (p. 3), and thus to offer the possibility of changing the co-ordinates of our situation. The Lenin to be retrieved, they argue, ‘is the Lenin-in-becoming, the Lenin whose fundamental experience was that of being thrown into a catastrophic new constellation in which old reference points proved useless, and who was compelled to reinvent Marxism’ (p. 3) – ‘What Lenin did for 1914, we should do for our times’ (p. 4). On this score, war, globalization, ‘the human face of market tyranny’ (Bensaid, 2007: 148) are, throughout the collection, the connecting, mobilizing points – Labica, for instance, emphasizing this link in reading contemporary globalization as a higher stage of capitalism, as imperialism with some new twists: ‘the predominance of speculative finance capital, the technological revolutions . . . and the collapse of the so-called socialist countries’ (2007: 228–9). Lenin as philosopher, then, is read in the context of this earlier ‘dramatic turning point of history’, which pushed him towards Hegel (the Philosophical Notebooks) and towards strategic reformulations (the ‘April Theses’, The State and Revolution) (Michael-Matsas, 2007: 102). Similarly, Etienne Balibar argues that these circumstances moved Lenin away from laws of history, unfolding capitalist dynamics, etc., towards the discovery of the ‘field of the overdetermination intrinsic to class antagonisms’, to the ‘analysis of concrete situations’ (2007: 211), to the ‘non-predetermined constitution’ p. 212) of theory and practice.

While my reservations about this sort of line are legion, there’s obviously a great weight of intelligence in play here, some of the best stuff coming from the French thinkers – Badiou, Balibar, Lazarus, Lecercle. The boldness of assertion and declarative style is often bracing and provocative: Badiou on the ‘short twentieth century’ as ‘a century of the act’, whose ‘subjective determination is Leninist’ (p. 9); Lazarus on the 20th-century’s ‘new figure of politics’ (p. 255), politics as ‘party-like’, and on the contemporary need for ‘an intellectuality of politics without party or revolution’ (p. 265) – ‘The end of the nation-state, which must be dated from 1968, is basically the end of the state as object of an “inherited” conflictuality’ (p. 266); Lecercle’s reading of Lenin’s qualities – firmness, hardness, and subtlety – as forces towards a much needed new direction for the philosophy of language. It is also interesting to see Callinicos contesting Žižekian decisionism, in favour of ‘an ethics of political action’ (p. 35) – improbably constructed by way of Trotsky.

A central issue, casting a shadow across the entire collection, is the question of the party – foregrounded, in a very different way, in Lefort’s Complications. In noting the necessary encounter with the Real for any genuine change, Žižek has previously pointed to the crucial facilitating role of three figures – God, Analyst, Party. In line with this emphasis, Kovacevic endows the discourse of the analyst with special significance, in ‘making desire emerge, stimulat[ing] the creation of new frameworks for the life of the analysand’ (2007: 205), arguing that, in the world of politics, this role is played by leaders, a ‘responsible, emancipatory, analyst-type leadership’ (p. 207). In the Budgen et al. collection, Jameson puts forward something similar – Lenin in the position of the discourse of the analyst, ‘who listens for collective desire and crystallizes its presence in his political manifestos and “slogans”’ (p. 71).

Again, there are some good points made here on issues of organization, intellectuals, strategy: for instance, Eagleton arguing that ‘intellectual’ ‘designates a social or political location . . . not a social rank or origin’ (2007: 46), distinguishing between elite and vanguard, and making some sound arguments against the easy, thoughtless rejection of authority per se. But, on the whole, for anyone influenced by the efforts of Castoriadis and the ultra-Left more widely, the whole endeavour will smack of a magnificent regression. For all its sparkle, we might want to read the volume as a sort of Sorelian myth around Lenin and Red October, bearing very little connection to the realities of Bolshevism or to any political realities and possibilities currently in play or ahead of us. For instance, Shandro considers the relationship between the Bolsheviks and the workers’ movement, arguing against the image of Lenin as Machiavellian opportunist formulating conflictual positions solely in the interests of power, contending instead that, in Lenin, ‘vanguard and masses play different, potentially complementary but sometimes essentially contradictory parts in the class struggle’ (2007: 329–30). Lenin, then, is seen as steering an intelligent path beyond both naïve spontaneism and substitutionism, delicately, dialectically thinking the relation between different actors in social change. At times, there seems an implicit ‘bid’ at work, here, in relation to the present and future course of the alternative globalization movement with Bensaid, for instance, arguing that:

A politics without parties (whatever name – movement, organization, league, party – that they are given) ends up in most cases as a politics without politics: either an aimless tailism toward the spontaneity of social movements, or the worst form of elitist individualist vanguardism, or finally a repression of thepolitical in favour of the aesthetic or the ethical. (2007: 162)

This connection – globalization-socialist organization – is interestingly in play in the most uncomfortably out-of-place piece in the collection, the contribution of Antonio Negri, who makes some effort to begin with Lenin but is clearly of another tradition – ‘Lenin beyond Lenin’ (2007: 300), ‘Everything has changed’ (p. 300), ‘the limitations . . . of the Leninist point of view’ (p. 305). And I would suggest that, for all the problems with Hardt and Negri’s Empire (2000) and Multitude (2004), we have, here, an instance of second phase post-Marxism, alive with a bold return to ‘logic of the social’ theoretical synthesis, and reconstructive ultra-Left/anarchistic utopianism. In this ‘post-Marxism II’, I think we can see movement past demobilizing, onesided cultural criticism, really existing liberal democracy, post-modern deconstruction, and Leninist retrievals – some decent attempts to offer replacements for Marxism’s broken triangle and chart paths beyond the post-socialist condition.

Emphasis mine. Thoughts, yours? More Leninade?

Gulag

Gulag Peephole

Ferenc Fehér’s article “In the Bestiarium—A Contribution to the Cultural Anthropology of ‘Real Socialism’” (from Eastern Left, Western Left: Totalitarianism, Freedom and Democracy, ed. Ferenc Fehér and Agnes Heller (Cambridge: Polity, 1987)) gives an account ‘from below’ of Communism. For him, like Foucault’s histories of the clinic, prisons and asylums, it is the Gulag which tells the, by now, not so secret history of this system: “the Gulag, in its past and present forms, is an encyclopaedia and an open display of the hidden principles which keep the society of the dictatorship over needs running.”

To put it briefly, the principles are displayed in the control by authorities in the camps, the disavowal of collectivisation and individual rights, the denial of leisure and opportunity to do non-prescribed work. The control of the prisoner, too, reveals the forms of total social control: “mobilising the endlessness of time against the finitude of an individual’s life,” thrown out of the wagons and into the stone-age arctic climes of remotest Soviet Union, “abandoned to nature, to the ‘natural’ process of decomposition and disintegration”—the undernourished prisoner, self-tortured by denied medical care, was systematically weakened, the listless form opening up an obedient mind, subservient in all respects. For Fehér, this distinguishes the Gulag from the concentration camp. There is none of the camp’s bombast, violent efficiency and operatic melodrama in the Gulag. (Which is perhaps one reason why the Holocaust is endlessly more appealing to the cinematic lens and the literary novel than any of the ravages of the Gulag.)

In the Gulag, the body is exposed to “excesses of climate, heat or frost”—and systematically, passively in effect, run down. “But in all cases,” he notes, “it was a kind of bestial utilitarianism, never aesthetic sadism, as with the Nazis, that prevailed.” Fehér sees in this the telos of the entire “dictatorship over needs,” “the principle of total social control, a self-abandonment of enlightenment, a return to the tutelage of authority, i.e. to complete disenlightenment.” He sees it here in the “re-education process…the process of ‘voluntary’ self-abandonment of one’s Ego, of one’s opinions”; the admission to re-education a “sign of grace” from on high, which entailed “being fully absorbed by an alien and unchallengeable authority”—the better option than being “selected for destruction.” Throughout his essay, Fehér is playing with the Cartesian split—arguing that the Soviets use “the finitude of the body in the service of an alienating and imprisoning ‘soul’.” Against the individual body’s finite imprisonment, the attempt to imprison the soul is the greater barbarism, in Fehér’s account.

His biographical details—former Communist dissident in the Budapest School, marginalised by the Soviet-friendly Kádár leadership—suggest his theoretical investment in this role of dissidence in exile. For Fehér, Communism has become a shell. The attempt of the totalising Soviet rulers to gain the minds—souls?—of its citizens is the frontline of the entire system—the souls of the people are to vibrate in sympathy with that of the system. And yet: “the Soviet bestiarium imposes a false ideology of collectivism and cheerful optimism on every citizen which is no longer internalised even by a minority but which has no accepted public competition.” Returning to the soul-body metaphor but in a different register, he suggests that Bolshevism—and Fascism, for that matter—discover “illness in the body[:] Fascism finds it in the alien body (this is why it can and must be destroyed), Bolshevism in the body of ‘its own’ subject* which, therefore, has to be incarcerated and re-educated.” Bolshevism, then, is the maintenance of a false ideology by a system of incarceration, re-education and totalised socialisation.

(* At last night's Michael Dutton talk, he remarked that -- unbelievably -- in the period of the Maoist revolution in China, the Communists executed as many from the inside as the Nationalists did from the outside. This Communist quest for purity is endlessly brutal and irrational. As Fehér notes in his sweeping section of Dictatorship Over Needs, Communism has a preference for hyperrationality but largely delivers social irrationality: "anyone entering these societies from the world of calculative rationality has, as a first impression, the feeling that he has arrived in Bedlam. Nothing functions, or at least nothing does in the way one would expect having been brought up in the spirit of rationalist standards; mysterious interdictions block the road from one to the other in the shortest and most innocent peripatetics of everyday life, and usually the question 'why' receives no answer at all." Far from being some Eastern quaintness though, this wholly apparent irrationality -- despite the Communist formation's "enormous, technologically perfectionist army" and sixty years of existence -- masks a genuine social problem.)

Passionate Dutton, in the Flesh

Given the previous posts on his work, it's worth mentioning this talk at Melbourne Uni tomorrow night. Late notice, but...he has been known to lecture in a Mao suit, so it's worth the effort.

For those unable to make it, perhaps sample a little Mango Mao at home.

~

Contemporary Cultures and Societies
The seminar series of Anthropology, Gender Studies & Social Theory, University of Melbourne

Passionate Politics
Professor Michael Dutton

Wednesday, 16 April 2008 - 5:15 PM - 6:45 PM
Lecture Theatre A, Old Arts

Beginning with Mao Zedong’s Selected Works, Michael Dutton raises the question that was fundamental to the Chinese revolutionary process: ‘Who are our enemies, who are our friends’. In Dutton’s hands, however, this is more than a Chinese revolutionary question, it is one of relevance to all forms of politics that require strong commitment. Given recent events, such as 9/11, the London bombings of 7 July and the war in Iraq, this question takes on new salience. Through examples from China, Dutton explores this ‘passion of politics’, which is something, he fears, the West may have lost the capacity to fully understand.

Michael Dutton is Research Professor in Chinese Political Culture, Griffith University & Professor of Politics, Goldsmiths College, University of London. In 2007 he was awarded the Joseph Levenson Prize (Post-1900), for Policing Chinese Politics: A History. His most recent book – Beijing Time, co-authored with Hsiu-ju Stacy Lo and Dongdong Wu – is to be published in May.

For further information about the Contemporary Cultures and Societies Series (Anthropology, Gender Studies and Social Theory) contact Andrew Dawson

Couldn't Have Said It Better Myself...

Indeed, didn't say it better myself. Guy Rundle's searing critique of Australian left-liberal cultural production, published in Arena Magazine last year, has turned up again. This time it's in The Best Australian Political Writing 2008. It's alongside the usual neo-liberal and simpering-left op-ed drivel -- from the likes of that "sensible Aboriginal" Noel Pearson -- so it's not surprising it's been a tad "neutralised" via editing. Nevertheless, in the full-cream PDF linked above, it starts with Australian film Jindabyne and wends onward from there, not stopping at our borders but extrapolating from the Australian example.

So it's much of what I was gesturing toward in my earlier post, only articulated at greater length and with stronger examples.

Museums and the Objectification of Memory

In her book on the remembrance of Hungary 1956, James looks at both 'official' and 'unofficial' collections or museums. This distinction divides her analysis. Both, she implies, contribute something different to the discursive construction of '56. One is the work of a street fighter from the time -- now accused of nationalism and connections with the far-right -- and the others the state-run Hungarian National Museum and the Military History Museum. There is also now the Terrorhaza (House of Terror), a state-run, embattled museum of Communist terror. It's worthy of its own post.

The first official exhibition about the revolution in 1956 was held in June 1957, documenting the "counter-revolutionary events" of 1956 at Contemporary History Museum. Another exhibition was held here in 1989, lasting a month and titled "Objects, Documents, and Photographs, October 23-November 4, 1956." The main exhibit is now at the Military History Museum.

The unofficial exhibition is in the Hungarian countryside. The 1956 Museum is run by Gergely Pongrátz. He was a leader of insurgents and fled the country when the Soviets began attacking. He only returned in 1991 "after some thirty-five years of exile 'to tell the truth about 1956'." James:

A number of ideological questions are at issue in competing currents of popular thought about Hungary's 1956 revolution: What social group instigated the uprising? Who were its heroes? Who was to blame for its failure? What are its implications for Hungary's position in the international community today? And who can be trusted, both within and beyond the nation's borders?

There's some nice references on museums here. Appadurai and Breckenridge express the role of the public museum well when they say, via James' paraphrase, "the museum presents static displays through which group identities are fixed and stablized as artefacts and are abstracted from their dynamic contexts." While Eilean Hooper-Greenhill (2000, 124) "writes that the interpretation of visual culture in museums can be approached from the point of view of the curator or the visitor." James' concern is with the curator.

Ordinarily this mode of institutionalising the past is directed by national governments. In Hungary, for instance, public museums are under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of National Cultural Heritage. But Raphael Samuel argues for the significance of the amateur museum as a site for the construction of collective memory.

These amateur museums, as we see in the 1956 example, are still thoroughly ideological.

This seemingly capricious collection locates the revolution within a broader conservative ideology of traditional, Christian nationalism that comes from the heart. While the museum owner has carefully and methodically assembled a narrative of 1956 through the material culture available to him, he has done so on the basis of principles that are held at a deeply intuitive and emotional, rather than cognitive, level and derive from the authenticity of experience.

The conservative ideology that frames the production of culture in the 1956 Museum requires elaboration. Analyses of conservatism in post-communist Central and Eastern Europe tend to emphasise its most extreme, protofascist, anti-Semitic forms. (In Hungary this usually means focusing on ultraconservative writer and politician István Csurka.) Sabrina Ramet (1999, 18-19) writes that at the core of radical-right beliefs is 'an ideological and programmatic emphasis on 'restoring' supposedly traditional values of the Nation and imposing them on the entire Nation or community.

This fits with the outline of "restorative nostalgia" theorised by Svetlana Boym. For Boym, this juxtaposes with "reflective nostalgia":

• Restorative: this stresses nostos (home), defying a linear conception of history in the quest to reconstruct a lost home. It is not self-consciously questing, however, but understands itself as seeking truth and tradition. It "protects the absolute truth." This is the type of nostalgia at the core of revivals in nationalism and religion. Its plot is that of a return to origins or conspiracy. It prefers pictoral and oral culture. Dead serious, it reconstructs "emblems and rituals of home and homeland in an attempt to conquer and spatialise time."
• Reflective: this is longing itself, algia. It "delays the homecoming," circling in a wistful, ironic and desperate fashion. Consequently, it dwells, ambivalently, on longing and belonging. It is embedded -- without struggle -- in the "contradictions of modernity". It questions -- even doubts -- "truth". It has no singular plot, ranging across dispersed places at once; ensconced in details, not symbols; it imagines different time zones. At its best, it can challenge, ethically and creatively, modernity, progress, truth -- and their assumptions. In this mode it is "not merely a pretext for midnight melancholias"; it is more creative and useful than the common caricature of nostalgia would allow.

This typology is offered to illuminate "nostalgia's mechanisms of seduction and manipulation." Boym believes these can help make the distinction between: a restorative national memory, "based on a single plot of national identity"; and a reflective social memory, made up of individual memories marked -- but not defined -- by collective frameworks. Nostalgia is memory at the interface of individual and collective remembrance. This interface is a difficult relationship to theorise. Collective memory, as an object of study, is a slippery thing. For Boym, it "is a messy, unsystematic concept that nevertheless allows one to describe the phenomenology of human experience." As Radstone has pointed out, the field of memory studies has left undertheorised the meaning of 'collective memory'. In some usage, collective memory is merely a synonym for history (it emerged as a scholarly interest, after all, contemporaneously "with the so-called crisis of historicism"), in others a name for ritual and commemoration, in yet others a social glue holding against forces of change. It often carries a political charge without ever really describing this provenance. Halbwachs, an early theorist in this field, has been criticised for effectively substituting "collective memory" for the bad, old and unfashionable vocabulary of the "spirit" or "inner character of a race or nation". Moreover, collective memory, at points, harbours a hidden essentialism. A leap is made from individual memory to Memory through material artefacts -- although this is problematic as, James Young notes, "individuals cannot share another's memory any more than they can share another's cortex." Young, instead, has argued for "collected memory" to replace "collective memory." I will return to these critical points elsewhere.

James' discussions with Pongrátz, curator of this 1956 "collected memory," are interesting in this context.

Many years later, he continued, Boris Yeltsin visited the United States and stated on television that the downfall of communism started in 1956 in Hungary. 'So these kids,' he added, 'they weren't making only Hungarian history; they were making world history. Thanks to these kids, the whole communist system collapsed' (Pongrátz 2000).

Both of these exhibits...locate the revolution within a narrative of oppression, triumph, betrayal, and ultimate victory. This theme is subtly but forcefully written into the carefully scripted exhibit of the Military History Museum. The eclectic nature of the 1956 Museum's holdings, together with their more whimsical arrangement, invites a more imaginative reading that centres around the romantic image of the courageous and selfless young street fighters.

An analysis of the arrangement of collections follows. "Walter Benjamin (1968, 67) once observed that 'the phenomenon of collecting loses its meaning as it loses its personal owner. Even though public collections may be less objectionable socially and more useful academically than private collections, the objects get their due only in the latter.' The emotional power of the collection displayed in the Military History Museum is indeed blunted by its abstraction from the lived social world."

Again, on the public/private collection difference, James finishes her chapter discussing the homely presentation of objects in the unofficial museum.

Here the vase of chrysanthemums departs entirely from professional display practices. Viewers are not only reminded of a shrine, they are forced to realise that someone has made this shrine. And therein lies the unintended emotional power of this display and of the 1956 Museum as an institution: it speaks to the human drive to honour and preserve the past regardless of the limitations of the composer.

For me, the interest lies in the way these museums tell the same history. Or, better put, the way they narrate the same event. Their imperatives are not so different, in the end. Wishing to unite the nation in the restorative way Boym outlines. This is not so surprising in the case of the national institution, but its romantic evocation in the private collection is not so inevitable. James comes away from the private collection at once touched by the personal mode of presentation, but angered by the curator and his manipulative, unassuming style.

Restorative nostalgia, believing its project is reinstating the 'truth' of the past, is the kind of remembrance given to "total reconstruction of monuments of the past," to a return of national symbols and myths, to conspiracies. Etymologically it has its roots in re-staure -- re-establishment. It suggests stasis and a return to the prelapsarian state. The invented traditions circulating the restorative drive suggest a sensed loss of community, offering, in Hobsbawm's phrase, a “comforting collective script for individual longing." The invented tradition, of course, is not created out of nothing and it can be emancipatory, not just conservative. Its appearance may afford multiple imagined communities and forms of belonging, not just national and ethnic ones. (We're back with Eagleton now and the sense of tradition that can be central for radical politics.) The 1956 Museum seems so uncomfortable for James because it marries an individual, personal -- almost lonely -- campaign with a nationalist, conservative one. Where the grand gesture for reconstituting national unity is undertaken by the same man who changes the vase water every day. The sense of purpose and vitalism endlessly circling and deeply invested in what is, literally, a past battle.

For the restorative nostalgic, home, or the nation here, is "forever under siege, requiring defence against the plotting enemy"; it is not a place "made of individual memories but of collective projections and 'rational delusions'." The nuance and ambivalence of history is forgone for a paranoid view of the world, a "fantasy of persecution". Tradition is the fortification to hold these impostors at bay, to bind 'we' against 'them': "'they' conspire against 'our' homecoming, hence 'we' have to conspire against 'them' in order to restore 'our' imagined community". Conspiracy theories have a tendency to flourish after revolutions. There has been a rise of conspiracy theories around this second millennial turn. These two tendencies coalesce in one particular formation given to embracing this nationalist nostalgia:

It is not surprising that many former Soviet Communist ideologues have embraced a nationalist worldview, becoming 'red-and-browns,' or Communist-nationalist. Their version of Marxism-Leninism-Stalinism was revealed to have the same totalizing authoritarian structure as the new nationalism.

Nostalgia, Boym remarks, is a "double-edged sword." It is "an emotional antidote to politics, and thus...the best political tool." She explores this largely in a Russian setting. Her operative framework comes when she poses questions as relevant to her project as mine:

While aversion to politics is a global phenomenon, in Russia mass nostalgia of the late 1990s shared with the late Soviet era a particular distrust of any political institutions, escape from public life and reliance on indirect language of close interpersonal communication. What made everyday Soviet myths, affections and practices survive long after the end of Marxist-Leninist ideology? How is nostalgia linked to the beginning and the end of the Soviet Union?

Left vs Right Art

This was originally going to be part of the post below, until I realised that missive is cumbersome and ungainly enough as it is. So...

How do these two quotes, also derived from the James book discussed below, speak to each other?

The first derives from Barthes:

While the mythology of the Right is 'well-fed, sleek, expansive [and] garrulous,' the mythology of the Left is barren: 'Whatever it does, there remains something about it stiff and literal, a suggestion of something done to order….In fact, what can be more meagre than the Stalin myth? No inventiveness here, and only a clumsy appropriation: the signifier of the myth…is not varied in the least: it is reduced to a litany.

The second, just a Chunnel trip away:

Terry Eagleton makes an observation that radicals and conservatives alike -- as opposed to postmodernists -- are traditionalists, ‘it is simply that they adhere to entirely different traditions’ (Eagleton 1996, ix).

So if radicals have myths and traditions just the same as conservatives do, why does Barthes think the radicals get it so wrong in their imagery? He certainly seems to be slipping the Communist art wholesale -- and, well, "unproblematically" -- into the leftist constellation. While I don't agree with this association, I think what Barthes is getting at is still, more or less, the case. I'm speaking mostly of those insufferably programmatic leftist art works that leave ambiguity aside, contradicting their (supposed) political belief in the non-hierachic distribution of human intelligence, capabilities and potential. So that the political endpoint of the piece is not so much implied as bellowed. The rhetorical devices -- be they visual, literary or musical -- are not bothered by things like nuance, ambivalence and uncertainty. Perhaps it's consciousness raising that's aimed at? The rough hewn piece veritably shocking the viewer into action and out of apathy? Is the slow-burn of art not valid here? Those pieces which come back and back to you because they don't quite compute? I'm not admonishing passion in art. (Although I am starting to feel like the pompous Olivier Castro-Staal character from Six Feet Under.) But I must've seen/heard/read tens of such pieces in the last years of the Howard era in Australia, yet none of them truly stuck.

The Socialist Body + Scrubbing History Clean

I'm back looking over my notes about the historicisation of the Hungarian 1956 revolution. It's certainly one of those events which, as history, is actually worthy of that favourite old cultural studies descriptor, "contested". It's split between leftists claiming the history of an attempt to reform socialism and right-wingers claiming it as a nationalist, anti-Soviet, anti-imperialist and anti-Communist uprising. (The Flickr photo accompanying this paragraph, for instance, is an image of a rally organised by the conservative Fidesz party on the occasion of the 51st anniversary of 1956.) That bifurcation is another post for another time. What is interesting me at the moment is the socialist body and its use in aesthetic regimes.

Most useful here has been Beverly A. James' Imagining Postcommunism: Visual Narratives of Hungary's 1956 Revolution, a TAMU press book from 2005. She talks in there quite a bit about statuary, both in Socialist Realist and later forms. Statuary is at the heart of 1956, of course, because a statue was at the heart of the revolution's stunning sweep through Budapest. The toppling of the enormous Stalin statue was at once a spontaneous spectacle and a definitive political statement. (Spontaneous in the way the US-staged Hussein-statue debacle in Iraq precisely wasn't.)

Following Yampolsky, James suggests that the power associated with the destruction of a monument is redoubled by its representation in other media -- it elevates it to a “super symbol.” The internet, for one, has become a repository of related Stalin-statue images -- see, for instance, hungary1956.com, from where the above collage is drawn. The destruction of a monument is a powerful intervention because of the very "intended durability" of the statue; the "memorial is designed to cheat history through the eternal commemoration of an individual, event, or concept," James writes. The memory and account of the events surrounding the toppling is doubly important because of the "repression of memories of that glorious moment throughout the thirty-one years of the Kádár regime," the Soviet-friendly regime which ruled following the revolution. They introduced certain approaches to the monument, specifically, and history, more generally, just as their predeccesors had and followers would do: "the codes that governed (or were intended to govern) the collective consciousness of Hungarians were radically revised several times over the course of the monument’s life and afterlife." (That is, Socialist Realism, denunciation of the cult of personality, softening in artistic policy, liberal democracy etc.)

The Stalin statue was widely damned as artistically worthless, merely a doctrinaire execution of socialist realist programming. The Socialist Realism form the statue represented was, for the Hungarians, its own indictment -- regardless of the equally despised body and visage it represented. "Observers of the Stalin monument," James writes, "'saw' reflected in its patina the heavy hand of the state, with its clumsy attempt to recast history." Indeed, the statue was made from the very stuff of the Soviet cultural imperialism:

Quite apart from the fact that Stalin...was the prime symbol of everything bad, people held a grudge that the bronze for this eight-metre monstrosity, on its ten-metre-high podium, had been obtained by melting down the statues of a host of still widely respected Hungarian figures, such as István Tisza, Gyula Andrássy and Artúr Görgey.

The statue, then, certainly had it coming. Following the Khrushchev denunciation, the authorities were already discussing removing the iconic monument. The revolutionaries beat them to it. This destruction has been "prominent in the discursive revisions that have ensued[:] the scene is recounted through language that is highly metaphoric, with its references to Gulliver and the Lilliputians, and highly visual, with its images of fiery sparks flying against the clear, black October night[;] what is most striking about the narratives is how the visual imagery illuminates the courage and will to freedom that motivated the destruction of the monument." The base of the monument stood until 1990.

James ends the chapter on the monument with a nice story about Stalin’s enormous hand. It was picked up by Sándor Pécsi, put in a taxi, taken home and secreted away for years. It's now on display at Hungarian National Museum.

[T]he most potent symbol of the regime had been destroyed at the hands of the people, an event that endures in Hungary’s collective memory. If socialist realism loomed large in its physical scale and in its ability to inspire terror, the destruction of its epitome by a people armed only with the tools of their trade is a powerful narrative indeed. The humiliation and physical suffering inflicted on Hungarians during the period of reprisals was (bitter)sweetened by the memory of this mythic event. And when the end of the long revolution finally came, the memories would come out of hiding as objects to behold, just like Pécsi's Stalin hand.

~

If this was simply the bloodless symbolic and monumental victory of the revolutionaries, more problematic were the events of the Republic Square. James' following chapter looks at Memorial to Martyrs of the Counter-Revolution -- a "colossal bronze statue" -- which was one of the (few) public markers of the 1956 uprising during the Kádár regime. It was sited in Republic Square, a site of resistance in 1956. It sat opposite what was the Communist Party’s municipal branch. Defended by the ÁVO -- the secret police -- in 1956, revolutionaries nevertheless managed to get inside and shoot, "in cold blood," a number of staff. Police and military were "hanged on the spot, and their bodies mutilated." It was, in all, "the scene of the revolutionaries' most reprehensible actions in the thirteen days of the uprising." By the mid-70s the siege was forgotten.

As virtually the only public [that is, sanctioned] memento of October 30, 1956, [sculptor Kalló's] Memorial to the Martyrs of the Counter-Revolution shouldered a heavy rhetorical responsibility. But what was the nature of this responsibility if the party's aim was the obliteration of the memory of 1956? The martyrs monument embodied a narrative that was generated in various public discursive spaces long before the bronze was cast.…With the suspension of the terror that had been enacted in the form of imprisonments, show trials, and executions, the state could now exercise social control through the microphysics of power. And Kalló's monument would blend into the landscape as one more barely noticed apparatus of control.

This monument complicates memory of the revolution in precisely the same way the events of Republic Square altered the tenor of the uprising.

The purity of the revolution was a point of pride during the uprising itself, and it has taken on the character of a central myth in the post-communist rehabilitation of 1956. With national sovereignty as a rallying point, Hungarians experienced a deep sense of solidarity and national honour during the thirteen days of the uprising. A small country with limited resources had faced off against a superpower bent on world domination, and they had pursued this cause with a standard of honour and integrity seldom experienced in peacetime.…The massacres in Republic Square were immediately denounced by the various revolutionary groups at the time.…Despite such [denunciations], Republic Square is the black eye of the uprising. [Emphasis mine]

The years which followed were uneven in their approach to the revolution. As noted above, clutches of people were charged, some of them executed or imprisoned for "life". However, the government's smear campaign, which immediately followed the revolution, was brief -- it lasted only a few years. Much longer was silence, repression and concealment.

The competition for the statue was called in 1957. The statue was to be erected in 1960. By this time, a general amnesty saw free most of those imprisoned, even those with life sentences. (Less lucky, of course, were those who had already been summarily killed.) At the time of the erection, this shift had already begun. Consequently, the text to be written on the inscription was a matter of some controversy and debate. (Glossing somewhat so as to accelerate...)

There are some interesting remarks on the relationship of socialist realism and the body. Kalló's monument breaks with the stiff form favoured by socialist sculpture. "The result was a monument that is undeniably more subjective, expressive, and dynamic than Sándor Mikus's [toppled] Stalin." Despite this, the figure was still passably socialist realist, it thematically "represents the struggle against the [']reactionary enemies['] of the socialist project, and stylistically it meets Christina Lodder's specifications: 'an essential descriptiveness which is reliant for its impact on a stark monumentality.' (1993, 17)" Now we're at the interesting bit.

What is this emphasis on the body all about? Tibor Wehner's work on socialist realist sculpture helps us make sense of it. He writes that most of the statues commissioned in Hungary during the 1950s and 1960s depicted the generic worker or peasant engaged in productive activity. In keeping with the didactic function of Zhadanovian art, such representations almost always featured a tool so that the public could easily read the figure's occupation and understand the role he or she played in the building of socialist society -- the miner was armed with his lamp, the welder with his torch, the engineer with his compass, the soldier with his rifle, the peasant with her scythe, and the student with her book. In the final moment of his life, though, Kalló's figure is no longer defined by the clichéd tools of socialist production. He has now become an archetypal martyr, and his 'tool' is the body he sacrifices in performing this role.…Unlike the martyr of Christianity, whose virtues of fatalism and passivity evoke a sense of pathos, the martyr of communism -- following Marx's admonition to make man the agent of history -- is resolute, determined, and self-controlled. The result, iconographically, is that the robust, heroic body of the communist displaces the sickly, weak, pale body of the Christian martyr. (Aradi 1974, 140).

Representations of the communist martyr's physical body reflect the broader trope of the 'new man,' which dates back to early Soviet art and literature. From that time the human body was used to display projections of the coming utopia and to personify its ideals of a perfectly functioning body politic. The movement toward a classless society would free people from the physical debilitations of hunger, poor nutrition, inadequate medical care, and back-breaking manual labor. In turn, workers and peasants who were liberated from the crippling and stunting effects of capitalism would be willing and able to build the new society by virtue of their strength, stamina, vigor, and health. In the worldwide class struggle, the flabby, enervated capitalist that so often appeared in Soviet propaganda would be no match for the superhumans engineered according to Marxist specifications. (Clark 1993)

The monument, today, is a different matter. It's missing from its original location in the square, abandoned to the outskirts of the city.

The absence of the Martyrs Monument conveys a more complicated set of meanings. It stood in Republic Square for thirty-two years -- far longer than the Stalin statue -- yet few people today remember it. The statue came down not in a memorable fit of revolutionary zeal, but in the routine of government activity by municipal bureaucrats who aimed to scour the city of its communist iconography. While the public had registered its preference for leaving such monuments in place, the truth is, most people didn't much care.

The abandoned platform in Republic Square speaks volumes about the complex processes of remembering and forgetting, of revealing and concealing, that characterize the formation of historical memory in postcommunist Hungary. The symbolic erasure of a once-dominant narrative -- in this case the literal removal of a monument -- is only the first step in re-remembering the past. The empty space must be filled in, the pedestal must be recycled to support a new narrative. This is not so simple. David Lowenthal writes (1985, 326), 'though the past is malleable, its alteration is not always easy: the stubborn weight of its remains can baulk intended revision.' In other words, reconstructions of the past must come face to face with elements of the old narrative.

The monument now lurches into the sky at the Statue Park outside Budapest. A place of fascination itself, where the stark desolation of the setting clashes with outsized monuments and their embodied litany of ethico-politico-historic ideals. A place I'll no doubt return to in future posts...

A Bureaucratic Clarification

A friend questioned me the other day on the distinction between Heller's and Badiou's account of bureaucracy -- or at least the versions I fumbled out in my earlier post. As Badiou's reference is a passing one and Heller's a more systematic engagement, it is perhaps unfair to pin Badiou down to a mere phrase. But I get the feeling that he is positing precisely what Heller is arguing against.

In the lead-up to the section I quoted, Heller points out that: "All Soviet leaders, from Lenin on, regularly blamed the inefficiency of the system on bureaucracy; they launched campaigns against it, against the dimensions of paper-production, against the lack of initiative and the narrow-mindedness." (p175) Which is to say that they were the scapegoat, the whipping boy, for the endemic problems of the system itself. The centralisation of power cannot avoid bureaucracy. "The totalisation of the whole society (economy included)," she writes, "cannot function without a hierachic administation of immense dimensions.... [I]n order to realise its set aims, it needs bureaucracy." To blame bureaucracy, as I think Badiou may have been doing, is to engage in the game of the party leaders. "These charges cannot be taken seriously," Heller writes, "not because they were not true, but because they localised the source of the decay in the wrong spot."

Passion Politics

More on this Dutton book, Policing Chinese Politics...

I am drawn to a comment by Dutton in the newspaper article linked in the previous post. It is about commitment politics or what he calls, elsewhere, passion politics. It describes, as the newspaper gloss puts it, those moments when "people were drawn to a cause that took on, for them, a great moral importance, over-riding all other considerations." For Dutton, it's crucial. "It is really that alien type of politics ," he says, "that liberal democracy doesn't understand but needs to take into account." This is to continue the point made at the end of the previous post -- the distinction between system and lifeworld, what happens when the two collide and merge and behave in ways outside of the liberal democratic frame.

In regard to this topic within the book, Dutton speaks first of Hannah Arendt. She "writes of politics as something that speaks to the very heart of the human condition." (p9) Arendt's understanding of politics is one which values action shared with others. The condition of the political is action "based upon a recognition of plurality" but one that distinguishes "between life, instrumental control and freedom." So it is striving for freedom, individual identity and plurality that are the ground of politics. When other categories like life and instrumental action are placed in political categories, in Arendt's theorisation, considerable costs are exacted. Politics, then, is a contained thing. When it becomes a question not of freedom but compassion, "it starts to raise the specter of terror". (p9)

But, this for Dutton, stops too short.

It is only when 'the political' oversteps the mark in this way and 'colonises' other domains, that one comes to see clearly the types of intensities that would drive one to act beyond oneself in the name of a cause. That is to say, it is only at those moments of intensity that one comes to see the political clearly.... Indeed, I would argue that politics is not about freedom per se, but about the production of a particular set of desires and intense feelings based upon the commitment to a cause. To speak 'in the name of' something suspends one's own egocentric desires but, simultaneously, leads one to cast aside own's own moral bearing for the pursuit of a greater good. To fight 'in the name of...(the political)' is to produce and release a series of non-agonal intensities. These are not necessarily reducible to a striving for freedom but they do entail commitments to action that sometimes speak in freedom's name. Only by rephrasing Arendt in this way do we come to capture something of the human condition that is political. And while this may only constitute a minor linguistic modification, it proves a significant theoretical one. (p9-10)

We come then to a question of commitment, a point of focus that extends from Arendt. The actions carried out under this sign can vary. "Hence, a striving for commitment entails recognition of the fact that one strives for a multitude of freedoms (freedom from economic want, from chaos, from oppression) and while this leads one many miles from Arendt's position, it has the virtue of highlighting the centrality of passion and intensity in any political expression." (p10) This commitment -- these passions and intensities -- are what draw us toward the distinction of friend and enemy. And so we come to Schmitt, Hitler's "crown jurist." Mao's comment ("Who are our enemies, who are our friends? That is the question germane to the revolution.") has the effect of laying bare the "policing of the political," for Dutton. He nicely terms this the "Chinese passion play of policing." (p11) The book, in moving from these opening theoretical meditations to the empirical and historical narrative, is a study of these abstractions via a concretisation of the friend/enemy distinction in everyday life. "It tells of a social life in which friend and enemy moved from being a state of mind to a station of nation." The book, then, is one in which the author has "almost entirely focused upon expression of, responses to, attempts to place limits upon, and techniques to promote...this friend/enemy dichotomy." Where it is to end up, having told its history of the revolutionary era's friend/enemy dichotomy, is the post-revolutionary reform-era. He is strident here. "I want to show how the Chinese reform-era state has successfully eaten away at the marrow of these old-style political commitments, and, through this, learn something of the way it has tamed, if perhaps only temporarily, the beast that is politics."

There is a potential commentary to be offered here on recent protests in China, particularly surrounding the Olympics juggernaut. The return of the repressed (beast)?

More interesting for my project, though, is the question of the subject's interpellation. For Dutton, it is one produced by policing procedures and directives: a new recruit learns the orthodox history of the force and its role in the society etc. For Soviet and Eastern European subjects, it is one no less structured by the role of the police, of being inside/outside the 'correctly' conceived politics. The Stasi, of course, are front-and-centre of many accounts of the GDR. This focus, not least in the vapourtrail of The Lives of Others, has been criticised for good reason -- eclipsing and overvaluing the role of this organ. But Dutton makes a good point about policing the borders of the political, about what is acceptable (friendly) and unacceptable (enemy). This ought to take us from the mere question of the secret police -- with its tantalising and melodramatic smell of espionage and spying and power plays -- to the conception of politics and the legitimation of a certain order. This then concertinas out to considerations of the subject's (non-)commitment to an alternative politics and should, with any hope, land me somewhere in the region of my topic.

Dutton, Schmitt & Sino-cops

At the bidding of my supervisor, I’ve been dipping into Michael Dutton’s award-winning Policing Chinese Politics: A History from 2005. I can see why it was recommended to me. It’s going to take some work to get its insights all lined up with my direct area of research, but the results will be worth that effort.

His fundamental insights come from drawing together Mao's writings, empirical work on Chinese policing, archive work on Chinese political and policing history and theory from Schmitt, Arendt and Foucault. He begins with the opening line from a 1926 Mao article: "Who are our enemies, who are our friends? That is the question germane to the revolution." Anyone with the slightest understanding of Schmitt will instantly see here the connection: friends and enemies as the fulcrum of politics.

And so Dutton presses on, outlining his project: "For nigh on fifty years this deadly division between friend and enemy framed revolutionary politics and life in socialist China. This division would take a variety of names (class struggle, contradictions, etc.) and forms (psychic, social, governmental) but it would always remain the central question of the Chinese revolutionary movement." (p3). This question of friend and enemy, he notes, is both the birth of the revolution and its epitaph -- 1926 and 1976, "these two dates demarcate the chapter conventionally marked out as revolutionary in Chinese history. In its revolutionary phase, the nation operated almost entirely on the basis of this binary divide. It was a divide that carved out a revolutionary path and paved that path with endless empirical exemplifications and permutations of this politico-philosophic distinction. Through the figure of public security, this book traces the life cycle of this distinction in China." (p4)

And yet the book is more than this.

It offers, in effect, the tale of the political told empirically through the re-telling of the concrete story of Chinese policing. It is the tale of this binary division as it develops and takes on organisational forms. It is the story of what happens when the binary of politics saturates the lifeworld to become its doxa -- when every facet of life turns on knowing who the enemy is and acting against that figure. It is at that moment that we arrive at the point where society and life itself become fused in politics. (p4)

This names something I'm currently trying to work out in my PhD work: the system and lifeworld distinction, as Habermas has it, of Soviet Communism. More pointedly, the way this distinction under Communism is collapsed to 'invade' the private (and psychic) space of the subject. (Always subject, never citizen -- as Heller puts it.) This is where Dictatorship Over Needs has been so useful, but I think Policing Chinese Politics could be just as instructive. More on it another day...