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.