This Was Milwaukee

The same year that the mixed blessing of the telephone reached Milwaukee, the city decided to encourage reading. The taxpayers took over the Young Men's Association library and in 1890 the aldermen decided to spend $630,000 for what became the largest Milwaukee duplex ever built. This was a building completed in 1898 to house the main library in one wing and a natural history museum in the other. Combining these two somewhat unlikely neighbors under one roof was done to save money and no doubt did, but it sometimes caused problems. Among their other functions, libraries are designed by nature to serve as a haven for respectable but broke gentlemen who have had a little too much to drink, but not so much to drink that they are apt to start throwing encyclopedias or trying to organize a quartette to sing sentimental ballads. During the years when Milwaukee's main library and its museum shared the stone duplex on the avenue, a number of these customers zigged when they should have zagged and instead of winding up in a comfortable chair in a reading room discovered themselves lost among displays of dead bison, dinosaur bones, stuffed birds, and other artifacts no drunk should be forced to look upon until he's sober. There are no statistics available on what percentage of these lost Milwaukeeans survived to reach the library. Perhaps all of them did, sooner or later, although the mummy displayed in the Egyptian exhibit looked much like a fellow who used to sit on the third stool from the end in Stash and Irma's Tap until he disappeared one wintry afternoon and was never seen again.
- Robert Wells, This Is Milwaukee (1970)

Whenever I get sick of reading academic history—and this is often—I turn to other types of historical writing. As a snob, though, I have to tread carefully: anything published by a trade press in the last twenty years or so is automatically suspect, as is anything advertised by the History Book Club. I end up with a dwindling stock of random pop-historical works which were probably rejected by similar snobs in their day: Barbara Tuchman, Richard Sennett, Lynn Montross (who is obscure, but whose War Through the Ages drew me, as a child, into a historical career).

Even with this formidable set of prejudices, I have no idea what to make of Wells's book. It's a popular history, sure, but it's a remarkably detailed one. There are, moreover, few legitimate histories to counterpose it to: before the publication of John Gurda's The Making of Milwaukee in 1999, Milwaukee history was either fragmentary or problematic. In other words, as a complete history of the city from its founding to the date of publication, This Is Milwaukee could well have vied for the dubious prestige of being the city's definitive academic history. Its refusal was clearly deliberate. The whole book is written in this comic style, and with much greater success than such attempts tend to have. I haven't laughed out loud so much in a long time. (Well, Eric Widmer's history of the Russian Ecclesiastical Mission in Beijing, which I mentioned a month or so ago, is also a good contender.)

What allows Wells's book to be so funny is its wink-nudge attitude to its reader. Wells expects him (definitely him) to be familiar with the geography of Milwaukee, to share the same devotion to drinking, Gemuetlichkeit, and mild anti-Chicago xenophobia, to identify with its German-Polish immigrant heritage and Socialist municipal politics. I know very few people in Milwaukee who would even recognize these as the constituent elements of some sort of coherent "Milwaukee identity," much less embrace them uncritically. To really get Wells's humor, therefore, the reader needs to play a kind of dress-up. He needs to pretend that these values are his own and, to some extent, become emotionally invested in their survival throughout Milwaukee's history (which, if the book has a real narrative at all, is its central axis).

It's clear that this cannot move very far beyond dress-up, for reasons that are actually pretty profound. The clear and distinct regional identities that American cities used to have are rapidly eroding under the pressure of such phenomena as creative-class gentrification and the abandonment of cradle-to-grave corporate employment. It is difficult today to appreciate the extent to which urban identities like Wells's were once widely shared and grounded in stable social structures and reliable processes of integration. (Both Good Will Hunting and The Town are really paeans to the loss of this identity in Boston.) Only New York (and perhaps Los Angeles and Las Vegas) has retained something of this stability, but this is really the exception that proves the rule: "Being a New Yorker" is today more like a collective hallucination of common ground than anything else.
Of course, not only cities but states and nations have undergone similar changes, if to a lesser extent (and this is visible in Europe much more than in the US). The nationalist historiography of Stephen Ambrose, who is already something of an epigone of nineteenth-century historians like Francis Parkman, is read mainly by retirees; younger people either prefer Howard Zinn or Jared Diamond or have no interest in history at all. I'm not complaining: I don't think we're any better or worse off for the lack of concrete national historical narratives, but they are something we have to recognize is missing. (Not to single out the Republicans, but nineteenth-century American nationalists would be revolted at the lack of elementary factual knowledge of the American Revolution and the Early Republic era displayed by right-wing talking heads.)

Much as I would like to conclude this post with a rousing call to write more Wells-style history, I can't do it. You can already see the spirit of consensus and shared values breaking down when Wells discusses the Milwaukee race riots of the late 1960s. He endorses the police crackdown on them, and, characteristically, ventriloquizes the average Milwaukeean, who of course agrees with him too. But it's an uneasy sort of agreement. Wells clearly cannot quite bring himself to think that cops and National Guardsmen kettling black rioters is quite the same thing as the good old night watchman bopping red-haired heads in the Bloody Third Ward. The Milwaukee that he so unqualifiedly offers the reader is one that is already in the process of disappearing.

Escape From Freedom

The reader of just that first chapter, however, would be wrong about Freedom. The novel aspires to be a portrait of America on a Tolstoyan scale—at least that's one way to interpret the many references to War and Peace in it—and Franzen has indeed absorbed some of Tolstoy's astonishing capacity for empathy. Gentrification and the fetishizing of parenthood occupy the foreground of Franzen's panoramic canvas but have not been reduced to caricature, except in that curious first chapter, which I'll get to later. Rather, they are made to seem like aspects of an urge to nurture that has run amok, two of the many ironies of life under late capitalism chronicled by this exuberant but keenly critical novel.

... Patty has carefully constructed her life to be as unlike as possible that of her artsy Westchester family, which is distantly implicated in corrupt New York State Democratic politics. Her parents never took any interest in her career as a basketball star, though they fulsomely overpraised their other children's minor successes in theater and painting. So, to her mother's dismay, Patty chose the University of Minnesota and a Title Nine basketball scholarship over a fancy private school. Moving to the nonironic Midwest also gave her the means to escape the family tone set by her father, a snarky East Coast wit; all she had to do was become relentlessly pleasant, like everyone around her. Walter, a mild-mannered lawyer, has been equally deliberate in his effort to become an intensely nice person, a dialectical refutation of his father, an alcoholic roadside-motel owner who favors his lazier, dumber sons over Walter.

There's an oedipal theory of history, and of America, at work in The Corrections and Freedom. Characters believe they can throw out the past and create a new reality, as if that reality won't prove as restricting as the previous one and as if the next generation won't turn around and do the same thing. Walter's legal career is thwarted by his ferocious politeness, his way of choking everything down. So is his marriage. "Walter's beautiful rage going wasted," Patty laments, about Walter's inability to end a good spat with rough sex. Patty's and his life together unravels when their son, Joey, rejects it, leaving their house even before he finishes high school and moving in with the daughter of Patty's least-loved neighbor, a working-class woman whose redneck boyfriend has unacceptable redneck tastes. 
- Judith Schulevitz, "The Tolstoy of the Internet Era"

I've raved about Eva Illouz's Cold Intimacies here before, but it was reading this novel that really brought home to me its value as an interpretive paradigm. Illouz's argument, in brief, is that postwar capitalism has made psychological self-investigation a fundamental part of its functioning. '60s style "self-actualization" psychology, Oprah, and the demand for narratives about the self characteristic of online dating are all part of this epochal shift. Oprah, for her, is an especially important figure. In order to succeed at the kind of therapeutic practice perfected on daytime talk shows, the individual needs to reconstruct a story of her life around a core underlying trauma: she can't sustain relationships with men because she wasn't loved enough as a child. The point, for the audience as well as the people on stage, is that the pathological state is normal, and that self-actualization demands requires constant psychological self-analysis.

In the glowing reviews—as well as, interestingly enough, the denunciations—of Franzen's new novel, we are constantly told that we are looking at the Great Novel of Our Times (or The Overhyped Novel That Encapsulates Everything Wrong With Our Times). Invariably, the reviewers cite the subject matter, the political tone, the Internet-enabledness of Franzen's style. (B.R. Myers is predictably bilious.) In the process, they miss what's really important about Freedom: its total and unquestioning immersion in the vocabulary and mindset of contemporary emotional capitalism. This book may not be the best example, but I haven't yet found one better.

We can already see this element emerging in The Corrections. The family drama here, of course, resolves into four separate psychological narratives, and the plot is driven by the interwoven resolutions of each character's therapeutic process. What keeps the earlier book traditional, however, is the way in which the author designs and presents his sets. They don't pretend to be anything more than boxes in which self-analysis takes place, which is why they are generally sketched out so schematically. (When the narrative shifts briefly to Lithuania, they collapse into absurdity, which clearly suggests the tenuousness of the link between the world of The Corrections and reality.)

Freedom, by contrast, is a resolutely post-9/11 novel. America has been rudely awakened from the cozy involution of the Clinton years, and the reigning opinion is clearly that "after 9/11, to write a non-politically-sensitive novel is barbaric." Franzen's follow-up, accordingly, includes more politics than anyone could reasonably have hoped for. We're meant to sniff at the NPR liberals, recoil in horror from the sinister Jewish PNACniks, cheer along with the environmentalists. The characters get involved in great events, meet stand-ins for prominent political figures, and endlessly position themselves in relation to the political identities of their neighbors. Franzen is clearly making a determined effort to bring the real world into his family drama.

His failure is dramatic and striking. We never get the sense that anything happening here intersects meaningfully with the lives of anyone outside the narrow cast of characters we're introduced to at the beginning. Politics, political opinions, national events—these things only seem real in Freedom. In fact, we've only gone from the wooden set of the Midwestern house to the painted backdrop of the Capitol in the distance. Everything here is about one thing and one thing only: the drama of therapy, self-analysis, and the excavation of the pathological self. (It's no mere stylistic error that the confessional tone of the sections told from Patty's perspective looks so similar to the style of the rest of the book. They're all, in fact, written with a therapist in mind.)

In this sense, Freedom really is a Novel of Our Times. We don't recognize the oddity of this mysterious melding of James and Zola because we've been so thoroughly conditioned by literary fiction to expect characters to be "psychologically complex." Once upon a time, this term referred simply to the need to create characters framed in shades of gray, with nuanced sets of motivations and inner conflicts. For Franzen, it has come to mean accepting and luxuriating in the kind of psychological thinking characteristic of Illouz's emotional capitalism. Compare Franzen with Flannery O'Connor: it's hard to deny that the latter's characters are psychologically complex in the older sense, but it is equally hard to imagine them talking about themselves in the way Franzen's protagonists do.

It is thus both supremely fitting and ironic that the defining feature of Franzen's career so far has been his spat with Oprah. Oprah clearly knew what she was doing when she picked The Corrections for her book club, and Franzen's rejection of her overture was a fantastic example of the kind of denial members of the intellectual class fall into when confronting the emotional-capitalist world. (Illouz insists that the '60s counterculture was as responsible as any corporation for the emergence of this new world.) And as it turns out, Oprah doesn't hold a grudge: she's now picked Freedom for her book club and mended fences with Franzen. Obviously, she knows who her real friends are.

The Specter of Civil Society

Thinking people look around and choose themselves. Individualism has become the religion of the past decade. Recently I interviewed the songwriter Sergei Shnurov, whose point of view is fairly typical. He sincerely believes that any civic protest is bunkum: when there are elections coming any outfit will be closed down, so why waste your time? When I asked what the course of action should be for an Akakiy Akakievich i.e. a little man with no rights surrounded by coppers and bandits, the musician answered in his typically colourful language “If you make any Akakiy Akakievich a policemen for a week he’ll be so pleased, he’ll wet himself. Give him a baton and a “No Entry” sign and he’s got a f**** life. When he experiences a twinge of jealously for those black Mercs and their flashing lights – well, offer to put him in one and he certainly won’t refuse. No one would. It’s easy to say things when you don’t have a choice.” ...

The world, thank heavens, is better than it seems through the tinted glass of armed Mercs. Our main cause for optimism is for the moment in the virtual space of the blogosphere. Comscore Agency recently established that Russian internet users are the most active bloggers in the world. We spend on average twice as much time on social networks as our Western counterparts. Nothing surprising in that. The internet has long since become a parallel reality that has everything so lacking in ordinary life: freedom of expression, lack of window dressing or propaganda, the possibility of civic engagement. For the moment it’s more often a banal cross-post, which acts like psychotherapy. In the smoking areas of the Japanese Panasonic factories there used to be little figures of the bosses. During the smoking breaks the workers would beat up the rag figures of the exploiter with all their might and main. The figure would squeak pathetically in response. Having let off some of the steam of their class hatred, the workers would then go back to work. That’s how it is with us: we read of the latest lawlessness, put up a link and feel a bit better. But it’s not worth regarding the cross-post as purely palliative. It’s just the first stage of civic engagement. Internet man is no longer indifferent. He’s taken the first step, broken ranks and started his own battle. The energy of his discontent builds up to become a real force, which is capable of knocking a breach in the rusty carcass of the state. There have already been several examples of the lethal force of the internet.
- Andrei Loshak, "Parallel worlds: how connected Russians now live without the state" (November 22, 2010)

This is a fascinating article, even if it's somewhat overexuberant and starry-eyed--and it's even more interesting when considered in the context of Loshak's previous article, which is considerably more depressing. What are we to make of it, though? Is the claim that the Internet in general and Livejournal in particular are making new forms of civic engagement possible something that we should take seriously?

The question is more complicated than it looks. Loshak, in this as well as the previous article, is very much the bien pensant. Russians, as I've observed many times on this blog, love nothing more than a good jeremiad about how eternally and epically fucked the country is and how it can never be "normal." At the same time, the world of Russian Livejournal is, like many other online communities, a colossal echo chamber which overstates its own significance simply by virtue of the fact that the people involved spend so much time reading it and talking to one another. (This is something akin to the nation-building effect of daily newspapers Benedict Anderson observed a while ago.) It can safely be said that for the vast majority of Russian people television comedy shows are much more relevant than anything posted by drugoi. And, of course, much of the Russian speaking ZhZh-osphere consists of emigrants and expats of various kinds, who generally reside in the US or Israel and are therefore thoroughly saturated with the ideology of civic activism and civil society.
In other words, Loshak's argument to a large extent represents a claim made by Internet civil society about itself. This does not mean it is false. It's quite possible that Russians really are the world's most active users of social networks, and it seems certain that the kind of activism that has come into fashion on Russian Livejournal is of a qualitatively different kind from the politics of "awareness" that dominate English-language Facebook. The most salient point of comparison here probably ought to be the Internet in China, whose memes often have more political edge simply because the territory is considered something of a borderland compared to the mainstream media.

But Loshak is a journalist, and as such he is perhaps overinvested in civil society as an intellectual category. In fact—in China as in Russia—the Internet just as often becomes a venue for nationalist mobilization, whether of the state-sponsored or genuinely grassroots kind. Around the edges, this looks like fascism, but the majority of it is simply inchoate nostalgia and dissatisfaction. The comments on this sad little video of Brezhnev are priceless: "thank you, dear Il'ich! all of a sudden I'm somehow saddened that there are no more people like you, that there are no rulers that would stand with all their strength for our country. today blood is spilling not in the corners of the planet, but in our country. the country is being robbed and destroyed by nations. how little one needs for happiness, if only this recording was played as usual during the New Year's celebrations..." This about a guy who was so decrepit that he drooled on himself on television!

My point here is not that the Internet isn't fueling the kinds of activism Loshak cites. It may well be doing so more and more every year. Rather, it's that technological explanations alone can't get us very far. The Internet isn't unlocking and excavating the civil society that lies dormant among the atomized and passive Russian masses—the idea itself is preposterous. For every leader of an anti-migalki protest there are two schlubs who are happy to believe that the intelligence services of the Main Enemy are funding and controlling the opposition.

My hypothesis, instead, is this. The Soviet Union was a deeply archaic state in many respects, but one thing it did excel at was science (and especially science education). Towards the end of the regime, it began to pay attention to computers as well. The result, in the 1990s, was an enormous community of computer-literate people with no access to legitimate employment. It's no accident that Russian "hackers" are behind so many spam botnets and malware infections: they are the product of connections forged between "kompiutershchiki" and organized crime during that chaotic period.

Being a business professional in the tech industry is easier now than it ever was back then, which means that this community has begun to acquire status and legitimacy. With Livejournal's help, it has also set the tone for Runet. The new fascination with online activism, I suspect, has a lot to do with the self-consciousness of this highly technological middle-class elite and its desire to take part in the functioning of society. As Loshak's article suggests, in the absence of other viable candidates, it has been allowed to claim the mantle of civil society for itself (much like the bourgeois public, if we believe Habermas).

The tl;dr here is that we should not be seeing these developments as a sociopolitical process—on a par with "institution-building," "civic mindedness," and so on—but as a socioeconomic one.  The growth or stagnation of the computerized middle class (currently about a fifth of the population) will ultimately determine its meaning for political life. Even if this proves to be enormous, however, it won't move the oountry away from the privatized-state system of governance, because nothing in the program is in contradiction with it. You've got to take what you can get.

The Trouble With Cynicism

Furthermore, there is growing consensus among analysts that even if the power elite wants to tackle corruption, the economic crisis has exacerbated tendencies towards unmanageability of corruption within the power vertical. XXXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXXX, told us that the GOR may have waited too long. XXXXXXXXXXXX said that a few years ago, when only millions had been "stolen" from the Russian people (as opposed to today's billions), the GOR could have acted and not sparked public outrage. XXXXXXXXXXXX said that the crisis had made the GOR's task more difficult and the scope of corruption has become unmanageable. As the crisis reduced the size of the pot and the anti-corruption rhetoric increased, some Russians felt that they had best grab as much as they could while the going was good. XXXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXXX, noted that the tendency of corruption to evade control by the GOR was not new. In 2006 -- at the height of Putin's control in a booming economy -- it was rumored within the Presidential Administration that as many as 60 percent of his orders were not being followed.

XXXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXXX, said that only a "revolution" could change Russia's current trajectory. He argued that the system had become too sclerotic and too beneficial for too many to allow for change. XXXXXXXXXXXX noted that corruption had even become a positive factor for a substantial portion of society. By taking merit out of the equation for success, it was simply easier to pay for entrance to a university, for a contract, etc. XXXXXXXXXXXX, who has made a fortune in Russia's casino business, told us forthrightly that the "levels of corruption in business were worse than we could imagine" and that, after working here for over 15 years and witnessing first-hand the behavior of GOR officials at all levels, he could not imagine the system changing.

Corruption in Russia remains pervasive and deep-rooted. While Medvedev's anti-corruption rhetoric is a step in the right direction, we have yet to see significant implementation of new measures. Russians appear to accept current levels of corruption and seem inclined to pay up or emigrate, rather than protest. Neither have Russians reacted to the sight of the connected few continuing to indulge in luxurious lifestyles as the economic recession continues to leave most Russians worse off than they were two to three years ago. Nonetheless, the commentary on the GOR's increasing inability to manage the scope of corruption bodes ill for its stated effort to enhance corporate governance and investor confidence.
- Wikileaks cable 09MOSCOW2823, November 2009

I've been surprisingly troubled by the reaction to my post this summer about Western reporting on Russia. On the one hand, I didn't really expect anything different: people who I expected would be receptive were receptive and most other people disliked it intensely. (It's hard not to forget sometimes that words like "democracy" and "rule of law" actually mean things to people outside of my discursive community, and those people are liable to get upset if I throw them around thoughtlessly like references to an inside joke.) On the other hand, the nature of the pushback suggests to me that my presentation was too tendentious and facetious when it should have been judicious and thoughtful.

In particular, one comment ran like this: "I'm not sure which resonates stronger here...your naivety, or that you're a pretend academic." As it came from an anonymous poster and was unaccompanied by elaboration or argument, it's hard to tell what the intention here was. The crucial word for me, though, is "naivety." I was writing in a demystifying mode, which implies accusing everyone else of naivety. Could I have been naive too? I can't see how, though of course the nature of the problem is such that I wouldn't recognize it. Could it be that the poster was trying to say that I was naive if I didn't recognize the dead hand of the totalitarian state in some of the situations I alluded to? That seems likely, but from my point of view that interpretation looks naive too.
But I've decided to give this commenter the benefit of the doubt, so I've been thinking about ways by which my interpretation of the subject could be made more incisive. Finally, thanks to conversations with friends and an obsessive reading of the relevant Wikileaks cables, I think I've figured out what I was missing.

My reading of Western reporting on Russia was fundamentally based on the notion that Westerners see only the State in Russia and therefore end up blaming it for all sorts of imagined and real misdeeds, domestic and foreign. To this I implicitly (and quite unreflectively) counterposed a model in which Russia is basically a normal country with an unusually wicked Society, making Society (which includes nationalist extremists as well as oligarchs) the root of most evil and the State a kind of hapless scapegoat.

This, I now see, is both wrong and naive. If it's true that nothing like "The Russian State" was responsible for the murder of Alexander Litvinenko, it's also true that Berezovsky can't be blamed in any simplistic way. It seems clear that a representative of state power was involved in some form, and this needs to be accounted for. What's less clear is the motive: the typical argument that Litvinenko was a critic of Putin isn't very convincing, because he was known far more widely in the West (which obviously would not be impressed by his murder using one of the most obviously traceable substances possible).

My new frame of mind on this subject is, alas, not of much use to people who care about the facts of the case, but it does help me arrive at explanations of this and many similar events in contemporary Russia. Basically, there is no State and Society that can be meaningfully distinguished in the contemporary Russian context. This is something historians have long believed about previous periods in the country's history, but the development of democratic forms led people to think a firm distinction would finally develop. What seems to have happened instead is a lot more interesting. Unlike previous periods, where the State carefully nurtured, mobilized, and constructed Society under its wing, in today's Russia Society has been allowed to create its own state.

This means that every politician, from the prime minister on down, is involved with private power blocs, whether financial, criminal, or of some other type. This also means that less unity of action can be attributed to state bodies in Russia today than in any previous period: the murder of an activist is first and foremost resolved politically as a struggle between institutional power bases (such as the Procuracy and the FSB). These are entangled in non-state webs of dependence and conflict that may give the event a totally different significance. (It seems likely, for instance, that business disputes, and not anything as straightforward as great-power politics, were ultimately responsible for the death of Litvinenko and the poisoning of Iushchenko.) Any explanation that stops at the state-interests stage of the analysis should thus be regarded as deeply incomplete, as should any explanation that leaves out the ways that the interests of "civil society" are reflected and find resonance in the power politics of state institutions.

Using this kind of analysis has been much more satisfying than the uncoordinated lashing-out I was doing before, and it has helped me see that even if American officials doubletalk in public it does not mean they're being spoonfed bullshit around the clock. It has also given me some perspective on the problems of cynicism as an interpretive lens for political questions. Because cynicism is always demystifying, it always has to make special claims to insight: you're too dumb to see that the state did it or that the media are lying to you. This has the side effect of removing any possibility of nuance or discussion, since the closet always has to contain exactly one parsimoniously-described skeleton (for instance, "it's the oil, stupid," or "it's American imperialism, stupid," or "it's totalitarianism, stupid"). It's no surprise Noam Chomsky's essential ideas haven't changed in decades—the man is immune to being out-cynicized.