Coming to America

If you want to get to know our neighborhood, stand next to the office-supplies store. It's on the intersection of 108th and 64th. Come as early as you can.
Here are our taxi drivers, just starting to make their rounds: Leva Baranov, Pertsovich, Eselevskii. They're all stocky, gloomy, decisive.

Leva Baranov is past sixty. He's a former Molotov-artist. At the beginning of his career he painted Molotov exclusively. His work was exhibited in countless property-management offices, clinics, local committees. Even on the walls of former churches.

Baranov had studied all the subtleties in the features of this minister with a skilled worker's face. On a bet, he could draw Molotov in ten seconds. Blindfolded, too. Then Molotov was removed. Leva tried to draw Khrushchev, but to no avail. His prosperous peasant's features turned out to be beyond his ken.

The same thing happened with Brezhnev. Leva couldn't tackle his opera-singer face. And then, out of sheer grief, Leva became an abstract painter. He started painting colored spots, lines, and curls. Plus he got into drinking and debauchery.

His neighbors complained to the local beat militiaman about Leva: "He drinks, sleeps around, he's into some kind of abstract cynicism..."

In the end Leva emigrated, got behind the wheel, and calmed down. In moments of leisure he does impressions of Reagan on a horse.
- Sergei Dovlatov, Inostranka (The Foreign Woman)

I'm not very familiar with the diasporas of other countries, but I'm pretty sure Russians are the only people who call theirs, sneeringly, "the emigration." The term has something contemptuous embedded in it, as if what defined the transnational community of Russian or ex-Soviet people were not their common cultural heritage or sense of history but the fact that they couldn't cut it back home. Unlike Russians, French or British expats (or even émigrés) are not treated as traitors when they come home to visit, except in the kind of political sense that is totally foreign to most Russian people. It doesn't even matter why they emigrated, since the manifest differences between the ultraconservative White Russians, the pro-Western liberal dissidents, and even the left-leaning Jews are washed out in the language of "emigration." The reasons behind the sneer are complicated, but they certainly include a fair amount of tall-poppy syndrome and a latent or expressed anti-Westernism. Most vividly they are dramatized in the finale of the early post-Soviet film Window to Paris, in which a bunch of Russian zhloby [boors] end up magically transported to a chic Parisian neighborhood. Among the Russians there is a class of schoolchildren who, at the end of the movie, is faced with the choice of remaining in Paris or returning to Russia; the protagonist makes an impassioned plea for them to return and help fix their miserable, broken country, and they end up agreeing. But the point here is not American-style civic can-doism--it's that only sharing in the misery makes you authentically Russian.

Window to Paris also contains one of the classic Russian portrayals of the émigré: the fugitive who makes it good in his adopted country but spends his time complaining about the dullness and materialism of his new countrymen and pining for the intimate kitchen discussions and pickles of his homeland. (Of course, when he's offered the chance to return, he hates Russia even more than France.) This stereotype isn't entirely made up; I've met a few of these people myself. What it points to, though, is the way in which the essentialized contrast between the authenticity of Russia and the inauthenticity of the West become internalized even among the émigré Russians who are the principal targets of this style of thinking. (Incidentally, this style even predates Russian nationalism properly speaking, which is convincingly demonstrated in Hans Rogger's brilliant and unpretentious 1960 book National Consciousness in Eighteenth-Century Russia.) A distrust of the West is one of the weightiest pieces of cultural baggage an emigrant carries with her, and the largest faultlines in the Russian immigrant community in the States are traced out by the ability or inability to get rid of it.

One of the consequences of all this is that members of the emigration, saturated as they are with the national ideology, have a very uneasy or sometimes outright antagonistic attitude to other émigrés. (I'm one of them, look at me being contemptuous right in this post!) For some reason, Russians rarely seem to develop the kinds of instinctive ties of affinity to one another that members of other immigrant communities enjoy. When I hear Russian being spoken on public transportation, I don't feel pleased or experience any urge to strike up a conversation. Instead, I feel vaguely embarrassed, as if the presence of other Russians were somehow a reflection on my own imperfect assimilation. Brighton Beach, the epicenter and symbol of the Russian community in America, feels cobbled together from fear and desperation rather than a positive sense of communal identity. Even the weirdly anglicized Russian grammar and pronunciation used there strike me as somehow whiny and demanding, despite there being nothing objectively wrong with them at all.

This is why Dovlatov's Inostranka is both one of the best novels of "the emigration" and a profoundly flawed book. It presents émigré life in all its strangely skeevy social complexity, unlike some intellectualized books that seem to treat it as a purely individual matter of tortured conscience and private betrayal, and it has a healthy skeptical attitude about all the sociopolitical rejects that make up The Russians in America. On the other hand, Dovlatov is (of course) himself an émigré, and even a character in his own novel, but he never takes the opportunity to reflect on the sources of his satirical bitterness. To be really profound and thoughtful, an emigration novel needs to figure out why Russians are so disengaged from one another, why you can't feel like a self-confident member of the melting pot without pretending everyone else on your boat just washed up on shore by accident.  Something about the emigration seems to work if you look at it hard enough. The more integrated émigrés get into American life (I don't know about other countries), the more comfortable they seem with the Russian community, as if viewing it from from the reassuring distance of full Americanness makes it look more satisfying and cohesive than it can ever be seen from the inside. Dovlatov's style, which works brilliantly in the Soviet context because of the way it skates just at the surface of things and thereby reveals their absurdity, doesn't really untangle the contradictions of the emigration. Here, the absurdity is obvious and the coherence is hidden.

I've dreamed for a long time about writing a history of the emigration that resists the narrative of trauma and dysfunction without ignoring it. But to whom would such a book be addressed? Among Americans it would be of interest maybe to a few literary Russophiles. Among Russians the audience would be made up of the same émigrés and domestic intelligentsia that's been having these discussions for centuries--in other words, the book would be yet another fruitless extension of a debate that's been rendered useless by its own involution. The paradox is that the intelligentsia can't get over its complexes until it starts talking to outsiders about other things, and we can't start talking about other things until we've gotten over our complexes. (Is "complexes," roughly meaning "hang-ups," usable in English in this form at all? I've just realized I've been using it as a calque from Russian my whole life.) Maybe Keith Gessen's essay on Brodsky, targeted, it seems, at a broadly literary reader and generally unencumbered with neurosis, is a good start. We'll just have to wait and see what happens. (It's discussed at Hat's here.)

Once More, With Feeling

And the boss drunkenly babbles of Stalin,
And grabs the wheel with his hands..
And then, of course, the paramedics
Took us into the triage room.
They took my pants off and my leather jacket,
Threw all my stuff in a bag,
And sent round Marusia the nurse
To give me the powder of life.
And I kept saying that I'm healthy,
And if...whatever else..
Then in this best of all possible worlds,
I still don't give a damn.
It's all the same, it's long been all
The same damn thing to me!
- Aleksandr Galich, "Больничная цыганочка" ("The hospital gypsy-girl") 

(More substantively, see this Nezavisimaia Gazeta roundtable on the current issues.) (Google Translate)

There is a widely-held opinion that the current regime in Russia is obsessed with rehabilitating Stalin and Stalinism. The reasoning--which generally proceeds by innuendo rather than argument--goes something like this: Stalinist Russia is just like Putinist Russia because they are both illiberal, and all illiberal regimes are alike; if you get the people used to accepting the legitimacy of one illiberal regime they'll be more likely to accept another; therefore it is in the interests of Putin to deny the Great Terror, squelch the complaints of Stalin's victims, and bring back the cult of personality. A lot of things are wrong with this picture. First, of course, Stalinism and Putinism are very different forms of governance, though it may well be true that both are illiberal (for one thing, Stalin's authority rested on his ability to mobilize the population, whereas Putin's depends on the population remaining as quiescent as possible). Second, far from being a vital ideological prop for a similar regime, the memory of the Stalin period is in fact a volatile and potentially toxic phenomenon: the perception of Stalin as someone who was victorious over petty bosses at home and enemies abroad is likely to invite--and does in fact already invite--invidious comparisons to the pervasive corruption and impotence that characterize the current situation. Third, as a result of all this, official gestures in the direction of re-Stalinization have been at best lukewarm even in the more confident and increasingly distant era of High Putinism.

Now we're faced with an even stranger situation. The Medvedev government's civil-society advisory body has overwhelmingly approved a proposal that would push Russia in the direction of explicit and legislatively-backed de-Stalinization. The public's response has been, to say the least, unenthusiastic, although the polling is controversial. The traditional outcry among the Communists and nationalists--the rather ill-considered view that de-Stalinization means capitulating to the Western narrative of the Cold War--has been joined by a mass wave of boredom and frustration among ordinary people, who'd rather the authorities solve some real problems and leave them to their nostalgia. If the government persists, it will end up in the paradoxical position of having to impose de-Stalinization from above.

Paradoxical though it may be, this position is by now a familiar one. Neither the Khrushchev-era Soviet public nor the Gorbachev-era public of perestroika proved appreciative of the authorities' attempts to drag them kicking and screaming into the post-totalitarian enlightenment. (After the gulags were closed, the wave of freed prisoners caused such a jump in the crime rate that before long massive numbers of people were demanding they be reopened.) It's doubtful that Medvedev and his liberals have the clout or political will to push through a single-minded program of this kind, but stranger things have happened. There is, of course, calculation involved: not only will convincing people of the need for de-Stalinization (if they can manage it) be a major political victory, it would also be a boost for relations with liberals abroad, who are convinced that Stalinism is an immediate political concern in Russia.

But if we consider de-Stalinization outside of its narrow political context, the justifications become much murkier. Is it really true that some kind of explicit collective penance for the 1930s is a morally laudable goal from an abstract point of view? What is it meant to achieve? Facile arguments along the lines of "those who do not know history are condemned to repeat it" lose much of their appeal when confronted with the messiness of real history, which is increasingly unable to render an unambiguous verdict on the Stalin era. If forced into having a real and serious discussion, as opposed to a rigidly moralist "de-Stalinizing" one, Russians may well conclude (and in fact already have) that there was much to admire about Stalinism, even if this admiration is generally based on specious grounds like Stalin's supposed military genius and preservation of public order.

Within the parameters of the liberal interpretation of Russian politics such a conclusion would be immediately dismissed. (Witness the fiasco with the online poll that almost managed to declare Stalin the "Name of Russia." Insinuations that the Kremlin was rigging the vote in Koba's favor appeared almost right away and continue to be cited in support of the "Putinism-as-Stalinism" thesis.) The heavily policed nature of the spaces of public discussion in Russia has led to a tendency to dismiss any manifestation of views inconvenient to any particular ideology as the manipulation of the other side. Since the "homo sovieticus" position is now considered politically incorrect, the default assumption has reverted to the demonstrably false one that a liberal and anti-Stalinist society exists in Russia and needs only to be released from Putin's clutches. It seems to be impossible to refute this with any kind of evidence, since all the evidence is suspect by definition.

That may be putting it too strongly, but the point remains that there is no possibility for a de-Stalinization process that would be both "real" (i.e. society-wide and public rather than top-down) and satisfying to each of the sides involved. The stark moral categories of the totalitarian interpretation of 20th century dictatorship cannot be satisfied with anything except complete and enthusiastic self-purification as in postwar Germany, an outcome which is manifestly unlikely in the Russian case no matter how many would-be reformists take up the banner. In the end, Russians will have to be satisfied with the murky and ambiguous history that all other beneficiaries of history's great crimes have to live with. Unlike de-Stalinizationist utopianism, such an outcome at least leaves some room to think.

The Empire and the Barbarians

5. The INS rejects the Enlightenment’s version of time: of time as progress, a line growing stronger and clearer as it runs from past to future. This version is tied into a narrative of transcendence: in the Hegelian system, of Aufhebung, in which thought and matter ascend to the realm of spirit as the projects of philosophy and art perfect themselves. Against this totalizing (we would say, totalitarian) idealist vision, we pit counter-Hegelians like Georges Bataille, who inverts this upward movement, miring spirit in the trough of base materialism. Or Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus, who, hearing the moronic poet Russel claim that “art has to reveal to us ideas, formless spiritual essences,” pictures Platonists crawling through Blake’s buttocks to eternity, and silently retorts: “Hold to the now, the here, through which all future plunges to the past.”

6. To phrase it in more directly political terms: the INS rejects the idea of the future, which is always the ultimate trump card of dominant socioeconomic narratives of progress. As our Chief Philosopher Simon Critchley has recently argued, the neoliberal versions of capitalism and democracy present themselves as an inevitability, a destiny to whom the future belongs. We resist this ideology of the future, in the name of the sheer radical potentiality of the past, and of the way the past can shape the creative impulses and imaginative landscape of the present. The future of thinking is its past, a thinking which turns its back on the future.

7. As Walter Benjamin correctly notes in “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” contemplating Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus—a floating figure who stares intently at something he’s moving away from—the angel of history faces backward. “Where we perceive a chain of events,” writes Benjamin, “he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet.” What we call progress, Benjamin calls “the storm.”
- Tom McCarthy, "Declaration on the Notion of 'The Future'," The Believer, November/December 2010

I'll begin this post by announcing, rather arrogantly, that I've never read any of Tom McCarthy's novels and have no near-future plans to do so; there're still a lot of Iain Banks books on my Kindle to get through. I'm not very au courant with the literary world, so I only found out about McCarthy's apparently revolutionary intervention into the discourse of realism by reading the long N+1 review of his latest book. I've only subscribed to the magazine recently, and I've found it makes good breakfast reading: I'm at my most charitable when I can feel myself gradually returning to consciousness and good humor. So reading about McCarthy at breakfast might have been a mistake. The reviewer--Yale professor Amanda Claybaugh--was just sardonic enough that the outline of the man behind the curtain came off as shabby and ridiculous, but she left enough to the imagination that I could feel my rejection of McCarthy's posturing to be a well-deserved piece of morning enlightenment.

I've glanced around McCarthy's various manifestoes, though, and they haven't done much to disabuse me of my smug sense of second-hand competence. Just like the review promised, they were full of vaguely radical language and appeals to the French-theory classics. The International Necronautical Society would look much more like the cleverly tongue-in-cheek takeoff on the Situationist International it's clearly meant to evoke if it didn't look so much like a warmed-over ripoff. Is anything, at this point, more staid and traditional than quoting Benjamin's pithy take on Angelus Novus? I remember feeling like a majestic prophet when I read that bit aloud to my Drum-smoking bohemian buddies, but in my defense I was eighteen years old at the time and had no understanding of just how banal it was. (A Google Books exact-phrase search for the quoted part of the paragraph yields 762 results, with no false positives as far as I can tell. 762! And that doesn't include periodicals or works using other translations.) What's McCarthy's excuse?

OK, but mockery only gets us so far. The much more interesting question is this: why have "French theory" and its allies retained the aura of radicalism, nonconformity, and edginess that their intellectual contemporaries have now totally lost? After all, the '60s and '70s were full of proposals for world-changing intellectual shifts, and only later did many of them die off or become colonized by Theory. It is astounding to think that authors are still being described as "trendy" or "fashionable" when most of them have long since died of old age. But that can be chalked up to the poor communication between the world of academia and the world of popular intellectual debate. It seems far more relevant that actual people who are trying to be trendy and fashionable--and, as far as experimental literature goes, apparently succeeding--are still using Derrida and Blanchot as points of reference.

The most plausible explanation for this that I can come up with is that the various thinkers and schools of thought that have been characterized as belonging to Theory (and, in popular discourse, assigned to the even less meaningful category of "postmodernism") in fact represented the last stage in what still looked to be a coherent intellectual history of the West. There is a great irony in the fact that an array of thinkers who mostly tried to break down idealist genealogies and  resisted the impulse to render the history of ideas monolithic and univocal ended up as the more-or-less indistinguishable last chapter in that history. At the same time, it's hard not to see the result as a predictable one. Of course whoever has the last word is going to be the person who insists on incoherence, since after her there exist only local possibilities for further development. (Maybe that's a little overdrawn.) (It's also worth pointing out somewhere that the characterization of Theory as the always-already latest fad to hit the ivory tower is very useful for people who dislike the academic humanities and wish they'd go away so funds can be spent somewhere else. Naturally such people cannot be expected to keep up with the latest special issue of PMLA.)

Things haven't ossified around Derrida, of course. Individual fields and specializations still have their own conversations, turns are constantly taking place, new kinds of approaches and subject matter are being proposed. Yet all of the candidates for a broad-front interdisciplinary turn--evo-psych, speculative realism, maybe even digital humanities to the extent that this exists as an idea--have resoundingly failed to catch on except as yet another intervention narrowly bounded in a discipline. Even within disciplines, individual subfields are rarely in sync with one another, and one subfield's methodological revolution is often the stodgy antiquarianism of the next. In the broader world of art and letters, as far as I can tell, newly-discovered epochal shifts are rarely tied to contemporary developments in academia.

Still, when Tom McCarthy wants a flag to wave, he reaches out for the flag of Theory. There must be something more to this than a radically misguided sense of what the latest trends are. Even the Onion, after all, was making jokes about deconstruction in the late '90s, and what could be more middlebrow than that? No, it seems like the answer lies somewhere else.

My sense is that, despite all his revolutionary sloganeering, McCarthy is actually operating from a deep-seated sense of nostalgia. The resurrection of the radicalism of Theory is in reality just a wistful recollection of the days when the liberal arts could be glanced at, dismissed, or revolutionized as a coherent whole. Benjamin, here, isn't playing the role of the unjustly forgotten critical savior. He's actually more like Longfellow, Stephen Crane, or Fenimore Cooper--authors who could once be cited as the bearers of a great and unified national tradition, before its fragmentation into warring subcultural cliques. The necrophiliac necronauts are rather more conservative than they think.