Stalinka Revisited

Wed Oct 19 17:05:01 UTC 2005

Dear colleagues,

First of all, I apologize for an erroneous posting of a private letter on the
SEELANG.

Responidng to Professor Rancour-Laffarriere's post, I'd  like to clarify my
position not for self-defence but for the sake of broader and really important
issues touched in this discussion. Professor Rancour-Laffariere refers to my
answer to a polemically shaped question "Do we need Vyshinsky to analyze
Kharms?" All I said was the following: as long as we assume that a writer is
working with a discourse (playing with it, problematizing or undermining it),
we  have to consider others who participate in a more primary fashion in the
shaping of the discourse. Thus, speaking about discourses of violence in
Soviet culture, one needs to take into consideration political figures such
as, say, Vyshinsky, who actively participated in the shaping of this discourse
verbally and practically. Without this it would be hard to understand the
approach to violence performed by Soviet writers and, especially, by Soviet
modernists. Having said that I certainly didn't mean that Kharms and
Mayakovsky should be perceived in the same way as Vyshinsky or Ezhov.

Furthermore, in my talk at UC Berkeley I was trying to show how Babel or
Kharms deconstructed  the Soviet rhetorics of violence that served as a
spiritual foundation for the terror. They do this in very different manners
neither of which can be reduced to a simple moral lesson, yet, the term
deconstruction seems to describe their treatment of discourses of violence
better than any other.  How unfortunate it is that Professor Rancour-
Laferriere did not find this (the largest) part of my lecture convincing.  I
wish he had asked me about it at the time so that I could have clarified my
position on this point.

As to more general, theoretical or ethical, issues addressed by Professor
Rancour-Laferriere, theoretical approach I used, only partially belongs to
postmodernism. It goes back not only to Derrida and  Foucault, but also to the
thinkers that cannot be qualified as postmodernists:  Walter Benjamin
(Critique of Violence) and Rene Girard (especially, Violence and the
Sacred, as Rima Salys already pointed out).  As to my ethical perspective on
Soviet culture, it is indeed very close to that eloquently formulated by Eliot
Borenstein. Professor Rancour-Laffarriere asks if is it possible to continue
the development of postmodernist theorizing about Russia without realistic
regard for the massive traumatization and  massive killings of human beings in
Russia during the twentieth  century. I believe that to investigate violence,
its inner logic, its connections with the sacred, its cultural roots and
justification, exactly means taking regard for the massive traumatization and
massive killings. Otherwise, we deal with Soviet culture as if Russian/Soviet
historical catastrophe was caused by an invasion of monsters and sociopaths
that came from nowhere.

However, I think that theoretical discrepancies between Professor Rancour-
Laffarriere and those who, like me, are poisoned by postmodernist
theorizing, is more of  a faith-based nature. I do not believe in clear-cut
oppositions in general and especially in those that were cultivated in late
soviet intelligentsias circles (Soviet power vs. modernist culture, communist
terror vs. independent art, executioners vs. victims). Professor Rancour-
Laffarriere apparently still finds these dichotomies valid. Perhaps, this is
why for me postmodernist theorizing is a tool allowing to find new meanings in
classical (or not so classical) texts of the Soviet period, and for my
opponent it is something that can (or should?) be restricted on moral
grounds.

As we all know, this kind of disagreement rarely leads to consensus; however,
there is nothing more productive for culture than religious debates. In my
view, an open  theoretical discussion will be very healthy for our field.

Yet, this suggestion can be considered a postmodernist provocation too.

Quoting Daniel Rancour-Laferriere <darancourlaferriere at COMCAST.NET>:

> 17 Oct. 05
>
> Dear Colleagues,
> This afternoon at UC Berkeley I attended a lecture by Prof. Mark
> Lipovetsky of the University of Colorado, Boulder, on the topic
> "Strategies of Violence in Soviet Culture: Mythical and Divine."  I will
> not attempt to summarize the contents of this interesting scholarly
> lecture, which was delivered with considerable style and verve.  As can
> be guessed from the title, however, the topic had the potential to
> provoke some emotional distress in listeners, especially those listeners
> among the thirty or so people in the room who had survived Soviet
> violence (or who were close to said survivors, or who were just very
> involved in the study of violence in Soviet Russia).
>
> After the lecture some questions came up which, although politely
> formulated, indicated that some emotional distress had in fact been
> provoked - for example, "are you not perhaps aestheticizing violence?"
> This was apropos of Lipovetsky's talk of "the discourse of violence" in
> certain literary works by Babel, Kharms, Zamiatin, and others, and his
> references to theories of discourse promoted by postmodernist
> theoreticians such as Derrida and Foucault.  What came next however, was
> an assertion that we can view the "discursive practices" of Vyshinsky on
> the same level as those of Mayakovsky, Babel, Zoshchenko....
>
> Say what?  That's right, Vyshinsky's performances at the show trials are
> in the same discursive field with the performances of Mayakovsky,
> Zoshchenko, etc.  This sociopath, Procurator General Andrei Vyshinsky
> (1883-1954), sent countless human beings to their deaths with his
> "discursive practices."  Real people died real deaths because of him.  I
> doubt that any real people died real deaths as a result of, say, the
> "shows" put on by Vladimir Mayakovsky (excluding his suicide).
>
> To place Vyshinsky and other Soviet political monsters like Stalin
> (remember Groys) in the same category with Babel, Zoshchenko,
> Mayakovsky, Zamyatin - is what philosophers would call a category
> error.  Or, if that seems an insufficient explanation, consider this
> analogy: to conflate the "discursive practices" of Vyshinsky and
> Mayakovsky is like confusing a snuff film with a film acted by
> professional actors.
>
> Yes, it's the "Stalinka" problem all over again: foregrounding of the
> properties of discourse at the expense of human feelings (and by the
> way, the builders of that web site have STILL not offered us a
> justification for its name).
>
> A more general topic for potentially productive discussion on SEELANGS:
> is it possible to continue the development of postmodernist theorizing
> about Russia without realistic regard for the massive traumatization and
> massive killings of human beings in Russia during the twentieth
> century?  I wish some of the postmodernist theoreticians on this list
> would stop lurking, would come out and explain to us old-fashioned
> philologists (and psychoanalysts) why postmodernist theorizing should be
> retained.  I am willing to change my mind if there are some interesting
> and convincing arguments put forth.
>
> Best regards to the list,
>
> Daniel Rancour-Laferriere
> Emeritus Professor of Russian
> UC Davis
>
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*******************************************************************************
Mark Lipovetsky [Leiderman]
Associate Professor of Russian Studies and Comparative Literature,
Department of Germanic and Slavic Languages and Literatures,
CU-Boulder, UCB 276, Boulder CO 80309
Fax: (303)492-5376
Tel: 303-492-7957

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