Comradely Greetings (6 page)

Modern capitalism has a deep interest in seeing that you and I believe the system runs completely on principles of free creativity, limitless growth, and diversity, and that the flip side—millions of people enslaved by all-powerful and (take it from me) fantastically stable standards of production—remains invisible. We have an interest in exposing this deception, which is why I insist on unmasking the static, centralized, hierarchic basis of what advertising will later sanctify as a product of unbridled creativity alone.

That's why I take exception to your distrust of thinking that is posited within the frameworks of binary oppositions, and even insist on the use of such binaries as a heuristic—one
that is situational and, when it must be, even burlesque. This is exactly how I deploy the opposition between Apollonian equilibrium and Dionysian flux. And given the broad expansion of fundamentalist tendencies in politics and economics, I'm sure we can't yet write off the suggestion of militant workers that economic growth and ecological conservation must be antithetical.

With regard to the techniques that the global economy's intellectual and ad-industry core has developed for escaping static identities of subjugation, my feeling is that we need to find a way of joining this game without checking our beliefs at the door. We can definitely profit from the ping-pong being played between an egalitarian-emancipatory “deterritorialization” and the postmodern, capitalist one. But we have to stay brave, energetic, and stubborn—we can't walk away from the fight. Sparring is how you build endurance, how you learn to be quick on your feet and develop a sense of humor. Unlike the old Left, we can't just reject capitalism out of hand—we'll get further by playing with it, teasing till it's been perverted. Perverted, I mean, in the sense of being turned to face us, enlisted into our cause.

Don't waste your time worrying about giving in to theoretical fabrications while I supposedly suffer “empirical deprivations.” There's value to me in these inviolable limits, in my being tested this way. I'm fascinated to see how I'll cope with all this, how I'll channel it into something
productive for my comrades and myself. I'm finding inspiration in here, ways of evolving. Not because but in spite of the system. Your thoughts and anecdotes are a help to me as I negotiate this conundrum. I'm glad we're in touch.

I await your reply.

Wishing you luck in our common cause,

Nadya

Dear Nadya,

Let me begin by confessing that I felt deeply ashamed after reading your reply. You wrote: “Don't waste your time worrying about giving in to theoretical fabrications while I supposedly suffer ‘empirical deprivations.' ” This simple sentence made me aware of the falsity of the final turn in my last letter: my expression of sympathy with your plight basically meant, “I have the privilege of doing real theory and teaching you about it while you are basically good for reporting on your experiences of hardship” … Your last letter abundantly demonstrates that you are much more
than that, that you are an equal partner in a theoretical dialogue. So my sincere apologies for this proof of how deeply entrenched male chauvinism can be, especially when it is masked as sympathy for the other's suffering, and let me go on with our dialogue.

First just a minor remark. I deeply appreciate your point about the advertising industry—I am myself so tired of the purist pseudo-Marxist critique of advertising as part of commodity fetishism that I am almost tempted to propose the following guideline: a critical social theorist who is not able to enjoy advertisements should not be taken seriously … But let me now pass to our key
differend
. (Sorry that I use so many quotes—but others have formulated things much better than I am able to.) Your central point is that the anti-hierarchical structures and rhizomes of late capitalism are a deceiving facade that conceals hierarchical structures and normalization: beneath all the glitz of free creativity there is the same old static, centralized, and hierarchic material production base. With this I fully agree … up to a point. I, of course, agree that beneath the much-celebrated postmodern dynamics of global capitalism lie deeply entrenched structures of domination and exploitation. But are these structures of domination and exploitation still “the same old static, centralized, and hierarchic material production base”? Permit me to quote here a well-known passage from
The Communist Manifesto
which is valid today more than ever:

It is this crazy dynamic of global capitalism that makes effective resistance to it so difficult and frustrating. The rage exploding across Europe today is, as Franco Berardi put it in
After the Future
, “impotent and inconsequential, as consciousness and coordinated action seem beyond the reach of present society. Look at the European crisis. Never in our life have we faced a situation so charged with revolutionary opportunities. Never in our life have we been so impotent. Never have intellectuals and militants been so silent, so unable to find a way to show a new possible direction.” Berardi locates the origin of this impotence in the explosive speed of the functioning of the big Other (the symbolic substance of our lives) and the slowness of human reactivity (due to culture, corporeality, diseases, etc.): “the long-lasting neoliberal rule has eroded the cultural bases of social civilization, which was the progressive core of modernity. And this is irreversible. We have to face it.” Recall the great wave of protests that spread all over Europe in 2011, from Greece and Spain to London and Paris. Even if for the
most part there was no consistent political program mobilizing the protesters, their protests did function as part of a large-scale educational process: the protesters' misery and discontent were transformed into a great collective act of mobilization—hundreds of thousands gathered in public squares, proclaiming that they had enough, that things cannot go on like this. However, such protests, although they constitute the individuals participating in them as universal political subjects, remain at the level of a purely formal universality: what they stage is a purely negative gesture of angry rejection and an equally abstract demand for justice, lacking the ability to translate this demand into a concrete political program. In short, these protests were not yet proper political acts, but abstract demands addressed to an Other who is expected to act …

One cannot but note the cruel irony of this contrast between Berardi and Hardt/Negri. Hardt and Negri celebrate “cognitive capitalism” as opening up a path towards “absolute democracy,” since the object, the “stuff,” of immaterial work is increasingly social relations themselves. Their wager is that this directly socialized, immaterial production not only renders owners progressively superfluous (who needs them when production is directly social, formally and in terms of its content?), but the producers also master the regulation of social space, since social relations (politics)
is
the stuff of their work: economic production directly becomes political production, the production of society itself. Berardi's conclusion is the exact opposite: far from bringing out the potential transparency of social life, today's “cognitive capitalism” makes it more impenetrable
than ever, undermining the very conditions of any form of collective solidarity among the “cognitariat.” What is symptomatic here is the way the same conceptual apparatus leads to two radically opposed conclusions.

If we are not able to step outside the compulsion of the system, the gap between the frantic dynamics it imposes and our corporeal and cognitive limitations sooner or later brings about a fall into depression. Berardi makes this point apropos his friend Félix Guattari, who, in theory, preached a gospel of hyper-dynamic “de-territorialization,” while personally suffering from long bouts of depression:

What can be done in a situation where demonstrations and protests prove to be of no use, where democratic elections fail to make any difference? According to Berardi, only withdrawal, passivity, and the abandonment of illusions can
open up a new way: “Only self-reliant communities leaving the field of social competition can open a way to a new hope.” I, of course, do not follow him here, but I do share his skepticism about chaotic resistance. I am more and more convinced that what really matters is what happens the day after: can we convince the tired and manipulated crowds that we are not only ready to undermine the existing order, to engage in provocative acts of resistance, but are also able to offer the prospect of a new order?

I think that Pussy Riot's performances cannot be reduced to being just subversive provocations. Beneath the dynamics of your acts, there is the inner stability of a firm ethico-political attitude. Pussy Riot does not propose merely a Dionysian destabilization of the existing static order—in a deeper sense, it is today's society that is caught in a crazy capitalist dynamic with no inner sense or measure, and it is Pussy Riot which de facto offers a stable ethico-political point. Pussy Riot's very existence communicates to thousands the fact that opportunist cynicism is not the only option, that we are not totally disoriented, that there still is a common cause worth fighting for.

So what I wish you is also good luck in our common cause. To be faithful to that cause means to be brave, especially today—and, as the old saying goes, fortune favors the brave!

Yours,

Slavoj

Dear Slavoj,

Let me start this letter out by drawing a distinction I find crucial to avoiding the pitfalls of fictive universalization.

At the beginning of your letter, you caught yourself in a moment of male chauvinism. But I'm inclined to think you and I and our whole conversation are susceptible to a more justified—and so heavier—charge: that of a colonial perspective. What I mean is that we haven't so far been accounting for regional differences and quirks in the operation of the economic and political mechanisms we're discussing. This omission, this silence, feels suddenly shameful. Seduced by your arguments, I fell unreflectingly into the classic trap of exclusive and discriminatory universalization. And in
the end, like anyone toying with unfounded universals, I excluded and discriminated against myself.

The difference I feel a civic duty to stipulate is between how what you call “global capitalism” works in the US or Europe, and how that same capitalism works in Russia. From where I'm sitting as a political activist, not to address and problematize this distinction would amount to intellectual cowardice. I know that comparing Russia with a hypothetical “West” will always yield more questions than answers, and I guess that's why, even though I would've loved to, I didn't get into the distinction in my last letter (which I had to jot down quickly while at my sewing machine). I'd never have time to say as much as I was thinking, sitting here in jail in one of those Special Economic Zones, the zones of institutionalized exploitation.