Afterword: The Critical Disposition: Vladimir Sofronov-Antomoni
Afterword: The Critical Disposition: Vladimir Sofronov-Antomoni
Afterword: The Critical Disposition: Vladimir Sofronov-Antomoni
Afterword:
The Critical Disposition 1
Vladimir Sofronov-Antomoni
It seems to me that today a critical position must take into account two
points: (a) the Cold War has been won by the liberal social and
ideological construct; (b) however, the social and mental space has not
become bipolar. The situation is not defined by the contest between the
liberal world-view and the right-wing conservative position, whose
extreme flank overlaps fascism. In fact, liberal ideology is opposed not
only by right-wing reactionary conservatism but also by the ideology of
the left, or left-wing progressivism. Thus, the two-flank picture of the
world is so crude and imprecise as to be essentially inaccurate.
An important characteristic of the critical stance is a refusal to accept
the status quo as obvious and unchangeable. The Marxist tradition
(Althusser, Z̆iz̆ek, Jameson, etc) notes that, as soon as we hear such
statements as, ‘this is human nature, this is in the nature of things,
nothing can be done about it’, we can be sure that we are looking at pure
ideology.2
Fredric Jameson analyses the principal ‘obvious’ idea of the 1990s (the
decade of the delegitimisation of the socialist bloc and, more broadly, the
socialist idea): ‘It is obvious to any rational person that the market is an
1. Published in inalienable part of human nature.’ The market is thus represented as the
Khudozhestvennyi Zhurnal,
no 36, Moscow 2001.
only possible form and mechanism of social existence.
As Jameson reveals, the concept of the market as employed here is a
2. Jameson gives a good
example of such analysis in
model which combines two phenomena previously considered incompat-
Chapter 8 of his book, ible: the Hobbesian ‘war of all against all’ and Adam Smith’s ‘invisible
Postmodernism,or, The hand’. Curiously, Hobbes feared the very thing in which Smith had
Cultural Logic of Late
Capitalism, Duke University absolute confidence: the unrestrained market competition of everyone
Press, Durham, NC, 1991. against everyone. The notion of violence as an inalienable part of human
Third Text ISSN 0952-8822 print/ISSN 1475-5297 online © 2003 Kala Press/Black Umbrella
http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals
DOI: 10.1080/0952882032000166279
436
“Near the painting”. Photo Boris Ignatovich. The painting was done in 1950 by the
“brigade” of artists (Boris Ioganson and others). The title is “Lenin’s Speech to the
Third Congress of the Comsomol”.
nature which manifested itself during the English revolution (when it was
theorised by Hobbes) is not altered or improved by the ‘joys of
commerce’; it coincides precisely (according to Marx) with market
competition as such. The distinction here is not political or ideological
but historical: for Hobbes, the state is a necessary means of softening and
controlling the violence of human nature and human hostility; for Adam
Smith (and on a different, metaphysical level for Hegel), competition is
softened and controlled by itself, without the need for an absolute state.
But here is the most important point: it is clear that the conservative
tradition is always shaped by its own fears, with civil war and urban
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