Afterword: The Critical Disposition: Vladimir Sofronov-Antomoni

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Third Text, Vol.

17, Issue 4, 2003, 435–438

Afterword:
The Critical Disposition 1

Vladimir Sofronov-Antomoni

WHERE ARE WE NOW?

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

THE CRITIQUE OF ‘THE OBVIOUS’ FROM THE LEFT

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
437

crime as mere figurative representations of the class struggle. For


conservatives, the state is a Leviathan in sheep’s clothing: its function is
not so much to sustain and protect freedom (to say nothing of political
diversity) as to suppress it. (Wisdom supposedly consists in following the
primeval, the unalterable, the one-and-only possible – in following a sort
of European Tao.) Market ideologues seek to convince us that people
make a mistake when they try to control their destiny (‘socialism is
impossible’), but that, fortunately, we have at our disposal an inter-
personal mechanism – the market – which can serve us better than
human arrogance, and better than decisions made by human beings, so
imperfect and so riddled by violent impulses. All we have to do is keep
this mechanism clean and well oiled, and it, like the monarch in the old
days, will take care of us and keep us from getting out of control.
As Jameson shows, an analysis of the modern market economy leads to
the conclusion that an ideal market in today’s conditions is as utopian and
unattainable as a socialist revolution in developed capitalist countries is
for the left. However, this can be applied to the two most fundamental
processes of the 1990s: not only the efforts of the countries of Eastern
Europe to return to a market system but also the efforts of the West,
specifically under Reagan and Thatcher, to end ‘regulation’ in the welfare
state and return to ‘purified’ forms of market competition. One has to take
into consideration the fact that both of these processes can fail for
structural reasons. But the important point is that the ‘market’ turns out to
be a utopia, just as socialism has commonly been regarded in recent years.
In this case, however, one inert institutional structure (the market as such)
cannot serve as a substitute for another (bureaucratic planning). Jameson’s
response to this challenge of modernity is that we need a large collective
project that would allow the majority of the working population to
participate in everything that affects it and everything created by its labour.

Barricades in Moscow, 1991. Photo Sergei Borisov.


438

A set of social priorities – defined as planning in socialist theory – could be


a part of such a collective project. It should be clear, however, that the
market, by definition, cannot be a project.

THE DEMON OF DOUBT


The congenital trait of the critical stance, therefore, is disagreement with
the status quo. This is a necessary condition, but not a sufficient one. In
which direction to deviate from the status quo – right or left, forward or
backward – this is no less important a characteristic. Clearly, those who
call for a return to blood and soil are on the right; those who want the
realisation of something that has never happened before, something as
yet unseen, are on the left. Thus, a critical position generally requires
only disagreement with the status quo. A left-wing critique requires at
least two other conditions.
First, the desire for the as-yet unseen, the right to social experimenta-
tion and social activism in general. Second, it has to be merry, devoid of
what Nietzsche called ressentiment. Hate Is Reactionary! Not all
counter-revolution is hate, but all hate is counter-revolution.

ART AND CRITIQUE


I do not know if such a social-ideological analysis contains any
conclusions for modern art. Any individual artist can apparently occupy
any one of the three positions defined above. It is unlikely that art (if that
word still has any meaning) can find itself at the centre, that is, in a state
of immobility. The kind of art with which I could personally identify is on
the left.
It is a socially active art (or at least, art which presupposes the
possibility and even the necessity of contact with the social).
It is an art of project, of the ‘not yet seen’.
It is a laughing art.

THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE COLLECTIVE


The misfortune, even the death sentence of many projects, both in art and
outside it, is faith in the possibility of a pure aesthetic. This faith rests on
the liberal ideal of the self-sufficient value of an individual position, of
individual expression. However, it seems to me that, today, it is impossible
to just create a ‘good’ magazine, a ‘good’ seminar, a functioning critical
authority, if there is no social ‘demand’ for them, no social group, no
public interest of one kind or another (not necessarily the interest of all
society, but at least the interest of some social group).
This does not mean that collectivity is the only ‘mover’. It means that
a critic cannot be simply a ‘critic as such’. He or she has to realise and try
to express an existing social problem; then, his or her individual or
collective identity will in turn have a social effect. Thus, to formulate the
question as, ‘What is more important, the individual or the collective?’ is
too crude and therefore inaccurate.

Translated by Cathy Young

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