The Plight of Colonized Nations: Would the West Prefer to Keep Russia Intact?

On the 26th of February, after months of claiming that “everything goes according to the plan” and “we have not started anything yet,” Russian president Vladimir Putin emerged in a new amplua frightening the Russian people with their imminent disappearance as a result of the war, trying to lift the stakes to the existential level and rally support for the war that is evidently not sufficient since such scarecrows are necessary.

Putin, to most of whose words it is vain to pay any attention after 2/24/2022, said something new by stating, “If we go down this road (of a collapse of the Russian Federation–V.O.), I think that the fates of very many peoples of Russia and most of all, certainly, the Russian people may change cardinally, simply in a cardinal way… Instead of the Russian people, there will be Muscovites, Uralites, and others.”

This is merely one of the many bricks that Putin with a stubbornness worthy of a better application puts into the foundation of the future collapse of the Russian Federation. By beginning to talk about it as an imminent threat (of course blaming the West for everything), Putin is merely repeating earlier suggestions by Medvedev and Shoigu, who are similarly trying to ramp up the existential stakes in the war.

However the curious reality is that, as Casey Michel observes in his recent article in New Republic, is that the West has hardly learned the lessons of the “Chicken Kyiv” speech by President George H.W. Bush in Kyiv in 1991, where Bush attempted to stand in the course of history by urging Ukraine to reconsider the then-palpable intention of pulling away from the USSR, mere months before the USSR dissolved.

Not only was that speech short-sighted and did not help to build trust with the newly emerging independent states, apart from the Russian Federation, but it was as useless as standing in the way of a speedy train trying to stop it.

The deja-vu of the contemporaneity is in the Western voices who hurry to proclaim that the new round of the falling apart of the Russian empire, the new states will be “unviable,” as Casey Michel observes citing an American professor Marlene Laruelle calling the prospect of “minorities” creating prosperous states “naive” (no less) and British historian Mark Galeotti.

Mark Galeotti, who we know and like for his short sardonic book A Short History of Russia (2020), presents a particularly puzzling case of an Anglophone scholar, and this case is typical. For whatever reason, before the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, bunches of scholars were rather critical about the current Russian public discourse, sharing in a horrified amusement with each other the jucier and crazier bits of the Russian media. However, with the full-scale Russian invasion, they were the first to be terrified of the supposed might of the Russian state, predicted the swift fall of Kyiv, claimed it was impossible to defeat Russia, and appeared to be terrified of the nuclear war. Suddenly, their criticisms of the regime disappeared. It is almost like being a specialist in Russian studies made you, in fact, less capable of judgment than if you were a non-specialist. I can only assume that having studied the Russian discourse in depth, they were affected by it more than people who didn’t study it.

Not only were they routinely transmitting those same crazier tropes of the Russian propaganda that they criticized earlier, but–Casey Michel calls it Westsplaining–some of them began Westsplain to the colonized peoples in Russia and the public that would listen that the prospect of the dissolution of the Russian Federation was undesirable, and the future independent states could not exist without Russia.

It is not difficult to see here the familiar trope of Western colonialism at large, supposing that the presence of the colonizer is a necessary civilizational constraint without which the savages will immediately begin killing each other, regressing into the depths of ignorance and savagery immanent to them, their natural condition complicated by the presence of nukes. Perhaps the shared position of the colonizer of the Western scholars and the Russian officials would create a shared ground for them in which they find it easier to sympathize with the colonizers, however different, than with the colonized.

In his article, Casey Michel brings up the example of Sakha, one of the potentially richest regions in Russia that is nevertheless suffering from centuries of Russian colonialism that keeps it poor and nowadays uses Sakha men as cannon fodder for the project of the Russian imperial colonial conquest against Ukraine. Casey Michel contests the idea of the “inviability” of the Sakha state:

“Russians first began slaughtering the Sakha in the 1630s, with Russian forces requiring over a half-century to finally subdue them and begin seizing their land, installing slavery, torture regimes, and routine hostage-taking as matters of course. “To the Sakha, Russian rule brought all the usual ills,” Anna Reid wrote. During that half-century of initial Russian conquest, the Sakha population fell by as much as 70 percent.

And yet, despite the decimation, the Sakha survived, rebuilding their population base. They also fought. Century after century, Sakha launched revolt after revolt against Moscow and St. Petersburg, first against tsarist officials and then against the Bolsheviks. During the late Soviet period, things were hardly better: “Frequent ethnic brawling” was routine, with “no-go areas for Slavs” in many Sakha towns. Things were so bad that Soviet troops were forced to intervene in 1979, with ethnic riots rocking the region a few years later. All of it culminated in the early 1990s, when Sakha leadership affirmed Sakha’s right to secede, to form its own army, and to declare that all Sakha natural resources belonged “to the Sakha population.”

And what natural resources they are: billions of dollars in diamond mines, deep deposits of gold, a hydrocarbon industry that is “of great importance … for all of Russia.” Toss in sea access—which will only improve as the Arctic Sea, unfortunately, warms—and the Sakha Republic suddenly begins looking far more “viable” than many of the former Soviet republics, all of which have now enjoyed decades of independence. But thanks to the Kremlin’s neo-imperialism, much of Sakha remains impoverished and underdeveloped—and Sakha residents have now become cannon fodder for Russia’s war in Ukraine.

None of this is to say Sakha independence is, or even necessarily should be, forthcoming. That is a decision for Sakha residents, and especially those among the Sakha nation butchered and bludgeoned by Russian forces for centuries. But the Westsplainers have it all wrong: The Sakha Republic has more than enough cohesion, resource base, and historical identity to emerge as the first fully independent Siberian nation. These notions that Sakha—or any of the other extant Russian colonies—would not be “viable” are founded on farce, not facts.”

In the Russian social media writing about the potential independence of former Russian colonies that are currently comprising the likely transitional state called “the Russian Federation,” Sakha indeed is often imagined as the potential “Northern United Arabs Emirates.” There is little doubt that possessing the resources, as it does, and being able to distribute the profits of these resources internally, within the region, would change the way of living, consuming, and constructing the future in Sakha.

The Sakha initiative groups are discussing the various prospects. From the beginning of the new stage of the Russian war against Ukraine (2022), Sakha Pacifist Association rejected the Russian Federation’s attempts of the revitalizing of the Soviet project, extolled the horizontal connections above the “vertical of power” (Surkov’s ideologeme and a supposed value that it has been offered to strengthen throughout Putin’s rule), questioned whether “the war is in the interest of the republic” (Source). Since then, Sakha Pacifist Organization has spoken against mobilization, sounded alarm about disappeared activist Aikhal Ammosov, and developed connections with the Free Yakutia Foundation that directly states:

“Finally, to many came the realization that there is no great Russian nation. What exists is the wild population of a territory that is called “Federation.” In reality, there is also no federation but colonies and a metropolis, there is a state-forming (gosudartvoobrazuyushchaia), main nation (titulnaia natsiia), and its slaves. Finally, we are talking openly about it.” (Source).

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When the conversation takes this kind of turn, it is probably not up to the Western scholars and officials to try and stop the processes that acquired such momentum that the Russian president and other figures in the Russian government noticed and decided to use as existential scarecrows.

Of course, Sakha is just one example. Tatarstan, Bashkortostan, Tuva, Chechnya, Dagestan, Buryatia, and many other Russian subjects observe the unfolding events with their intellectuals analyzing the possibilities and the plights that await their peoples in various scenarios. We should hear from them about the futures they envision, not the Western intellectuals speaking for them and proclaiming the dreams of their ancestors unviable.

It may be that the scope of the violence unleashed by the war is such that the collapse of the Russian Federation becomes a prospect that has long left the realms of offices and corridors. No collective speaker wishing to stop it can control it.

Green gates in a Siberian village

Mikhail Khodorkovsky and a “Normal Country”: What Would Russia’s Future Be?

In his book “The Russia Conundrum: How the West Fell for Putin’s Power Gambit–and How to Fix It” (St. Martin’s Press, New York, 2022) Mikhail Khodorkovsky offers an ambitious plan for the Russian future. The book is a memoir and simultaneously a political manifest. It details the complicated trajectory of Mikhail Khodorkovsky himself, from the time of his youth, hopes, and ideas, to the moment of coming in high positions of power within the Russian society, relationship with Vladimir Putin, imprisonment, and exile.

The book was clearly written before the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine of 2022, as there is little doubt some accents and highlights would have changed places were it not the case. The Preface, probably written last, addresses the monumental change. The book offers a sort of apology for Khodorkovsky’s own inevitably questionable biography and for the Russian public in its perception of the war.

“Russians, — says Khodorkovsky, — did not see the images of cities in ruins, terrified child refugees, burned out Russian tanks and defiant Ukrainians defending their homeland. They did not hear about the captured Russian soldiers, the international outrage and the speculation about the state of Vladimir Putin’s mental health. All they heard was that Putin’s operation was going to plan.” (P. vii-viii).

In other words, Khodorkovsky makes an effort to elevate his compatriots, curiously, by also denying them the ability to analyze the events as though “the captured Russian soldiers” are a matter of informational space and not the lived reality for their families in Russia. While no doubt the informational coverage of the Russian war against Ukraine is different in Russia and abroad, it is probably not fair to portray Russians as not having access to information when many Russians are in fact highly skilled in accessing all sorts of information in multiple languages and are themselves deeply embedded in the international structures.

Reading this book, it is hard to get rid of the regret that takes the form of the consideration how much more prosperous Russia be and more multifaceted Russian informational sphere and discourse if those same people who were called oligarchs in the 1990s and approached with mix of curiosity and mistrust by many, remained in Russia and applied their talents and ambitions to the inner life of the country. Alas, the intense struggle for power, wealth, celebrity, and ideas that Khodorkovsky describes, resulted in one figure eliminating the competition and climbing to the top of the pyramid.

Khodorkovsky portrays himself as a liberal and creates his hopes for Russia to become a “normal country,” an aspiration that accompanied him throughout his life and that he repeated within the country itself during the existence of the organization Open Russia that he modeled after Soros’s initiatives.

“They (newer generations) will have been born in the new Russia and they will turn Russia into a normal country.” (P. 88)

The new Russia in question is a post-Soviet Russia.

“By ‘normal,’ I meant a turn away from the distorted model of social values that Putin had imposed on Russia and a move towards Western standards of openness, pluralism and enterprise.”

Herein seems to lie a problem of Khodorkovsky and other Russian liberals that labeled Russia a not normal (paranormal? Sub-normal?) country based on their own understandings of normality which included the adherence to the Western standards. Given that Khodorkovsky is a Russian, it is a self-orientalizing view of Russia as not adhering to the standards he would like it to adhere. Russian standards are those of closeness, monolism (as opposed of pluralism), and presumably absence of enterprise. The problem is not that this is not so, but that Russia being framed and approached in this way can hardly move on to the standards that Khodorkovsky calls for. Of course the West is also not a monolith, and these standards will be formulated in different ways in different countries, further differently by the officials of the European Union, in the United States, or in various groups within each countries.

Does it mean we cannot operate such generalizations as “Western standards of openness, pluralism and enterprise”? Probably not. Does it mean that we cannot conceive of them as standards inherently better than the Russian standards? No, not at all. But does that create a ground from which the conversation about Russia could be happening not only in the West but also in Russia? Also no.

Much as Khodorkovsky is a figure in the West, it is a figure of Russia for the West, an embodiment of a certain ideal of a liberal Russian acceptable in the West. He may be having sympathy of people in Russia who are able to overstep what others will no doubt perceive as a colonial attitude of the West towards Russia, but that demographic is probably not significant enough for the change that he is offering.

Parliamentary Democracy for Russia?

Khodorkovsky sees the future for Russia in the direction of Russia becoming a parliamentary democracy. “I am convinced that my homeland can become a normal country, blessed by the benefits of market-oriented liberal democracy.” (P. 309). The crowd with which Khodorkovsky argues and that he imagines as his listener says that “Russians are ‘genetically unfit for democracy.'” (309). We of course make no such claims and reject racist genetic predicaments. Khodorkovsky rejects the dichotomy in which the West is imagined as synonymous for progress and the East as a shorthand for everything backwards. He says, “There is every likelihood, even in today’s difficult times, that Russia will cement her enduring cultural and ideological union with the Euro-Atlantic civilisation she belongs to.” (310).

The claim reads today as a symbol of religious belief, a Credo that needs no confirmation nor ground in reality, that is assuming, groundlessly optimistic, and even inappropriate considering that at these very days Russia is doing everything it can and more to prevent Ukraine to enter her “enduring and ideological union with the Euro-Atlantic civilisation,” and when Russian nationalists who are most vocal voices in the Russian information sphere uniformly reject things connected to the West, Western values, ideas of tolerance, praise the unique way of the Russian civilization that stands alone in opposition to the West not like the insufficient West lacking Western standards but like being more West than the West, like a bearer of “traditional values” rejecting European vices.

This is of course an old conversation between what in Russian is called “Westernites” (zapadniki) and “Slavophiles” (slavianofily). “Westerners” like Alexander Herzen, Pyotr Chaadayev, and now Mikhail Khodorkovsky think that Russia belongs to the European civilization. “Slavophiles” like Aleksey Khomyakov, Ivan Kireyevsky, and contemporary champions of the “Russian world,” now probably most of Russian nationalists, think that Russia has its own unique civilizational path.

With Ukraine fighting valiantly for its sovereignty and right to join alliances the way Ukraine sees fit, the West supporting it, and the Kremlin mad hatters having done everything to get the Western weapons to be directed at Russians, the alliance between Russia and the West seems very unlikely, and the wish to adhere to the Western standards within Russia at the minimum.

Questions need to be asked as to what it is exactly that time and again brings Russia into autocracy at every new stage of the collapse of the Russian Federation. This is not a genetic code, of course, but these are deeply rooted cultural mechanisms. It is unclear how, without addressing them, it is possible to imagine Russia as moving towards “the Western standards.”

A Program of De-Imperialization for Russia

I am thinking about that program of de-imperialization and de-colonization that I’ve been mentioning a lot in my writing in Russian.

I would venture to say that anthropology classes in the U.S. universities are the ready program of de-imperialization and de-colonization. They may be critiqued, or it can be said that they don’t fulfill the goal of their existence, but they are there and, in reality, do a great job.

Is it possible to create a program for de-imperialization, de-programming and disabusing of racist and colonial notions specifically for the Russians?

There could be a lot of public good following from it.

The question is how does one make the Russian students go through it?

Perhaps a special program of moving them to the U.S. for studying.

Perhaps it can be done online.

Perhaps the program could be run for those who move from Russia to the U.S.

It can’t be just a program of raising cultural awareness. It should be a program enabling people to distribute their knowledge to their communities, families in day-to-day interactions, and to their audiences on social media.

This could be a program in which the U.S. government would be interested or that philanthropists could sponsor.

I can create such a program. The success could be measured by tests at the beginning and at the end of it.

The progress will be demonstrable.

The end goal is flourishing and a happy life for all where there is no space for hatred based on ethnicity, and where the Russian world is disabused of the notion that aggression achieves anything.

Such a program will create a ground for a post-war rehabilitation by working towards getting rid of certain notions, towards the preparation of the ground for the societal agreement and endorsement of the compensations and reparations for Ukraine.

Such a program should prepare the people capable of creating such a ground of societal convention in Russia. We must invite change.

Punk Band Pussy Riot’s Story and Political Affect

The text of a project on Academia.edu.

I examine the performance of the feminist punk band Pussy Riot in the Christ the Savior Cathedral, Moscow, 2012, and the immediate political context of this performance. Three members of the group were arrested, accused of hooliganism motivated by religious hatred, and sentenced to two years in prison. One member was released on probation, the others were granted amnesty after they served nearly the full sentence. A relative harmlessness of the crime in comparison to the severity of the punishment was striking. Looking at the feminist activist group Pussy Riot and their most famous performance, I examine how political and civic activism can be read, interpreted, and practiced in the neoliberal context. I suggest that Pussy Riot is a telling story revealing the nature of Putinism as a Russian multicultural neoliberal project. By exercising state power over the female bodies of Pussy Riot protesters, the political imaginary of the Putin Modern strives not only to discipline the bodies of political activists, but also to perpetuate a patriarchal oligarchic regime maintaining a status of the second-class citizenship for women and sanctioning and condoning the genderization of those whom it deems fit. I argue that the reason Pussy Riot’s performance generated a political affect was that they, consciously or not, worked with Russian “cultural memory.” A spiritual practice and a tradition of the Orthodox sanctity called jurodstvo underpinned their actions in the given cultural context. The trial, in turn, evoked a specter of the show trials conducted by the Soviet state. The power dynamics at play during the performance followed by the trial, made many people co-participate by interpreting the events, articulating positions, and changing sides. The “meaning” of the action was, and still is, intensely contested.

Active Ruination (ISIS)

I uploaded my article on “active ruination” (namely ISIS’s affective ruining the space practices) on academia.edu. Years will pass before I get it published so it might as well just dwell there

ISIS: Active Ruination and Performativity of Public Execution

As atrocious actions, public executions and world-making endeavors of ISIS analyzed in terms of performativity open the space for questioning the dominant ideas of history and politics. ISIS released the video of the shooting of 25 Syrian soldiers at the Palmyra ruins in the beginning of June, 2014. On the video, the executioners, most of whom appear to be teenagers, parade the soldiers on the scene of the amphitheater, kneel them down and shoot. The Palmyra amphitheater is present as a visible two-fold reminder of spectacle: as arena of violence and the metaphor for the arena of violence. A crowd, children among them, watched the execution. I argue that the public executions serve several goals for ISIS: not only does ISIS compose propaganda messages, but the very lawlessness and atrociousness of the executions function as a powerful claim of the group’s legitimacy as a state in the ISIS imaginaries. Through the staged executions, ISIS seeks to create the world of power which is alternative to the Western world. In the process of creation of this world, ISIS generates landscapes of violence, and produces spaces haunted by killings. An attempt to redefine ancient ruins and to reenact medieval executions, is a claim to build a world of alternative historicism.

The Governing and the Governed

In his book “The Politics of the Governed: Reflections on Popular Politics in Most of the World” (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), Partha Chatterjee rejects Benedict Anderson’s notion of a homogeneous time-space of modernity which politics inhabit, suggesting instead that such time is “the utopian time of capital” (6), and that time is heterogeneous, unevenly dense, since modernity is, in which he follows Foucault, heterotopia.

Foucault’s notion of heterotopia is evoked of describing the spacio-temporal characteristics of ambiguity, in which the subject finds herself in several places or points at once, for instance, looking at the mirror. To say that the modernity is heterotopic, is a productive way of speaking about modernity, in my opinion. Modernity is characterized by this ambiguity of positioning, when futurity and remnants of the past commingle and coincide, but also contradict one another and clash with one another.

Homi Bhabha, according to Chatterjee, formulated heterotopic ambiguity around the axes of nation in which “the people were an object of national pedagogy because they were always in the making, in a process of historical progress, not yet fully developed to fulfill the nation’s destiny” (6), yet at the same time, “the unity of the people, their permanent identification with the nation, had to be continually signified, repeated, and performed” (6). Chatterjee announces it to be an inherent feature of modernity, or “modern politics itself” (6)–and one might agree, but there is no big contradiction here, it appears. Both these statements describe the nation in becoming, in flux, in progress. What does contradict each other though, is that the people in the making and in process are simultaneously already perceived or framed as nation today, already–the nation which has a glorious history and bright future; which is a key feature of nation building. Apart from having the future, the past, and the present, nation is as a rule relates somehow, sanctioned by divine providence and blessed by God. To evoke the specter of Vl. Solovyev: “The idea of nation is not something that the nation itself thinks about itself in time, but something that God thinks about it in eternity.” (Соловьев, 1911, 3)–a standard motif of governmentality engaging into what might be called “narrativization of the nation.” (“efforts to narrativize,” as Chatterjee puts it, 8).

The analysis of the untouchables in India, affords for understanding that “Citizens inhabit the domain of theory, populations the domain of policy.” (34).

Chatterjee shows that Lockian idea of two types of citizens–sound-minded citizens who get to govern and those who should be governed because they could not be subjects of consensual politics–is deeply ingrained into structures of democracy; this is indeed modernity’s constitutive, foundational idea, and not some glitch or malfunction happening occasionally.

 

References

Chatterjee, Partha. The Politics of the Governed: Reflections on Popular Politics in Most of the World. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004.

Соловьев Вл. Русская идея. М., 1911.

Space Generating Bodies and Vice Versa

According to Foucault, racism is an inevitable tool of the nation state, which it uses to stratify and modify its citizen. Racism is not occasional slippage of the system, it is a part of the system, its integral, system-generating part. (I’d say that the same is true in regard to misogyny.)

Biopolitics is concerned with great masses of people, as opposed to the old (pre-eighteenth century) sovereign power, which concentrated on attaining control over the individual bodies. The control over bodies did not disappear, but was permeated with new types of control, subtler, and more nuanced. If in the sovereign power was the right to let live and make die, in a new era, the era biopolitics, it was a power of ‘“make” live and “let” die.’ (241)

This new mode of power, the mode of ruling over the human-being-as-a-species, rather than human-being-as-an-individual, required new methods of control, care, and management. And such methods emerged—hygiene routines, insurance, safety trainings, mandatory medical service, and so on.

Foucault critics Socialism as being but another version of capitalism, because Socialism re-implemented all these methods and tools, and never offered any critique of them—to the contrary, embraced the new Leviathan of biopolitics, still more devoid of individual features than ever, and no any less horrifying than in the Hobbesian imagination.

It is in these settings that camps appear, according to Agamben. Agamben conducted a revolution in the understanding of camps. Rather than attempting to decipher the nature of camps from the events that took and are taking place there, he asked, to the contrary, what are the nature of things which happened as derived from what camp is (Agamben, 2003). In it, he follows Benjamin, who, and this is a Marxian insight, positioned “space” before the “events,” “space” before the “bodies” which it produced (and not vice versa). Agamben shows that camp is intrinsic to the new social order—the camp, where all laws are suspended, is a place inevitably resurfacing in the biopolitical mode of power, in a nation state which is busy with its endless purification and sustaining of its population.

Dehumanized “zoe” is both camp’s production and its first victim, whereas “bios,” political life, as long as it remains in power at least. Perhaps it is possible to think about “zoe” and “bios” as about a cast division of our times, and this division has class, racial, gender, sexuality, and mental health dimensions. There is always a possibility for “bios” to slip into “zoe,” but there is hardly any possibility for “zoe” to rise to “bios.”

 

References

Agamben, Georgio. Means Without End: Notes on Politics. University of Minnesota Press, 2000.

Foucault, Michel. Society Must Be Defended. Pikador, New York. 2003.

Citizenship Debates: Exclusions and Inclusions

Whereas Locke establishes that all human beings are free, rational, and interested in protecting their property individuals, receiving the right of existing as such from birth, the whole clusters of people do not fit this definition, because they are “lunaticks,” “ideots,” do not own property, or are children; the question of whether women fit or not the Lockean figure of a citizen, is up to further consideration (Mehta, 59). Such individuals could not be considered independent agents of consensual politics, and belong to the sorts of people who should be guarded, their volition notwithstanding, in the process of taming. Some of them could not hope to achieve the destination of becoming citizens (“lunaticks,” “ideots,” and women), and for some, un-citizenship is a temporary state. Thus the complex play of exclusions and inclusions begins.

To the question of Mouffe, “Is it possible to disentangle political liberalism from the vocabulary that it has inherited from the rationalism of the Enlightenment on the one hand and from the connotations in has acquired by its long association with economic liberalism on the other?” (Mouffe, 1993, 41) there could be one reasonable answer: no, this is not possible. For whatever this is that ends up being disentangled, it could not be called “liberalism,” precisely for the reason that the very term liberalism is the term which originated and gained its history and weight within the contexts of the Enlightenment discourses. To disentangle liberalism from its origin and a very nature, means to deduct the liberalism from liberalism.

This is a debate related to the debates around the issues “Can the Subaltern speak?” (Spivak) and of “provincializing Europe” (Chakrabarty), which stumble upon the linguistic impossibility of having one’s own voice while navigating the political, philosophical, and scientific thought of a colonizer. To “provincialize” a geographico-political locale using the instruments which are imminent to the locale and reinforce its power by virtue of being used, is a task which too easily slips into further “metropolizing” of the metropole.

In the contesting modernities, the one modernity is privileged: that which is predicated on the Enlightenment ideals, largely Anglophone, grappling with its own colonial history and reluctantly renouncing positions.

In 1988, Partha Chatterjee wrote: “This is the task which, I think, faces non-Western political theorists: to find an adequate conceptual language to describe the non-Western career of the modern state not as a distortion or lack, which is what inevitably happens in a modernization narrative, but as the history of different modernities shaped by practices and institutions that the universalist claims of Western political theory have failed to encompass” (Chatterjee, 1998, 279). Whereas this magical language, the philosopher’s stone, has not been found to this days, hopefully, the task described is not only the concern for non-Western theorists. One wishes Western theorists should be also interested in completing this task, if they are loyal to the ideals of Enlightenment of freedom and equality in their best possible reduction, developed since Locke in corpuses of texts.

Empire is a governmental organization of the utopian thought. And the thought of Enlightenment is one of the most persistent utopian thoughts, generating dystopian worlds with a remarkable frequency and equanimity, on a great scale.

“The dynamism of empire is so thoroughly wedded to the betterment of the world that it is easy to see why the deployment of power despite its acknowledged and sustained abuses <…>, and the often wholesale erasure of extant life forms, could have been countenanced as justified by a higher purpose.” (Mehta, 87). I would argue that there is no need in countenancing or justifying abuse as a deed performed for a higher purpose while it was indeed performed for a higher purpose—the purpose of establishing of the universal freedom as a particular (imperial, colonial) power sees it. There is no deception going on, because the power deploying itself is genuine in its deployment. If there should be numbers of exclusions, sorting-outs, stratifications, standardizations, groupings, hierarchizations, and selections performed, for a better governing, so be it (in the imperial consciousness).

Still, as Taylor points out, it is remarkable that the world, which has only known the hierarchical structures of societies, begets the very idea of equality and that it is now so widespread (Taylor, 100). “Cosmos as a work of God’s providence” (Ibid), mimicked, in the medieval understandings, the kingdom with its orders of “oratores, bellatores, and laboratories—those who pray, those who fight, and those who work” (Taylor, 95).

Zoon politicon (Aristotle), political animal, continues its desperate search for endamonia—happiness, the intrinsic part of the fantasy of which, equality seems to be.

 

 

 

References (Incomplete)

Chatterjee, Partha. Community in the East. Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. 33, N.6 (Feb 7-13, 1998): 277-282

Mehta, Uday. “Strategies: Liberal Conventions and Imperial Exclusions.” Chapter 2 in Liberalism and Empire.

Mouffe, Chantal. The Return of the Political. Verso. London—New York. 1993.

Taylor, Charles. “Modern Social Imaginaries.” Public Culture 14 (1): 91-124

Bare Bones of Neoliberalism

What could be learned by “learning from Lagos” (Gandy, 2005) a megalomaniac city stretched as a “continuous urban corridor” (Davis, 2004, 73), “the biggest continuous footprint of urban poverty on earth” (Davis, 2004, 76)?

First, that things are not what they appear to a Western eye, which vision is predicated on linguistic ideologies of post-Enlightenment ethnocentrism, privileging “a single conception of the good” (Scott, 1999, 220): what appears to be an agglomeration of squalor, dirt, debris, detritus, rubble, garbage, and ruins, turns out to be “heaps of similar materials and colors. The actuality taking place was actually not a process of sorting, dismantling, reassembling, and potentially recycling” (Koolhaas, 2002, 117)—the reality which merits two “actual” in the sentence, in a tautology perhaps subconsciously reflecting on the surprising quality of such discovery. Hence the inadequacy of habitual Western tools of dealing with the new worlds, emerging cities and futures, which resist being captured and described in categories and notions of “traditional” architecture as well as social thought. And therefore, there is a need of new lexical inasmuch as socio-political apparatus of cognition in order to dealing with the alternative reality of what Davis calls “urban poverty ‘Big Bang’” (Davis, 2004, 77). I am sympathetic with this claim, but I am unsure how we can say that our tools of thought are not applicable if for saying so we use these exact tools of thought—linguistically, politically, socially, culturally, and otherwise.

The practical approach to postcoloniality requires a new language, a new subject grappling with the legacy of the colonial, imperial world saturated with metropolia-periphery and colonizer-colonized dichotomies. New kind of figures emerge in the process of “self-fashioning,” to use Scott’s impression. It is not a Benjaminian flâneur who takes precedence over political imagination of bourgeoisie expurning out of its stratum a city dweller, but Fanonian ruud bwai (rude boy), as David Scott offers (Scott, 1999, 195)—young, black, impoverished, angry, armed with hand-made or illegally acquired armor. Ruud bwai is the masculine figure whose body, by very virtue of its untamed existence, becomes a site of violent struggle with the colonial implications in the process of confrontation of the new kind of selves: colonial versus post-colonial subject, rather than colonized versus colonizing subject. A native of the urbanity for the conversation of whom the current language and mindset of social science is dramatically lacking in precision, the inhabitant of the new loci of “collective dwellings” (to use Benjaminian expression for the lack of a better term), such as dancehall, in a seeming disorder of movement, rhythm, gesture, and movement, which, again, might turn out to be just a new type of order, a clandestine order of things.

The rapid post-industrial urbanization that the Third World lives through, was once a utopian project of Soviet empire. After the construction of Bratsk dam in Eastern Siberia in 1961, for the clearing of territories for the Bratsk reservoir (currently the second-largest people-created water reservoir on the planet), in the Bratsk district alone sixty-three settlements were consolidated into six towns (Chepel, 2014), as the state plans of consolidation were moving inhabitants of the villages into newly built urban-type settlements of what might be called “nascent urbanity,” the prospective cities of the future. Half a century later, with the dismantling of the Soviet project, these prospective cities represent the zones of abandonment. Not only the economic dream of prosperity was not fulfilled, but the transformation of environment in the absence of infrastructure led to revelation of the bare bones of Russian neoantiliberalism in a very literal sense. The level of water in the Bratsk reservoir have been lowering down for the last three years for reasons not altogether known. Aside from barren shore, of rock and stone, appearing from under the water, old cemeteries were being exposed, graves burst open. In a number of rural places, during the summer of 2016 one could see bucolic and Apocalyptic landscapes: children playing with skulls and bones on the shore of the retreating river.

Thus “rural-urban continuum” (Davis, 2004, 73) undergoing a social and ecological transformation, unfolds as a theater of a spectacularly uneven distribution of power, income, and rights. Which in different sense (that connected to a massive outburst of population and to a slow dwindling down of a community, respectively) is likewise apparent in slums of Lagos and streets of a Siberian village.

 

References

Davis, Mike. Planets of Slums. New Left Review, 26 March-April 2004.

Gandi, Mathew. Learning from Lagos. New Left Review, 33 May-June, 2005

Chepel, M. Preparing the Bed of Bratsk Hydro Power Plant Reservoir for Water-Flooding of a First Stage (1956 – 1961). Thesis. Bratsk, 2014.

Koolhas, Rem. “Fragments of a Lecture on Lagos” in Under Siege Four African Cities, 2002.

Scott, David. Refashioning Futures: Criticism after Postcoloniality, 1999.

Pokemon Go as a Political Endeavor

Pokemon Go is a game which revealed deeper political structures and became a socio-political action of self-surveillance, a topic of reflections on racial dynamics in the modern society, an artistic hijack used in order to draw attention to / capitalize on children’s sufferings, a border-breaching endeavor, and recently, an anticlerical practice.

Pokemon Go and Race Self-Awareness

I invite you to read my piece.

Pokemon Go and Mass Media Usage of Children’s Suffering

“Syrian graphic designer Saif Aldeen Tahhan has also used Pokémon Go to highlight the devastation in the country.

He created images — each carrying a ‘Syria Go’ logo — to show the impact of the war on the Syrian people over the last five years.

“I created these images as a way to turn attention to the Syrian war, and to focus on Syrian suffering instead of Pokémon, which people are crazy about,” he explained.” (Molloy, 2016).

Pokemon Go and Border-Breaching

I read two young man crossed a border chasing a pokemon, which hints that Pokemon Go was invented to breach state borders. It’s a modern space game (not the first of them). We mustn’t forget that eventually borders will be obliterated.

Among predecessors of Pokemon Go I’d name creating pictures in the canvas of urban space using GPS-navigator; have you seen those? Phalli were most widespread to draw.

Pokemon Go and Anticlericalism in Russia

Pokemon Go quickly went out of fashion but before that a scandal erupted in the Orthodox Church in Russia, and a trial over a man who was catching pokemons in a church is about to unfold, with church officials officially refusing to plead on his behalf and ask for mercy.

As someone who attended closely to a memorable punk band Pussy Riot performance and a trial, I would point out on the stylistic and aesthetic correlations between the performance videorecorded by Alekhina and Tolokonnikova (leaders of Pussy Riot) and a video made by “pokemon-hunter” Ruslan Sokolovsky.

 

References (Incomplete)

Mark Molloy “Syrian Children Hold Pokemon Photos Praying World Will Find Them.” Telegraph. 21 July, 2016. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/07/21/syrian-children-hold-pokemon-photos-praying-world-will-find-them/ [retrieved 7/22/2016]