by Slavoj Zizek
The only thing we can offer up in opposition to the current transformation of our communities into a prison is an absurd, unfounded faith that another state of affairs is possible. Will we be able to infect others with our dreams before we find ourselves again deprived of voice—returned, perhaps, to prison?
The other day we traveled to Nizhny Novgorod’s Penal Colony No. 2, where Masha had been held. We went to lend our support to some female inmates who’d had the temerity to disagree with the infallible prison administration. These women took the camp administration to court, challenging the legality of their humiliatingly meager pay of $7–$10. At the Nizhny Novgorod train station, we were attacked by a gang who doused our eyes with a caustic liquid. We put up no physical resistance, but only asked our attackers to explain why they were doing this. We were left with chemical burns to our eyes. Masha suffered a concussion and needed stitches.
Facing physical violence was a test of my usually friendly and composed response to opposition. To what degree can this goodwill be preserved? At what point does such a situation become an actual threat to one’s life? When I reflect how I might conduct myself, I take comfort in the story of how St. Paul, fleeing his pursuers, had himself lowered from the Damascus city walls in a basket, “In Damascus the governor under Aretas the king kept the city of the Damascenes with a garrison, desirous to apprehend me: And through a window in a basket was I let down by the wall, and escaped his hands.” (2 Cor 11:32–33) This episode has for me become key, opening as it does the possibility of resistance, of saving one’s own life, of being calculating, even sly, in apostolic Christianity.
Slavoj, it wasn’t too long ago that you suggested it might be a good idea for Masha and me to speak our minds about Edward Snowden. This is no simple thing to do when Snowden is living in your country under the protection of the same intelligence services that have ordered and overseen physical violence against you and your friends. At the same moment that we two were in prison, Edward Snowden was finding himself in quite an awkward situation—a fighter for the free dissemination of information, he found himself in Russia, where, like it or not, his presence inevitably conferred legitimacy on the Kremlin’s information policy. The same Kremlin that was directing an aggressive propaganda campaign on TV, destroying all independent channels, condoning the murder of independent journalists—professionals, heroes like Anna Politkovskaya. Snowden, however, had been cornered into a dismal position from which he could not expose any of this. He now lives in Russia, but he can’t tell the truth about how information is collected and disseminated here. He has no choice but to keep his mouth shut. Russia’s intelligence and propaganda sectors have used Snowden for their own grubby games. And for me, as one of Russia’s activists, it’s horrible to watch. There’s no doubt that his persecution is a drastic misstep by the US, which is keeping far too busy destroying the possibilities for true democracy around the world. This error is made visible by Russia’s cynical use of the whistleblower to stabilize the Kremlin’s own reactionary information policy.
Once in an interview you said that you wanted to write an essay criticizing Pussy Riot for our inordinate conservatism. I think I know what you were getting at, but it would be inordinately interesting all the same for this essay to see the light of day.
Pussy Riot is a mask: a simplifying, modernizing mask. Prison, confinement, these are also masks, different masks, ones that help people of our generation to shake off cynicism and irony. When you put on a mask, you leave your own time, you abandon the world in which any sincerity will be mocked, you move into the world of cartoon heroes, where Sailor Moon and Spiderman, those consummate modern role models, can be found. Somewhere in that world our other role models live on, too: Kazimir Malevich, Dziga Vertov, Wassily Kandinsky.
Pussy Riot has proved so effective that its promise—simple to the point of impossibility, minimalist to the point of indecency—rings loud and clear. The masks that members of Pussy Riot wear hold, if any, a therapeutic function: yes, we belong to a generation raised on irony, but we also put on masks to reduce that impotent irony. We go out in the streets and speak plainly, without varnish, about the things that matter most.
The most penetrating speeches, writings, and actions are born of modernist condensation, of the modern age. True crises—imprisonment, war, the crisis of democracy that you have described in which people grow alarmed, stop trusting the elites, and realize that it is now truly up to them alone—catalyze the emergence of such historic periods.
No one is speaking out more truthfully about contemporary Russia than the May 6th protesters,2 now sentenced to the camps for as many of four years’ deprivation of liberty. Their final words in the courtroom are worth remembering: “We’ve been taken hostage by the authorities. We’ve been tried for the sore feelings bureaucrats still harbor for the civil disobedience of 2011 and 2012, for the apparitions that still haunt the police bosses. They’re forcing us on stage in their theatrics of societal punishment.” (Alexei Polikhovich) “I know that even in prison I’ll be freer than most because my conscience will be clear.” (Alexandra Dukhanina) There are few today speaking such simple, clear, passionate truths—all of them behind bars.
In Russia, recent days have seen a sincere discussion of the threat of armed conflict in Crimea. Journalists, poets, and artists are composing incendiary texts against war. Schoolteachers are extending alarmed exhortations to everyone they know to join the peace demonstrations. People have poured into the streets with placards bearing anti-war slogans, even releasing doves, though we all know that in a minute everyone’s going to be manhandled and arrested by the cops. I, for one, welcome this mood, which is trading out doubt and irony for a new, decisive voice.
By the way, the modernist and zealous declarations of today are being used far more successfully by Russia’s officially sanctioned journalism establishment than by the independent or opposition media. The mouthpieces of state propaganda, I’m forced to admit, have learned a lot from the early Soviet avant-garde’s methods of agitation. Sharing Pierre Bourdieu’s slogan “Pour un savoir engagé,” I would like to see more combustion and personal, emotional involvement in the statements and gestures of those who today rise up against unfreedom, social corruption, humiliation, and lack of prospects for a decent life in Russia.
It is impossible not to sympathize with the passionarity3 of the Ukrainians involved in Euromaidan. The perseverance, the courage, and—sure, I’ll say it—the heroism with which Ukrainians, from the lowliest workers to the upper echelons of management, have defended their political interests comprise, without question, an utter miracle. As surely a miracle as the turning of water to wine for the Marriage at Cana.
I respectfully await your reply,
Nadya
1 Often translated “Justice Zone,” the phrase in fact means something closer to “Zone of Right.” The Russian word, like the English word “right,” denotes simultaneously “right” as an axiomatic political entitlement, “right” as opposed to left spatially and politically, and “right” meaning “correct.” “Zone” is also Russian criminal slang for “jail.”
2 Tolokonnikova here is referring to the Bolotnaya case, the prosecution of participants in a protest on May 6, 2012, the evening before Putin’s inauguration for his third term as president
3 “Passionarity” (passionarnost’) is a concept developed by the heterodox Soviet ethnographer Lev Gumilev, son of the major poets Nikolai Gumilev and Anna Akhmatova. It refers to the will of an ethnos to expand in population, influence, and geographic territory, which arcs over the duration of a people’s existence.
“A new and much more risky heroism will be needed”
Slavoj to Nadya, March 18, 2014
Dear Nadya,
Let me first express my joy—I am glad that you are now free, and even more glad that your struggle goes on. You have, of course, my full solidarity with Zona Prava. I also fully support Pussy Riot’s style of performance. What you wrote about masks reminds me of what Nietzsch
e wrote apropos Hamlet: “what must a person have suffered if he needs to be a clown that badly!” One should unconditionally defend the apparently irreverent and clownish attitude of Pussy Riot’s actions as the only appropriate reaction to traumatic and violent events—let me make an extreme example to clarify this point. A Bosnian cultural analyst was surprised to discover that among those people whose relatives died in Srebrenica, dozens of jokes about the Serb massacre circulated. Here is one of them, which refers to the way of buying beef in old Yugoslavia when usually the butcher would ask, “With or without bones?” The joke goes: “I want to buy some land to build a house close to Srebrenica. Do you know what the prices are?” “Prices vary, depending on what kind of land you want—with or without bones.” Far from expressing tasteless disrespect, such jokes are the only way to deal with the unbearably traumatic reality: they render quite adequately our helpless perplexity, belying pathetic compassion with victims of atrocities as itself a truly tasteless blasphemy.
Let me address the rumor you mention that I intend to write an essay criticizing Pussy Riot for their inordinate conservatism. Frankly, I don’t know where this rumor originated—it is simply not true, and furthermore “conservative” is to me not necessarily a critical notion. From Marx on, the truly radical Left was never simply “progressist”—it was always obsessed by the question, what is the price of progress? Marx was fascinated by capitalism, by the unheardof productivity it unleashed. He just insisted that this very success engenders antagonisms. And we should consider the same in the context of today’s progress of global capitalism, to keep in view the dark underside that is fomenting revolts. What this implies is that today’s conservatives are not really conservative: fully endorsing continuous capitalist self-revolutionizing, they just want to make the system more efficient by supplementing it with some traditional institutions (religion, etc.) to contain its destructive consequences for social life and to maintain social cohesion. A true conservative today is the one who fully admits the antagonisms and deadlocks of global capitalisms, the one who rejects simple narratives of progressism, and is attentive to the dark obverse of progress. In this sense, only a radical Leftist can be today a true conservative.
I did, however, make a remark about solidarity with Snowden, about the danger of becoming engulfed by the liberal human rights movement, and on this I have more to add. First, let me emphasize that I totally agree with your characterization of Snowden, the compromises he had to make, and the way he can be (and is) exploited by Putin. My only point is, what other choice did he have? He is exploited and manipulated in the same way (and much more so, undoubtedly) that human rights liberals try to manipulate Pussy Riot. This is why I think that it would be very important for Snowden, Assange, Manning, etc., to make it clear that they cannot be reduced to simple anti-Americanism. Snowden should be defended not only because his acts annoyed and embarrassed the US secret services. What he revealed is something that not only the US but also all other great and not-so-great powers, from China to Russia and Germany to Israel, are doing to the extent they are technologically able to do so. His acts thus provided a factual foundation to our earlier premonitions of how much we are all monitored and controlled—the lesson is a global one, it reaches far beyond the standard US bashing. We didn’t really learn from Snowden or from Manning anything we didn’t already presume to be true, but it is one thing to know it in general and another to have concrete data. It is a little bit like knowing that one’s sexual partner is playing around—one can accept the abstract knowledge of it, but pain arises when one learns the steamy details, when one sees the photographs. Sometimes, we learn such steamy details from smaller marginal countries that pass security measures in a much more open and direct way. In the summer of 2012, the Hungarian parliament passed a new national security law that
enables the inner circle of the government to spy on people who hold important public offices. Under this law, many government officials must “consent” to being observed in the most intrusive way (phones tapped, homes bugged, email read) for up to two full months each year, except that they won’t know which 60 days they are under surveillance. Perhaps they will imagine they are under surveillance all of the time. Perhaps that is the point. More than 20 years after Hungary left the world captured in George Orwell’s novel 1984, the surveillance state is back … Now, if the Fidesz government of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán finds something it doesn’t like—and there’s no legal limit to what it may find objectionable—those under surveillance can be fired. The people at the very top of the government are largely exempt from surveillance—but this law hits their deputies, staffers and the whole of the security services, some judges, prosecutors, diplomats, and military officers, as well as a number of “independent” offices that Orbán’s administration is not supposed to control.1
And here is how the Hungarian government justifies such measures:
Officials of the Hungarian government will say that what they are doing is nothing novel. Other countries, they will point out, have ways to determine whether high-level officials have played fast and loose with state secrets or whether people holding the public trust are corrupt. The US government has now been shown to be gathering up everyone’s phone calls and emails, so how can anyone be critical of what the Hungarian government is doing?2
When confronted with such facts, should not every decent US citizen feel like a baboon suddenly overwhelmed by the shame of its protruding red butt? Assange, Manning, and Snowden are exemplary cases of the new ethics that befit our era of digital control and communications. They are no longer just whistle-blowers who denounce illegal practices of private companies (banks, tobacco and oil companies) to the public authorities; they denounce these public authorities themselves when they engage in the “private use of reason.” We need more Mannings and Snowdens in China, in Russia, everywhere. States like China and Russia are of course much more oppressive than the US—just imagine what would have happened to someone like Manning in a Russian or Chinese court: in all probability there would be no public trial, a Chinese Manning would just disappear! However, one should not exaggerate the softness of the US tactics, though true they doesn’t treat prisoners as brutally as China or Russia. Because of the global technological priority of the US, they simply do not need to take an openly brutal approach, though they are more than ready to apply it when necessary. In this sense, the US are even more dangerous than China insofar as their measures of control are not perceived as such. That is to say, in a country like China, the limitations of freedom are clear to everyone, there are no illusions about it, the state is an openly oppressive mechanism, whereas in the US, formal freedoms are mostly guaranteed so that most individuals experience their lives as free and are not even aware of the extent to which they are controlled by state mechanisms. Such whistle-blowers do something much more important than state the obvious by denouncing openly oppressive regimes, that is, rendering public our already directly experienced unfreedom: instead they render public the unfreedom that underlies the very situation in which we experience ourselves as free.
This feature is not limited to the control of digital space: it pervades thoroughly the form of subjectivity that characterizes the “permissive” liberal society. Since free choice is elevated to a supreme value, social control and domination can no longer appear to infringe on a subject’s freedom: it has to appear as, and be sustained by, the very self-experience of individuals as free. There are a multitude of forms in which unfreedom appears in the guise of its opposite: when we are deprived of universal healthcare, we are told that we have been given a new freedom of choice, to choose our healthcare provider; when we can no longer rely on a long-term employment and are compelled to search for new precarious work every few years, we are told that we have been given the opportunity to re-invent ourselves and discover unexpected creative potentials that lurk in our personalities; when we are obliged to pay for the education of our children, we are told that we become “entrepreneurs
of the self,” as if we should be acting like a capitalist who chooses freely how he will invest the resources he possesses (or has borrowed) into education, health, travel … Constantly bombarded by such imposed “free choices,” forced to make decisions for which we are not even properly qualified or sufficiently informed, we more and more experience our freedom as a burden that causes unbearable anxiety. Unable to break out of this vicious cycle as isolated individuals, since the more we act freely the more we are enslaved by the system, we need to be “awakened” from this “dogmatic slumber” of fake freedom from outside, by the push of a Master figure.
This brings me back to my central point: it is absolutely crucial to insist on the universality of our struggle. The moment we forget that Pussy Riot and WikiLeaks are moments of the same global struggle, everything is lost, we have sold our soul to the devil. And I think that we must maintain the same attitude towards the events in Ukraine. I, again, totally agree with you that the the protests that toppled Yanukovich and his gang were a miracle comparable to the Arab Spring. They were triggered by the Ukrainian government’s decision to prioritize good relations with Russia over the integration of Ukraine into the European Union. Predictably, many anti-imperialist Leftists reacted to the news about the massive protests with their usual racist patronizing of the poor Ukrainians: how deluded they are, still idealizing Europe, not seeing that Europe is in decline and that joining the European Union would just make Ukraine an economic colony of Western Europe sooner or later, pushed into the position of Greece. What these Leftists ignore is that Ukrainians were far from blind about the reality of the European Union, but fully aware of its troubles and disparities. Their message was simply that their own situation is much worse. Europe’s problems are still a rich man’s problems—remember that in spite of the terrible predicament of Greece, African refugees are still arriving there en masse, drawing the ire of Rightist patriots.