Another stunningly beautiful day in New York City. The NYC half-marathon is being run, and you would think Left Forum attendees are participants: with the café closed until 10am there’s nonstop sprinting back and forth to Starbucks for that morning jolt. With my giant iced coffee and crumb cake in hand, I head to the morning heavyweight panel, Critical Theory and Social Movements. Breakfast for my stomach and my mind.
Verso hosts this panel. Boris Groys and Todd May hold court. Simon Critchley, expected to be on the panel, is decidedly absent(!). Perhaps he’s still waiting in line for his coffee…
And we’re off and running. The theme of the morning is to discuss Groys’ new book, The Communist Postscript (Verso, 2010). Groys opens it up by dancing around the book, or rather, before the book, as he sets the scene for the motivations behind writing the slim hardback.
Groys sees a reemergence of the communist movement in Eastern Europe and Russia. Why is this? Well, in the 1990s the popular movements wanted democracy; instead, they got capitalism. Inequality amongst the people quickly emerged, widening the gaps between the haves and have-nots. Social, protective institutions were weakened. Rights and political participation dissolved. Medicine, science, and education, all once fully dependent on the central government, deteriorated as it was privatized. Enter a socialist and communist backlash.
Curious thought: During the 1980s Groys often heard from his friends in the West (Groys was still behind the Iron Curtain) that conditional dictatorships provided envious conditions for the intellectual and artist because the frontlines are clear and the enemies are known. Groys recalls that Stalin did not fit the definition of a classical dictator because he felt compelled to explain his actions and decisions to the masses. A classical dictator need not do such.
Being a writer and poet under communist rule was important. Writing provided a space to engage the political status quo, either for or against. Their work at least contributed to public discourse in a meaningful way. Now, however, being a writer or intellectual in post-1989 Eastern Europe and Russia is not as sexy. For intellectuals, the immense loss of social prestige was a hard blow to take, especially in Russia.
“You can only have sentimental attachment to the past, not to the future. You can only have an ideological commitment to the future.”
Groys says the current neo-communist/neo-nationalist movement in Russia is ambivalent because the next generation is interested in universalist/internationalist, East/West unification paradigms.
And now onto Todd May!
May first dissects Groys’ book, then provides a couple of critiques. There was way too much of May’s comments to distill into this blog post, so I just highlight a couple.
First, on Groys and his book: The author sees politics as a matter of language, a dialectic, that operates with words. Groys gives primacy to language above everything else (e.g., action).
Groys says no speech can avoid being contradictory; language is self-contradictory and thus, a paradox (this is the dialectic). [My thought: so, if politics is language, then is politics self-contradictory?] There are always contradictions, which maintains a possibility of revolution.
Now, May’s critique: On language being dialectical, he has two issues. First, Groys’ theory presents a logical problem. If one says that language is contradictory, then one must also say that language is NOT contradictory. Proposing both is a logical conundrum.
Second, May argues that politics is more than just language and linguistics. In agreement with Foucault, May says politics is a matter of societal practice, and that what we do and say in society acts on and informs more action and language.
Thus, May says Groys is too reliant on language as a foundation for his thought, a seductive trap to which too many contemporary philosophers succumb.
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Groys responded, but my head and belly full, I split to take in the second half of a panel on mass media and Islam and the U.S.’s two wars. Up and across the hall!
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