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Cold Peace

Petrov’s Flu (2021), the latest film by Kirill Serebrennikov, opens with a depiction of a crowded commuter bus in Russia. The atmosphere is febrile, almost violent. In the grip of a fever, the protagonist suffers a coughing fit and moves to the back of the vehicle. Following closely behind him, another passenger shouts, ‘We used to get free vouchers for a sanatorium every year. It was good for the people. Gorby sold us out, Yeltsin pissed it away, then Berezovsky got rid of him, appointed these guys, and now what?’ He concludes that ‘All those currently clinging to power should be shot’. At this point, the protagonist steps off the bus and enters a daydream in which he joins a firing squad that executes a group of oligarchs.

‘These guys’ refers to Putin and his clique, while ‘now what?’ is a question that weighs heavily on the country they’ve created. What kind of society is contemporary Russia, and where is it headed? What are the dynamics of its political economy? Why did they spark a devastating conflict with its closely entwined neighbour? For three decades, cold peace reigned in the region, with Russia and the rest of Europe swimming together in the icy waters of neoliberal globalization. In 2022, following the invasion of Ukraine and the West’s economic and financial sanctions, we have entered a new era, in which the delusions that animated the country’s market transition have become impossible to sustain.

Of course, the fantasy of post-Soviet development has never matched the reality. In 2014, Branko Milanović drew up a balance sheet of transitions to capitalism, which concluded that ‘Only three or at most five or six countries could be said to be on the road to becoming a part of the rich and (relatively) stable capitalist world. Many are falling behind, and some are so far behind that for several decades they cannot aspire to go back to where they were when the wall fell’. Despite promises of democracy and prosperity, most people in the former Soviet Union got neither. Because of its geographical size and politico-cultural centrality, Russia was the gordian knot of this historical process, which constitutes the vital background to the Ukraine crisis. For beyond the military tropism of ‘Great Power’ approaches, domestic economic factors are at least as essential to map the coordinates of the present situation and explain the headlong rush of the Russian leadership into war.

Period I: 1991–1998

Russia’s aggression is part of a desperate and tragically miscalculated attempt to face up to what Trotsky called ‘the whip of external necessity’: that is, the obligation to compete with other states to preserve a degree of political autonomy. It was this same whip that led the Chinese leadership to embrace a controlled economic liberalization in the early eighties, fuelling forty years of mostly successful integration into the global economy while allowing the regime to rebuild and consolidate its legitimacy. In Russia, however, the whip broke the state itself after the Cold War ended.

As Janine Wedel documents in her indispensable Collision and Collusion: The Strange Case of Western Aid to Eastern Europe (2000), the demise of the Soviet Union resulted in a profound weakening of the country’s domestic elite. During the first years of the transition, the state’s autonomy was minimized to the point that policymaking was effectively delegated to US advisers led by Jeffrey Sachs, who oversaw a small group of Russian reformers including Yegor Gaidar – the prime minister that launched the country’s decisive price liberalization – and Anatoli Chubais, the privatization tzar and onetime Putin ally. Their shock therapy reforms caused industrial involution and soaring poverty rates, inflicting a national humiliation and imprinting a deep suspicion of the West on Russia’s cultural psyche. Given this traumatic experience, the most popular motto in Russia remains ‘the nineties: never again’.

Vladimir Putin built his regime on this motto. A simple look at the evolution of GDP per capita tells us why. The early years of transition were marked by a severe depression that culminated in the financial crash of august 1998. Far from the total collapse described by Anders Åslund in Foreign Affairs, though, this moment in fact contained the seeds of a revival. The rouble lost four fifths of its nominal dollar value; but as soon as 1999, when Putin rose to power on the back of another war in Chechnya, the economy had begun to recover.

Before the crash, the macroeconomic prescriptions of the Washington Consensus had created an intractable depression, as anti-inflationary policies and an obtuse defence of the exchange rate deprived the economy of the necessary means of monetary circulation. Skyrocketing interest rates and an end to reliable wage payments by the state resulted in the generalization of barter (accounting for more than 50% of inter-company exchange in 1998), endemic wage arrears and the exodus of industrial firms from the domestic market. In remote places, the use of money had almost completely disappeared from everyday life. In the summer of 1997, I spent a couple days in the small village of Chernorud, on the western shore of Lake Baikal. The villagers harvested pine nuts and used them to pay for bus fare to the nearby island of Olkhon, as well as accommodation and dried fish, with one full glass of nuts representing a unit of account. The social, health and crime situation was dire. A widespread sense of despair was reflected in the high mortality rate.

Period II: 1999–2008

Compared to this economic catastrophe, the early Putin era was a feast. From 1999 to the 2008 the main macroeconomic indicators were impressive. Barter rapidly retreated and GDP grew at an average annual rate of 7%. Having nearly halved between 1991 and 1998, it fully recovered its 1991 level by 2007 – something Ukraine never achieved. Investment rebounded along with real wages, showing annual increases of 10% or more. At first sight, a Russian economic miracle seemed plausible.

This enviable economic performance was made possible by rising commodity prices, yet this was not the only factor. In addition, Russian industry benefitted from the stimulating effects of rouble devaluation in 2008. The loss of value made locally manufactured goods more competitive, facilitating import substitution. Since industrial enterprises were completely disconnected from the financial sector, they did not suffer from the 1998 crash. Moreover, thanks to the legacy of Soviet corporatist integration, major firms generally preferred to delay wage payments in the nineties rather than lay off their workforce. As a result, they were able to rapidly increase production to accompany the reflation of the economy. The capacity utilization rate increased from about 50% before 1998 to nearly 70% two years later. This, in turn, contributed to productivity growth, creating a virtuous circle.

Another factor was the government’s willingness to take advantage of export windfalls to revitalize state intervention in the economy. The years 2004 and 2005 marked a clear shift in this regard. Privatization was still on the agenda, yet it continued at a much slower pace. Ideologically, the current flowed in the opposite direction, with a greater emphasis on public ownership. A presidential decree of 4 August 2004 established a list of 1,064 enterprises that could not be privatized and named a number of joint stock companies in which the state’s share could not be reduced. State activity was expanded through a pragmatic combination of administrative reforms and market mechanisms. Putin’s most important target was the energy sector, in which he aimed to reassert state control of prices and eliminate potential rivals such as the liberal oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky. Meanwhile, a combination of new policy instruments and incentives for Russian overseas investment created enterprises that could compete in areas such as metallurgy, aeronautics, automobiles, nanotechnology, nuclear power and of course military equipment. The stated objective was to use funds generated by the export of natural resources to modernize and diversify a largely obsolete industrial base, so as to preserve the autonomy of the Russian economy.

Period III: 2008–2022

One could glimpse a developmental vision in this attempt to restructure Russia’s productive assets. However, strategic mistakes in managing the country’s insertion into global markets, along with strained relations between its political leadership and capitalist class, prevented a proper articulation of this social settlement. The symptoms of this failure became apparent with the 2008 financial crisis and the agonized growth over the following decade. They were first evident in the ongoing reliance on commodity exports – mostly hydrocarbons, but also basic metal products and more recently cereals. Externally, this increasing specialization left the economy susceptible to the fluctuations of global markets. Internally, it meant that policymaking came to revolve around the distribution of an (often squeezed) surplus from these industries.    

Russia’s developmental failure could also be seen in its high levels of financialization. As early as 2006, its capital account was fully liberalized. That measure, along with entry to the WTO in 2012, indicated a double allegiance: first, to the process of US-led globalization, whose keystone was the free circulation of capital; second, to the domestic economic elite, whose lavish lifestyle and frequent clashes with the regime required them to stash their fortunes and businesses abroad. Putin encouraged this outflow of domestic capital, even as he simultaneously adopted macroeconomic policies designed to bring foreign investment into Russia. The resultant internationalization of the economy, combined with its dependence on commodity exports, explains why it was gravely affected by the global financial crisis, suffering a 7.8% contraction in 2009. To cope with this instability, the authorities opted for a costly accumulation of low-return reserves – which meant that, despite its positive net international investment position, Russia lost between 3% and 4% of its GDP through financial payments to the rest of the world during the 2010s.

Hence, in the decade preceding the invasion of Ukraine, the Russian economy was characterized by chronic stagnation, an extremely unequal distribution of wealth, and relative economic decline compared to China and the capitalist core. Granted, there have been other, more positive developments. As a consequence of the sanctions and counter-sanctions adopted after the annexation of Crimea, some sectors such as agriculture and food processing benefitted from an import substitution dynamic. In parallel, a vibrant tech sector enabled the development of a digital ecosystem with an impressive international reach. But this was not enough to counterbalance the structural weakness of the economy. In 2018, mass demonstrations against neoliberal pension reforms forced the government into a partial climbdown. They also revealed the increasing fragility of Putin’s regime, which is unable to deliver on its promises of economic modernization and adequate welfare policies. For as long as this trend continues to undermine his legitimacy, the president’s reliance on nationalist revanchism – and its military expressions – will become all the more intense.

Facing economic hardship and political isolation after its adventure in Ukraine, the prospects for Russia are bleak. Unless it can secure a rapid victory, the government will falter as ordinary Russians feel the economic costs of war. It will likely respond by ramping up repression. For now, the opposition is fragmented, and sections of the left, including the Communist Party, have rallied round the flag – which means that in the short-term Putin will have no trouble putting down dissent. But beyond that, the regime is imperiled on multiple fronts.

Businesses are terrified by the losses they will incur, and Russia’s financial journalists are openly sounding the alarm. Of course, it is not easy to predict the outcome of sanctions – yet to be fully implemented – on the fortunes of individual oligarchs. One must note that the Russian Central Bank deftly stabilized the ruble after it lost one third of its value immediately after the invasion. But, for Russian capitalists, the danger is real. Two examples illustrate the challenges they will face. First is the case of Alexei Mordashov – the richest man in Russia according to Forbes – who was recently added to the EU’s sanctions blacklist for his alleged ties to the Kremlin. Following this decision, Severstal, the steel giant he owns, halted all supplies to Europe, which used to make up about a third of the company’s total sales: roughly 2.5 million tons of steel a year. The firm must now look for other markets in Asia, but with less favorable conditions which will damage its profitability. Such cascading effects on oligarchs’ businesses will have implications for the economy as a whole.

Second, restrictions on imports pose serious difficulties for sectors such as automobile production and air transport. A ‘technological vacuum’ could open up, given the retreat of business software companies such as SAP and Oracle from the Russian market. Their products are used by Russia’s major corporations – Gazprom, Lukoil, the State Atomic Energy Corporation, Russian Railways – and will be costly to replace with homegrown substitutes. Attempting to limit the impact of this shortfall, the authorities have legalized the use of pirate software, extended tax exemptions for tech companies and announced that tech workers will be freed from military obligations; but these measures are no more than a temporary stop-gap. The critical importance of software and data infrastructure for the Russian economy highlights the danger of monopolized information systems dominated by a handful of Western companies, whose withdrawal can prove catastrophic.  

In sum, there is no doubt that the war in Ukraine will be deleterious for many Russian businesses, testing the loyalty of the ruling class to the regime. But the consent of the broader population is also at risk. As socioeconomic conditions further deteriorate for the general population, the motto that served Putin so well against his liberal opposition (‘the nineties: never again’) may soon backfire on the Kremlin. The mixture of widespread immiseration and nationalist frustration is political nitroglycerin. Its explosion would spare neither Putin’s oligarchic regime, nor the economic model on which it rests.  

Read on: Michael Burawoy & Pavel Krotov, ‘The Economic Basis of Russia’s Political Crisis’, NLR I/198.

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Dreadful Present

Kay Dick’s 1977 book They, which has been newly republished in Britain, is a fiction with a story attached. It was plucked from obscurity after almost half a century by the literary agent Becky Brown – a slim orange paperback found languishing amongst the shelves at a Bath branch of Oxfam Books. They is the latest in a steady stream of reappearing books by dead women from the middle of the last century. Perhaps there has never been a better time to be a writer hitherto judged as too strange, too working class, too queer, too intellectual, too foreign, too not-a-man or simply too much. Recent years have seen the republication of the work of Brigid Brophy, Ann Quin, Ivy Compton-Burnett and Christine Brooke-Rose, amongst others. Novels in translation by Clarice Lispector, Tove Ditlevsen and Ingeborg Bachmann, meanwhile, have become Penguin Modern Classics. An awkward, difficult-to-categorise era of literary history has emerged as prime prospecting ground for a publishing industry apparently eager to demonstrate its willingness to right the wrongs of the past, but not yet able to fully address the failures of the present: systemic racism, lack of class inclusivity, endemic sexual harassment, amongst other ills. In the Los Angeles Review of Books recently, Katie da Cunha Lewin warned of the ways in which such narratives of rediscovery, and their elevation of the figure of the neglected woman writer, can risk further solidifying the structures of power they seek to dismantle.

Such questions about the protection and preservation of culture, and what parts of it we rescue and for whom, are central to Dick’s book, which is less a novel or collection of short stories than a series of frightening visions – it bears the subtitle ‘a sequence of unease’. When old books like this one are drawn from the margins back towards the centre of our literary culture, we cannot help but read them for the ways they give the present meaning. Certainly, when encountering They in 2022, the sense of prescience is startling. The book is set in an unnamed but unmistakeable England under an authoritarian regime. It all began as a joke, a ‘parody for the newspapers’, Dick tells us, but ‘[n]o one wrote about them now’ – in fact, newspapers no longer exist. It has become impossible to ‘close the door between work and leisure’, while ‘[n]othing goes right, yet nothing goes really wrong’. Life is tightly surveilled and controlled and there’s a powerful sense of encroaching dread – though for some it is still possible to sun oneself on a veranda with a decent Muscadet, whilst the horror happens nearby but not quite here yet.

Love, creativity, pain, grief and living and working alone are all outlawed but enforcement is chillingly unpredictable. ‘Silent stealth was a greater pain to bear; it was their form of punishment’, the narrator notes. ‘They only took sharper measures if one went beyond the accepted limit.’ A phalanx of anonymous envoys is apt to show up at any time, they may simply quietly remove books from shelves and cart away paintings, a process they call ‘gleaning’, or they may dole out savage retribution: artists have their eyes put out, writers their hands and tongues removed. The injured are allowed a two-week grace period for the expression of pain. The single pair up into ‘family units’ under duress.

They is set amongst a community of artist and writer dissidents rounded up into communal ‘Centres’ along the coast, like a dystopian reimagining of the Bloomsbury group’s Charleston Farmhouse in Sussex, where they are granted special dispensation to keep working. When the regime tightens, they continue in careful defiance. Each part of the sequence begins in the natural landscape, made heady and at times out-and-out erotic, but for the most part Dick’s prose is austere and eerily neutral, like the sparse and urgent notation of a dreadful present as proof against future erasure. Characters are rendered flat and unknowable, we find out little about them beyond their names, the way they talk is clipped and odd. Like the hydrangeas blooming defiantly amongst paving stones described in the opening scene of the book, they are ‘an insolent abundance of flourish’. Or, perhaps, as a fisherman the narrator meets on the beach says of his latest catch, they are ‘[s]illy buggers… [s]currying under rocks’. Dick leaves this question open. In They, she is preoccupied by playing out debates about the role of the artist in dystopia – questions of protest, refusal and commitment, as well as collusion. 

In the opening part of the sequence, as news comes through that the Bodleian library has been ransacked, the characters attempt to commit to memory, and thereby preserve, artworks that are being disappeared. Later, a poet whose right arm has been badly burned defiantly continues to write with her left. ‘It’s a matter of survival, not of suicide’, one character says. Though it’s a perspective frequently voiced by characters, They isn’t a straightforward paean to the value of art and the dignity of holding out at all costs – it’s a more complicated, and more profoundly pessimistic, book than that. As it progresses, the narrator begins to question the artist’s strategy, asking ‘Aren’t we keeping dead tombs alive?’ and ‘Can we go on creating for ourselves?’ Hurst, who owns and runs one of the artists’ enclaves, is revealed to be conspiring with ‘they’, permitted to collect and keep the artworks in return for betraying and turning in the artists who created them. The artists maintain a wilful blindness, telling one another that it’s ‘[b]est not to notice these things’. They seems to ask whether this form of resistance – the attempt, as characters put it more than once, to ‘explore the limitations’ – may well amount to the same thing as acquiescence. Every now and again, the narrator speaks of ‘making a stand’, but they don’t.

*

Within the context of Dick’s own body of work, too, They represents a voice regained after a long silence. It was her first work of fiction in fifteen years after a breakdown and suicide attempt in the mid-sixties. She would later recall how the ‘psychological repercussions’ of what she calls her ‘demonstration of free will’ resulted in ‘an inability to work properly and function as a writer’. When she returned to writing, it was at first in conversation with others: two books of literary interviews: the first with her friends, Compton-Burnett and Stevie Smith in 1971, the second, Friends and Friendship (1974), with a wider selection of authors from her circle, including Brigid Brophy and Maureen Duffy. After They she would write one more work of literary fiction under her own name, The Shelf (1984), about a tragic infatuation which drew on one of her own relationships – apparently closely enough that thirty years later it was still being referred to in the literary press as a ‘heartless roman a clef’.

Several of the obituaries written upon her death in 2001 remark upon Dick’s failure to realise further ambitions for a cycle of novels and several literary biographies. These notices are markedly scurrilous, noting her ‘taste for controversy’ and ‘androgynous mental attitude’, her perceived profligacy with money and lovers, as if these were a reasonable quid pro quo for the difficulties she endured. By her own candid account, once she’d got better, what paralysed her writing was money. Upon her recovery, she took on freelance work to support herself and pay off debts and was a prolific literary critic. She did not exactly vanish into obscurity, then – so much so that for years her birthday continued to be recorded in the Times’ society pages – but this kind of work dragged her away from the writing she actually wanted to do. In the memoir that makes up the second half of Friends and Friendship she recalls:

Apart from this despair about money, there was a worse despair; the fact that having to devote so much energy and time to obtaining the very basic monies for living, there was little strength (let alone peace of mind) left for working on the books whose non-completion was daily haunting and tearing away at my mind. I was, for a period, reduced to a total feeling of inferiority, hating myself, placing no value on myself, lacking all confidence.

When she returned to writing fiction with They, it was different in form, style and mood from the novels she had produced in the fifties and early sixties. The critic Lucy Scholes has described it as a ‘surreptitious late-career aberration’, and Carmen Maria Machado in her foreword notes the ‘whiplash’ effect of arriving at They after Dick’s other works.

They is not quite without precedent, though. In the late 1940s, she edited three collections of fantasy and supernatural stories under the pseudonym, Jeremy Scott, which she also used later on for a couple of racy thrillers. In her introduction to one of these volumes, The Mandrake Root (1946), Dick writes of her preoccupation with ‘the whole question of the reality of fantasy’. ‘Each man carries within himself his own fantasy’, she writes, that usually lies ‘untouched in a corner of his brain’ because the ‘unknown is a terrible world, its associations are too ephemeral for the humanly acclimatized mind to recognise, let alone live with’. That nameless dread and how it irrupts into people’s lives can be glimpsed elsewhere in her work. The title of The Shelf refers to the place where we sequester the things that besiege us – in this instance letters sent by the protagonist, Cass, to her lover, Anne, that are returned to her when Anne kills herself. Anne, Cass recalls, had some kind of originary wound, ‘a stigma invisible to the naked eye, yet sentient, attracting brutal responses as some wounded animals attract attack from their kind’. Elsewhere in the book, speculating on what might have caused her friend Maurice to also attempt suicide, Cass cannot find the source of the ‘despair’ that was concealed behind his ‘general impression of solidity’. Writing may be one means by which to keep it at bay. Sophia in The Shelf tells Cass: ‘I had to write…. I’ve always felt the need to explain myself, because I’ve felt so acutely in the wrong’. Recalling her own childhood in Friends and Friendship, Dick remembers how at seven years old, with her mother newly married, what she calls her ‘vie en rose’ – referring to the freedoms she’d enjoyed as her mother’s consort amongst London’s artistic demi-monde – ended abruptly, when she was sent to boarding school. It was then, for the first time, she ‘became conscious of unmentionable matters, never quite defined, yet vaguely menacing’.

Dick was not alone amongst her peers during this period in feeling that the borders between reality and fantasy had gone fuzzy, leaving the conventional forms of literary fiction wanting. A generation of British writers, including Brooke-Rose, Ann Quin, B.S. Johnson, Brophy, Alan Burns and others sought to question the approaches to knowledge of the past, embracing the idea that existence could be understood in terms of a number of different provisional and contingent narratives. Brooke-Rose, who was a friend of Dick’s, understood the modern re-emergence of the fantastic as central to these novelistic experiments. ‘[T]he sense that empirical reality is not as secure as it used to be is now pervasive at all levels of society,’ she would write in her study of this new mood, A Rhetoric of the Unreal (1981), and ‘if the “real” has come to seem unreal, it is natural to turn to the “unreal” as real.’

Neither was Dick the only writer for whom this sense of existing epistemes collapsing had a personal dimension that was felt in the form of breakdown, breakthrough, or some other alteration of consciousness, and which resulted in transformations in their output. Several of her peers found themselves moving to new styles, forms or genres. Following religious conversion experiences, in the mid-fifties Muriel Spark moved from poetry and literary criticism to writing the brittle, hollowed-out and deeply strange stories she’s now famous for; in the early seventies the poet and novelist Rosemary Tonks gave up writing altogether. After a serious illness, Brooke-Rose claimed she had gained ‘a sense of being in touch with something else’ and upon her recovery, in a manner somewhat akin to Dick, abandoned the social satires she’d written during the fifties to produce a cycle of wildly experimental novels.

*

It feels churlish to do anything other than celebrate a work that has, in unlikely fashion, shuffled its way up to the top of the great, teetering stack of unread books. But we do such books and their authors a disservice if we allow the goodwill that attends such republications to smooth their edges. Reading They, I found myself wishing that Dick hadn’t made the threat cohere, hadn’t finally given an object to the dread that makes the earlier parts of the book so unmooring. Though we are never shown where all this is coming from, in the fifth of the nine parts of the sequence we begin to see how it manifests itself in the form of industrial cities, new-build housing and tower blocks, peopled by feral children and yobs who sling beer cans around and piss in the street.

Earlier in the book, two sinister envoys appear at the narrator’s garden gate and are welcomed in for tea and cake and offered flowers – as if they might yet be redeemable – and in return they put off what we assume to be the enforcers who follow in their wake up the garden path. Meanwhile, the ‘sightseers’, the name Dick gives to the marauding hoards who flock like ‘locusts’ to the artists’ precarious coastal idyll from those urban centres as eager spectators of scenes of surveillance and demolition, are depicted with lurid aesthetic revulsion. They are a ‘uniformity of ugliness’, aroused by carnage and assuaging ‘their apathy with small acts of vandalism’. They ‘jabber like savages’ in ‘indecipherable gang vocabulary’. So very uncouth are they that they ‘prefer concrete’:

Think of their passion for marinas, not for boats, but for the car parks, the amusement arcade, the proliferation of restaurants and blocks of high-tower apartments. They like to see the sea pulverized out of its natural area by concrete. They dislike the beaches for the same reasons; bathing in the sea is too uneasy a freedom, they prefer swimming pools. They like nothing better than to sit in their cars and look at the sea from the safe harbour of a monstrous marina complex.

At length, then, in They the unease is given a form and it is mass culture – pointedly not the invisible regime itself, but its subjects, those represented as narcotised by television and by the pop music piped over public address systems at ear-splitting volumes. As all this comes into focus, Dick’s vision of a peculiarly out-of-time artistic set, bewitched by the landscape or busy in their studios and at their desks and forever setting the table for a nursery tea, like the phantoms of a previous era, whilst brutality is meted out nearby, becomes more ordinary. We’re back in familiar territory here, that of the intellectuals versus the masses, of Richard Hoggart’s ‘shiny barbarism’ and the anxieties about cultural decline, ‘massification’ and the threat to individual expression that were felt by a post-war generation of intellectuals thirty years earlier. That’s not to say Dick invokes the same old metaphysic about the value of art being its ability to act as a moral guide to the ‘good life’. In They its power is about friendship, communion, love – a means of living separately together. Where Dick seems to falter is in extending these capacities of culture to everyone.

In the penultimate part of the sequence, two characters visit an eighteenth-century pleasure garden. In its heyday, it was carefully maintained for the enjoyment of a select few, but now the garden is mostly left to grow into wildness. Its walls are beginning to crumble and the gate is often left unlocked. The ‘sightseers’ don’t go there, though, suspicious of its ‘beauty’ and ‘sensuality’. For the artist dissidents, meanwhile, the garden is a ‘trap’ that lures them in with its ‘dangerous fantasy’ – ‘[i]n the garden it’s easy to forget’. In They, Dick writes her way into, and productively sustains, perennial questions about culture: its social role, its capacities as a form of resistance and the individual responsibilities of the artist. But although she seems at times to implicitly recognise them, she is unable or unwilling to think through the implications of having her dread cohere around the all too familiar spectre of ‘the masses’ as a uniform, passive and pathologised other.

Read on: Patricia McManus, ‘Happy Dystopians’, NLR 105.

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Thanatos Triumphant

Does hegemony require a grand design? In a world where a thousand gilded oligarchs, billionaire sheikhs, and Silicon deities rule the human future, we should not be surprised to discover that greed breeds reptilian minds. What I find most remarkable about these strange days ­– as thermobaric bombs melt shopping malls and fires rage in nuclear reactors – is the inability of our supermen to validate their power in any plausible narrative of the near future.

By all accounts, Putin, who surrounds himself with as much astrology, mysticism and perversion as the terminal Romanovs, sincerely believes that he must save the Ukrainians from being Ukrainians lest the celestial destiny of the Rus becomes impossible. The present must be smashed in order to make an imaginary past the future.  

Far from the arch-strongman and master-deceiver admired by Trump, Orbán and Bolsonaro, Putin is simply ruthless, impetuous and prone to panic. The people in the streets of Kiev and Moscow who laughed away the threat until the missiles started falling, were naive only in expecting that no rational leader would sacrifice the 21st-century Russian economy to raise a faux double-eagle over the Dnieper.  

Indeed, no rational leader would.  

On the other shore, Biden conducts a nonstop seance with Dean Acheson and all the ghosts of Cold Wars past. The White House is visionless in the wilderness it helped to create. All the think tanks and genius minds that supposedly guide the Clinton-Obama wing of the Democratic Party are in their own way as lizard-brained as the soothsayers in the Kremlin. They can’t imagine any other intellectual framework for declining American power than nuclear-tipped competition with Russia and China. (One could almost hear the sigh of relief as Putin lifted the mental burden of having to think global strategy in the Anthropocene). In the end, Biden has turned out to be the same warmonger in power that we feared Hillary Clinton would be. Although Eastern Europe now distracts, who can doubt Biden’s determination to seek confrontation in the South China Sea – waters far more dangerous than the Black Sea?

Meanwhile the White House seems to have almost casually chucked its weak commitment to progressivism into the trash. A week after the most frightening report in history, one that implied the coming decimation of poor humanity, climate change rated nary a mention in the State of the Union. (How could it compare to the transcendental urgency of rebuilding NATO?) And Trayvon Martin and George Floyd are now just roadkill rapidly vanishing from sight in the rear-view mirror of the presidential limousine as Biden rushes around reassuring the cops that he’s their best friend. 

But this is not simply a betrayal: the US Left bears its own share of responsibility for the dismal outcome. Almost none of the energies generated by Occupy, BLM and the Sanders campaigns were channelled into rethinking global issues and framing a renewed politics of solidarity. Equally there has been no generational replenishment of the radical mindpower (I.F. Stone, Isaac Deutscher, William Appleman Williams, D.F. Fleming, John Gerassi, Gabriel Kolko, Noam Chomsky…to name just a few) that was once focused laser-like on US foreign policy. 

Nor has the EU for its part conquered the problems of epochal characterization and the foundations of a new geopolitics. Having hitched its star to trade with China and natural gas from Russia, Germany in particular risks spectacular disorientation. The milquetoast coalition in Berlin is ill-equipped, to say the least, to find an alternative path to prosperity. Likewise, Brussels, even if temporarily reanimated by the Russian peril, remains the capital of a failed super-state, a union that has been unable to collectively manage the migration crisis, the pandemic, or the strongmen in Budapest and Warsaw. An expanded NATO entrenched behind a new Eastern wall is a cure worse than the disease.

Everyone is quoting Gramsci on the interregnum, but that assumes that something new will be or could be born. I doubt it. I think what we must diagnose instead is a ruling class brain tumour: a growing inability to achieve any coherent understanding of global change as a basis for defining common interests and formulating large-scale strategies.

In part this is the victory of pathological presentism, making all calculations on the basis of short-term bottom-lines in order to allow the super-rich to consume all the good things of the earth within their lifetimes. (Michel Aglietta in his recent Capitalisme: Le temps des ruptures emphasises the unprecedented character of the new sacrificial generational divide.) Greed has become radicalized to the extent that it no longer needs political thinkers and organic intellectuals, just Fox News and bandwidth. In the worst-case scenario, Elon Musk will simply lead a billionaire migration off planet.

It also may be the case that our rulers are blind because they lack the penetrating eyesight of revolution, bourgeois or proletarian. A revolutionary era may dress itself in costumes of the past (as Marx articulates in The Eighteenth Brumaire), but it defines itself by recognizing the possibilities for societal reorganization arising from new forces of technology and economics. In the absence of external revolutionary consciousness and the threat of insurrection, old orders do not produce their own (counter-)visionaries.

(Let me note, however, the curious example of the speech that Thomas Piketty gave on 16 February at the Pentagon’s National Defense University. As part of a regular series of talks on ‘Responding to China’, the French economist argued that ‘the West’ must challenge Beijing’s rising hegemony by abandoning its ‘dated hyper-capitalist model’ and promoting instead a ‘new emancipatory egalitarian horizon on a global scale’. A strange venue and pretext, to say the least, for advocating democratic socialism.)

Nature meanwhile is taking back the reins over history, making its own titanic compensations, at the expense of powers, especially over natural and engineered infrastructures, that empires once thought to control. In this light, the ‘Anthropocene’ with its hint of the promethean, seems especially ill-fitted to the reality of apocalyptic capitalism.

As an objection to my pessimism, one might claim that China is clear-sighted where everyone else is blind. Certainly, its vast vision of a unified Eurasia, the Belt and Road project, is a grand design for the future, unequalled since the sun of the ‘American Century’ rose over a war-shattered world. But China’s genius, 1949-59 and 1979-2013, has been its neo-mandarin practice of collective leadership, centralized but plurivocal. Xi Jinping, in his ascent to Mao’s throne, is the worm in the apple. Although he has economically and militarily enhanced China’s clout, his reckless unleashing of ultra-nationalism could yet open a nuclear Pandora’s Box.

We are living through the nightmare edition of ‘Great Men Make History’. Unlike the high Cold War when politburos, parliaments, presidential cabinets and general staffs to some extent countervailed megalomania at the top, there are few safety switches between today’s maximum leaders and Armageddon. Never has so much fused economic, mediatic and military power been put into so few hands. It should make us pay homage at the hero graves of Aleksandr Ilyich Ulyanov, Alexander Berkman and the incomparable Sholem Schwarzbard.  

Read on: Perry Anderson, ‘Jottings on the Conjuncture’, NLR 48.

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The Russia Problem

For once, we find ourselves sharing the barely hidden wishes of the Pentagon, White House and entire Western establishment: if only a nice group of boyars could unite in an old-style plot to overthrow Putin and put an end to a war whose objectives remain difficult to comprehend. By boyars I mean the upper echelons of the armed forces or billionaire oligarchs and their contacts in the intelligence and security services; a whole class of potentates who seem ever more uncomfortable with their leader’s adventurism. Yet even if Putin fell and his adventure in Ukraine were halted, an enormous dilemma would persist: the Russia problem. This is something the West has not confronted since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Put simply, what place should Russia occupy in a more or less stable world order? Given the vicissitudes of the past, the small to medium states neighbouring Russia – from Lithuania to Poland to the other ex-Soviet satellites – may hope that it disappears from the geopolitical map. But that isn’t possible.

An alternative solution was put forward by Zbigniew Brzezinski when he suggested turning Russia into an assorted bouquet of territories, even advocating for the dismemberment of Siberia: ‘A loosely confederated Russia – composed of a European Russia, a Siberian Republic, and a Far Eastern Republic – would find it easier to cultivate closer economic relations with its neighbours.’ This solution was at the very least problematic due to the presence of China. One look at a map suffices: China, an overpopulated country of 1.4 billion inhabitants, with arable land at a high level of desertification, borders Siberia to its north, an interminable expanse of 13 million square kilometres, home to a population of only 35 million, possessing immense mineral reserves and land that could be rendered fertile with the thawing of permafrost. Demographic pressure alone suggests the future movement of human masses. For the emerging superpower, a weakened and isolated Siberia would be no more than an irresistible mouthful to be devoured – an outcome the United States would find difficult to digest.

In any case, even if amputated, a European Russia would remain the largest state this side of the Urals. In short, our insurmountable problem survives: Russia is simply too big to become yet another American vassal, but too weak to be a world power. Let’s not forget that Russia’s GDP ($1.49 trillion) is inferior to Italy’s ($1.89 trillion), and only slightly larger than Spain’s ($1.28). By comparison, Germany’s GDP is $3.8 trillion, Japan’s $5.1 trillion, China’s $14.7 trillion, and the US’s $20.9 trillion. As Joseph Brodsky wrote in 1976, ‘along with all the complexes of a superior nation, Russia has the great inferiority complex of a small country’.

While the United States failed to recognize the Russia problem in 1991 when it emerged victorious from the Cold War, a similar quandary with Japan was ingeniously resolved after 1945, when the enemy was integrated into the new world order. Of course, Japan was lavished with two atomic bombs to inculcate an indelible lesson – whereas, despite everything, this wasn’t possible with the USSR. In the 1990s the victorious US never found a place for post-Soviet Russia. Now everyone blames the past. In retrospect, a few are willing to admit that NATO’s (and the EU’s) eastward expansion overly precipitous; even a Cold War liberal like Thomas Friedman has written that America and NATO are hardly ‘innocent bystanders’ in the Ukraine crisis.

Noting this might seem like a futile exercise in historical recollection. But it is useful, in such instances, to rethink our relation to the past. Might the massacres, wounds and scars of Partition have been alleviated (and the ascent of Narendra Modi halted) had the framework employed by the British to split India on the basis of religion been critically interrogated? (It’s worth remembering that the first partition took place not in 1947, but 42 years prior in 1905, dividing the majority Muslim East Bengal from the Hindu West). Likewise, given the now century-long state of instability and endemic war experienced by the Middle East, we may also need to re-examine the borders arbitrarily traced and abstracted from the realities of human geography by a British and French official – Mark Sykes and François-Georges Picot – in their apportionment of the moribund Ottoman Empire in 1916.

That remembering the past is no idle task is demonstrated, a contrario, by the fact that at the close of the Second World War, the United States remained wary of a second Versailles, in which the victors of the First World War imposed such oppressive reparations on Germany that the peace resulted in runaway inflation and a revanchist nationalism that would find its expression in Nazism. After 1945 the US never asked Germany for so much as a penny, but rather financed its reconstruction. Nor would it have been remiss to recall, in front of the ruins of the Twin Towers in September 2001, that it was the US that initially sponsored and supported Osama bin Laden.

Here, though, what we need is not necessarily an examination of the past, but an analysis of the failure that persists before our eyes. This failure consists in an inability to construct a Russian entity that might have a place – a function, a voice – in the post-Cold War global order, and the inability of the leading capitalist power to guarantee the stable transition of Russia from a statist economy to a structured market one. A handful of naïve commentators saw in the Russian gangsterism of the 1990s a rerun of the late nineteenth-century American ‘robber baron’ era. But in the earlier case magnates reinvested their profits in America, funding its universities and libraries, whereas all Russian oligarchs have done is export their capital and assets abroad while impoverishing their homeland. In creating a society of gangsters, the US was implicitly asking for Russia to be governed by either a cop or a spy. With Putin, they got both.

Responsibility, however, not only lies with the US: Europe too has not been an innocent bystander. The United States might have failed to reconfigure its empire to accommodate Russia, but it has only grappled with this problem for the last thirty years. Europe has been hesitating about Russia for three centuries. At times it has been invited to the fora of the great European powers – the Congress of Vienna in 1815, for instance – but otherwise it’s seen itself relegated to Asia (especially in considerations of its so-called ‘oriental despotism’, the title of Karl Wittfogel’s famous work). As Alexei Miller and Fyodor Lukyanov observe, ‘for more than three centuries Russia was represented in the European discourse in two ways.’ One is that of a ‘barbarian at the gate’. After the end of the Second World War, Italian anticommunist propaganda incessantly conjured Cossacks watering their horses at the fountains of St Peter’s Square (note that Cossacks have always been identified with Ukraine, ever since Pugachev and Gogol’s Taras Bulba). Today the image of ‘barbarians at the gate’ is as topical as ever. However, the second role commonly attributed to Russia is more interesting. For Miller and Lukyanov, it is

that of an ‘eternal apprentice’. In medieval Europe, the apprentice was entirely dependent on the master craftsman, who was responsible for his instruction. Some were allowed to create and present their own masterpiece for the whole guild to judge its merits and to become a member of the guild in case of approval. In Russia’s case the European discourse invariably insisted that ‘the apprentice is not good enough yet’. The role of an eternal apprentice was (and still is) a trap, where Europe invariably positions itself as an instructor and changes evaluation criteria again and again, thereby perpetuating Russia’s role of a trainee.

This attitude – that of a teacher constantly failing Russia in its exams – is evident in German doubts over whether its Ostpolitik is a normalization of ties or, conversely, the first step towards a new Drang nach Osten. Perhaps Europe should also have figured out long ago the relationship between the Union and its cumbersome neighbour.

Of course, Russia is also a problem for Russians, one that’s fuelled by Russia itself. Just compare the Russian and Chinese reactions to American supremacy. For thirty years, China exercised political restraint (from 1980, when Deng Xiaoping launched his reform programme, to the rise of Xi Jinping in 2012) as it focused on expanding its economy, developing new industrial and technological capacities. Only then did it begin to raise its head. This strategy has also allowed it to make inroads in the field of soft power (by building infrastructure for the Third World, for instance, and establishing extremely robust commercial ties with Africa and Latin America). Military spending was therefore sanctioned by a rise in GDP, and investment was able to focus on cutting-edge technology. Russia, on the other hand, concentrated all its resources in the defence sector and remained an exporter of raw materials in almost every other. China and Russia’s per capita GDP is virtually the same, around $10,000 a year, yet the technological and infrastructural gap between the two is abyssal.

From the perspective of efficiency, there’s no competition between Chinese and Russian state capitalism. The causes of this are perhaps best explained by the longue durée: the virtues of the Confucian tradition in the former, as opposed to the purposeful search for incompetent cadres in the latter (under Brezhnev, functionaries were prized for their defects: their passivity, lack of initiative, willingness to act as ‘yes men’). Another factor has been the enormous brain drain after the collapse of the USSR, which triggered perhaps the greatest exodus of scientists in history, reminiscent of Germany’s during 1930s. The result, so far, has been the emergence of a dominant group that never constituted a ruling class.

Behind each of these causes is another unresolved problem, that of Russian exceptionalism. Usually, when exceptionalism is invoked it’s in reference to the United States, the ‘beacon of hope’, a ‘city upon a hill’ with a ‘manifest destiny’. Indeed, every state that strives for hegemony thinks of itself as exceptional. (We’ll have to come back to this affect. As far as the individual is concerned, given that one’s life is unique, and given that when one’s own life ends all other life ends with it, it’s natural that each of us lives their life as an exception; it’s equally obvious that this exceptionalism extends to, for instance, one’s city: I can’t think of a city in the world, no matter how ugly or rotten, whose citizens don’t feel privileged for being born there, or otherwise lyrically glorify the poetics of the urban agglomeration in which they live. The feeling then grows to encompass an entire region or country of birth. Every homeland is ‘the most beautiful country in the world’. In the end, citizens become victims of their city’s mythology, as members of a state become victims of its national myth.)

The fact is that the French, English and Germans are, in their respective ways, healthy carriers of national exceptionalism (here I mean healthy carriers in the same sense as healthy carriers of HIV). Even the Chinese, who are beginning to dominate the world arena, have built a unique narrative of exceptionalism (which I previously analyzed in these pages). Russian exceptionalism also has a story of its own. With good – or more often bad – reason, every nation has monopolized a specific quality of the human spirit: the United States have appropriated dreams (‘the American dream’); the British, humour; France, refinement (l’esprit de finesse); Germany, order (‘German discipline’); Italy, creativity; Spain, pride…

But only the Russians have gone all in with their revindication of the totality of this spirit; the ‘Russian soul’ (Russkaia dusha), that is to say. Dostoyevsky was its standard bearer (‘the Russian soul embodies the idea of pan-humanistic unity, vsechelovecheskogo uedineniia, of brotherly love’). In his Pushkin Speech (1880), he loses it completely:

To become a true Russian, to become fully Russian (and you should remember this), means only to become the brother of all men, to become, if you will, a universal man. (…) I believe that we – not we, of course, but our children to come – will all without exception understand that to be a true Russian does indeed mean to aspire finally to reconcile the contradictions of Europe, to find resolution of European yearning in our pan-human and all-uniting Russian soul, to include within our soul by brotherly love all our brethren. At last, it may be that Russia pronounces the final Word of the great general harmony, of the final brotherly communion of all nations in accordance with the law of the gospel of Christ!

Tell that to the Ukrainians currently under Russian bombardment.

The truth is that none of the great Russian writers of the nineteenth century escaped the clarion call of the Russian soul. Even Europhile Turgenev (who spent most of his life abroad) had the most sympathetic character in his novel Rudin (1857) exclaim: ‘Russia can do without each of us, but none of us can do without her. Misfortune on those that think otherwise, and again misfortune on those who live outside Russia… outside of national temperament there is no art, there is no truth, there is no life… nothing!’

The irony of Russkaia dusha lies in the fact that the concept of ‘a people’ as an individual, with its own personality, is a German one imported from Herder, and the idea of a collective, universal soul is lifted verbatim from Schelling. Russian unity is expressed in a German concept! The Russian innovation was to add an adjective that had until then not been thrusted onto any other nation – Holy Russia (comparable only to Israel’s chosen people). The Russian soul subsequently became a European fashion, spread by the love for Dostoyevsky, at least until the 1930s, when D. H. Lawrence looked with disgust on ‘these self-divided gamin-religious Russians who are so absorbedly concerned with their own dirty linen and their own piebald souls we have had a little more than enough’. Today, ‘Holy Mother Russia’ has resurfaced.  

The reactionary character of these conceptions cannot be stressed enough. One of the most ominous long-term effects of this war is that it legitimates – through the destruction magnanimously offered up by the holy Russian soul – the recrudescence of nationalism in Europe, as if the history of this continent needed any more nationalisms.

To think that the first great writer to evoke Russkaia dusha was Gogol, a Ukrainian. Contrary to what Herder thought, an ethno-linguistic community does not at all implicate belonging to a single state, or a single people. The German-speaking Swiss want nothing less than to become Germans, like the great majority of Austrians. The best example of this is Spanish-speaking Latin America, where nations that share a language and a common culture have frequently waged war on one another. The best post-Soviet Ukrainian novel I’ve read, Death and the Penguin (2001), was written in Russian by Andrei Kurkov, who happens to be a strong supporter of Ukrainian independence.

Translated by Francesco Anselmetti.

Read on: Tony Wood, ‘Collapse as Crucible’, NLR 74.

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Domino Effect

The western nations have moved to kick Russia out of the SWIFT system. What is SWIFT, and what was your reaction to this news?

SWIFT is the primary system used by banks around the world to transfer money. Essentially, it is a third party that will take money from Citi Bank in New York and deposit it in a bank in Zurich. The only precedent for a country being taken off the SWIFT system in recent times, as far as I know, was Iran. Russia is the second one, although these current sanctions are far more limited, in the sense that they only cover about twenty entities and two primary banks. Even so, they have already caused a significant drop in the rouble and forced the Russian central bank to increase interest rates by an unprecedented ten points.

As for using SWIFT as a weapon to punish serious breaches of international law: well, the Russian action could be said to warrant it. However, by this standard you’d have to do the same to China based on its treatment of the Uyghurs, and UAE and Saudi Arabia for their actions in Yemen. According to the UN there are about five million people starving in Yemen right now, and another nine million on the verge of joining them. And then there’s Turkey, which has invaded three of its neighbours and committed ethnic cleansing in Northern Iraq and Syria. So I’m all for using these standards, but if they are simply for countries you don’t like then they are not standards at all – they are hypocrisies.

Ukraine seems to be winning the battle of narratives. Is that going to tip the odds in its favour? And can you explain what we mean when we say ‘the PR war’?

The PR war is anything that involves weaving a narrative about the conflict. On this front, what the Ukrainians are doing is avant-garde, cutting-edge stuff. Granted, they have it easier because they’re the ones that are being invaded; but they’re doing a masterful job. There have been some very effective fabrications coming from their side: for example, the border guards on Zmiinyi Island who were declared to have been killed after telling the Russians to ‘go fuck themselves’, but turned out to be alive and well; or the so-called ‘Ghost of Kyiv’ fighter pilot, who was said to have shot down six Russian planes, but never actually existed. The tone of such communications is very American – Anglo-Saxon, you might say – and has played well with the US public. Much of this is probably not being done by Ukrainians themselves; it is probably being assisted by Western actors (state or otherwise), because they know which buttons to push. They understand not only how to speak to a Western audience, but to a young, social-media savvy one. They’ve managed to make Ukraine a cause célèbre among young people who don’t know anything about this region or about this conflict.

How is the war going militarily? On the Ukrainian side, the narrative is that Russia was expecting to Blitzkrieg through Ukraine but hasn’t managed to; on the Russian side, they are talking about advances in a lot of different regions of Ukraine. What is actually going on?

Well, they’re both right. The Ukrainians are clearly putting up a much tougher fight than anyone expected, but that doesn’t fundamentally alter the power dynamics. The Russians are making slow and steady advances. To put things in perspective, it took the Americans three weeks to get to Baghdad in the face of almost no resistance. By contrast, the Russians were outside Kyiv in a day and a half, and I think they made a foolhardy attempt to see if they could end it quickly by sending special forces into the city – which proved to be a disaster. Ultimately, the PR war doesn’t move lines and doesn’t involve tanks. So the Ukrainians’ narrative might win out, but if you look at the actual situation, they’re steadily losing ground. Mariupol has been surrounded, which means that most of southern Ukrainian coastline down to the Black Sea, outside the area around Odessa, could soon be captured. In the north, they’re making their way to the big cities, encircling Kharkiv and Kyiv, and there seems to be a pincer movement to trap the Ukrainian troops facing the Donbass. The best of the Ukrainian forces are on the eastern front, and if they get surrounded that will be a major blow. So I think there’s a tendency to miss the forest for the trees. This has obviously been more costly to Russia than expected, but so far only one side has been retreating every single day, and I frankly don’t see that reversing.  

The economic war has also started. What do you think will be the real-world ramifications of the Western sanctions?

The implications of the economic war are in some ways more geopolitically relevant than the actual war, because Russia is an integral part of the world economy. If you look at the sanctions that have been applied, they are not directly targeting the energy sector, from which Russia gets most of its income. There is an extent to which they can’t sanction it, because then the Germans and Danes and whoever else is buying Russian gas won’t be able to pay for it, and the Russians will cut it off. So I think that, in a couple of days, Russia will adjust to the economic bite and realise this is not the same as what happened to Iran. Whereas the rouble has now fallen by about forty percent, the Iranian rial fell by almost three hundred percent in a couple of days. There’s a question of scale here, and there’s only so much you can sanction.

However, a more frightening element is the issue of food security. Ukraine and Russia are the bread baskets for most of the region, including North Africa and the Middle East, and if their shipments are interrupted you’re looking at bread prices rising three or four hundred percent, which will destabilize various countries from Turkey to Egypt to Lebanon. Russia is also one of the biggest fertilizer producers in the world at a time when there is great demand for it, and there is also the critical issue of oil prices, which will trigger another recession if they continue to rise. Meanwhile, many countries are closing their airspace to Russia. If Russia reciprocates, then pretty much every flight to Asia from North America will need to be rerouted, because every flight that goes to China, Korea, Thailand, Singapore, also goes through Russia. This rerouting means they’ll either need to go to Alaska or South America to refuel, which would make every trip ten hours longer and twice as expensive. So I don’t think people understand the domino effect of disasters that will flow from this.  

What is the likely trajectory of the war?

Historically speaking, Ukraine is highly dysfunctional. It was essentially an Argentina in the middle of Europe: a large wheat-producing nation with an imbalanced economy and a corrupt political system. In fact, I think it’s the only post-Soviet country that hasn’t returned to 1990 GDP levels, which is extraordinary. It is clearly not a threat to anyone. I totally understand Russia’s desire to not have NATO at its border, but the greatest geopolitical threat to Russia does not come from the West; it comes from the south. In between Armenia and China there are seven current and future Afghanistans, current and future failed states. If you remove the carbon industries from all these countries, their GDP levels would be in the seventy to one-hundred dollar per annum range. One of the effects of this war will be to accelerate decarbonization, as Western Europe learns that if it cannot rely on Russia, it must make the switch to renewables. That will endanger Russia’s long-term national security by creating seven Afghanistans on its doorstep, with flat border regions in which millions of people will try to migrate by foot. When these states collapse and implode over the next twenty years, the consequences for their neighbours will be severe.

On the Western side, we are descending into madness with former generals of NATO and members of US Congress talking about no-fly zones over Ukraine. This would mean a war between two nuclear powers – an insane price to pay for gaining influence in this dysfunctional country. Whoever wins the war may come to regret it, because for many different reasons, economic and demographic, it is exceptionally difficult to transform Ukraine into a workable state. If the conflict continues for an extended period, Ukraine will go from being the Argentina of Europe to the Syria of Europe, with six or seven million refugees displaced on the continent.

There is speculation that the Polish military have been telling Western powers they can use their airbases to fly in and out of Ukraine. Well, what if one day Russia decides to destroy your base? Then you’ll have war between NATO and Russia. None of this is worth it. We don’t need more weapons being shipped to this area; what we need is a ceasefire and direct negotiations – ones in which Russia recognizes Ukraine’s independence and agrees to withdraw, in exchange for a neutrality agreement that prevents Ukraine from joining NATO. There is a widespread notion that Ukraine has a right to associate with whoever it wants. And yes, that right exists, just as I also have the ‘right’ to be a centre-forward in the Premier League – but that doesn’t mean it’s going to happen. It’s not a question of what your rights are, it’s a question of what price is worth paying for them. So I am confounded and disappointed that we could be sleepwalking into an entirely unnecessary nuclear confrontation over this issue.

Right now there should be immediate shuttle diplomacy, involving Blinken, Macron, Putin, et al. People have criticised Macron for speaking to the other side, but how are you going to end this conflict unless you agree to talk? What we need is intensive negotiations to end the war and find a solution that saves face for everyone. The Ukrainians have already proved their independence. One thing the invasion has done is create a distinct Ukrainian identity – a narrative and a story – which they previously lacked in some respects. Meanwhile, the Russians have made their point that they’ll blow up the world if Ukraine joins NATO. So what’s needed now is active diplomacy rather than more irresponsible warmongering.

An earlier version of this interview appeared on CivilNet.

Read on: Georgi Derluguian, ‘Recasting Russia’, NLR 12.

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Animatron

In May 2020, the radio station France Inter commissioned a series of prominent writers to reflect on the consequences of the pandemic. One of the first invitees was Michel Houellebecq, reporting on the home front while holed up in his Paris apartment. The tenor of most other interventions was one of hopeful transition, that COVID would mark a civilizational watershed, leaving behind a world indelibly changed. Houellebecq disagreed violently: ‘After lockdown we will not wake up in a new world; it will be the same one, just a bit worse.’ COVID was ‘a banal virus, unglamorously related to some obscure flu illnesses, with poorly understood survival conditions, unclear characteristics – sometimes benign, sometimes deadly, not even sexually transmissible: in short, a virus without qualities’. This banality appeared crueller still given the response – the ways in which the victims had been hidden, abstracted, dehumanized in past months. In his intervention, Houellebecq wondered until what age elderly patients could ‘be resuscitated and cared for? Seventy, seventy-five, eighty years? It depends, apparently, on which region of the world one lives in; but never has the fact that not everyone’s life has the same value been expressed with such quiet impudence; from a certain age onwards, you are practically already dead.’

Indignation at the contemporary treatment of death, along with empathy for the private suffering of the dying, emerges as the animating force of Houellebecq’s latest novel, Anéantir, which arrived in Francophone bookstores in January. The set-up is as follows: the year is 2026, and Paul Raison is an advisor to his friend Bruno Juge, the Minister of Economy and Finance. Trapped in a tired marriage with Prudence, another senior civil servant at the same ministry, he dreams of one-night stands with Juge’s wife, Evangeline. Presidential elections are underway, and Juge is planning to run on a modernizing platform after delivering a reasonably performing economy for the previous five years. Videos of the minister’s beheading surface online, made with such ingenuity that the department’s specialists find themselves at pains to figure out who composed the clips. A series of mysterious cyberattacks then occur, shutting down traffic in several international ports. At this point though, the novel changes gear, as Paul leaves Paris to visit his father, on life support after suffering a stroke. The homecoming involves his sister Cécile, a loyal Le Pen voter and born again Catholic, now married to an unemployed notary. We also get glimpses of Paul’s mother Suzanne, a conservationist, and his brother, Aurélien, an archivist at the Ministry of Culture married to a displeasing woman named Indy. The novel ends with Paul’s own descent into purgatory after a cancer diagnosis.

‘A political thriller veering into metaphysical meditation’ was the polite summary given by one French critic; another spoke of ‘a book written in the minor key’. Many were less polite. Promoted as both a personal reflection on faith and a world undergoing rapid deglobalization, the novel’s 730 pages suggest a Wagnerite symphony, but Anéantir (‘Annihilation’, though the meaning is closer to the German ‘Vernichten’, literally ‘nothingify’) is closer to a string of sonatas, orchestrated with little sign of editorial interference. While the cyber warfare and broken supply chains of the opening pages conjure the same lure of the contemporary as the Islamist takeover of Soumission (2015) or the périphérique revolt of Sérotonine (2019), these incidents rapidly fade from view as the book suddenly transitions into a hospital memoir, growing more and more claustral, dragging itself from one sonata to the other without ever settling on a unifying theme. We hear Paul’s thoughts on presidents, televisions, vegans, the far right, fantasy films, yet none of this amounts to any clear declaration of intent or desire. The novel simply continues, aimlessly, like a device stuck on shuffle mode, switching from one track to another. 

To the habitual houellebecqien, the constitutive elements of Anéantir may feel familiar – reminiscent of the competitive sociability of Extension du domain de la lute (1994), the neurotic professionals of Particules élémentaires (1998), the vaudeville treatment of the art world in La carte et le territoire (2010), the meditations on religious feeling in Soumission (2015), the social upheavals of Sérotonine (2019). But there is an unmistakeable diminution. The novel reads as if it was written compulsively and in haste, the range of themes is remarkably less grand in scope, and the tone is uncharacteristically mellow. Its goals are clear enough: Houellebecq hopes to rescue death from its contemporary dehumanization as exemplified in the state response to the pandemic. This is paired with openly congratulatory portraits of the healthcare workers and general practitioners who helped France weather its plague years (in his acknowledgements, Houellebecq devotes a word of thanks to specialists at a French hospital, who helped him with technical details on medical care). Yet this is not what the novel initially promises, nor what we’ve come to expect from Houellebecq.

A degree of strategic aimlessness has long been part of his repertoire, and indeed once provided us with Houellebecq at his most exhilarating, whether in the opening party scenes in Extension du domain de la lutte or the closing visits to the psychiatrist in Sérotonine. Such moments approximate the repetitively psalmodic style of Thomas Bernhard, an influence that was made manifest in 2019 when Houellebecq was pictured trying on Bernhard’s jacket during a visit to the late Austrian author’s country estate. The admixture of personal and political also has precedent: Soumission simultaneously dwells on the religious and existential concerns of its protagonist, Sérotonine their depression and ailing sex life. Yet in Anéantir, the balance has shifted, with its long flight of interiority taking Houellebecq’s writing closer and closer to Bernhardian monologue. Bernhard, however, was consistent in his refusal to engage in conventional storytelling. ‘Whenever signs of a story begin to form somewhere, or even when I just see in the distance, behind a prose-hill, the indication of a story emerging, I shoot it down.’ The resulting oeuvre was one in a dizzying state of mid-air suspension, castigated by Baudrillard as little more than onanism for the Viennese bourgeoisie, but consistently captivating in its own right. In Anéantir, however, we have stretches of writing which could only be described as ‘animatronic’, intimating a sense of style where there is, in fact, none:

It was still rather vague but you could feel the beginning of spring, there was a sweetness in the air and the vegetation felt it, the leaves were shedding their winter protection with a quiet shamelessness, they were showing off their tender areas and they were taking a risk, these young leaves, a sudden frost could at any moment destroy them.

Or:

He began to wonder whether he would have been better off coming by car; it was a pleasant surprise to discover that there was a car park in the courtyard of the hospital. Its brightly coloured facade reminded him a little of the one at Saint-Luc Hospital in Lyon. After the PET-Scan, the prospect of a spinal tap and a gastrostomy, this façade. Decidedly, he thought with a mixture of ambiguous feelings, he was increasingly following in his father’s footsteps.

In a passing assessment from 2004, Perry Anderson noted how ‘the steady drone of flat, slack sentences’ in Houellebecq’s work ‘reproduces the demoralised world they depict’. Here even the affect is missing, flatness without its imitative correlative. What might explain such passages? One factor may be that Houellebecq, far from a natural born member of the establishment, has gradually developed a proximity – a cosiness, even – with parts of the French power elite. France, beholden to its republican heritage, is unique in the close relation between its literary stars and political class, consecrated through institutions such as the Académie. The Charlie Hebdo killings of 2015 marked a point of escalation: Houellebecq featured on the cover during the week of the shootings and Soumission was released the same day, with the murders prompting a rallying round of the French establishment in the name of free speech. New Philosophers such as Alain Finkielkraut subsequently celebrated the book as an authentic portrayal of France’s impending ‘Lebanonization’. The effect has been an inevitable weakening of his oppositional stance.

This proximity is encapsulated by the fact that the minister and presidential candidate in the novel is based on Bruno Le Maire, current Minister of Economy and Finance and personal friend of Houellebecq. They first met when the latter’s dog was held up by Irish customs and help from the diplomatic service was required. The two have been exchanging emails ever since about ‘German Romanticism, economic affairs, and Rilke’s poems.’ Anéantir bears unfortunate traces of this friendship. In a recent debate with Éric Zemmour, Le Maire claimed that France was now ‘nearing a growth and employment rate equal to that of the trente glorieuses’. Houellebecq picks up this theme in the book, claiming that the ingoing president was able to restore France’s competitive edge by recharging the nation’s ‘knowledge economy’. The very same ‘knowledge economy’ was once the bane of the French working class in his novels, and these passages could perhaps be read as ridiculing Macron’s attempt to modernize a hopelessly declining country. Yet in the run-up to the last election Houellebecq confessed that, given his recent change of station, he ‘now obviously supports Macron’. Such are the dangers of a writer immune to self-theorization.

In Anéantir this inability for introspection is compounded by an even more destabilizing development. The central subject of Houellebecq’s original novels – the nihilist neoliberalism of the 1990s and 2000s – has become less reliable as a target. As a raw capitalist reflex, neoliberal policies will retain their attraction. But they are hardly election winners anymore, as the current contest in France makes plain. Macron and Le Maire might be Europe’s ‘last neoliberals’, yet they are operating in a landscape far removed from that which the first neoliberals had to navigate. Along with a return to religion, Houellebecq had long predicted that neoliberals might one day adopt the protectionist platforms of their opponents. Yet what to do when the ‘entrepreneurs of the self’ of the 1990s become the ‘zombie Catholics’ of today? The great portraitist of the neoliberal subject has lost his model; in the resulting confusion, the natural pivot is to existentialist cliché: death, faith, Jacob wrestling with the angel, love eternal and so on.

‘Every writer knows the temptation of irresponsibility’, as Sartre used to say. And there has always been a place for smaller feelings in Houellebecq’s work, much as Schopenhauer’s practical philosophy – a source of lasting inspiration to the novelist – ended in unconditional devotion to his poodle. But it is grating to see a writer once antinomic to the ruling order now appear essentially subdued by it. The unrelentingly bleak vision of French life in Houellebecq’s finest novels, which tied together the personal and social dimensions of despair, seemed to implicitly ratify almost any anti-establishment movement (though never openly supportive of the Gilets Jaunes, it appeared that they had a shared object of critique). The characters in Anéantir however do not appear as the resigned victims of neoliberal restructuring. Rather, we see men and women outside of history, facing a godless universe as Christians without a church. The novel may reference nearly every contemporary political orientation – from right-identitarians to anarcho-primitivists to deep ecologists – but all appear merely as unwitting agents in a ‘gigantic collapse’, a naturalised disaster personified by Paul’s father’s comatose state. In this way, Anéantir is more Blaise Pascal than Michel Clouscard, the protagonist (Paul Raison) merely a cipher for modern man’s incapacity to face up to the transcendental.

If this is indeed Houellebecq’s last novel, as he proclaims in the acknowledgements, it is an underwhelming finale. Incensed as he may be by the indignities of the dying, he has remarkably little to say about the causes or material circumstances of their suffering. The pandemic is ultimately just an avenue for his growing spiritual preoccupations, increasingly detached from brutalities of the social. Houellebecq was once able to write compassionately without succumbing to religious delirium. In a 1993 essay on the city of Calais, for instance, composed after the French vote on the Maastricht Treaty, he gave readers a portrait of a déclassé France filled with spleen and anger at its tormentors, but also deeply admiring of its victims:

Calais is an impressive city…even if it was razed to the ground during the Second World War. Saturday afternoon one does not see a soul on the street. One passes by abandoned store windows, immense deserted parking spots (without doubt this is the city with the most parking space in the whole of France). Saturday evening is a bit jollier, but it is a particular kind of jolliness: everyone is inebriated. In bars one finds a casino, with a set of machines at which the Calaisians come to waste their benefit payments. The preferred walking spot Sunday afternoon is the entry tunnel to the Manche. Behind the bars, families pushing baby carriages watch the Eurostar pass by. They handwave to the foreman, who hoots in response before being swallowed up by the sea.

Christopher Prendergast, ‘Negotiating World Literature’, NLR 8.

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Nun Chai Stories

Highway of Zojila Pass, a high mountain pass between Srinagar and Leh at 11575 ft, 9 Km stretch. Highest Indian National Highway. Black and white image.

A popular image from the 1970s shows an eight-handed Hindu goddess superimposed over a map of the Indian subcontinent. Sitting astride a lion, Bharat Mata or Mother India clutches a set of vaguely symbolic objects: a prayer bead, a lotus, a quill; a Trishul or trident, a sword, a sickle. Over her flowing hair, she wears a gem-studded crown which neatly obscures Kashmir. The picture speaks with crude eloquence to Indian imperialism in the Himalayan region, much of which it has occupied since Partition. (There are now under fourteen million people living in Indian-administered Kashmir as opposed to four million in Azad Kashmir or Free Kashmir, the arid north-western part controlled by Pakistan. China sits on a few villages in the far-eastern reaches.) For Indian nationalists, Kashmir is as a mystical, contradictory place: both national treasure and troubled borderland, an ‘integral part of the country’ – the phrase is repeated – that threatens to slip away.   

Part of the problem for India is that it has no historical basis for claiming Kashmir. For centuries, the Kashmir Valley has been ruled by outsiders: it was annexed by the Mughal Empire in the late 1500s, taken over from 1750-1840 by Afghan and then Sikh warlords, and after the Anglo-Sikh war of 1846, purchased for seven and a half million rupees from the British East India Company by Dogra mercenaries. From then until 1947, the Hindu Dogras lorded it over the Muslim peasantry – the ratio of Muslims to non-Muslims, 85 to 15, has stayed roughly the same since the fifteenth century – even bringing back the corvêe. Crucially, Kashmir was never part of the British Empire, whose subjects shared a colonial identity, whatever their other differences.

In Constitutional terms, Kashmir was a ‘Princely State.’ This meant that Maharaja Hari Singh had the right to accede to either country created at independence. He flirted with both options until Nehru lost patience and forced the issue in October 1947, sending in the newly minted Indian army, who were met by Pakistani forces entering from the northwest. Skirmishes continued till 1948, when the United Nations Security Council called a ceasefire and drew up a Line of Control (LOC) demarcating Indian and Pakistan-held territory. Kashmir was partitioned. What’s often forgotten is that over two hundred thousand were killed in massacres inflicted by the departing Dogra mercenaries, with support from paramilitaries sent north by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the ever-resourceful fascist organization that later set up the Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP). This is how the atoot ang or inseparable limb of Kashmir was joined to Mother India.

The Security Council had mandated a plebiscite on the national question in Kashmir, which Nehru agreed to and then put off indefinitely. (King Hassan followed his lead in Western Sahara.) In 1953, he arrested Sheikh Abdullah, the charismatic leader of the National Conference (NC) party, which stood for Kashmiri Azadi or independence. For the next four decades, democracy in Kashmir meant rigged elections, press censorship, random arrests, and the transformation of the NC into a client regime. When armed resistance broke out in 1989, the state enforced democracy more bluntly.

By 1990, there were three hundred fifty thousand soldiers in Kashmir; that number has more than doubled thirty years later. Ostensibly sent to track down militants, they have effectively occupied the valley – erecting check-posts and spreading barbed wire, grabbing land for barracks and torture centres. An estimated seventy thousand has been killed, and another eight thousand ‘disappeared’, their bodies missing. A tiny minority of the victims are militants. The preferred method is a ‘fake encounter’, in which a civilian is murdered and labelled an insurgent. The army has also opened fire on public demonstrations, in recent years blinding and killing stone-pelting teenagers, who are risibly classified as ‘agitational terrorists’. While the insurgency petered out in the mid-90s, counterinsurgency has only intensified. Today, Kashmir is the most militarized region in the world.

In August of 2019, the ruling BJP abrogated Article 370 of the Indian constitution, which had given the Kashmir assembly the sole right to determine who could purchase land in its territory. The Jammu and Kashmir Reorganization Act also dissolved the state, splitting it into two ‘union territories’ to be controlled by the federal centre. Kashmiris are clear this legal coup paves the way for setter colonialism. In the build-up, there was an ominous influx of troops into the valley, presumably sent to spread news of the abrogation from door to door. The Indian government completely shut down the state’s internet access, which was only partially restored four months later.

Kashmir remains under siege. The Legal Forum for Kashmir, a human rights monitor, recorded 257 political killings in 2021: of 163 militants, 46 civilians, and 48 armed forces. In November, Khurram Parvez, an activist who has tirelessly chronicled state impunity, was himself put in jail under the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (UAPA), the crown jewel of Indian Penal Code, which allows for the arrest of anyone that might endanger national security. Under a new media policy, Kashmiri journalists have been harassed for publishing ‘anti-national’ content. Like everything else, the response to Covid-19 has been militarized.

*

How has India managed to get away with the occupation? In the first place, it has faced next to no domestic resistance. There was a time, in the 1950s and 60s, when socialist politicians like Ram Manohar Lohia could make the case for Kashmiri self-determination in mainstream newspapers – a state of affairs that seems apocryphal today. The space has been entirely ceded to Hindu nationalists and their liberal holograms, who alike place the integrity of Mother India above such things as democratic aspirations and human rights. (The parliamentary left – represented by the Communist Party of India (Marxist) – opposed the abrogation and has urged Modi to uphold human rights. But self-determination remains a bridge too far for them.) The media has merrily played along, vilifying Kashmiris as separatists and Islamist fanatics while piously worrying after our under-paid soldiers.

Nor has the United Nations covered itself in glory. After calling for a plebiscite in 1948, it’s done little to hold India to account, now and then expressing ‘concern’ over human rights abuses. As for guardians of the liberal order, their strong words on Xinjiang contrast bitterly with the silence on Kashmir. ‘The cautiousness – or timidity – of western politicians is easy to understand,’ Pankaj Mishra has observed. ‘Apart from appearing as a lifeline to flailing western economies, India is a counterweight, at least in the fantasies of western strategists, to China.’

Mishra was writing in the summer of 2010, when mass protests broke out on a scale that drew comparisons to the Palestinian Intifada. The trigger was the murder in Kupwara district of three civilians who were lured into the hills with the prospect of jobs by soldiers, who shot them, planted weapons on their bodies, and no doubt pocketed a tidy sum for their efforts – a system of financial rewards has been put in place for nabbing or killing militants. ‘There’s a very important link between these incentives and the occupation of Kashmir,’ according to Khurram Parvez. ‘Stop this corruption, and I don’t think the occupation will even last a day.’ (Anna Politkovskaya said as much about counterinsurgency in Chechnya.) When the truth came out, so did demonstrators onto the streets of Srinagar, who were in turn greeted by police violence.

On 11 May, a seventeen-year-old boy, Tufail Mattoo, was returning home from tuitions when he was hit in the head by a tear gas cannister tossed by police. The intense protests that followed his killing lasted through the summer. The protestors’ demand was unequivocal – ‘Go India. Go Back’ was chanted and graffitied on walls – and as was the state response. In four months, 118 civilians were killed. Many were teenage boys, some even younger. This endless cycle – state crimes leading to protests leading to more state crimes – is why Kashmiri anthropologist Muhamad Junaid compares the Indian occupation to an ‘ouroboros’, after the mythical dragon that eats its own tail.

The 2010 Intifada forms the backdrop to Alana Hunt’s artbook Cups of Nun Chai, published in 2020 by documentary filmmaker Sanjay Kak’s press Yaarbal Books. (This is their second title, following Witness (2017), an extraordinary compendium of photographs by Kashmiri photojournalists.) An Australian artist and writer, Hunt first grew interested in Kashmir in the late aughts, while doing an MA in aesthetics at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi. Visiting the region with friends, she was horrified by what she saw, and felt powerfully if obscurely compelled – like Joe Sacco was in Palestine – to expose the atrocities that the Indian government was keeping quiet. Hunt was back in Australia by the time the Intifada broke out, which made it impossible for her to record voices on-the-ground, even as she wanted to commemorate the protests. ‘Cups of Nun Chai is born of that juncture,’ she writes in the introduction.

An oral history of a kind, the book is made up of 118 conversations Hunt held over two years with people in Australia (mainly), India and Kashmir. The rules are simple: over a cup of ‘nun chai’ – a salty tea popular in Kashmir – she speaks about the occupation, adapting their discussion into a two-to-three-page narrative. Each entry is accompanied by a close-up photograph of the interlocutor’s hands holding the teacup. ‘Cups of Nun Chai is a search for meaning in the face of something so brutal it appears absurd,’ she writes. ‘It is an absurd gesture when meaning itself becomes too much to bear. It is also a memorial, grounded in the killing of 118 civilians.’

Tea-drinking as an act of witness? The conceit is less naïve than it is seems. Like the Parisians clueless of Algeria in Chris Marker’s La Joli Mai (1962), most of Hunt’s interviewees know next to nothing about Kashmir, which, paradoxically, makes for fruitful dialogue. They ask commonsensical questions –


‘Is it a war over resources or religion?’

‘If the UN is so good, why don’t they step in and do something to help Kashmir?’

‘Is it something to do with India and Pakistan?’

‘Does Kashmir have its own politicians, or are they governed by India?’


 – that she patiently answers, filing in the historical and political background, offering a useful primer on the occupation. Their more wide-eyed observations – ‘When people are mourning, they are being killed!’; ‘They are killing children!’ – carry a simple moral force, burning through the justifications of the Indian state. The discussions also fill a void in the cultural discourse on Kashmir, which tends to be presented in the media as a conflict zone and nothing more. Kashmiri poet Uzma Falak addresses this tension in her lyric essay, ‘Life or Siege?,’ included in the volume:

How much silence makes a siege?

And how much sound ends it?

What makes a siege a siege?

When do we stop calling it so?

For how long does a siege last?

Does the Siege interrupt [our] Life or is [our] Life

merely in the way of an undying Siege?

What is a siege in a [perpetual] siege called?

What is more persistent – Life or Siege?


Hunt, however, foregrounds the lived experiences of Kashmiri people, who have responded to her project. In 2016, on the anniversary of Tufail Mattoo’s murder, her recorded conversations began to appear as a column in Kashmir Reader, an independent Srinagar newspaper founded in 2012 and known for its investigative reporting, which has kept the Indian censors busy. A month later, the popular military commander Burhan Wani was killed by security forces, prompting the largest protests seen since 2010. On cue, the Reader was banned for three months. Archival images of its pages (and, it seems, of some Indian publications) are interspersed throughout the book. The headlines allude to Kashmir’s dismal political situation – ‘JKPCC chief demands ban on use of pellet guns’; ‘Shutdown marks 1994 Kupwara Massacre.’

*

Most of the conversations take place in Sydney, where Hunt is based. Mainly friends and acquaintances, her interlocutors are curious, well-intentioned, and basically liberal in their political outlook – though she might have spoken to some conservatives too. The discussions tend to begin with uncertainty. Confronted by the scale of violence – ‘Isn’t that akin to genocide?’ – many wonder, with a mix of embarrassment and outrage, why so little global attention is paid to India’s crimes. ‘I doubt that anyone in my journalism class has ever heard of Kashmir,’ a student confesses. ‘None of this has been in our media,’ a friend complains. They guess this is because India is in the United States’ good graces, which is part of the story. Another factor, which Hunt alludes to obliquely, is that Kashmiris have been largely denied ‘the permission to narrate’ their own experiences – to borrow a phrase from Edward Said. All mainstream Indian politicians, and most of its liberal intellectuals, describe the occupation as an ‘internal matter’, as if the whole point was not Kashmir’s rejection of imposed state boundaries.

As the facts sink in, people are curious to know what life is like in the valley. Drawing on her own experiences and the stories of her friends, Hunt describes the overwhelming presence of the army. ‘I had seen the soldiers, thousands and thousands of them,’ she writes. ‘On street corners, on top of buildings, in their barracks, in trucks and armored cars, in orchards, under trees . . . I have seen stones fill the surface of an almost empty street.’ Hunt is also attuned to the more insidious ways in which India is disfiguring the landscape. For instance, she notes that Chinar trees – a recurring image in the towering Kashmiri-American poet Aga Shahid Ali’s verse – have been declared state property, along with the land on which they are planted, which obviously discourages people from growing them. ‘This makes the most majestic and iconic of trees in Kashmir an enemy of the people,’ Hunt caustically reflects, ‘and the people are made any enemy of it.’

Hunt speaks to Aboriginal people who immediately grasp the parallels between Australian and Indian state-creation. ‘That’s the same story here,’ the late Gija painter Rusty Peters tells her, describing settler massacres in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, one of which his uncle narrowly escaped. In staging such moments, Hunt seems to critique ‘the whole idea of a map and of a nation,’ though she does not spell out what an alternative to a state-based order would look like. (For a more in-depth discussion, see recent books by Claire Vergerio, Mahmood Mamdani, and James C. Scott, who Hunt cites in passing.)

Two years after Tufail Mattoo’s killing, Hunt finally arrives in Kashmir. Here she speaks to students, professors and activists, who alike greet her with affection – she is clearly a cherished visitor. The scholar Sheikh Showkat Hussain compares her project to the Kashmiri tradition of fatheha-chai, in which neighbors take responsibility to feed a mourning family for three days after a death, and on the fourth, nun chai is drunk to mark the end of grieving. Indian citizens will have to speak up against the occupation if we too hope to someday be accepted by Kashmiris as neighbours and not jailers.  

Read on: Alpa Shah, ‘Explaining Modi’, NLR 124.

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Fog of War

Accounting for the descent of the European state system into the barbarism of war – for the first time since the collapse of Yugoslavia and NATO’s 1999 bombing of Belgrade – needs more than lay psychiatry. What made Russia and ‘the West’ engage in an unrelenting wrestling match on the edge of the abyss, with both sides eventually falling off the cliff? As we live through these monstrous weeks, we understand better than ever what Gramsci must have meant by an interregnum: a situation ‘in which the old is dying and the new cannot be born’, one in which ‘a great variety of morbid symptoms appear’, like powerful countries turning their future over to the uncertainties of a battlefield clouded in the fog of war.

Nobody knows at the time of writing how the war over Ukraine will end, and after what amount of bloodshed. What we can try to speculate about at this point is what the reasons may have been – and human actors have reasons, however crankish they may seem to others – for the uncompromising brinkmanship on the part of both the US and Russia. What a scene: escalating confrontation, rapidly dwindling possibilities for either side to save face short of total victory, ending with Russia’s murderous assault on a neighbouring country with which it once shared a common state.

Here we find remarkable parallels, as well as the obvious asymmetries, since both Russia and the United States have long been facing the creeping decay of their national social order and international position, apparently making them feel that they must halt it now or else it will continue forever. In the Russian case, what one sees is a regime both statist and oligarchic, confronting growing unrest among its citizens, rich in oil and corruption, unable to improve the lives of its ordinary people while its oligarchs are getting immeasurably rich, a regime increasingly turning towards the use of a heavy dictatorial hand against any organized protests. To sit more comfortably than one can on bayonets requires stability derived from economic prosperity and social progress, in turn dependent on global demand for the oil and gas Russia has to sell. For this, however, it needs access to financial markets and advanced technology, which the US had for some time denied it.

Similarly with external security, where the US and NATO have for nearly two decades now penetrated politically and militarily into what Russia, only too familiar with foreign incursions, claims as its cordon sanitaire. Moscow’s attempts to negotiate on this have led to post-Soviet Russia being treated by Washington in the same way as its predecessor, the Soviet Union, with the ultimate aim of regime change. All attempts to end the encroachment have led to nothing; NATO has moved closer and closer, recently stationing intermediate-range missiles in Poland and Romania, while the United States has increasingly treated Ukraine as a territory it owns – viz., Victoria Nuland’s vice-regal proclamations on who should lead the government in Kyiv.

At some point, the Russian regime apparently concluded that this creeping erosion, domestic as well as external, would continue unabated unless dramatic action was taken to stop the rot. What followed was the military build-up around Ukraine from Spring 2021, accompanied by the demand for a formal commitment from Washington to henceforth respect Russian security interests – seeking an open conflict instead of a hidden one, perhaps in the hope of mobilizing the spirit of Russian patriotism that had once defeated the Germans.

Turning to the American side, one finds a grudge going back to the early 2000s, after Boris Yeltsin, America’s post-Soviet placeman, turned over the farm to Vladimir Putin in the wake of the economic and social disaster caused by American-advised ‘shock therapy’. Putin’s initial quest to join NATO under the auspices of the New World Order was rejected, despite all his efforts to help Washington in its invasion of Afghanistan. Russian objections to the 2004 enlargement of NATO – now threatening its northwestern border – were met by Bush and Blair’s declaration of the ‘open-door’ policy for Georgia and Ukraine at the 2008 Bucharest summit.

The American political establishment, led by the Hillary Clinton wing of the Democratic Party, began to treat Russia as a rogue state, much like that other country that had extricated itself from American control, Iran. Where in the past there had been a Red under every American bed, now the self-invited guest was a Russian – a distinction that many Americans had never really learned to make in the first place. Even Trump’s election in 2016 was attributed by the losing party to covert Russian machinations, which politically killed Trump’s initial attempts to seek some sort of accommodation with Russia. (Remember his innocent question about why NATO still existed, three decades after the end of Communism?) By the end of his term, in order to mend fences with the American deep state and the voters, he had returned to the tried-and-tested anti-Russian stance.

For Trump’s successor Biden, as for Obama–Clinton, Russia offered itself as a convenient arch enemy, domestically and internationally: small economically, but easy to portray as big on account of its nuclear arms. After the media debacle of Biden’s withdrawal from Afghanistan, showing strength vis-à-vis Russia seemed a safe way to display American muscle, forcing the Republicans during the run-up to critical midterm elections to unite behind Biden as the leader of a resurrected ‘Free World’. Washington duly turned to megaphone diplomacy and categorically refused any negotiation on NATO expansion. For Putin, having gone as far as he had, the choice was starkly posed between escalation and capitulation. It was at this point that method turned into madness, and the murderous, strategically disastrous Russian land invasion of Ukraine began.

For the US, refusing Russian demands for security guarantees was a convenient way to shore up the unconditional allegiance of European countries to NATO, an alliance that had become shaky in recent years. This concerned especially France, whose president had not long ago diagnosed NATO to be ‘brain-dead’, but also Germany with its new government whose leading party, the SPD, was considered too Russian-friendly. There was also unfinished business regarding a gas pipeline, Nord Stream 2. Merkel, in tandem with Schröder, had invited Russia to build it, hoping to fill the gap in German energy supply expected to result from Germany’s Sonderweg exiting coal and nuclear power at the same time. The US opposed the project, as did many others in Europe, including the German Greens. Among the reasons were fears that the pipeline would make Western Europe more dependent on Russia, and that it would make it impossible for Ukraine and Poland to interrupt Russian gas deliveries should Moscow be found to misbehave.

The confrontation over Ukraine, by restoring European allegiance to American leadership, solved this problem in no time. Following the lead of declassified CIA announcements, Western Europe’s so-called ‘quality press’, not to mention the public-broadcasting systems, presented the rapidly deteriorating situation as a Manichaean struggle between good and evil, the US under Biden versus Russia under Putin. In Merkel’s final weeks, the Biden administration had talked the US Senate out of harsh sanctions on Germany and the operators of Nord Stream 2; in return Germany agreed to include the pipeline in a possible future package of sanctions. After the Russian recognition of the two break-away East Ukrainian provinces, Berlin formally postponed regulatory certification of the pipeline – which was, however, not enough. With the new German Chancellor standing next to him at a Washington press conference, Biden announced that if necessary, the pipeline would definitely be included in sanctions, Scholz remaining silent. A few days later, Biden endorsed the Senate plan that he had earlier opposed. Then, on 24 February, the Russian invasion propelled Berlin to do on its own what would otherwise have been done by Washington on Germany’s and the West’s behalf: shelve the pipeline once and for all.

Thus Western unity was back, greeted by the jubilant applause of the local commentariats, grateful for the return of the transatlantic certainties of the Cold War. The prospect of entering battle in alliance with the most formidable military in world history instantly wiped out memories of a few months before, when the US abandoned with little warning not just Afghanistan but also the auxiliary troops provided by its NATO allies in support of that once-favoured American activity, ‘nation-building’. No matter also Biden’s appropriation of the bulk of the reserves of the Afghan central bank, to the tune of $7.5 billion, for distribution to those affected by 9/11 (and their lawyers), while Afghanistan is suffering a nationwide famine. Forgotten too is the wreckage left behind by recent American interventions in Somalia, Iraq, Syria, Libya – the utter destruction, followed by hasty abandonment, of entire countries and regions.

Now it is ‘the West’ again, Middle Earth fighting the Land of Mordor to defend a brave small country that only wants ‘to be like us’ and for the purpose desires no more than being allowed to walk through the open doors of NATO and the EU. Western European governments dutifully suppressed all remaining memories of the deeply rooted recklessness of American foreign policy, induced by the sheer size of the United States and its location on a continental-sized island where nobody can get to them, regardless of the mess they make when their military adventures go wrong – and, astonishingly, gave the United States, a far-away non-European declining empire with different interests and a host of problems of its own, full power of attorney in dealing with Russia over nothing less than the future of the European state system.

What about the EU? In short, as Western Europe is returned to ‘the West’, the EU is reduced to a geo-economic utility for NATO, aka the United States. The events around Ukraine are making it clearer than ever that for the US, the EU is essentially a source of economic and political regulation for states needed to help ‘the West’ encircle Russia on its Western flank. Keeping pro-American governments in power in the former Soviet satellite states, which may be costly, makes for an attractive burden-sharing under which ‘Europe’ pays for the bread while the US provides the firepower – or the imagination of such. This makes the EU in effect an economic auxiliary to NATO. Meanwhile, Eastern European governments are happier to trust Washington with their defence than Paris and Berlin, given the former’s proven trigger happiness and its invulnerable home base. In return for US protection through NATO, and Washington’s patronage in their relation to the EU, countries like Poland and Romania host US missiles allegedly defending Europe against Iran, while unfortunately having to pass over Russia on their way.

The implication for von der Leyen and her crowd is to confirm their subordinate status. EU extension to Ukraine and the West Balkans, even to Georgia and Armenia, is considered by the US as ultimately for Washington to decide. France in particular may still object to further enlargement, but how long it can hold out, especially if Germany can be made to pick up the bill, is anybody’s guess. (Though formal EU accession procedures for Ukraine are not yet underway, von der Leyen has announced: ‘We want them in.’) Moreover, Poland being strictly anti-Russian and pro-NATO, it will now be hard to punish it by cuts in EU economic support for what the European Court sees as deficiencies in its ‘rule of law’. The same holds for Hungary, whose wayward leader, Orbán, has turned increasingly anti-Russian. With the American return, the power to discipline EU member states has migrated from Brussels to Washington D.C.

One thing EU-Europeans, especially those of the Green kind, are currently learning is that if you allow the US to protect you, geopolitics trumps all other politics, and that geopolitics is defined by Washington alone. This is how an empire works. Ukraine, a house divided between an astounding collection of oligarchs, will soon begin to receive enhanced financial support from ‘Europe’. This will, however, be no more than a fraction of what Ukrainian oligarchs are regularly depositing in Swiss or British or, one assumes, American banks. Indications are that, compared to Ukraine, Poland and even Hungary are, to use an American simile, as clean as a hound’s tooth. (Who could forget the salary Hunter Biden enjoyed as non-executive director of a Ukrainian gas company whose principal owner was then facing a money-laundering investigation?)

What remains a mystery, obviously not the only one in this context, is why the United States and their allies were for the most part happy to discount the possibility of Russia responding to continuing pressures for regime change – in the form of ‘Western’ denial of a security zone – by deepening an alliance with China. It is true that historically, Russia always wanted to be part of Europe, and something like Asiaphobia is deeply anchored in its national identity. Moscow is for Russians the Third Rome, not the Second Beijing. As late as 1969, Russia and China, both Communist then, clashed over their mutual border on the Ussuri River. Now, with Russia cut off from the West for an indefinite future, China, short of raw materials, may step in and provide Russia with modern technology of its own. As NATO is dividing the Eurasian continent into ‘Europe’, including Ukraine, against Russia, as a non-European enemy of Europe, Russian nationalism may, against its historical grain, feel forced to ally with China, as foreshadowed by that strange picture of Xi and Putin standing side by side at the opening of the Beijing Winter Olympics.

Would an alliance between China and Russia be an unintended result of American incompetence, or on the contrary, an intended result of American global strategy? If Moscow were to team up with Beijing, there would be no prospect anymore for a Russian-European settlement à la française. Western Europe, in whatever political form, would more than ever function as the transatlantic wing of the United States in a new cold or, perhaps, hot war between the two global power blocs, the one declining, hoping to reverse the tide, the other hoping to rise.

Only a Europe at peace with Russia, one that respects Russian security needs, could hope to free itself from the American embrace, so effectively renewed during the Ukrainian crisis. This, one presumes, is the reason why Macron insisted for so long on Russia being a part of Europe, and on the need for ‘Europe’, as represented of course by himself and France, to provide peace on its Eastern flank. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has for a long time, if not forever, put an end to this project. But then, it was never very promising to begin with, given Germany’s felt dependence on American nuclear protection, combined with German doubts about all-too-fanciful French global ambitions, re-defined as European ambitions to be funded by German economic power. And Russia may with some justification have questioned if, under these conditions, France would be able to push the US out of the European driver’s seat.

So the winner is… the United States? The longer the war drags on, due to the successful resistance of Ukrainian citizens and their army, the more it will be noticed that the leader of ‘the West’, who spoke for ‘Europe’ as the war built up, is not intervening militarily on behalf of Ukraine. In case there was war, the US has given itself a special leave of absence, as Biden made clear from the start. Looking at its record, this is nothing new: when their mission gets out of hand, they withdraw to their distant island. Nevertheless, as Germans look on, wondering where the US is, they may start to feel some doubt about the American commitment to come to their nuclear defence. That commitment, after all, underlies German membership in NATO, German adherence to the nuclear nonproliferation treaty, and the housing of 30,000 or so American troops on German soil.  

In this context the special budget of €100 billion, announced a few days into the war by the Scholz government and devoted to fulfilling the promise, going back to 2002, to spend 2 percent of Germany’s GDP on arms, looks like a ritual sacrifice to appease an angry God who one fears might abandon his less-than-true believers. Nobody thinks that had Germany actually lived up to the 2 percent NATO demand, Russia would have been deterred from invading Ukraine, or that Germany would have been able and willing to come to its aid. It will also take years for the new hardware, of course the latest on offer, to be made available to the troops. And it will be hardware of exactly the sort that the US, France and the UK already have in abundance.

And not to be forgotten, the entire German military is under the command of NATO, meaning the Pentagon, so the new arms will add to NATO’s, not Germany’s firepower. Technologically, they will be designed for deployment around the globe, on ‘missions’ like Afghanistan – or, most likely, in the environs of China, to assist the US in its emerging confrontation in the South China Sea. There was no debate at all in the Bundestag on exactly what new ‘capabilities’ would be needed, or what they will be used for. As in the past, under Merkel, this was left to ‘the allies’ to determine. One item could be the Future Combat Air System (FCAS), beloved by the French, which combines fighter bombers, drones and satellites for worldwide operations. There is scant hope that there will at some point be a strategic debate in Germany on what it means to defend your own territory, rather than attack the territory of others. Can the Ukrainian experience help start this discussion? Unlikely.

Georgi Derluguian, ‘A Small World War’, NLR 128.

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To Be Both

Who is Arthur Rambo? To hear the name spoken, it is the young radical poet who comes to mind. To see it written conjures instead the image of Sylvester Stallone’s muscle-bound action hero. The disturbing ability to be both, for one individual to contain two apparently opposed personalities, is at the heart of Laurent Cantet’s new film, released in French cinemas this month. When we meet Arthur Rambo, he does not go by that name anymore. He is Karim D., the new star of Paris’s literary scene. A second-generation Algerian immigrant, he has just published a first novel about his mother’s courageous journey from le pays to begin a new life in France which has ‘stunned’ the critics and set the Twittersphere alight with praise. ‘Your story is my story Karim’, ‘Thank you Karim D. You have given me a voice to speak about my own past’ are among the types of comments posted after the young writer delivers yet another charming television interview. The opening shot of the film shows him seated in a studio against a green screen special-effects background. Framed in deception, in other words, is how Cantet introduces us to his protagonist, in an elegant foreshadowing of what will follow. 

For the next fifteen minutes or so we are with Karim as he navigates the crowds, dressed in a sharp tie-less suit, the man of the moment, a smug grin fixed on his face. He is at a party at an upscale venue in Paris. The setting is a high-rise, not of the suburban social housing we will later enter as we step back into Karim’s childhood, but in a neighbourhood that through the huge windows looks like La Défense, the financial district. This is 21st century French publishing: the smoky cafés of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, historically the backdrop for anything associated with the capital’s literary scene on screen, are nowhere to be seen. At this gathering people are talking business. After discussing a film adaptation of his novel with one producer, Karim weaves his way through the trays of canapés and champagne and into a room where strobe lighting illuminates a gyrating crowd. He joins in, taking centre stage, then steps out for a breather on a balcony, the lights of the city behind him.

Enter Arthur Rambo. Someone online has made the connection between Karim and the tweets he posted under this pseudonym a few years before. In an instant all Rambo’s old tweets are shared. As Karim scrolls on his phone, we read what he is seeing, one message after the other. Their vehemence, their vitriol, their crude anti-Semitism and misogyny, is stomach-churning. ‘You have destroyed all my faith’, ‘That’s what happens when you let the suburbs come into the centre’… are the tone of the reaction tweets starting to flow. Karim’s downfall is as quick and as definitive as the drop of the guillotine’s blade. Commentators on the left denounce him as an embarrassment and a fraud, those on the right as a perfect example of what they have always said about the racaille, or scum, of the banlieue.

This is the ninth feature by Laurent Cantet, one of France’s most interesting and understated directors. Born in 1961, he grew up living in a school in a small town in the Deux-Sèvres region of central France where his parents worked as teachers. His introduction to cinema came through a ciné club they organised for pupils, as well as watching classics on television. He initially studied photography in Marseilles but, he has said, soon grew impatient to tell stories and in 1983 enrolled at the prestigious IDHEC, since renamed La Fémis, where many of France’s directors are educated. During his studies he formed a close-knit group with other budding filmmakers in his class – Dominik Moll, Gilles Marchand, Robert Campillo – and their friendship has been integral to his work since then, leading to several collaborations on various features. In the 1990s, as he began to shoot his own films, he also joined the collective ‘Les cinéastes des sans-papiers’, an activist group calling for the legalisation of undocumented workers and he has contributed shorts for all their portmanteau films to date: Nous, sans-papiers de France (1997), Laissez-les grandir ici! (2007), On bosse ici! On vit ici! On reste ici! (2010) and Les 18 du 57, Boulevard de Strasbourg (2014).

Cantet’s dominant themes have been clear ever since his first short Tous à la manif in 1997. There he focused on students organizing a protest, and one young man hoping to join them, but held back by family loyalties and his role as a waiter in the bistro where they are gathered. Class dynamics, social issues of various kinds, and the tensions between personal loyalties and political beliefs are the substance of Cantet’s cinema, and this – in addition to a more traditional approach to mise-en-scène – has set him apart from those more typically celebrated as France’s leading auteurs, both domestically and internationally, such as Claire Denis, Léos Carax and Gaspar Noé. More provocative and formally experimental, but less occupied by ordinary lives and struggles, these directors tend to steal the limelight at festivals and have garnered more critical and scholarly attention.

Among Cantet’s stand-out features are his second and third films, which focus on the world of work and our relationship to it. The clash between unions and management is at the heart of Ressources humaines (1999), which examines this through the prism of a father-son relationship. L’Emploi du temps (2001), meanwhile, takes loose inspiration from the Jean-Claude Romand affair to follow a man who pretends to go work each day even after he has been fired from his white-collar job. Cantet’s best-known work that won him the Palme d’Or at Cannes, Entre les murs (2008), takes place in the education sector. But while that was familiar territory, he has also worked outside his comfort zone, studying the relations between outsiders and locals in two other key films set in Haiti, Vers le sud (2005), and Cuba, Retour à Ithaca (2014).

The idea for Arthur Rambo derives from the case of Mehdi Meklat. This affair sparked a major controversy in France in 2017 when it was revealed that the 24-year-old Meklat, celebrated for his Libération blog, regular radio appearances and his first novel, had a pseudonym, Marcellin Deschamps, under which he posted racist, misogynist and homophobic tweets. Until then he had been that rare thing in France: an Arab media personality. ‘He allowed himself all excesses’, Meklat would later say to explain why Marcel Duchamp had inspired his pen name. He imagined Deschamps doing the same: ‘How far could he go? What would be his limits?’ For Cantet, Meklat presented an enigma that sparked his imagination, much as the mass murderer Romand had done for L’Emploi du temps. ‘I remember’, Cantet said about his discovery of Meklat, ‘the impossibility to me of superimposing these two images of the same character: the witty and politically irreproachable radio columnist and the author of these messages. It was such an enigma that I began to read more on the subject, and watch the videos’.

In the film, Karim echoes Meklat’s defence of his actions for his Rambo persona – it was all about testing the system’s limits, and should be read as playful, ironic, experimental. Cantet examines this by turning the film into a series of mini-trials. Karim has to answer the challenges that come from different people in his life, from his family and old neighbourhood friends to his media-savvy agent and publisher. Their charges vary from bien pensant outrage to emotional bafflement ­– ‘I don’t know who you are’, says his tearful girlfriend, a sentiment shared by his mother – as well the impassioned call from his younger brother to never apologise because he and his friends look up to him and understood what he was doing. This argument, made by Farid in a barren room at the top of the high-rise where Karim grew up, is a chilling revelation for the older brother as he sees the younger generation taking him literally, their own frustrations developing into a more extreme form of resistance that he claims he had never intended.

Cantet deals particularly well in Arthur Rambo with the formal challenge of representing social media on screen. Rather than resorting to the more typical clunky shots of someone reading their phone, the camera hovering over their shoulder, Cantet instead presents tweets onscreen like a block of hovering subtitles. ‘I make the tweets part of the drama’, he explained in a recent radio interview, ‘because I believe the text takes on a terrible weight when it is put on the big screen’. The ‘dazzling quality, and the violence of social media at the time. That’s what I wanted to show by putting the tweets on screen in the film and then showing them unfurl so quickly we no longer have time to read them. They enter our thoughts and live like a parasite, with their big slogans and punchlines… which are a reduction of any form of reflection.’

Who is Arthur Rambo? Who is Karim D.? In the end, Cantet does not solve the enigma presented by his anti-hero. Karim sits in the back of a taxi riding along the Paris ring road at night, heading ‘somewhere, just to get out’, as he writes in a text to his girlfriend. Meklat too got away, to Japan, and then returned a year later to publish Autopsie (2018), an essay in which he sought to explain his actions. This uncertainty, driving into the night with nowhere to go, seems the only ending possible to Cantet’s story. The enigma of Meklat and the fractures his actions exposed remain unresolved – he never apologised, and what he represented both before and after the revelations are still a source of discomfort and debate. That Cantet stayed true to this ambiguity is characteristic of his strength as a director, and it may also explain why the reception of Arthur Rambo in France has been strikingly muted. Meklat offered no closure to what he brought to the surface, and Cantet too resists any false resolution on screen.

Read on: Stathis Kouvelakis, ‘The French Insurgency’, NLR 116/117.

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Convulsions

Here is the first throw of our three-sided die: Surrealism is an accidental codex of invocations that pairs well with materialism. Second toss: Surrealism made sense of sleeping horror (dreams) after Dada made sense of waking horror (war). Last toss: Surrealism is the unconscious response (Freud) to material pressure (Marx). Let’s just say that there are no Surrealist cops and put away the dice. (I feel certain that there are Impressionist cops but cannot prove it.)

Our timeline begins in 1920, in Paris, with the publication of André Breton and Philippe Soupault’s The Magnetic Fields, a weeklong writing session that they published without (allegedly) the benefit of revision. The idea of this ‘automatic writing’ was to bypass any gatekeepers of the mind, and that impulse had wide appeal. Surrealism spread almost as fast and far as photography, to which it also responded. If the recording of facts had been subsumed into the work of the lens, what was left? Surrealism’s answer was the right one: give voice to sensations above and below language and let the movement of the spirit guide the material. As German critic Wolfgang Grunow described it in 1928, Surrealism is ‘idea-photography’. The reverberations of this approach have been deep and wide, many of them complicating the very idea of Surrealism being a single idea. In 1967, Martiniquan poet and revolutionary Aimé Césaire said that ‘Surrealism interested me to the extent that it was a liberating factor’. In 1968, the Chicago Surrealists made common cause with Detroit and Paris and preached the power of both Bugs Bunny and the Black Panthers.

Surrealism Beyond Borders, just finished at the Met in New York and arriving at London’s Tate Modern this week (co-curated by Stephanie D’Alessandro and Matthew Gale, along with Lauren Rosati, Sean O’Hanlan and Carine Harmand), is an attempt to write some of this sprawl into the timeline and decenter Paris. The proper Surrealist response to an institutional show is probably to switch all the wall texts (and please don’t tag me if you do). The work here stretches from the twenties to the seventies, and is organized into small thematic clumps, which come in different categories. There are ideas (Revolution, the collective, ‘scientific Surrealism’), places (Chicago, Cuba, Cairo) and material varieties (dreams, objects – Dali’s Bakelite telephone host and its plaster lobster guest is one of the only dorm room hits here). That this all succeeds will be obvious to even a sleepy visitor. If it is not too late or too meek to look for something as evanescent as fun – the original revolution? or simply as evanescent as revolt? – this show is stocked with it. I returned to the show several times; it had become a second tinnitus. Did I return in hopes that I could make it stop, that the art might cancel itself out and die down?

Marcel Jean’s Armoire surréaliste (1941) is the perfect doorman, blending the obviousness and mystery that drives so much Surrealism. It’s exactly an armoire, with a real wooden body and unreal, painted doors swinging open to reveal a view of, depending on my mood, hills or clouds or the ocean. The corny bits of Surrealist art are often my favourite, the moments where representation clings to itself and lets a dream melt the frame.

Cuban painter Wifredo Lam is the exhibition’s menacing docent, whose work makes good on his claim that he could ‘act as a Trojan horse that would spew forth hallucinating images with the power to surprise, to disturb the dreams of the exploiters’. His towering canvas, Le présent éternel (1944), is a beige riot of elbows and beaks and bodies that throws Picasso back into the ocean. I fell hardest in love with his elegant black-on-yellow line drawing for the cover of Aimé Césaire’s Cahier d’un retour au pays natal (1939), a two-headed alligator with a flowered tail and a bridge for a body. Lam shares a psychic charge with American painter, Ted Joans, also a friend of Breton’s. His 1958 canvas, Bird Lives!, turns Charlie Parker into a hulking animal silhouette vibrating black on white. Joans is also responsible for a thirty-foot long paper work called Long Distance, a cadavre exquis conducted over thirty years with dozens of artists and writers. William Burroughs almost refused to participate because he didn’t draw or doodle unless he was on the phone, so Joans stayed on the line with him while he scribbled (literally) his panel.

I came back the fourth time for Remedios Varos’s triptych, reunited here for the first time since its Mexico City debut in 1961. The three paintings – ‘To the Tower’, ‘Embroidering the Earth’s Mantle’, and ‘The Flight’ – depict a set of girls who bicycle away from a convent to work on a tapestry in a tower. In the final panel, a girl surfs on a sea of coppery foam with her friend. In a notebook, Varo wrote of the first painting: ‘Their eyes are as if hypnotized, they hold their knitting needles like handlebars’, which is an odd note, since they do appear to be holding handlebars attached to their hairline bicycles. ‘Only the girl in the front resists the hypnosis’, she writes. Varo notes that while embroidering the ‘earth’s mantle’ in the second painting, this awake girl weaves a ‘ruse’ into her fabric, which enables her to escape with her ‘beloved’ in a ‘special vehicle’, which I maintain is an umbrella turned upside down.

These are the paintings that Oedipa Maas and Pierce Inverarity see in The Crying of Lot 49. Varo is described as a ‘beautiful Spanish exile’ and the subjects are ‘frail girls with heart-shaped faces, huge eyes, spun-gold hair’. What stuck with me is Pynchon’s description of the middle painting, of the girls weaving the tapestry in the tower: ‘All the waves, ships and forests of the earth were contained in this tapestry, and the tapestry was the world’. The larger world is often under-discussed in the conversation around Surrealism and the church, which Surrealism simultaneously replicated and replaced. (Breton is often referred to as ‘the Pope’.) That the Varo triptych looks like a series of frescoes is no minor parallel. The early twentieth century saw religion explicitly detached from religion. The soul had to go somewhere to work, and Surrealism was one of the safest harbours.

Connecting this revolution to the one waged with rocks and bodies is slower work. The relevant effect of Surrealism Beyond Borders is to establish adjacency rather than unity as the necessary condition for art and politics to feed each other without restraint. Placing Surrealism in the vicinity of emancipatory work isn’t hard because, as nebulous cohorts go, Surrealists generally favour the right side of history. Haitian historian and novelist Roger Gaillard wrote that Breton ‘helped create, beyond any doubt, a climate among young people of my generation, a confidence in ourselves and in the future’. Haitian poet René Bélance said that while Breton ‘had no intention of disturbing the political order of a country which was not his own’, the ‘banal fact was that to speak of liberty – at that moment – was certainly a subversive act’. In 1945, a reporter suggested that Breton ‘had a hand in the Haitian revolution’, to which Breton responded, ‘Let’s not exaggerate’. ‘At the end of 1945, the poverty, and consequently the patience, of the Haitian people had reached a breaking point’, Breton said, and the Haitians largely drew their ‘vigour from the French Revolution’. Even the problematic father knew the order of revolutionary events.

Resistance was a part of the Surrealist project from the beginning. The Surrealists supported the Rif rebellion in Morocco and became involved in various anti-colonial activities, chief among them a friendship with Aimé and Suzanne Césaire. The decentering of Paris has also been around as long as Surrealism itself, it turns out. Etienne Lero, in 1932, and Suzanne Césaire, in 1942, (in the Paris-based, Martinique-driven Legitime Defense and the Martinique-based Tropiques) both contended that literature that remained ‘tethered to French stylistic rules could not adequately represent the reality of Antillean life, culture, and landscape’, as Annete K. Joseph-Raphael describes it in her essay for the exhibit catalogue. Even while rejecting the Parisian tilt, both artists ‘explicitly claimed Surrealism as an antidote to the poisons of colonial violence and cultural assimilation’. Surrealism, then, doesn’t necessarily need Breton, or even Surrealism. This is where the art-historical gives way to the material. You can leave behind a set of shared references and friends and move towards action: surrealizing rather than Surrealism, a practice that predates the artform and exists as a layer of consciousness rather than an affiliative tendency.

In January, at the close of the exhibition’s run at the Met, Fred Moten and Robin D.G. Kelley talked over Zoom with Zita Cristina Nunes about Black, Brown, & Beige: Surrealist Writings from Africa and the Diaspora, an anthology of Black Surrealism published in 2009 and co-edited by Kelley. After almost an hour of discussion, Moten played songs by George Clinton and Klein, and Kelley moved to the heart of the action. ‘For black artists, Surrealism was less a movement to join than a set of practices they recognized as deeply grounded in African and Afro-diasporic culture’, he said. ‘They found in surrealism more of an affinity than an ideological commitment, more recognition than revelation’. In his essay for another anthology, the forthcoming Get Ready for the Marvelous: Black Surrealism edited by Adrienne Edwards, Kelley paraphrases ‘Suzanne Césaire paraphrasing André Breton: “Surrealism will be political or it will not be.”’ He also contends that ‘the key words undergirding Surrealism are not reality, or the Marvelous, but FREEDOM and REVOLUTION’.

That freedom, over time, has morphed, just as Surrealism itself began as a writing exercise and turned into a way of seeing. One of the most relevant freedoms now is the freedom from work itself. In November, at the second annual conference of the International Society for the Study of Surrealism, writer Abigail Susik led a panel on Charles Fourier and laziness, a gloss on her new book, Surrealist Sabotage and the War on Work (2021). It was uncanny, but not surreal, to attend a surrealist conference on Zoom during the pandemic and see that the ministrations of Parisians one hundred years ago had become not just fashionable but relevant. Susik wrote an editorial that appeared, in slightly different forms, in both The New York Times and the Washington Post this year. I enjoyed seeing Susik discussing ‘permanent strike’ in Bezos’s paper, and quoting a Surrealist proclamation from the 1925 pamphlet, Surrealist Revolution: ‘We do not accept the laws of economy or exchange, we do not accept the slavery of work, and on an even wider scale we proclaim ourselves in revolt against history’. (The Times version was more conservative.) Susik begins her continuum of refusal with the labour shortages after World War I – the context for Surrealism 1.0 – and connects it to the current ‘lying flat’ movement in China.

‘It is remarkable that the post-pandemic labour shortage and “Great Resignation” we are seeing right now in the United States resembles in significant ways the post-pandemic world that the surrealists confronted in the early and mid-1920s’, Susik told me. When France was recovering from a severe postwar labour shortage that had lasted for years, ‘the surrealists refused to comply’, she said. ‘They pulled the ultimate “big quit”’.

An actual dialectic, a deep, political connection that neither settles nor determines, was there from the start. Breton was engaging with socialism and Marxist thought before Surrealism officially began. In 1924, he was talking with the young Socialists of Clarté magazine, engaging, arguing, and trading spicy editorials. Breton and Aragon joined the French Communist Party in January of 1927 and then proceeded to have a series of splits over time with each other and the party. Pierre Naville, a Surrealist who stayed committed to Communism, reflected about all of this in 1989: ‘Indeed, the attitude of the Surrealists scarcely depended on their relationship with political goals, in the practical sense. The majority of them, Breton foremost, were concerned primarily with literary success’. I asked Alan Rose, author of Surrealism and Communism: The Early Years (1991), how this played out. ‘Naville, more than any other group member, understood why Marxism could not accept surrealist principles and was far ahead of the group in endorsing a Trotskyist, rather than Stalinist approach to world revolution’, Rose said. ‘For Naville, the political change preceded the artistic one’.

And at the time, years before Haiti, Breton lived up to the picture that Naville gave us. In the Second Manifesto, written in 1930, Breton wrote, ‘Surrealism is not interested in giving very serious consideration to anything that happens outside of itself, under the guise of art, or even anti-art, of philosophy or anti-philosophy – in short, of anything not aimed at the annihilation of the being into a diamond, all blind and interior, which is no more the soul of ice than that of fire’. This is the syllabus Breton, the better-known version, the Hegelian hothead who was generally opposed to authority even as he accrued it.

There are plenty of reasons to think surrealizing and Surrealism are both healthy now, fulfilling the purpose Michael Löwy described in 2001: ‘a movement of the human spirit in revolt and an eminently subversive attempt to re-enchant the world’. Long associated with American Surrealism, Will Alexander recently published a new book of poems, Refractive Africa (2021), anchored by a long piece called ‘THE CONGO, For the resistance rendered by Casimiro Barrios & Fela Kuti’. Alexander has the same ability to combine states of being and perception as Cesaire and Aragon: ‘as Congolese we replicate the impossible / our physical structure seemingly capable of the bizarre / in Western terminology we remain a dazed compounding / where our body gains no equated merit of itself’.

I see a great deal of surrealizing on Instagram and TikTok, where accounts like @Succ.exe and @onylshitpostsIG mash together sound and image for sequences that tell no linear story and can barely be explained. Two electric drills, joined at the bits, dance on a garage floor to a soundtrack of farts. Post it! Or you can go to hypnogram.xyz, and let AI make you a personalized exhibit. This was what the prompt ‘dark bottle animals Dali’ spat out:

The last time I saw the Met exhibit, I went with Sarah Leonard, publisher and co-editor of Lux. While we walked around, she said that it was a relief to see something in a museum that made her laugh. I emailed her after the show to ask if Surrealism seemed like it had any kind of organic relationship to the work of emancipation. ‘The element of surprise and delight in surrealism feels like a taste of the world I’d like to live in, or like class struggle through the looking glass’, she wrote back. Leonard also reminded me that Angela Carter loved surrealism. ‘She always said that we needed both Marx and Freud’, Leonard said, ‘and I agree’.

Read on: Michael Löwy, ‘Surrealism’s Nameless Soldier’, NLR 29.