LRB | Vol. 28 No. 12 dated 22 June 2006
http://www.lrb.co.uk/letters.php
Authoritative Discourse
From Alexei Yurchak
Sheila Fitzpatrick describes my position in Everything Was For Ever, Until
It Was No More, as ‘postmodern’, which she takes to be the belief that there
is no reality outside language or discourse (LRB, 25 May). In fact, my book
argues the exact opposite: not only that there is a real world outside
language, and that it is impossible for language ever to account for that
world in full, but that this is precisely why alternative realities and
internal displacements were part of late socialism yet remained ‘invisible’
(unaccounted for in language) until the collapse of the Soviet state. Some
‘postmodern’ theories reduce reality to language and Soviet socialism to
postmodernism (e.g. Mikhail Epstein’s model), but I argue that Soviet people
were able ‘to engage in the production of new forms and meanings of reality
that were tangible, multiple and grounded in the real world . . . Contrary
to Epstein’s claim that “reality that differed from the ideology simply
ceased to exist,” that different reality, in fact, exploded into the Soviet
world in powerful, multiple and unanticipated forms.’ Fitzpatrick is
incorrect, too, that the book’s object is to study the causes of the
collapse of the Soviet Union. She claims that ‘one would have to be very
committed to a belief in the “primacy of language” [her phrase] to accept
the notion that the “profound internal displacement” [my phrase] within the
Soviet system that led to its collapse had only discursive causes.’ In fact,
my book neither argues for the primacy of language nor claims that the
internal displacement of the late Soviet system had ‘only discursive
causes’. Instead, it argues that this displacement was a product of a
particular relationship between authoritative discourse and the forms of
social reality for which it could not fully account. Furthermore, the book’s
object of analysis is not ‘the causes for the collapse but . . . the
conditions that made the collapse possible without making it anticipated’.
The question is not what led to the collapse, but why it was not expected.
Finally, according to Fitzpatrick, I claim that ‘the Soviet collapse was a
totally hermetic, circular process.’ The book does not make this claim,
which she nonetheless goes on to dispute: ‘The perestroika that Gorbachev
initiated was surely an intervention, not part of a circular process.’ In
fact, the point of the book’s theoretical argument is that perestroika was
not part of the circular process. Gorbachev, I wrote, ‘unwittingly broke
with the circular structure of authoritative discourse’ and reintroduced
‘the voice of an external commentator or editor of ideology who could
provide expert metadiscourse grounded in “objective scientific knowledge”
located outside the field of authoritative discourse.’
It is Fitzpatrick’s slighting of theory that causes these problems. To
understand major social ruptures – in this case, why the Soviet collapse was
so unexpected, not only by Soviet citizens but also by external analysts and
scholars – requires both empirical investigation and theoretical
consideration, not the one rather than the other.
Alexei Yurchak
University of California, Berkeley
LRB | Vol. 28 No. 10 dated 25 May 2006 |
Normal People
Sheila Fitzpatrick
Everything Was For Ever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation by
Alexei Yurchak· Princeton, 331 pp, £15.95
If there is a prize for best title of the year, this book surely deserves
it. Alexei Yurchak, a Russian-born, US-trained anthropologist, has written
an interesting and provocative book about the way young Soviet Russians
talked in the Brezhnev period and what they meant by what they said. For
Yurchak, discourse is everything: there is no ‘real world’ outside the world
we construct via language. He argues that socialism really existed in the
Soviet Union because people not only talked the talk (as they had to do) but
at some level actually believed it. He also proposes that the Soviet system
collapsed when, and because, people stopped talking the talk: ‘Soviet late
socialism provides a stunning example of how a dynamic and powerful social
system can abruptly and unexpectedly unravel when the discursive conditions
of its existence are changed.’
Anthropologists usually get their information by talking to people, but if
the information you want is about the past this technique doesn’t work: by
definition, Russians are not talking Soviet anymore. So Yurchak had to
become a quasi-historian and look for documentation of past ways of talking,
which he did quite ingeniously. It helped that he was a native Soviet
speaker. ‘The last Soviet generation’ is Yurchak’s own, which means that the
book, despite its disguise as Western theoretically-informed anthropology,
has a submerged relationship to a favourite Russian genre, the ‘history of
my generation’, non-confessional autobiography that tells the story of a
milieu rather than a person.
But the disguise is heavy. Homi Bhabha, Claude Lefort, Slavoj Zizek, Jean
Baudrillard, Jacques Lacan, Tzvetan Todorov, Julia Kristeva, Judith Butler:
an extraordinary range of theorists is included. Derrida, Bourdieu,
Habermas, De Certeau and Althusser are not forgotten, and even Freud (though
not Marx) makes it into the bibliography. We hear about Foucault on
modernity, Chakrabarty on postcolonialism, Austin on performative language,
Tassi on masks and Deleuze on the rhizome. We are instructed about
deterritorialisation, hypernormalisation and manifest intertextuality.
Sentences beginning ‘In a critical reading of Butler’s discussion of
performativity, Saba Mahmood draws on Butler’s Foucauldian point’ may be
left forever unfinished by some readers, perhaps unfairly, as the sentence
in its entirety usually makes sense and has some relevance to Yurchak’s
argument. As the profusion of luminaries suggests (and my list is only
partial), Yurchak is not writing within a particular theoretical framework.
Rather, he selects whatever serves to illustrate his own ideas and insights,
which seems to me preferable to selecting a theoretical template and then
finding data to fit it. Yurchak, in short, has something of his own to say;
he just feels that he has to legitimate it by authoritative citation.
In any case, only the first hundred or so pages are truly weighed down by
theory. The good stuff comes in the five chapters in which he deals with the
conventions of Komsomol talk, alternative lifestyles, the imagined West,
rock music and jokes. While part of Yurchak’s data comes from memoirs and
post-Soviet recollections of the 1970s and 1980s, he is well aware of the
problems with this type of source: at the best of times people backread
current attitudes into the past, but in this case all the informants had
just been through a revolution that cast their whole understanding of the
past into question. So Yurchak looked for personal documents from the 1970s
and 1980s: diaries, letters, written notes, drawings, jokes, slang, music
recordings, amateur films. He got them partly by placing advertisements in
newspapers, first in St Petersburg, then in Moscow and six provincial
cities, asking people for ‘personal writings, diaries and correspondence’ to
document ‘our feelings and experiences of the Soviet years’, and urging that
‘these . . . important historical documents . . . not be allowed to vanish’.
Many people responded (Yurchak does not give any precise information), most
of them in their thirties and forties, and most of them well-educated.
Yurchak also had his own experiences and memories, though he rarely cites
them directly and rejects the label of ‘native anthropologist’, given his
fifteen years in the United States and his intellectual re-formation in an
American graduate school.
His inquiry starts from the premise so eloquently expressed in his title:
that to Soviet citizens, the Soviet system seemed unchanging and eternal –
until it suddenly disappeared. ‘Although the system’s collapse had been
unimaginable before it began, it appeared unsurprising when it happened.’
That is the book’s initial paradox. During the perestroika period, many of
his informants reported experiencing ‘a sudden “break of consciousness” and
“stunning shock” . . . quickly followed by excitement and readiness to
participate in the transformation’. Strangely enough, this epiphany did not
typically occur in a public setting, or in response to some dramatic event.
It usually took place while reading, and resulted in more reading.
Perestroika, which made possible the publication of all sorts of hitherto
inaccessible work, from the religious philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev to George
Orwell and Nabokov, is described by Yurchak as primarily a ‘discursive
deconstruction’ of the late Soviet system. He in turn wants to look at
discourse – both the formal discourse of newspaper editorials and
politicians’ speeches and the way ‘normal people’ talked in public and to
each other – to explain his opening paradox.
Yurchak is critical of Western scholarship’s assumption that everything in
the Soviet Union was ‘bad’ and ‘immoral’, and so regarded by its citizens;
that Soviet citizens were brainwashed into believing what ‘the regime’
taught them; and that those who rejected Soviet discourse were substituting
‘truth’ for ‘lies’. He also dislikes the idea that Soviet culture was
strictly divided into ‘official’ and ‘unofficial’, public and private, and
that people used distinct voices, languages and value systems in the two
contexts. Yurchak isn’t keen on ‘binaries’. But it’s more than a binary that
makes him dislike the idea that Soviet-style socialism ‘was based on a
complex web of immoralities’. As he sees it, socialism (in the way Soviet
Russians understood it) was a moral system, and it was alive and
surprisingly well in the late Soviet period. According to his informants,
the socialist value system, which people regarded as both theirs and Soviet,
embraced such fundamental values and ideals as ‘equality, community,
selflessness, altruism, friendship, ethical relations, safety, education,
work, creativity and concern for the future’. His informants didn’t of
course think that these values were fully and consistently expressed, either
in everyday life or in official ideological pronouncements, which they often
found boring and formalistic. Igor, a provincial Komsomol organiser in the
late 1970s, despised the Komsomol’s ‘tedious formalism’ yet he felt
‘personally invested in what he saw as its collective ethos and concern for
the common good’; his parents were both doctors, and he saw the government’s
basic concern as ‘caring for people, free hospitals, good education’.
Mikhail, similarly, ‘had always thought’ that the ‘actual idea’ of socialism
was ‘profoundly correct and that this was how things should be . . . I had
realised,’ he said, ‘that there were distortions . . . But I thought that if
we managed to get rid of them everything would be great.’
A key term in Yurchak’s analysis is ‘authoritative discourse’, which for the
lay reader means something like ‘the Party line’. For theorists, it is a
Bakhtinian concept used to describe discourse that has a special autonomous
status, independent of other discourses, which have no power to ‘interfere
with its code and change it’ but must ‘refer to it, quote it, praise it,
interpret it, apply it’; authoritative discourse, consequently, is
experienced as something that can’t be questioned, as immutable. Once upon a
time, Yurchak says, it was considered important that people stick to the
substance as well as the rhetoric of the Party line. But by the post-Stalin
period all that had changed: ‘the performative dimension of authoritative
discourse started to play a much greater role than its constative dimension’
– i.e. all that mattered was using the right form of words. Soviet
authoritative language was formal, stilted and highly stylised. It involved
frequent quotation, not just from the masters of Marxism-Leninism, but also
from itself; often whole blocks of language were borrowed from one
authoritative text for use in another. Certain constructions became
obligatory; argument had to be structured in a certain way; particular nouns
had their own correct adjectives.
This was the language not just of newspapers and ideological pronouncements
but of public life at all levels, and its clichés found their way (often
with ironic and parodic inflections) into informal Soviet talk as well.
Sometimes, as we know, people resented having to reproduce Soviet
authoritative discourse. But Yurchak shows – and this is one of his original
and useful contributions – that they often enjoyed it, for its rhetorical
élan when performed straight or in the equally popular parody version.
Masha, a high-school Komsomol committee member in Kaliningrad in the
mid-1980s, fell in love with authoritative discourse early on (‘Even as a
child I was always impressed by such serious and unclear phraseology’) and
learned to reproduce it so well that ‘often I would be unable to explain
what I wrote in my own words.’
Authoritative discourse had to be used in any official context, from a
Pravda editorial to a district Komsomol meeting or a school essay on Lenin.
This meant that everybody had to master it, and one of Yurchak’s questions
is why and in what spirit they did this. While even Komsomol secretaries
often regarded reproduction of the discourse as empty formalism, Yurchak
believes that this did not imply complete cynicism and indifference to
socialist ideology, for it was possible – indeed, normal – to make a mental
separation between ritual and values. The question, ‘Do you support the
resolution?’, which always had to be answered affirmatively, had nothing to
do with substance; according to Yurchak, its real meaning was: ‘Are you the
kind of people who understand that the norms and rules of the current ritual
need to be performatively reproduced?’ When local Komsomol secretaries
appealed to others to fulfil ritual requirements (attend meetings, vote for
resolutions, turn out for parades), their appeal was often based on
friendship and group solidarity: in effect, ‘Don’t make waves so that we can
all have a quiet life and/or get on with the things we really want to do.’
Although in theory all Komsomol officers were ‘activists’, by the late
Soviet period the term was reserved in ordinary speech for the minority of
enthusiasts whose insistence on literal reading of content as well as strict
observance of form was an embarrassment to the Komsomol majority, who
considered themselves ‘normal people’ – neither ‘activists’ nor
‘dissidents’. ‘Dissidents’ were even more of a minority than activists; in
fact, hardly any ‘normal people’ ever met a real dissident, although they
knew about them from the newspapers. They did, however, know a few
individuals with dissident inclinations (dissidentstvuiushchie), and
generally perceived them to be sick people, with ‘a screw loose’.
A good deal of Yurchak’s story has to do with alternative lifestyles,
fascination with the West, rock music and jokes: late Soviet phenomena that
scholars often put in the category of ‘resistance’. Yurchak dislikes this
idea because it involves a ‘them’ and ‘us’ binary and implies that rock
enthusiasts and joke-tellers were necessarily anti-Soviet. In his view,
Soviet structures not only tolerated but actually ‘enabled’ such informal
activities. He points out that some of the distinctive milieux that emerged
in the late Soviet period – the privileged world of Dubna’s theoretical
physicists, for example – were generously supported by the state.
‘Authoritative discourse’ encouraged interest in the West in some contexts
and discouraged it in others. Some foreign broadcasts were jammed even as
(state) production of shortwave radios soared, along with that of
tape-recorders (magnitofony), which made possible the rapid nationwide
dissemination of Western pop.
This argument is generally convincing, though it shouldn’t be pushed too
far. With regard to jokes (anekdoty), it’s true that in the great age of
joke-telling from the 1960s to the late 1980s, there were a few jokes about
dissidents to offset the thousands of ‘anti-Soviet’ jokes, and true, too,
that many of the jokes about the quirks of Soviet life were not
‘anti-Soviet’ in the way Westerners thought, being wryly directed against
‘us’ rather than bitterly against ‘them’ (the regime). No doubt Yurchak is
right, too, to reject the crude assumption that any young adult who wanted
to play Red Indians in an imagined American West (a weird fantasy game of
the 1980s and early 1990s described by the anthropologist Jennifer Rayport
Rabodzeenko) or spend all day talking philosophy in Leningrad’s Café Saigon
was ipso facto rejecting socialism and the Soviet regime, or indeed making
any kind of political comment. Yet it’s not unreasonable to regard dropping
out as a kind of resistance – as in the ‘boiler room’ phenomenon, in which
young people gave up professional careers in favour of jobs as watchmen,
loaders and street-sweepers so as to have more time to pursue their
intellectual and cultural interests unimpeded. ‘Enabled’ may be too active a
verb for the role that official Soviet institutions and discourse played in
the proliferation of new ideas and practices in the late Soviet period; I
would say that these developed, as Frederick Starr put it, in the
‘interstices’ of official structures. Working with the monolithic concept of
‘authoritative discourse’, Yurchak is too inclined to make a monolith of
Soviet institutions. Where there was simultaneous official discouragement
and encouragement, this was often because one Soviet institution discouraged
while another (whether because of policy disagreement or simple lack of
attention) did the opposite.
Perhaps the most interesting chapter in the book, and the one that best
illustrates Yurchak’s thesis that people who responded to the new in the
late Soviet period were not necessarily rejecting what they understood as
socialism, is the one about rock music. Rock was often condemned as a
degenerate Western import in Soviet authoritative discourse (Yurchak
publishes in its entirety a wonderful official document from 1985 listing
various pop groups whose songs were ‘ideologically harmful’ in various ways:
the Sex Pistols – ‘punk, violence’; Pink Floyd – ‘distortion of Soviet
foreign policy’; Tina Turner – ‘sex’ and so on). But the ‘last Soviet
generation’ fell in love with rock. ‘Normal people’, including local
Komsomol officers, often did not take the official condemnation seriously;
and Soviet institutions often ‘enabled’ the craze by providing venues for
rock concerts. The interesting point that emerges from Yurchak’s data is how
firmly some enthusiasts rejected the idea that rock and Soviet values were
incompatible, and how unworried they were when ideologists said the
opposite. Andrei, a Komsomol secretary in Leningrad, believed in socialism –
he retrospectively described his gradual loss of belief in the late 1980s as
his ‘personal tragedy’ – but accepted only part of the official position on
bourgeois popular culture (he agreed that capitalism tended to commodify
art, but not that rock was evil or anti-Soviet) and was an enthusiastic
organiser of rock concerts. Alexandr from Novosibirsk said that ‘the
building of Communism is the task of my life,’ yet regularly bought rock
records on the black market with no sense of incongruity. For him, as for
many of his generation, rock was a gateway to ‘deep truths’ as well as an
avant-garde aesthetic perfectly compatible with Communism, with its
orientation towards the future. Told that a Soviet professor of aesthetics
considered rock trivial, Alexandr responded (using impeccable SovietSpeak in
a private letter to a friend) that she must be a ‘dogmatist’ without vision
or imagination who ‘lagged behind’ his generation.
Yurchak’s general theory about the enabling function of authoritative
discourse becomes clearer when we look at the case that may be closest to
his heart, its reproduction in a particular genre of absurdist humour known
by the slang word styop (stiob in Yurchak’s American transliteration, but
the English version is truer to pronunciation: a crisp one-syllable styop).
Styop, a late Soviet product, was ‘a peculiar form of irony that differed
from sarcasm, cynicism, derision, or any of the more familiar genres of
absurd humour. It required such a degree of overidentification with the
object, person or idea at which [it] was directed that it was often
impossible to tell whether it was a form of sincere support, subtle
ridicule, or a peculiar mixture of the two.’ Styop was often used to comic
effect in private correspondence, mock-formal invitations and so on. It
became famous, at least in avant-garde circles, through its deployment by a
Slovene rock group, Laibach, and a Russian one, AVIA (Yurchak was once its
manager). Laibach’s specialty was to overidentify with the ‘serious, heroic,
and slightly terrifying part of Communist symbolism’, mixing this with some
Nazi ‘Blut und Boden’ symbols, but in a way that was more suggestive of punk
than politics. AVIA drew on specifically Soviet imagery: in its
‘performances up to twenty actors in workers’ overalls fervently marched in
columns, shouted slogans and “hurray”, and built human pyramids. In the role
of “young builders of Communism” they looked so cheerfully zealous that
sometimes it all verged on insanity.’ Some people thought AVIA pro-Soviet,
others anti, but in Yurchak’s opinion both were wrong. What can confidently
be said is that AVIA – like the omnipresent anekdoty of the Brezhnev period
– was a deeply Soviet phenomenon in the sense that without Soviet
authoritative discourse it couldn’t have existed.
Does all this help to explain Yurchak’s initial paradox? Yes, insofar as he
shows how an increasingly detached way of reproducing authoritative
discourse could prepare the ground for an apparently sudden repudiation of
it. But does his argument really work? Perhaps, as he would have it, the
Soviet collapse was a totally hermetic, circular process whereby ‘the more
the immutable forms of the system’s authoritative discourse were reproduced
everywhere, the more the system was experiencing a profound internal
displacement . . . Reproducing the system and participating in its
continuous internal displacement were mutually constitutive.’ Yet the
perestroika that Gorbachev initiated was surely an intervention, not part of
a circular process; and one would have to be very committed to a belief in
the ‘primacy of language’ to accept the notion that the ‘profound internal
displacement’ within the Soviet system that led to its collapse had only
discursive causes.
Yurchak doesn’t so much argue the idealist case as take it for granted:
untypically, he fails even to cite theoretical authority for his position.
The reason, perhaps, is that the primacy of language is one of the givens of
the postmodern theory in which he was educated at graduate school. Or, to
put it another way, it is the cornerstone of the Western academic
‘authoritative discourse’ of postmodernism. I found Yurchak’s explication of
authoritative discourse quite illuminating in this context, as well as the
Soviet one. To understand postmodernism’s obsessive habits of citation and
intertextuality, its esoteric lexicon and striking deference to authority –
to grasp why, to paraphrase Bakhtin, it is imperative always to refer to the
canonical theoretical works, quote them, praise them, interpret them and
apply them – we clearly need a theoretical paradigm that has so far been
lacking. Take Masha, the Komsomol leader with an aptitude for Soviet
authoritative language who ‘memorised a lot of phraseology and learned how
to create special constructions instead of the ordinary ones used in
everyday language’. Consciously or not, she was seeking both to bond with
the community of users of this particular authoritative discourse (the
Soviet equivalent of the Masonic handshake) and to appropriate some of the
mysterious power of the ritual itself:
by meticulously citing these multiple levels of authoritative form, from
concrete phrases and words, to structural principles, temporal modalities,
and voices, Masha gained access to Bourdieu’s ‘delegated power of the
spokesperson’. The more faithful the language of her speeches and reports
was to the authoritative form, the more she inhabited the position of
‘authorised spokesperson’ of the ideological institution and therefore the
more she was endowed with its ‘delegated’ power.
Without labouring the analogy between Masha’s deployment of authoritative
discourse in one world and Yurchak’s in another, it may be helpful to turn
once again to Yurchak’s useful concept of styop. Yurchak’s work might be
considered a styop tour de force, a performance in which mastery of
Postmodern discourse wins admiration regardless of content, were it not for
the fact that the book is full of new and interesting ideas. Styop is the
wrong idiom for that, and Yurchak is doing himself and his readers a
disservice by so extravagantly wrapping his message in theory. At the risk
of intertextual ambiguity, I cannot resist a final word of advice: styop it.
Sheila Fitzpatrick teaches at the University of Chicago. Her most recent
book is Tear off the Masks! Identity and Imposture in 20th-Century Russia.
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