In writing we call “non-fiction,” do premises always need to be solid to be accepted? Couldn’t they sometimes require the same suspension of disbelief that Coleridge said fiction demands? Belief, properly suspended, might lead to interesting conclusions that a more rigorous analysis would make impossible. Take, for instance, the argument Boris Groys makes in a chapter of his book Art Power (2008) called “Beyond Diversity: Cultural Studies and Its Post-Communist Other.”

In this typically Russian critique of Western values, Groys traces post-Soviet Russia’s desperate search for a national idea to the universalizing aspirations of neoliberal principles like diversity, pluralism, and multiculturalism. In order to fit into the mosaic of world cultures dictated by a Western “end of history,” Groys argues, each minor nation, including Russia, has to build its own national identity—a series of ethnic, cultural, and historical tokens and talismans—which it can then contribute to the multicultural richness of the world community. To build this argument, Groys has to make a few patently counterfactual moves. He first frames Russia as a country traumatically deprived of its past, one where the history of the Soviet Union has been discarded, and all but forgotten leaving behind it nothing but a void. There is no Russian national character. No history. No culture.

A void, of course, cannot satiate the world’s hunger for diversity, so Russia has to fill its emptiness with something. It has to invent a Russianness to palliate pluralism, otherwise it will be rejected from the world community, denied its rightful place at the table alongside turbaned and kimonoed representatives of other recognizable ethnic nationalities. Framed this way, the surge in Russian nationalism over the last decade or so can be seen not (in the typical way) as an illiberal re-entrenchment that rejects Western values, but rather as the unavoidable result of neoliberalism’s enforced universalism.

Even retracing this argument requires significant verbal gymnastics—laced, here, with a dose of sarcasm. Nevertheless, if we suspend disbelief and resist the urge to argue with every premise as Groys introduces it, the argument makes a certain kind of sense. Its internal mechanics work, even if the world it depicts—that of a Russia vulnerable to Western values and desperate to fit into a world community—seems far removed from a reality we would recognize as our own. On its own terms (which I would characterize as fictional or historically fantastical) the argument manages a somewhat satisfying conclusion. The mechanisms of neoliberal geopolitics push actors towards behavior that is opposed to the value systems those mechanisms ostensibly represent. It’s an interesting conclusion and adds some necessary complexity to the more familiar tale—perhaps equally fictional, though based on more acceptable premises—in which a reactionary “evil East” growls unprovoked as the good witch of the West smiles from a benevolent distance.

As with much speculative fiction, Groys’s argument works as a laboratory in which he tests an argument that might be more applicable outside of his immediate (and fictional) subject matter.

Still enchanted by Groys’s fantastical cultural analysis, I attended a workshop hosted here at Columbia on “The New Wave of Russian-Jewish Cultural Production,” which provided a context more appropriate to Groys’s line of thinking. The presentations in the workshop analyzed works by Russian-Jewish authors, poets and musicians, who had emigrated from Russia. Many presentations paid particularly close attention to how the cultural identities of both authors and characters interacted with the demands of Western cultural markets where “the immigrant experience” promises both a return on publishers’ investment and a rather rigid set of genre expectations.

In one example, Anna Katsnelson (CUNY) drew the workshop’s attention to the various depictions of the title character in Anya Ulinich’s graphic novel Lena Finkle’s Magic Barrel (2014). When Lena thinks back on her childhood, Ulinich’s drawings emphasize her typically Jewish features—hooked nose, frizzy black hair—which fade as Lena comes to the United States, integrates into society, and builds an identity for herself that is not exclusively Jewish. But the structure of meaning created through the novel itself (which becomes central to the plot and to Lena’s personal development) would be impossible if not for Lena’s traumatic memories of childhood. In other words, without the typically Jewish characteristics that imposed a feeling of otherness on Lena’s childhood, no cultural product is produced, certainly not one that can thrive in a U.S. book market hungry from portraits of diversity.

Elizaveta Mankovskaya’s (Princeton) paper, “How Michael Idov Became a Russian,” presents perhaps a clearer example of how the forces of Western markets can impose diversity. Michael Idov’s novel Ground Up (2009) traces the semi-autobiographical history of two immigrants’ attempt to start a coffee shop in lower Manhattan. Idov, who is a Russian Jew, apparently submitted a first draft centered around immigrants of indistinct provenance. Their salient characteristic, he argued, was their outsider status vis-à-vis New York, not their place of origin. But, according to Idov, the publisher insisted that he add cultural specificity. Make them Russian Jews. Talk about why they left Russia. Weren’t they persecuted? At least a little? In the published version, the characters are from Russia, but of indistinct ethnicity, a compromise Idov says he fought for.

Neither of these examples touches on the upsurge in Russian nationalism within Russia’s borders. Neither of them attempts to ascribe the ethnic tensions in Moscow’s markets, or the rise of the Natsboly or other neofascist groups within Russia to the demands of Western values. That would be patently absurd. Or fictional, like Groys’s chapter.

Of course, Groys also leaves out these more disturbing aspects of Russian nationalism, and instead builds an argument based on a series of fantastic premises that works only so long as it stays hermetically sealed off from Russia’s real situation. Or if it is transplanted into another context. Groys’s argument finds a much more fitting home in the world of Russian-Jewish immigrants attempting to find a place within Western cultural markets. Here, market forces seem to demand tokens of national identity, making authors search for them, or even create them from whole cloth, when they are not organically there. The international need for diversity might demand ethnic specificity after all. It’s probably not the root of Russian nationalism, but it might contain a broader truth—in the way all the best fiction does.

top

Blog Archive