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The rule of reality and the reality of the rule (on Soviet ideology and its “shift”)

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Abstract

The present article is a critical engagement with Aleksei Yurchak’s Everything Was Forever until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation. It contends that, as rich as Yurchak’s insights on the language culture of Brezhnev’s Stagnation have proven to be, his account ends up seriously misrepresenting the Stalinist episode in the life of Soviet ideology. This misrepresentation is due, in large part, to the problematic use of post-structuralist models, and particularly of Claude Lefort’s theorization of ideology in the modern era. Through a re-examination of Lefort’s “Outline of the Genesis of Ideology in Modern Societies,” the present article advances an alternative understanding of the discursive “shift” in Soviet ideology. Yurchak has argued that, before being set afloat in the 1950s, Soviet official discourse was held together through the figure of the “external master,” Stalin himself. The master is able to mask what Yurchak terms the “Lefort paradox” of Soviet ideology and which he glosses as the divergence between ideological enunciation and ideological “rule.” Yet Yurchak misreads Lefort’s theory, and specifically the latter’s references to “master” and “rule.” When these terms are restored to their proper theoretical significance, it becomes possible to formulate in a new way the contradictory duality at the heart of Soviet ideology. The article contends, contra Yurchak, that this is not the duality of enunciation and actual exercise of power; but rather the split internal to ideological discourse, between the “rule of reality” and the “reality of the rule.” The “shift” of Soviet ideological discourse begins as a slippage between these two ideological representations, and not as the removal of some anchor external to representation.

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Notes

  1. Yurchak also describes this contradiction as one between “goals and means” (2006a, 14, 40). And in a response to Sheila Fitzpatrick’s (2006) review of Everything Was Forever…, he writes of the “relationship between authoritative discourse and the forms of social reality for which it could not fully account” (Yurchak, 2006b). In all these formulations, the opposition between ideality and actuality is in plain view.

  2. “Now ideology requires a new interpretation as soon as we refuse to define it in relation to a supposed reality” (Lefort, 1986b, p. 189).

  3. In an echo of Althusser’s (1971) notion of ideology as interpellation, Lefort writes: “[The] universal assumes the task of inserting those who are dominated into their condition of domination and providing those who dominate with the assurance of their own position” (1986b, p. 191).

  4. See Laclau, 1996, pp. 36–45; Laclau & Mouffe, 2001, p. 113; Žižek, 1989, pp. 95–96, 105, 114–115; Žižek, 2007, 119.

  5. For a successful resolution of the Oedipus complex, this foundational act of socialization, the child must come to perceive the father as a bearer of an impersonal law, rather than regard him as an adversary whose superiority is due to his personal endowments. With the “Name of the Father” (le nom du père) Lacan always implicitly refers to this mechanism by which the human individual comes to function as a signifier of the social law (le “non” du père, the prohibition of incest). Also implicit in the theoretical setup is the non-substantiality, “emptiness,” of whatever comes to play the role of a master signifier. It is not who the father is, what he actually “has” (the penis), that matters for the child, but just the fact that he stands in for the law, his “representativity,” so to speak. For the child, the name of the father comes to name the symbolic order as such.

  6. See Žižek, 1999, p. 192–195, where he explicitly draws on Lefort and references Stalin and Stalinism; and, quite controversially, Žižek, 2013b, where he recommends a Thatcher-like Master to the present-day political Left.

  7. The two are integrally related, of course. The subject “happens” in the very same moment in which the ideological effect “happens.” They are one and the same event.

  8. As one example, here is how Herbert Marcuse (1958, p. 87) characterizes the language of Soviet Marxism: “They are unqualified, inflexible formulas calling for an unqualified, inflexible response. In endless repetition, the same noun is always accompanied by the same adjectives and participles; the noun ‘governs’ them immediately and directly so that whenever it occurs they follow ‘automatically’ in their proper place. The same verb always ‘moves’ the proposition in the same direction, and those addressed by the proposition are supposed to move the same way. These statements do not attribute a predicate to a subject (in the sense of formal or of dialectical logic); they do not develop the subject in its specific relations—all these cognitive processes lie outside the propositional context, i.e., in the ‘classics’ of Marxism, and the routine statements only recall what is preestablished. They are to be ‘spelled,’ learned mechanically, monotonously, and literally; they are to be performed like a ritual which accompanies the realizing action.”

  9. On the “emptiness” of master-signifiers, see Laclau, 1996; Žižek, 1989, pp. 108–110. See also footnote 10.

  10. “[I]ts role is purely structural, its nature is purely performative—its signification coincides with its own act of enunciation; in short, it is a signifier without the signified” (Žižek, 1989, p. 109). The lack of attributes on the part of the master signifier is correlative to the lack that, according to Lacan, is the subject. This is because the act of socialization through which the subject emerges is also the act that debars the subject from the primary object of desire (the prohibition of incest).

  11. On the tautological nature of point de capiton, see Žižek, 1989, p. 87; Žižek, 1999, p. 320; Žižek, 2013a, p. 537.

  12. See also Lefort, 1986a, p. 215. In another text, Lefort states the issue in terms of political formations: “may not totalitarianism be conceived as a response to the questions raised by democracy, as an attempt to resolve its paradoxes?” (1986b, p. 305).

  13. For example, in Lenin’s early attack on “objectivists”: “Materialism includes partisanship, so to speak, and enjoins the direct and open adoption of the standpoint of a definite social group in any assessment of events” (1967, p. 418–19). For elaborations of this Marxist–Leninist tenet, see: Osnovy marksistskoi filosofii 1962, pp. 325–330; Marksistsko-leninskaia filosofiia 1970, pp. 23–27.

  14. On the dialectics of partiinost’ and scientific objectivity, see Osnovy marksistskoi filosofii 1962, pp. 325–326.

  15. See, for instance, Stalin’s 1920 article “Lenin as an Organizer and Leader,” which begins by opposing two kinds of Marxist party: one that adheres to the letter of the doctrine but is “incapable or unwilling to transform it into life”; and another one, represented by VKP(b), “which shifts the weight from the external recognition of Marxism to its implementation in life” (1947, pp. 305–306).

  16. Largely extracted from Engels’s polemic opus, Anti-Duhring (1878), the text of Socialism: Utopian and Scientific appeared first in French in 1880, with translation by Paul Lafargue. The pamphlet went on to have a more successful publication history, and much wider audience, than the large work in which it originated.

  17. Of scientific socialism, Engels had written that it is “nothing but the reflex, in thought, of this conflict [between the forces and mode of production under capitalism]” (1910, p. 97).

  18. See von Geldern 1992, p. 64.

  19. This echoes such formulations by Stalin as, “We have, in the USSR, a growing upsurge [rastushchii pod”em] of socialist construction and industry, as well as agriculture” (1949c, p. 235; emphasis in the original).

  20. On the question of localization in Stalinist officialese, see Petrov 2013, pp. 600–601.

  21. For instance, in Stalin: “The disagreements in our party arose on the soil [na pochve] of those class transformations, on the soil of that sharpening of the class struggle, which is occurring in recent times and which creates a break in development” (1949d, p. 9; emphasis added); or in this statement from the Short Course: “On this basis was created the soil for a new powerful growth of the kolkhoz movement” (Istoriia 1945, 296). See also footnote 22.

  22. Consider this titanic effort by one of Stalin’s lieutenants, Valerii Mezhlauk, to construct a sentence consisting exclusively of nouns: “The building of the plan for the completion of the reconstruction of the people’s economy [is] one of the hardest tasks” (Mezhlauk 1932, p. 40). In the Russian original, the “to be” verb is omitted, which makes the effect of hyper-nominalization even more pronounced.

  23. Stalin’s oeuvre is replete with similar locutions: “The basis of our grain difficulty consists in the growing pulverization [raspylennosti] and fragmentation of the peasant economy” (1949c, p. 179); “The main link of the five-year plan consisted in industrialization, with its core—machine building” (1951, p. 175). On the penchant for nominalization in the lingua sovietica, see Thom 1989, pp. 21–22.

  24. See footnotes 20, 22.

  25. Stalin’s passion for “bases,” “foundations,” “soils,” “principles” [nachala], and “conditions” is often the reason for the excessive nominalization of his sentences: “On this very basis arise, at the current stage of development, in the given conditions of the relation of forces [v dannykh usloviiakh sootnosheniia sil], a sharpening of the class struggle and an increase in the resistance of capitalist elements in town and country” (1949d, 35; emphasis in the original); or, even more extremely, in this breathless sequence of eight nouns: “[The underestimation] arose on the soil [na pochve] of the incompleteness and insufficiency of some general postulates of Marxism’s teaching on the state” (1997, p. 330).

  26. For an in-depth discussion of the concept of truth implicit in Stalinist cultural ideology, see Petrov 2011.

  27. Consider Stalin’s pronouncement: “The nature of Soviet power excludes any kind of exploitation of the peasantry on the part of the state” (1949d, p. 50). The axiomatic form of this dictum makes it clear that no evidence adduced against it could ever prove it wrong.

  28. The scholarly trend of regarding the official idiom of state socialism as a langue de bois developed during the 1980s. Among its representative texts are: Besançon, 1980, Heller, 1986, Martinez, 1981, Thom, 1989, Weiss, 1986.

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Petrov, P. The rule of reality and the reality of the rule (on Soviet ideology and its “shift”). Stud East Eur Thought 73, 435–457 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11212-021-09433-2

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