The big bang never came. Eastern European communism has disappeared softly and almost without revolutionary ceremonial. Pushed to one side, gone underground into a social subtext from which it continues to bring about transformations of the political. The Bulgarian philosopher and cultural theorist Boyan Manchev (born in 1970) is tracing the structures that have arisen from a joint non-experience. As part of the research project »The Post-Communist Condition«, which the German Federal Cultural Foundation is carrying out at the ZKM in Karlsruhe, Manchev is working on a theory of political representation at the level of bodies.

[b]Schenke:[/b] In your project »The Body of Pleasure« you are working at a theoretical level on certain fractures in the post-communist situation. Could you outline the phenomena you are analyzing?

[b]Manchev:[/b] I am trying to work on the representation of the newly established community in the former Eastern-bloc countries and the attempt to build a new order of self-representation in these societies. I am especially interested in the suppressed side of this new symbolic order, which I think sometimes works at a deep, profound and invisible level. I am interested, for instance, in the representation of violence in Eastern European societies. This is one of the first points of reference from the Western point of view – that these are violent societies, that there is a mafia and people are killing each other. Of course, the huge change from one political and economical system to another unavoidably led to these kinds of phenomena. But how can one deal with them? For me, something which is very problematic in Eastern European societies is the obsession with big criminals. In Eastern societies, they are regarded almost as stars. This is extremely obvious in Russia, but also in other countries. So you have these new semi-mafioso figures who are sometimes killed by their rivals. In such cases, the media are very interested in the details of the event, and not in a very ethical way - they don’t carry out any investigation - but they like very much to publish photos of dead people. And in a way this is symptomatic.

[b]Schenke:[/b] Symptomatic with regard to what?... Under communism there were the embalmed bodies of leaders that were worshipped from a reverent distance. What does this shift of the symbolic object mean?

[b]Manchev:[/b] If I may be allowed to refer to a German philosopher, Walter Benjamin: he wrote an essay »Kritik der Gewalt« in which he presented the very interesting thesis that ordinary people – which is a very ambivalent expression (at the time, Benjamin sympathized a lot with the ideas of Carl Schmitt, and Carl Schmitt adored this essay) - unconsciously identify with criminals because, for them, the really big criminal, the monopolist of violence, is the state that is suppressing them. And that is why they see the figure of the criminal as a kind of Robin Hood: a tragic figure who dares to resist this monopolist of violence, the state. Doing violence to what is most violent. And, although this psychological explanation of Benjamin is, of course, problematic, I think it is absolutely true that, from the very foundation of the political order, there is this strange possibility of the political leader and the criminal swapping places.

[b]Schenke:[/b] Like the Hegelian master and slave?

[b]Manchev:[/b] Yes, if you like. I think that is an interesting analogy. For instance, to be more concrete, you know that in the case of Ceausescu it was not clear at all whether the trial was a legal trial or not: that is why it was called a revolution. But what does “legal” mean? Legal from the point of view of the legal system established by Ceausescu himself? Or legal from the point of view of human rights? It is obvious that this trial was carried out in a brutal way. It bordered on summary execution, the simulation of a trial.
And, at the end, you remember that the corpse was shown, the corpse of the former “king” – his dead body was exhibited like the body of Louis XVI during the French revolution. But it was exhibited as the body of a criminal. And we saw the same sort of thing recently when Saddam Hussein was arrested by the American army: he, too, was exhibited as a criminal.

[b]Schenke:[/b] Making the criminalization of the leader the founding element of a new political order…

[b]Manchev:[/b] Of course this exchange of the roles is something very ambivalent, and it is inscribed in the foundation and the political structure of modernity. But we should not forget that the modern political idea is related to the idea of the delegation of one’s life to the abstract body of the community. This means that, if you are the potential subject of a death sentence, if you could be killed, executed by the society, it guarantees the protection of your life by this society. This especially applies to the figure of the king, of the leader. This became obvious when there was a change of the political order and the head of the political system was literally cut off. This means that the person who dominates a given political order is risking his life in the Hegelian sense of the master, and that is the price for being the symbolic head of that political order. That is why I think that public exhibitions of the corpses of big criminals and those of former state criminals are profoundly similar.

[b]Schenke:[/b] The criminal representing the violent establishment of order and the fact that it can be sublated (to use your term for the Hegelian »Aufhebung«) by violence any time?

[b]Manchev:[/b] In the case of Bulgaria, the former dictator and communist leader was not killed or even put into prison; he was only kept under arrest in his own fantastic villa. There was a trial, but he died before the sentence was handed down. So this was, once again, a peaceful transition; there was no violence towards the former political leader. But, at the same time, I think that this representation of violent scenes, of the dead corpses of criminals, has something to do with resistance to the monopolist of power, which, according to Benjamin, is the state. Because in the former Eastern European countries, especially in the Soviet Union, and also perhaps in the Baltic countries, or Slovakia, Ukraine, Romania, Bulgaria, there is an ongoing discourse that governmental power - official power - and mafia are the same thing. And that is why the dead body of the criminal, from this point of view, is symbolically also the dead body of state power. ... But it is not true. Of course, there are connections, but it is not the general rule, and if you make this claim, you risk creating a dangerous homogenization that suppresses real, critical political thought, real, civil social positions, and the structures of civil society. And I think that these kinds of claims could, as a sublation of this negative power, produce a new body, a body of anti-modern, communitarian, homogenous people – a people of the extreme right or the extreme left. This risk should be neutralized by all possible means.

[b]Schenke:[/b] Violence as a leitmotif for Eastern Europe – is this Western projection a response to a cliché or to a form of self-perception and public discourse in the post-communist countries?

[b]Manchev:[/b] This discourse on violence is a discourse, which means it is auto-referential. It does not necessarily reflect a real situation. The symptomatic appearance of these violent representations does not necessarily mean that this is an extremely violent society. On the contrary, because I have the chance to travel a lot, I am able to say that Sofia is an extremely safe city.
When I speak of violence, it is really like the mafia gang wars in Chicago in the 1930s. This means there are group of criminals that destroy each other. So it does not really relate to ordinary people. But what is interesting to me is that this is exactly the discourse of violence found in popular literature, mass literature, and, I think, also in mass cinema. On the other hand, in contemporary art, elitist art, this problem of the representation of violence exists, but is not really related to the concrete situation in Bulgaria. This has been very influenced by philosophers like Georges Bataille, or even by the ecstatic ideas of people like Herman Nitsch in Austria. This is an artistic movement on the border between radical avant-garde and conservative gesamtkunstwerk that really experiments with violent representations, which, by the way, are not so much accepted in the West nowadays, interestingly enough. For example, Javor Gardev’s radical interpretation of Marat/Sade by Peter Weiss, which provoked negative reactions not only from conservative and right-wing intellectual circles, but also from the left, because he was in a way deconstructing, ironizing the idea of the revolution. Because in the post-communist situation this idea is a failed project.

[b]Schenke:[/b] You describe »the creation of law by violence«, something which brings Derrida to mind. What do you mean by saying that »the law is an outlaw«?

[b]Manchev:[/b] That is already the interpretative side of this phenomenon. The French Revolution was a violent, political event that changed an existing political order through violence and imposed a new political order. The Russian revolution, the Soviet revolution did the same. Communist regimes in the former Eastern bloc were, of course, established in a different way: they were imposed from the outside. But, nevertheless, there was a local communist movement, local forces, that also contributed to this violent establishment of a new political order. For instance, in the case of Bulgaria there was a famous people’s trial during which a number of people from the former economic, political and cultural elite were sentenced to death or expatriated. This was really a symbolic murder of the former elite, through which a new political system and order were imposed that also had social dimensions: it meant that new social groups came to power, and they, of course, tried to impose power in all possible ways. But in the case of the so-called »velvet revolutions« at the end of the communist period, we did not have the same kind of violent revolutionary solutions.

[b]Schenke:[/b] Except in Romania...

[b]Manchev:[/b] The Romanian revolution is, of course, another question. But I think Jean Baudrillard interpreted it correctly as a kind of virtual revolution, created through media and reacted to through media. But, in any case, there we had an example of the symbolic decapitation of the king. Ceausescu, the dictator, was killed. This was the same type of founding violence as, say, in the French revolution, which in a way is a modern archetype, the prototype of starting up a new political order. But in the other post-communist countries, even in the Soviet Union, the perestroika started peacefully and the change took place in the end without any bloodshed.

[b]Schenke:[/b] That sounds as if you see that as a problem. Is this symbolic decapitation necessary to legitimize the new order? What results from a relatively non-violent sublation of communism?

[b]Manchev:[/b] That is the big problem. People discovered later that this change was very ambivalent. For, in a way, it was initiated primarily by people from the Communist Party, the secret service. This made it a kind of organized event, which meant, I think, a frustration of this euphoric, hedonistic, erotic – in the widest sense – power of the people. I think that this power and desire for a new form of political existence was frustrated at some collective level. That is why people in most of these European countries often became very disappointed by the political realities of the so-called transition to democracy – and that is, I think, synonymous with the post-communist condition. And from this point of view, the lack of this founding moment of violence was really a problem.
What I am saying now could be interpreted as if I were claiming that the violence should have taken place. But that is exactly what I do not wish to say. The big problem faced by these societies was to find new possibilities of political existence without initial violence, without any brutal interruption, without – if you like - any symbolic bloodshed. Unfortunately, however, this hope, cherished particularly by the Eastern elite, was not fulfilled, and, in a sense, this has caused the upsurge of violence in Eastern European societies as a sublimation of the unsublated power, of the constitutive power of the people.

[b]Schenke:[/b] »Foundation« is a classic term in discourses of modernity. You describe post-communist societies as moving from a radical to a less radical modernity. However, from a Western perspective, Eastern Europe seems to be moving from a pre-modern Balkan culture to Western modernity.

[b]Manchev:[/b] This is a really crucial point that underlines the very complex interaction between the gazes of the East and the West. Communism was one of the most radical political projects of European modernity, born of utopian socialism in France. It was then, obviously, developed by Marx and Engels and became a real political project in the Soviet Union. The fact that it succeeded in the eastern part of Europe does not mean that this is not a European project.
So when I say that communism is the radical fulfilment of modernity, I mean that it has the structural dimension of modern political ideologies par excellence: imposing the absolute equality of all citizens, abolishing what the communist ideologists called »the classes«. At the same time, it was an attempt at radical technical modernization in the sense of the technologization, industrialization of society. Not to forget the radical abolition of religion. That was the same idea of secularization that had its roots in the Reformation and was radicalized during the Enlightenment. So these structural features of communism were some of the most radical features of modernity itself.

[b]Schenke:[/b] But the Soviet bloc had rather reactionary features, too. How does that fit »radical modernity«?

[b]Manchev:[/b] We should be aware of the fact that in this ideology there were many features that we could call anti-modern. The most important of these is revealed in the very name of the project: “communism” - it reflects the idea of community, Gemeinschaft, which in itself is not an anti-modern idea, but a very fundamental European one with religious connotations, coming from the Christian notion of »communitas«. Ferdinand Tönnies, the famous sociologist, makes a distinction between Gemeinschaft as an organic, natural community, and Gesellschaft as an artificially created affiliation. The communist project, on the one hand, wanted to form an organic community, a body of people and, on the other, tried to create a new type of social connection. So it reproduced an ambivalence immanent in the very concept of modernity – an anti-modernity at the very heart of the modern political project.

[b]Schenke:[/b] The failure of communism as a failure of classical modernity?

[b]Manchev:[/b] I don’t want to undermine the notion of modernity, which is a very important notion, especially in the German context. But there is a difference between the notion of modernity as a historical period and the axiological or ideological notion of »modern«. Ideologically, of course, modernity is positive, but that doesn’t mean that the whole modern historical period was positive: it is exactly the period in which the most terrible political realities in Europe took place, i.e. the totalitarian regimes. So I think that communism was a radicalization or hypertrophy of modernity in which it reached its own limits: the limits of the modern side and the anti-modern side of modernity.
I would like tell you a story that I saw in a documentary. In the art academies of the twenties, during the Lenin period, when the most radical avant-garde artists like Malevich, Rodchenko and Kandinsky took charge of the institutions – which was, by the way, not a bad thing from the point of view of the history of art, as the poor old conservative professors were kicked out - when students were painting a naked model, a nude, the students themselves were naked along with the model. The idea was that when someone is naked, it is in a way a humiliation of this person, so everyone should be naked to radically establish equality between all individuals.
But, at the same time, this representation of naked bodies was also related to these new social ideas of a new communitarian body, of a new organic, homogeneous communal body. This notion, however, always presupposes the exclusion of heterogeneous elements, as depicted in Plato’s Republic – Plato in a way agreed with the Spartan tradition of killing weak children, etc.. I think this idea – in a way, an anti-modern one - of organic, bodily community was already inscribed in the very idea of political modernity.

Results from the research project »The Post-Communist Condition« will be presented from 10-12 June at the international congress of the same name in »Das Moskau« in Berlin. For more information on the project, please visit the web site www.post-communist.de.

 

Translated by Timothy Jones

 

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