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Practicing the Good: Desire and Boredom in Soviet Socialism
A philosophical consideration of Soviet Socialism that reveals the hidden desire for capitalism in contemporary anticapitalist discourse and theory
This book, a philosophical consideration of Soviet socialism, is not meant simply to revisit the communist past; its aim, rather, is to witness certain zones where capitalism’s domination is resisted—the zones of countercapitalist critique, civil society agencies, and theoretical provisions of emancipation or progress—and to inquire to what extent those zones are in fact permeated by unconscious capitalism and thus unwittingly affirm the capitalist condition.
By means of the philosophical and politico-economical consideration of Soviet socialism of the 1960 and 1970s, this book manages to reveal the hidden desire for capitalism in contemporaneous anticapitalist discourse and theory. The research is marked by a broad cross-disciplinary approach based on political economy, philosophy, art theory, and cultural theory that redefines old Cold War and Slavic studies’ views of the post-Stalinist years, as well as challenges the interpretations of this period of historical socialism in Western Marxist thought.
This book, a philosophical consideration of Soviet socialism, is not meant simply to revisit the communist past; its aim, rather, is to witness certain zones where capitalism’s domination is resisted—the zones of countercapitalist critique, civil society agencies, and theoretical provisions of emancipation or progress—and to inquire to what extent those zones are in fact permeated by unconscious capitalism and thus unwittingly affirm the capitalist condition.
By means of the philosophical and politico-economical consideration of Soviet socialism of the 1960 and 1970s, this book manages to reveal the hidden desire for capitalism in contemporaneous anticapitalist discourse and theory. The research is marked by a broad cross-disciplinary approach based on political economy, philosophy, art theory, and cultural theory that redefines old Cold War and Slavic studies’ views of the post-Stalinist years, as well as challenges the interpretations of this period of historical socialism in Western Marxist thought.
304 pages, Paperback
Published July 7, 2020
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About the author
Keti Chukhrov
13 books4 followersKeti Chukhrov is a ScD in philosophy, and an associate professor at the Department of Сultural Studies at the National Research University Higher School of Economics. In 2012-2017 she was head of the Theory and Research department at the National Center of Contemporary Art, Moscow, where she founded the research platform Theoretic Inquiry in Cultural Anthropology (TICA). Her full-length books include: To Be—To Perform: ‘Theatre’ in Philosophical Art Criticism (European University, 2011), and Pound &£ (Logos, 1999) and two volumes of dramatic writing: Merely Humans (2010) and War of Quantities (2003). Currently she is a Marie Sklodowska Curie fellow in the UK at Wolverhampton University. Her research interests and publications deal with 1.The impact of socialist political economy on the epistemes of historical socialism 2. Philosophy of performativity, 3. Art-systems and 3. Neo-humanism in the conditions of post-human theories. Her forthcoming book deals with the communist epistemologies in the Soviet Marxist philosophy and culture of the1960-s and 1970-s. With her screenplay “Love-machines” she participated at the Bergen Assembly (2013) and “Specters of Communism” (James Gallery, CUNY, NY, 2015). Her latest screenplay “Communion” was in the program of the Kansk video film festival (Moscow, 2016) and at the Ljubljana Triennial U-3 “Beyond the Globe (2016, cur. B. Groys). Her play “Love-machines” is since 2016 in the repertoire of the Stanislavsky electrotheatre (Moscow).
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
August 16, 2021
Brilliant and frustrating collection of essays linked by the thesis that all the objections of western leftists to 'real socialism' showed their persistent adherence, albeit disavowed, to capitalist values, and by association, drew attention to those societies' deeply communist values. Various post-68 (esp French) thinkers are accused of this (imo, accurately), and there's some fascinating stuff in here on mainstream Soviet culture (especially film, linguistics and philosophy) to reinforce the argument. Its argument is hindered, not helped, by a weakness for Boris Groys-style grandly gnomic absurd pronouncements ('only commodities that incarnated socialist values could have been produced in the USSR!') and a suspicion that certain amount of it is a sophisticated wind-up might not be entirely off the mark, but intriguing and often thrilling anyway, an intellect going full pelt.
September 23, 2020
In “Practicing the Good” Keti Chukhrov uses the mechanisms of poststructuralism to reassert the goodness of life in the Soviet Union. Chukrov has for some time attempted to build dialogues between Soviet and Continental philosophy and this book demonstrates much of the progress of her thought. The book is fresh and bold in its thinking, and nothing if not provocative.
Chukhrov makes the helpful observation early on that the Nietzsche-inspired philosophies of poststructuralism posit norms as constraints and power as always malign. She contrasts this with sites like the Zagorsk school for deaf and blind children where norms/objects are appropriated for relative dealienation. Post-structuralist thinkers form the debate partners for the book and lead to interesting readings of Soviet thinkers like Lifshitz in a post-structuralist register. The later chapters on Ilyenkov offer a focused and comprehensive exposition of his thought (particularly in the discussion of substance) as well as making creative and helpful suggestions about the span and implications of his thought. There are however other aspects of the book I have more trouble with.
On the first television conference between the US and the USSR in 1986 a member of the audience was given the microphone and in answer to a question, said “There is no sex in the USSR...”. Her brief pause was filled with laughter from across the auditorium and the rest of her sentence was not heard but the phrase became a t-shirt slogan. In “Practicing the Good” Chukhrov presents a defense of the t-shirt slogan and a universe in which it, or perhaps nothing, is funny. She asserts with Platanov that in Soviet societies “We live at the time when sex is devoured by thought”.
Chukhrov argues that the “poverty” and “squalor” we can see in the Soviet Films which were officially endorsed by the USSR (as opposed to the apparently inauthentic Tarkovsky) are seen as such by us only through the fetters of our libidinal capitalist gaze. The same for the failed soviet attempts at the design and distribution of domestic goods. What needed to to be appreciated was that all this was in fact an expression of socialism and was to be experienced as an advance to higher forms of life, transcending the individual and bourgeois concepts like “welfare” or the expectation that films should entertain. One of the ambiguities in the book is whether this aesthetic assessment is to apply also apply to the poverty and squalor felt actually experiences by people living in the USSR - there appears to be no gap between intended meaning and actual experience - this blurred boundary is consistent with the books' overall thesis/ontology and seems through this very act to undermine it.
Chukhrov tells us that under really existing socialism sexual perversion and indeed libido in itself ceases and “On the contrary excessive action is manifested elsewhere – in labour, ethical deeds, social responsibility, art, and culture. It becomes the zeal and toil of dedication rather than pleasure or jouissance.” There is something to this critique. Liberal feminism is busy protecting legalized sex work on sites like OnlyFans rather than tackling the financial problems that lead many women to such platforms. Engels and others have discussed how liberating communism would be for women in freeing them from such commodification. But how far can we take this thesis? Chukhrov takes it to the very end.
Against a list of thinkers from Freud to Lyotard Chukhrov states that under socialism the problem of the death drive is solved because “desire stops being libidinal” and all are satisfied by the higher purpose of collective good. As a perverse trace of the real, there is a brief reference to statistics on the rate of sexual intercourse in the USSR vs. US. Having asserted the problematic status of individual desire and of the limitations of Althusser’s theory of the subject, Chukhrov adopts a vision of the USSR as it might be gazed at by a foreign diplomat greeted by Anatoly Lunacharsky. Throughout the book I find myself asking “but for who?” and “says who?” This question has in some sense been anticipated. To use Mark Fisher’s phrase, it is for the “harsh Leninist superego” who might judge our lack of purity of vision or failure of commitment to the cause. Chukhrov claims, “The economy of use value eliminated in socialist culture, and it was superseded by the languages of enthusiasm, zeal, and amorousness.” How do we know this? “we know from Foucault” - or at least it is with his help that we can raise the status of “languages” in order to undermine our criteria for truth and allow Chukhrov to perform an act or archeology which sets free a brand new Soviet Union from its now dead dry rubble. For instance to dilute the our revulsion at Stalinist terror, our attention is drawn to how more widespread Stalinist practices of shunning and shaming actually originated in the Russian Orthodox church. It is this hauntological Soviet Union around which the book is centered. This is a Soviet Union which has not died, whose death is not questioned, and in which there is no question of death. This is a universe which can only function by substituting utilitarian concepts like "amorousness" for "love". The other side of Chukhrov’s thesis drawn from Lyotard, who suggested a direct connection between the economy, production and desire. Chukhrov reasserts Lyotard’s gesture against itself to point to an outside of Capital, buried in its own past but Other to itself - in Soviet Communism. But Chukhrov sidesteps the centre of Lyotard’s own project: the impasse we are left in by Capitalism which, under post-Fordism, has now invaded every part of our lives, deterritorializing everything we might have identified with as part of any progressive social movement.
"the English unemployed did not become workers to survive, they — enjoyed the hysterical, masochistic, whatever exhaustion it was of hanging on in the mines, in the foundries, in the factories, in hell, they enjoyed it, enjoyed the mad destruction of their organic body which was indeed imposed upon them, they enjoyed the decomposition of their personal identity, the identity that the peasant tradition had constructed for them, enjoyed the dissolution of their families and villages, and enjoyed the new monstrous anonymity of the suburbs and the pubs in the morning and evening"
The impasse for any actual political change is that whatever society is to come will have been a society in which Facebook and Amazon have existed. When Chukhrov claims accelerationists are about “excelling over alienation. Which means accepting its conditions”. It is unclear what it would mean to not accept these conditions. Chukhrov is happy to go along with “Old Man Marx” and find enjoyment in simply repeating a reading of a particular structure defined by its non-Capitalism. This is a Communism without revolution, or at least without any indication of who will carry it out and who will be the proletariat. There’s certainly no sense in “Practice the Good” that Communism will form of its own accord through a class movement. The question of what workers would want from a new society is precluded ahead of time.
At times Chukhrov seems to suggest that the Soviet Union had put an end to desire right up until the fall of the Berlin Wall. She claims that it is only coming out of the socialist culture that women became sexualized again. But later in the book she accepts that some residual bits of libido did stubbornly hang around and block Communism from fully becoming. She is fairly plain in what we must do in the face of this extra trace of libido: we must “unlearn sin” - those who feel it, must be brought to see their own sin and must recognize that they are sinners and, as has effectively worked for organized religion throughout the centuries, to thus expel all lustful thought and action from their spirit and put their faith in the higher goals of a Communism which will live after they are dead. Perhaps such a thing will naturally happen, after all, Chukhrov claims “In socialist society sublime and unimaginable phenomena pervaded the everyday as if they were common, habitual, and even unremarkable things.” Do not ask to whom, for whom, or by what standard.
This is an original book, well grounded in mainstream debates in contemporary philosophy, on which it takes novel positions. It’s jam packed with ideas I have not explored here. This book is a helpful foil for future discussion, even if problematic in itself.
Chukhrov makes the helpful observation early on that the Nietzsche-inspired philosophies of poststructuralism posit norms as constraints and power as always malign. She contrasts this with sites like the Zagorsk school for deaf and blind children where norms/objects are appropriated for relative dealienation. Post-structuralist thinkers form the debate partners for the book and lead to interesting readings of Soviet thinkers like Lifshitz in a post-structuralist register. The later chapters on Ilyenkov offer a focused and comprehensive exposition of his thought (particularly in the discussion of substance) as well as making creative and helpful suggestions about the span and implications of his thought. There are however other aspects of the book I have more trouble with.
On the first television conference between the US and the USSR in 1986 a member of the audience was given the microphone and in answer to a question, said “There is no sex in the USSR...”. Her brief pause was filled with laughter from across the auditorium and the rest of her sentence was not heard but the phrase became a t-shirt slogan. In “Practicing the Good” Chukhrov presents a defense of the t-shirt slogan and a universe in which it, or perhaps nothing, is funny. She asserts with Platanov that in Soviet societies “We live at the time when sex is devoured by thought”.
Chukhrov argues that the “poverty” and “squalor” we can see in the Soviet Films which were officially endorsed by the USSR (as opposed to the apparently inauthentic Tarkovsky) are seen as such by us only through the fetters of our libidinal capitalist gaze. The same for the failed soviet attempts at the design and distribution of domestic goods. What needed to to be appreciated was that all this was in fact an expression of socialism and was to be experienced as an advance to higher forms of life, transcending the individual and bourgeois concepts like “welfare” or the expectation that films should entertain. One of the ambiguities in the book is whether this aesthetic assessment is to apply also apply to the poverty and squalor felt actually experiences by people living in the USSR - there appears to be no gap between intended meaning and actual experience - this blurred boundary is consistent with the books' overall thesis/ontology and seems through this very act to undermine it.
Chukhrov tells us that under really existing socialism sexual perversion and indeed libido in itself ceases and “On the contrary excessive action is manifested elsewhere – in labour, ethical deeds, social responsibility, art, and culture. It becomes the zeal and toil of dedication rather than pleasure or jouissance.” There is something to this critique. Liberal feminism is busy protecting legalized sex work on sites like OnlyFans rather than tackling the financial problems that lead many women to such platforms. Engels and others have discussed how liberating communism would be for women in freeing them from such commodification. But how far can we take this thesis? Chukhrov takes it to the very end.
Against a list of thinkers from Freud to Lyotard Chukhrov states that under socialism the problem of the death drive is solved because “desire stops being libidinal” and all are satisfied by the higher purpose of collective good. As a perverse trace of the real, there is a brief reference to statistics on the rate of sexual intercourse in the USSR vs. US. Having asserted the problematic status of individual desire and of the limitations of Althusser’s theory of the subject, Chukhrov adopts a vision of the USSR as it might be gazed at by a foreign diplomat greeted by Anatoly Lunacharsky. Throughout the book I find myself asking “but for who?” and “says who?” This question has in some sense been anticipated. To use Mark Fisher’s phrase, it is for the “harsh Leninist superego” who might judge our lack of purity of vision or failure of commitment to the cause. Chukhrov claims, “The economy of use value eliminated in socialist culture, and it was superseded by the languages of enthusiasm, zeal, and amorousness.” How do we know this? “we know from Foucault” - or at least it is with his help that we can raise the status of “languages” in order to undermine our criteria for truth and allow Chukhrov to perform an act or archeology which sets free a brand new Soviet Union from its now dead dry rubble. For instance to dilute the our revulsion at Stalinist terror, our attention is drawn to how more widespread Stalinist practices of shunning and shaming actually originated in the Russian Orthodox church. It is this hauntological Soviet Union around which the book is centered. This is a Soviet Union which has not died, whose death is not questioned, and in which there is no question of death. This is a universe which can only function by substituting utilitarian concepts like "amorousness" for "love". The other side of Chukhrov’s thesis drawn from Lyotard, who suggested a direct connection between the economy, production and desire. Chukhrov reasserts Lyotard’s gesture against itself to point to an outside of Capital, buried in its own past but Other to itself - in Soviet Communism. But Chukhrov sidesteps the centre of Lyotard’s own project: the impasse we are left in by Capitalism which, under post-Fordism, has now invaded every part of our lives, deterritorializing everything we might have identified with as part of any progressive social movement.
"the English unemployed did not become workers to survive, they — enjoyed the hysterical, masochistic, whatever exhaustion it was of hanging on in the mines, in the foundries, in the factories, in hell, they enjoyed it, enjoyed the mad destruction of their organic body which was indeed imposed upon them, they enjoyed the decomposition of their personal identity, the identity that the peasant tradition had constructed for them, enjoyed the dissolution of their families and villages, and enjoyed the new monstrous anonymity of the suburbs and the pubs in the morning and evening"
The impasse for any actual political change is that whatever society is to come will have been a society in which Facebook and Amazon have existed. When Chukhrov claims accelerationists are about “excelling over alienation. Which means accepting its conditions”. It is unclear what it would mean to not accept these conditions. Chukhrov is happy to go along with “Old Man Marx” and find enjoyment in simply repeating a reading of a particular structure defined by its non-Capitalism. This is a Communism without revolution, or at least without any indication of who will carry it out and who will be the proletariat. There’s certainly no sense in “Practice the Good” that Communism will form of its own accord through a class movement. The question of what workers would want from a new society is precluded ahead of time.
At times Chukhrov seems to suggest that the Soviet Union had put an end to desire right up until the fall of the Berlin Wall. She claims that it is only coming out of the socialist culture that women became sexualized again. But later in the book she accepts that some residual bits of libido did stubbornly hang around and block Communism from fully becoming. She is fairly plain in what we must do in the face of this extra trace of libido: we must “unlearn sin” - those who feel it, must be brought to see their own sin and must recognize that they are sinners and, as has effectively worked for organized religion throughout the centuries, to thus expel all lustful thought and action from their spirit and put their faith in the higher goals of a Communism which will live after they are dead. Perhaps such a thing will naturally happen, after all, Chukhrov claims “In socialist society sublime and unimaginable phenomena pervaded the everyday as if they were common, habitual, and even unremarkable things.” Do not ask to whom, for whom, or by what standard.
This is an original book, well grounded in mainstream debates in contemporary philosophy, on which it takes novel positions. It’s jam packed with ideas I have not explored here. This book is a helpful foil for future discussion, even if problematic in itself.
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