Stalin as Postmodernist

Postmodernism is often thought of as an anti-totalitarian movement, especially when "totalitarianism" is understood to describe an ideology that totalizes, that applies its worldview to every facet of human life without exception, and most especially when this worldview is in some way seen as derived from a dogmatic "meta-narrative" that explains and gives meaning to history.  Thus, the foremost theorist of postmodernism, Jean-François Lyotard, describes postmodernism as a epoch characterized by a skepticism towards over-arching metanarratives, summing it up with the slogan "Let us make war upon totality."  Postmodern culture emphasizes the incomplete, the fragmentary, the pastiche, the intersectional, the patchwork of contrasting and sometimes incompatible worldviews that co-exist with a certain unavoidable tension.  Postmodernist politics are characterized by their focus on the local, the micro-level of politics, rather than any pretensions to the global and world-historical.  But I want to rethink this, to complicate it and problematize it, by pointing out how Stalin, that paradigmatic example of a "totalitarian," might also be thought of as a postmodern.

I've remarked before that postmodernism is the cultural logic of detente.  By this, I do not mean that postmodernism began in the 1960s, perhaps during the presidency of Richard Nixon.  Far from it.  After all, in that same earlier essay, I began by mentioning postmodern literary figures such as the Marquis de Sade and Miguel de Cervantes, asserting that postmodernism came before modernism.  Likewise, detente was not invented in the 1960s - as a geopolitical strategy, it can be traced back far earlier.  (It is true, nonetheless, that the 1960s were a period in which, paradoxically enough, in the midst of enormous worldwide cultural turmoil, detente became relatively culturally predominant.  Especially after the terror of the Cuban Missile Crisis, "peace" became the watchword.)

It should be understood that I regard postmodernism as a fundamentally conservative ideological formation of cultural logic - or at the very least, it is the fragmentation of the universalist aspirations of progress.  In specific times and places, postmodernism can function in a way that is downright reactionary.  In general, as I've already indicated, postmodernism is defined by a skepticism towards metanarratives, and especially towards metanarratives of historicism - of "History with a capital H".  But this has two meanings, as it were.  If we take Lyotard at face value, then the Marquis de Sade and Cervantes could indeed be considered postmodernists - not to mention Shakespeare, or even Gorgias.  But let's face it: Lyotard and his ilk mean something much more historically specific when they talk about postmodernism.  When they complain about "History with a capital H," what kind of metanarrativity, in particular, is seen as radically historical?  It is, of course, that tradition that includes both Hegel and Marx.  There are, of course, other historical metanarratives - Judaism and Christianity, for instance, and especially some of their apocalyptic, millenarian variants, such as those of Joachim di Fiore, Giambattista Vico, or more recently Vladimir Solovyov.  But although each of these worldviews perhaps enjoyed a certain sovereignty over history, they nonetheless were not purely or exclusively Historical metanarratives that prided themselves in a pure Historicism; on the contrary, they explicitly pointed to that which is beyond history - the transcendental, the Eternal.  I assert that, in the 20th century, the movements which we collectively call "postmodernism" - architectural, artistic, cultural, political, etc. - this "postmodernism" was not really the wake of all and sundry metanarratives, as it is sometimes asserted to be, but rather of specifically one and only one metanarrative: Marxism in its role as an overarching worldview and giver of meaning to history.  (Which is not the only way of interpreting Marx: Michael Heinrich is one of many examples of a non-"worldview Marxism").  After the collapse, or failure, of this function of Marxism, there were still Marxists, to be sure, but no longer was there a clear epoch-making schematism for history.  It was no longer clear what was the way forward to the future, and what was the way back to the past.  As a result, many turned back and became traditionalist reactionaries, whether they saw themselves that way or not.  Postmodernism can be understood, to a large degree, as the disorientation of Marxism.  (I'll add: this disorientation was, in part, both deliberate and successful.)

So I regard Stalin as a postmodernist precisely to the extent that he was a cultural conservative - which I see as the predominant tendency of Stalinism.  Stalin's role here is key, exemplified in his famous phrase regarding left-deviationists and right-deviationists, "They are both worse."  Stalin was a master of triangulation, which was a sharp departure from Lenin's political strategy, which had been to co-opt, occupy, and take over the positions of the leftists, even as he denounced them.  No longer would the Bolsheviks put themselves forward as the representatives of the left end of the political spectrum.  Perhaps this was inevitable for a ruling party.  Whatever may be the case, Stalin's postmodernism could be summarized as the self-liquidation of the party as an organ of the international proletariat's ascension to self-rule.  

The early days of the Russian Revolution had been characterized, culturally, by a bold and thoroughgoing Futurism: Mayakovsky, Lunacharsky, the Constructivists, the Imaginists, Alexandra Kollentai's experiments with free love and the dissolution of the family, and the rest of the Russian avant-garde, who sought to push everything "off the side of steamship of the modern," rejecting all of traditional culture, rejecting everything from the 19th century and even rejecting Marinetti, desiring to start all of human society over again, creating everything from nothing.  They sought even to recreate language itself.  

But by the time of the ascendancy of Stalin, the mood had shifted.  A new conservatism had engulfed Russia - specifically Russia and not the entire U.S.S.R..  The traditional family was reasserted, free love was rejected, traditional gender roles returned, avant-garde art fizzled out and then was denounced, replaced with Bolshevik state-sanctioned heroic "Socialist Realism," tight controls were put on culture, literature, and music, including extensive censorship and pervasive surveillance, a climate of extreme nationalism and patriotism became utterly ubiquitous, and by the time of World War II, Stalin was even making a rapprochement with the Russian Orthodox Church.  (Mussolini had made his peace with the Roman Catholic Church decades earlier; the fascists, too, were postmodernists.)

The postmodern turn is the turn towards language - the "linguistic turn".  The turn towards language is a turn towards nationalism - the specific kind of nationalism that arose in the 20th century, the "right of nations to self-determination," as it emerged out of 18th and 19th century Romantic forms of nationalism, which were quite different (but also deeply involved in the philosophy of language - see, for instance, the work of Herder, Fichte, the Schlegel brothers, Kleist, etc.).  This "right of nations to self-determination" was embraced in somewhat different ways by both the Wilsonian west and the Leninist east (and subsequently also in another way by the Non-Aligned Movement).  It should be unsurprising, therefore, that Stalin intervened in theory on the questions of nations and of language. 

It is tempting to say that postmodernism is an attempt at dehistoricizing politics, of transmuting the politics of time into the politics of space.  (Perhaps the most postmodern thing that has ever been done, the most cartoonishly postmodernist act - and the primary aesthetic of postmodernism is cartoonishness - is the Yevreyskaya Oblast, the attempt to deal with the question of Jewish autonomy by putting Jews over there.)  But it is more complex than that.  Postmodern theorists are historical, in a way, but bewilderingly historical.

Stalin was a postmodern Marxist, and Lenin was a transitional figure, between modernism and postmodernism.  Perhaps the fundamental transition occurred with the failure of the German Revolution in 1918, for this represented the breakdown of what Lenin, Stalin, and others had understood as the Marxist schematism of history - the final disproof of Lenin's theory of imperialism.  After that, everything had to be reinterpreted.  History had to be revised.  Material reality had to be rearranged to fit the theory.  The state chose to dissolve the existing material world and elect a new one.  Thus truth had to be abandoned.

In 1936, Stalin was merely affirming what everyone already knew - that the U.S.S.R. was not, and had never been, engaged in pursuing its stated goals.  It had never been a Marxist country, and had never been pursuing the goals that Marx had outlined - and what goals were those, anyway?  They seemed to vanish as if they had never existed.  It had all been a "tragicomic misunderstanding."

It's amazingly appropriate that Stalin uses the term "tragicomic," since tragicomedy characterizes postmodernism as a whole.  Indeed, one way of understanding postmodernism is precisely through its tragicomic character - that is to say, in the way that both tragedy and comedy problematize the heroic.  (It is in this sense that Sade was a postmodernist - his work can be seen as the tragicomic extension, elaboration, and problematization of the logic of the heroic idealism of the French Revolution - in a way, as its reductio ad absurdum.)

 

Some might complain that I am taking Stalin's remarks too literally, that he did not in fact mean what he said, that this was nothing but a rhetorical feint and that in inwardly he was still scheming towards world revolution.  Of course, that may be so, and in fact I find it quite likely.  But that only proves my point, for nothing is more characteristic of postmodernism than the disappearance of truth, understood in a universal sense, and of good faith in discourse.  When Stalin told the world that he no longer aspired towards its universal domination, was he lying to us?  Or was he lying to himself?  Or both?  Or neither?  Does it matter?  Whatever he meant, back then in 1936, the meaning of these words changed in 1945 and the meaning of the memory of these words also changed.  (See my article, "The Bomb and Antism.")  In 1945, the "world" ceased to exist.  From then on, there were only "spheres of influence." 

Understanding this may allow us to grope our way towards an understanding of what is meant by postmodern politics.  It also can help us understand what is meant by Stalinism.  Some people - Trotskyists, especially, and also certain "left-communists" - like to assert that they are loyal followers of Lenin's theoretical work, and yet they decry Stalinism as "the revolution betrayed," by the "gravedigger of the revolution."  But what, exactly, is the difference between Leninism and Stalinism?  Recent scholarship, opening the Russian archives, has at least to some degree dispelled the notion that Stalin was a cynical manipulator who never had believed in the official ideology of the Bolshevik regime and merely used it to advance his way up the bureaucratic hierarchy.  Instead, the picture that emerges from his private writings and so on is that he was a true believer throughout his career, and saw his own policy as the continuation of Lenin's policy and as the consistent application of Marxist theory.  Even if that is true - a difficult pill to swallow - a noticeable shift is apparent after Stalin triumphed in the power struggle after Lenin's death.  But how can we characterize this shift, exactly, and how can we explain why it occurred?  Were the changes simply due to external forces, out of the hands of Stalin and the rest of the Politburo?

It is tempting to say that, politically, postmodernism can be defined, not as not so much as the refutation of an ideology but merely as it's abandonment.  (Specifically, of course, here, we are thinking not of the refutation of Leninism, but merely the abandonment of Leninism.)  No, that's not quite it - it's something less than abandonment.  There's a cunning kind of dialectic to Stalin's movement: he both abandoned and did not abandon Marxism-Leninism.  It was abandonment without abandonment - less than nothing (much as we can speak of lawfulness without a law, or fatalism without a fate).  Precisely by asserting Marxism-Leninism as a concrete utterance, that is to say as a word, Stalin robbed it of its substantive meaning.  Marxism-Leninism became a floating signifier; or, he revealed that it was always-already a floating signifier, a tragicomic misunderstanding.  His message was: "Marxism-Leninism means whatever we (the Party) say it means.  It can mean anything and everything, or nothing, depending on what is pragmatically useful to us."  Stalin was the Andy Warhol of politics, a virtuoso of subversive affirmation.  In the perfect postmodern move of pure difference, difference without a difference, Stalinism changed Marxism-Leninism without changing Marxism-Leninism.  Marxism-Leninism became virtual: all of its properties were still there, but it had ceased to exist.

The shift to postmodernism is uncannily inactive: it is not a critique of metanarratives, but merely an incredulity towards metanarratives.  Indeed, postmodernism is extremely uncritical.  In the case of Stalin - a paradigm case of the postmodern attitude, if ever there was one - the problem was precisely a lack of criticism.  It is precisely his failure to critique Lenin and Marxism that made him abandon Marxism.  He became incredulous towards the metanarrative of Marxism precisely because he believed it too much.  It is precisely our capacity to critique metanarratives that keeps them alive.  Once we stop thinking critically about them, they die.  In order to keep the Marxian analysis of political economy alive, it is necessary to challenge each and every one of its presuppositions, ruthlessly.