The complex post-Socialist sensibility
contains
-- the initial euphoria of the postSocialist countries returning to the
European bosom and soon discovering
their secondary status,
-- the more traditionally subaltern
postcolonial fate of the non-European
Soviet ex-colonies,
-- the bitter post-imperial Russian sense
of defeat which is dangerously
transformed into imperialist
revanchism.
The post-Socialist other was offered to accept
the existing hierarchy of the world where
everyone is assigned a precise and never
questioned place and even being unhappy with
this frozen human taxonomy naturalized by
modernity, is afraid of losing his/her quite
precarious position and of being associated with
those who stand lower, like the global South. In
two decades all of this resulted in a peculiar
postcolonial complex and even fashion within
Europe when the post-socialist people started to
compare their situation with the former third
world and regard the core Europe as a stepmother.
The post-socialist world has had its own trajectory
within the global coloniality. It was far from being
mono-directional or sustained, as the former socialist
countries have been sent through a test of
disappearance, erasing, dispersal and a peculiar
coming back in a retrograde pattern which made us
outcasts both for the global North (the winner) and for
the global South (large leftists parts of which were
disappointed with the failed Socialist modernity). This
unfortunate logic is clear in many spheres, including
the production of knowledge from which the postSocialist subject was effectively expelled. This
trajectory was the opposite of the usual logic of the
non-Western world slowly entering the space of
rationality. In the post-Soviet case the shift is the
reverse, from the second world to the global South or
to a strange limbo of the poor North.
”The post-Communist subject
travels the same route as
described by the dominating
discourse of cultural studies—
but he or she travels this route
in the opposite direction, not
from the past to the future, but
from the future to the past; from
the end of history … back to
historical time. Post-Communist
life is life lived backward, a
movement against the flow of
time”.
Boris Groys
Ovidiu Tichindeleanu: “After a brief period of growth in
the early 2000s, with the onset of the crisis of global
capitalism, Eastern Europe was confronted with the third
depression in three decades... However, since 2008 the
eruption of the crisis within the Western world and the
rise of the Global South has dramatically eroded the
ideological power of post-communist foundational
narratives. In the past three or four years, a wave of
popular movements has risen throughout the former
socialist bloc, at a scale unseen since 1989, leading among
other things to the demise of the neoliberal governments
in Romania and Bulgaria. In other words, the post-1989
civilizational promise of Europe and Occidentalism has
currently reached a critical point of saturation in Eastern
Europe. However, the direction taken by the
accompanying disenchantment and reinvention is by no
means predetermined. Consequently, one is faced today
with the historical task of decolonizing the imaginary and
rebuilding alliances, against the dissemination of
cynicism, ethnocentric nationalism, and postcommunist
racism.”
Most of the post-Socialist countries, prior to the
Bolsheviks, had their own women’s movements, unions,
journals and organizations, at least for several decades.
These gender initiatives were linked with the shaping of
the ideals of the New Woman which was regarded as an
important part of the national liberation movements and
the evolvement of national identities. It is true that early
on there emerged certain tensions between the feminist
agendas and the national(ist) discourses. But by the time
the Soviet Union occupied or reoccupied its “national
peripheries” the local feminist movements already
existed for quite some time and the Bolsheviks had to
erase these previous traditions to impose their version of
modernity like it is happening now when the neoliberal
modernity is being imposed onto the ex-second world.
Emma Asson
Nataliya Kobrynska
The absolute authority of the West as the sole producer of
knowledge was reinstated once again together with its
modern/colonial division of the academic labor making
the local discourses desire to be allowed into the elite
club of those who produce Theory. This effect was
particularly devastating for the emergent women’s studies
which were entirely imported from the West together
with the discourses of development, transition economies,
democratization, human rights and the mantra of the free
market. This logic repeated the civilizing discourses
which are permanently built into modernity rhetoric, but
with a deviation – instead of the downtrodden colonial
women there were the post-Socialist women, who in some
cases were also postcolonial as in the non-European
republics of the USSR.
“The rivalry of two collective projects (the
patriarchal and the communist) that have
disciplined, socialized and exploited women’s
labor and reproductive power for paternal or
common good, already in the 1950s found of
mutual interest the restoration of the discourse of
femininity and domesticity and expanded the
traditional division of family roles to society as a
whole”.
Renata Jambresic Kirin
Svetlana Slapsak: “The carefully cultivated
“wisdom of the colonized” is effective – almost
deadly – in restoring conservative values
imposed as liberation from socialist ideological
constrains, and imposing nationalist discourses
and practices instead, initializing forced silence
and other anthropological signs of power being
distributed through new channels”.
This going back and/or reliving modernization and
emancipation for the second and in many cases even third
of fourth time under the motto of the finally correct
neoliberal modernity has marked the experience of
various post-Socialist women’s movements and feminist
organizations. The post-Socialist subjects were offered
and willingly accepted a sanitized and generalized
Western vantage point to look at our own past and were
allowed to criticize it only from someone else’s
prepackaged perspective. For a while the post-Socialist
feminisms continued to reproduce the catching up
paradigm never exercising our right to assess our own
complex historical experiences and make sense of them
from our own geopolitics and body-politics of perception,
of being, and of gender.
The initial sanctioned ignorance of the West about
the complexity of real situations in the ex-Socialist
countries went hand in hand with efforts to
trivialize the recent history (ab)using it and
accentuating exclusively the sensational images
and stories such as mass rapes, prostitution, drug
and human trafficking usually reaching the West
through the media of journalism and fiction or
cinema, whereas the locally produced academic
knowledge on women, gender inequality, and
discrimination, have immediately become
appropriated by mainstream theorists for the
purpose of imposing the only correct kind of
feminism.
An important step for post-socialist
feminisms would be questioning the
darker side of the Soviet and Socialist
modernity/coloniality helping to
formulate a complex critique and a
positive program for the future which
would not be restricted by either postFordist or post-Socialist, postmodernist or
post-colonial lens, instead of that
attempting to draw a dynamic
intersectional picture and an open dialogic
attitude to others and particularly the
others from the global South with whom
we share a lot yet still are not able to find
a suitable language to communicate.
It is important to attempt looking at the
social reality through a wider than gender
lens. Here we could productively
appropriate Argentinean-American
feminist philosopher Maria Lugones’s
idea of taking gender into account in
understanding of resistance and its
sources, for example, resistance to
neoliberal globalization, instead of
reading gender categories into the texture
that shapes the self, in its relation to
opposition. Then a different logic which
organizes the social-in-resistance would
open. If we refuse to mechanically read
gender into the social, we would be able
to see the organization of the social in
terms, demonstrating a deep conceptual
incongruence in the process of imposing
gender constructs onto our selves. We
need a wider and more complex
intersectional approach getting rid of
disciplinarian nationalism and gatekeeping.
The common denominator in many post-dependence cases
including the post-socialist one, is getting rid of the trauma,
not necessarily in a colonial sense. It can be a trauma of
imperial difference typical for the Russian sensibility. It can be
an experience of a second-rate European from Eastern Europe
who for centuries have been multiply dependent on various
empires. After a careful deconstruction of one’s exclusion
experience, it is regenerated and reworked into an other view,
often grounded in re-existence – according to Colombian
thinker and artist Adolfo Alban-Achinte, as a step from a
negative and often violent model to a creation of an
alternative reality, and/or reformatting the world. This
sensibility is utopian. But it is a fiction which in Ranciere’s
formulation, “challenges the existing distribution of the real
and the fictional”. And this is probably its main political
function.
Critical border thinking is a constant negotiation and
neither-nor-ness, a product of a complex and
dynamic interaction with modernity, corresponding
to the philosophic concept of exteriority – the
outside created from the inside, as interpreted by
Enrique Dussel. It is not a call for going back to
some primordial state, rather it draws the attention
to how and what for, modernity actually invented
the negative image of tradition in the first place,
including its gendered and racialized versions. The
exteriority of living and thinking in hostile
environments and yet reinstating one’s epistemic
rights, leads to an itinerant, open and multiple
positionality, marked by shifting identifications and
a rejection of either/or binarity.
What is at work here is a horizontalized networking
of different local histories and sensibilities
mobilized through a number of common, yet
pluriversal and open, categories. Then we can
replace the negative stance entrapping women in
the situation of sealed otherness and victimhood,
and merely diagnosing our multiple oppressions,
with a more positive re-existent position of building
an alternative world where no one would be an
other. Chela Sandoval’s methodology of the
oppressed and Maria Lugones’s principle of nonaggressive loving perception, as well as Trinh T.
Minh-ha’s idea of critical difference from and
infinite layers of oneself are all important elements
of such border thinking and praxis.
As Nina Lykke points out,
intersectionality must be
maximally open, unfinished
and inclusive. She likens her
theorizing of intersectionality to
situated nodal points (rather
than a fixed system), that is a
shifting space for overlapping
and contradictory intra-actions
of race, gender, class, nation,
sexuality, language, and other
elements of inequality – the
“temporary crystallizations in
ongoing feminist negotiations of
located theory making”.
A subtler problem is the question of enunciation
understood in semiotic terms as the spatial and
temporal contexts of communication, the
conditions in which the discourse is produced
including the answer to the questions of who
produces it and why. Who speaks in and of
intersectionality and from what position the
enunciation is made? Who is the enunciator and
in what intersection of intersectionality does the
enunciation take place? The more important it
becomes to focus on different tangential
genealogies of knowledge, being, gender,
perception, and to shift the emphasis from the
enunciated to the enunciation.
The accent should be not on the description of
reality, but on the elaboration of concepts which
would affirm their own locus of enunciation,
arguing from a specific position formulated
thanks to the phenomenon described, but based
on epistemic disobedience and delinking. In other
words, we should be aware of the politics of
location in the knowledge production, in
Adrienne Rich’s formulation, the situated
knowledges as Dona Harraway would have it, the
“multiple standpoints” and “small stories,
situated in specific local contexts” according to
Nina Lykke, or the pluriversality in terms of the
decolonial option.
It is important for the post-socialist gendered others to get
acquainted with alternative approaches to gender, to be
“indoctrinated” finally from the theorists and activists of the
global South and also make our ideas available to them. To do
this we need to delink from neoliberal modernity
epistemologically, institutionally and administratively,
working for a creation of by-passing volatile networks,
events, flexible projects disobeying the mainstream academic
institutional control. Among the reasons for the lack of the
South to South and semi-periphery to periphery coalitions the
most important ones are ignorance, lack of information,
intensified by a continuing intellectual coloniality, a persistent
agonistic model and an unwillingness to drop one’s status as
a “second world” and be associated with the global South. It
is a negative victimhood rivalry grounded in monopolizing
the position as victims of modernity, refusing to make room
for anyone else.
Real ways out of internal and external epistemic asymmetries
are not in recognition claims but in delinking from the losing
battle and from the logic of catching up in the sphere of
knowledge production, and concentrating on creating a
discourse and a praxis which would be well aware of other
models, including the latest Western and non-Western ones, but
would not simply repeat them or mechanically apply them to a
local material. Finding intersections in our experience and
sensibilities, we can try to re-create a flexible discourse on
sexuality, various gender models and maybe other-than-gender
resistances, which would answer the local logic and specific
conditions yet would be able to correlate with other voices in the
world. To do this we necessarily take a border and intersectional
position negotiating between modernity in various forms and its
internal and external others, instead of endlessly ascertaining
one’s multiple oppressions and replaying one’s inferiority
complexes. Such a positive critical intersectionality would
develop in the direction of an open, liberating and creolized
theorizing.
Our dependencies continue in new forms of global
coloniality, pushing the Socialist experience farther and
farther away and sometimes placing it onto a museum
shelf. And yet, as long as we refuse to critically reflect on
this past, continue to vegetate amongst our complexes
and suppressed desires, nostalgia and hatred, there will
be no path to any future. We must therefore learn to see
the post-Socialist condition not as a nostalgic going back
tool, lamenting over the lost past or condemning it, but
rather as a difficult way to future re-existence. The postEast re-existence is yet an utopian model but it is
important for the post-socialist women to reflect on our
mutual experience and work out together this flexible,
open, intersectional and dialogical theory and practice, a
collective cathartic therapy which hopefully will help us
better understand ourselves and our place in the world,
and never slide back into the vicious circle of forever
dependent existence.