Topology for Three Power Paradigms: Pyramid, Grid, Circle.

By Keti Chukhrov

7 August 2020

In this text, philosopher Keti Chukhrov builds on a seminar on topologies of power, which she led for PPV in November 2019; as well as elaborating her critique of the notion that “perversion” is a “subversive” concept.

I. Pyramid

Foucault taught us that power has no personification and it cannot be identified with one single governing or executive institution. Yet the examples of the post-socialist, Soviet and non-western power paradigms demonstrate that power might acquire symbolic and ideological forms which -despite being post-disciplinary - are topologically different from the power dispositions that Foucault depicted. So far we could delineate three paradigms of power, standing for the Foucauldian and non-Foucauldian models respectively. These are: the pyramid (post-socialist and non-western autocracies), the flexible grid (neoliberal democracy), and the circle of self-critique (historical socialism).

The pyramid is governed by the Schmittean sovereign. Yet while the sovereign tops all that is below the pyramid and controls all perversities and deviations beyond the ruled order, he nevertheless continues to be the main subject of perversion himself. In the autocratic system perversion is inherent in the system of rule itself and pertains to the ruler. Therefore if we compare the subversive or perverse acts of the artistic initiatives resisting power in post-Soviet Russia (for example those of the Voina group, Piotr Pavlensky, or Pussy Riot) to the perversities that such power (Putin or the “Edinaya Rossiya” leaders) commits in the spheres of religion, politics, daily life, the deeds of the latter will seem much more blasphemous. As I argued in “Epistemological Gaps between the Former Soviet East and the Democratic West”, my article from 2017:

“The actions of Voina, in fact, reproduced the perversion inherent in Russian political power itself. Likewise, while Pussy Riot’s intervention at the Christ the Savior cathedral seems at first sight to be a classic gesture of violating the frames of established power and sanctity, it is rather the power itself here that is already transgressive and perverse; and the resistant practice reveals the power’s perversion by mimicking it—the fake way the government or clergy pray or stage their “chastity.” Furthermore, the members of the group socially and politically represent the rhetoric of decent democratic values and civil society. […] This is why the question becomes: How can one subvert or transgress the force that can withstand much stronger and more sacrilegious subversion? On the one hand, we know how often criticism and subversion have been prohibited in post-Soviet countries. But at the same time, these cases of prohibition do not mean that the authority is against perversion or subversion, but rather that the authority itself must remain the principal source of such perverse acts.”

1. For example, a few years ago Vladimir Putin suggested acknowledging the sanctity of Lenin.

2. In Art and Theory of post 1989 in Eastern and Central Europe. Critical Anthology. Eds. Roxana Marcoci, Ana Janevsky, K. Nouril, Duke University Press, 2018. P.375-81. https://www.academia.edu/38532175/Epistemological_Gaps_between_the_Former_Soviet_East_and_the_Democratic_West

II. Flexible Grid

Foucauldian research into neoliberal societies has revealed how transparent control simultaneously regulates the exposure of perverse or subversive elements contained within; and permits their application. In this case the power infrastructure is a flexible grid which internalizes methodologies of subversion and perversion to distribute them all over the grid, and construct some sort of transparent panopticon. The power is in this case hybridized, but the sociality and its tools of resisting power are hybridized too.

Each individual located in the transparent cells of this grid is allowed to present one’s own perverted or traumatized body to all, and even to commit certain transgressive acts, but they remain within the quasi-clinical cells of the flexible grid. So, on the one hand, the permissive possibility for each individual to expose one’s deviances, one’s revolutionary resistance against the regulated power, is always open and transparent. On the other hand, such transparency allows it to be visible and controlled. In fact, contemporary art practices have excellently thematized how subversive gestures or critical tactics are folded into the rhetoric and ideology of the Western liberal open society. Contemporary art, especially in the 1970s and 1980s, vividly demonstrated how perversion works when the exposure of one’s trauma or the deviances is on the one hand resistant to social order, but on the other – it becomes a syndrome of exhibiting the specimens of surplus pleasure or death drive. Not only does society not prohibit such exposures, but it even needs and demands them, in order to permanently re-vitalize itself through a mixture of control and mild critique.

(It is this combination of the neo-liberal flexible grid and the subversive detours from it that is now in the process of collapsing as Western liberal democracy gradually acquires a pyramidal structure, allowing oligarchic clans or sovereign figures like Donald Trump or Boris Johnson to surmount it.)

If Michel Foucault’s aspiration was to inscribe the heterotopic sections ousted from sociality (the clinic, the penitentiary institutes, practices of perversion) back into the grid of social institutions, and Judith Butler’s intention was to posit gender as the core element of a free individual concealed beneath the apparatuses, Deleuze’s approach (continued by the post-operaists: Franco Berardi, Antonio Negri, Paolo Virno) unraveled as the attempt to subvert the grid and surpass it by means of transversal lines of flight. The idea of exodus arises in post-Foucauldian discourse with Deleuze and later post-operaism as the result of the failure of translating perversion and subversion (and generally the clinical and critical agenda) into the lexicons of social resistance.

Thus, topologically perversion is located inside those transparent cells; whereas the topology of subversion attempts to navigate across and counter the grid, undermining its interfaces. Subversion, therefore, is centrifugal, but it hides its navigational diagrams and paths of flight in order to remain opaque and untransparent to the controlling institutions.

Transgression - another methodology for leaping out of the grid - stems from George Bataille’s thought and practice. In his onto-ethics sacrality and sacrilege, profanity and sublimity are converged. In such a disposition, the subject endeavors to transgress all forms of the rule and order and tries to surpass the might of the sovereign and sublimity itself by some unspeakable profane gesture. Bataille’s transgressive topology epitomizes the nihilist mood of early and late modernism and its various forms of negativity which often became part and parcel of contemporary art.

The question meanwhile remains whether the evasions from the grid by means of Deleuzean transversal subversion or Bataille’s transgression were able to facilitate a fundamental reconstitution and transformation of the power grid; or did they, like other, more habitual, forms of critique and detour, only enable the power grid to enhance its resilience against the resistant moves that desired to undermine it, so that the power infrastructure eventually acquired greater flexibility and became friendlier to the emancipatory agenda?

*** Returning to the role and the function of contemporary art in the framework of the grid: while at times embodying the Foucauldian relocation of heterotopic practices into the transparent clusters of the social grid in the name of emancipation, at other times contemporary art exerted more radical and negativist detours from the grid to remain completely untranslatable, excommunicated and undigestible for the society. Thus, while one of art’s angles represented the idea of immanent critique and “clinical” and critical exposures of social traumas and vicious nodes, remaining thereby within the grid, another of its angle demonstrated the complete defiance of social emancipation to persist in a mode of nihilist Dadaist gimmickry (this is the Bataillan path, traced also in Adorno’s aesthetics).

***

During the present pandemic numerous art institutions and initiatives have been advocating for practices of care, that would supersede artistic activities to become even more socially useful and effective. In this standpoint one can discern the quasi-foucauldian model – the one that believes in inscribing the clinical manifestations of vulnerability, traumatization and perversion back into the institutional infrastructure (i.e. relocating the heterotopia ousted from sociality back into its interfaces).

While supporting the social demand for care in general, I would express reservations about such an abrupt decision of numerous artistic institutions to confine artistic practice and social agency to care. Here are the motives behind my reservations.

1. Care re-affirms the clinical and therapeutic dimension of artistic practice, in terms of exposing social and individual traumas and vulnerabilities. But the intention to turn art into caretaking and clinical therapy inevitably becomes aestheticized and refurbished into a self-referential art-object. In short, the question is why an artistic work, or art generally, should necessarily become social care, or therapy, if its facilities and resources for caretaking are insufficient and inappropriately organized – unlike the proper care-work of the institutions which traditionally provide it. Or, why should the caring initiatives of any citizen, including the artist, become artistic, or become represented in an art institution as an artifact?

2. Care presupposes assistance to the feeble, rather than the empowerment of the feeble. We do not doubt the necessity of such assistance, but care should be regarded as an auxiliary component of social work, rather than a fully-fledged embodiment of the society of justice. Care in itself has no political intentionality. Its semantics can only be productive in the context of the broader scale of social agencies, including: enthusiasm, compassion, sacrifice, empathy, involvement, devotion, fidelity, social organization, duty, mobilization, necessity, etc.

3. Care is not sufficient for the ruptures that create the conditions of radical inequalities and the consequences of geopolitical conflicts. For example, in the treatment of problems concerning refugees, migration, or systemic racism it cannot exceed civic volunteering and institutional charity. Care lubricates antagonisms, but is not enough to solve them. It can function as a civic initiative, or social and institutional agency, but not as a political or juridical tool. Moreover, even to channel care and make it efficient, it needs organization of logistics, legislative decision-making and interconnection of public institutions and executive organs.

4. Last but not least, why do we think that those who need care – healthcare, childcare, nursing or any volunteered aid – would extensively need nothing but care in all life situations, and that their imaginaries of art and culture could be confined to nothing but therapy? During WW2, prominent artists and musicians toured around field hospitals and military regiments as artists, not as nurses; which does not cancel the fact that any artist could have chosen to volunteer as a medical or social worker, as we have witnessed during the pandemic.

5. Maybe such ardent persistence of museums and art-institutions to function as hospitals and care-taking initiatives only disguises the fact that art is not needed in the new conditions any more – at least not the kind of art that has been produced so far.

III. The Circle of Self-critique

In the power dispositions considered above, the social order, as well as power, can only be negative and malign. That’s why one has to pervert such a social order. But what if power is not malign and has been seized by the proletariat? What if its dictatorship becomes the only remedy to attain social justice and the common good? Can there be a form of power which embodies social justice, and does it have a specific topology? In his The State and Revolution, Lenin insists that power needs to be hijacked in order to make social justice a universal necessity – this is an act that might be coercive, yet indispensable before the withering of the state takes place. In that case, power is the tool to practice common good.

The topology for such a disposition of power would be a circle of self-critique; here, everyone aspires to enter into the circle, rather than to pervert or evade it.

In comparison to the circle of self-critique, even the party organs or communist citizens are insufficiently communist. Therefore, the aspiration is not to evade the circle, but to enter into it. Exploring why these things work so differently in capitalist and non-capitalist societies enables an understanding of the differences in disposition between power and liberation/resistance in capitalist and socialist societies respectively.

The stereotypical attitude toward socialist power is that it is just a classical disciplinary society with an authoritarian center, personified government, and indoctrinated masses, who otherwise could potentially be normal consumers and free, creative, middle class citizens. Such a stance does not duly describe the shape of socialist society. In the Soviet state, power lies not just in managing, administration, and governing, as in the post-disciplinary liberal or neoliberal state. Ultimate power is delegated to the idea, and the idea belongs to all. So, power belongs, let’s say, to the idea of communism. As for the government, the governing party merely operates and mediates the idea. But the government (or even the party) can never be identified completely with the idea. Moreover, the government is often itself suspected of being a perverse and an insufficiently communist government.

In To Reveal and Dissimulate (Oblichat’ I Lizemerit’ 2002), Oleg Kharkhordin makes a distinction between the Western paradigms of surveillance and supervision on the one hand, and the ones characteristic to post-revolutionary Soviet Russia, on the other. In the first case, the paradigm of supervision is Bentham’s Panopticon, in which each culprit or patient is in his transparent room, observed by the “eye” of a Big Brother. But as Kharkordin proves, Big Brother is not the Soviet socialist power paradigm at all. Moreover, even the Stalinist paradigm was not one of surveillance but rather of putting to shame (pozorit’). The aim of the socialist paradigm is not to exclude the ill, the insane, or the corrupt person but to transform him/her through his/her conscience, supra-consciousness, and belief, and instigate his/her own decision in becoming adequate to communism, in being converted into it, etc. The “sinning” “brother” voluntarily comes into the center of the circle to denounce his insufficient communism while he is surrounded by other brethren.

Those who share the shame and instruct are not supervisors, though, but one’s equals— brethren, comrades. The disposition then is not the Eye watching “me,” but the brethren surrounding “me” in the rebuke for “my” betrayal of communism and persuading “me” to convert. Those who instruct (the brethren) form the circle; the untrue communist is in the middle. Meanwhile each of the brethren remains potentially a hypocrite, who might dissimulate communism; at the same time, each has chance to voluntarily appear in the center to self-censure himself, being exposed to other brethren. This was the pedagogic method in Makarenko’s school (Kharkhordin mentions the same models in Orthodox monasteries).

Makarenko mainly educated criminal and homeless children after the revolution who had never lived in families and who were doomed to various kinds of perversions and criminalities. In this case the starting point and status quo was crime and perversion. The direction in this circular model is not to get away from or subvert power, but the persistence to remain faithful to the idea and fit into it. The governing structures of communist sociality are themselves so shaky, unstable, and potentially perverted in relation to the idea of communism, that one’s primary goal is to attempt to constantly self-improve in performing the concrete act of fidelity to communism, showing that one’s life and the communist idea coincide.

Consequently, the struggling effort is in the striving to adhere to the communist idea, rather than subvert it. If in the topology of the flexible grid (neoliberal democracy), perversion, subversion, and transgression could function as liberating acts, in the topology of the circle of self-critique (historical socialism) perversion and subversion would be seen as horrifying obstacles foreclosing the horizon of the common good (communism).

4. Oleg Kharkhordin, To Reveal and Dissimulate (SPb: European Un-ty, 2002), 230–355.

5. Anton Makarenko (1888-1939), a Russian and Soviet educator, pedagogue and writer, who elaborated the methodology of raising children in self-governing collectives and introduced the concept of productive labor into the educational system. In the aftermath of the Russian Revolution he established self-supporting orphanages for street children including juvenile delinquents. His main opus is the Pedagogical Poem (1925-35) – a novel in three parts.