Today, a lot of ongoing phenomena have to be explained through some kind of conspiracy theory (acts of semi-clandestine government agencies; the strategies of large companies). And, in order to fight them, we are more and more in need of our own half-clandestine organizations. Perhaps Lenin's formula of the Party from his much-vilified What is to Be Done? has acquired new relevance today.
John Berger recently made a salient point apropos of a French poster for the Internet investment brokers Selftrade: under the image of a hammer and sickle cast in solid gold and embedded with diamonds, the caption reads: "And what if everybody profited from the stock market?" The strategy of this poster is obvious: today, the stock market fulfils egalitarian Communist criteria: everybody can participate in it. Berger indulges in a simple mental experiment: "Imagine a communications campaign today using an image of a swastika cast in solid gold and embedded with diamonds! It would of course not work. Why? The swastika addressed potential victors not the defeated. It invoked domination not justice." The hammer and sickle, in contrast, invoked the hope that "history would eventually be on the side of those struggling for fraternal justice". The irony is thus that, at the very moment when this hope is officially proclaimed dead by the hegemonic ideology of the "end of ideologies", a paradigmatically "post-industrial" enterprise (is there anything more "post-industrial" than dealing with stocks on the Internet?) has to mobilize this dormant hope in order to get its message through. "Repeating Lenin" means giving new life to this hope, which still continues to haunt us.
As a result, repeating Lenin does not mean a return to Lenin--to repeat Lenin is to accept that "Lenin is dead", that his particular solution failed, even failed monstrously, but that there was a utopian spark in it worth saving. Repeating Lenin means that we have to distinguish between what Lenin actually did and the field of possibilities he opened up, the tension in Lenin between what he actually did and another dimension: what was "in Lenin more than Lenin himself". To repeat Lenin is to repeat not what Lenin did but what he failed to do, his missed opportunities. Today, Lenin looks like a figure from a different time zone: it is not that his notions of the centralized Party, and so on, seem to pose a "totalitarian threat"--it is rather that they seem to belong to a different epoch to which we can no longer properly relate.
Instead of reading this fact as proof that Lenin is outdated, however, we should, perhaps, risk the opposite conjecture: what if this impenetrability of Lenin is a sign that there is something wrong with our epoch? What if the fact that we experience Lenin as irrelevant, "out of synch" with our postmodern times, imparts the much more unsettling message that our time itself is "out of synch", that a certain historical dimension is disappearing from it?
No comments:
Post a Comment