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Monday, June 17, 2013

Slavoj Žižek

Kennedy's stroke of genius which was crucial for the resolution of the Cuban missile crisis, was to pretend that a key letter did NOT arrive at its destination, to act as if this letter didn't exist - a stratagem which, of course, only worked because the sender (Khrushchev) participated in it. On Friday, October 26 1962, a letter from Khrushchev to Kennedy confirms the offer previously made through intermediaries: the missiles will be removed if the US issues a pledge not to invade Cuba. On Saturday, October 27, before a US answer, another, harsher and more demanding, letter from Khrushchev arrives, adding the removal of missiles from Turkey as a condition, and signalling a possible political coup in the Soviet Union. At 8:05 PM the same day, Kennedy sends a response to Khrushchev, informing him that he is accepting his October 26 proposal, i.e., acting as if the October 27 letter doesn't exist. On Sunday, October 28, Kennedy receives a letter from Khrushchev in which he agrees to the deal... The lesson of this is that in such moments of crisis where the fate of everything hangs in the air, saving the appearances, politeness, the awareness of "playing a game," matters more than ever. One can also claim that what triggered the crisis was a symmetrical fact, a letter which also did not arrive at its addressee, but, this time, because it was not sent. Soviet missiles were stationed in Cuba as the result of the secret mutual security pact between Cuba and USSR; many observers (most notably Ted Sorensen) suggested that the US reaction would have been much less offensive if the mutual security pact had been made public in advance (as Castro had wanted, incidentally!). It was this secrecy on which Soviets insisted that made the US think that the missile emplacement could have no purpose other than to launch an attack upon the US: if the entire process of signing the pact and installing the missiles were to be public and transparent, it would have been perceived as something much less threatening: not as the preparation of a real attack, but as demonstrative posturing which poses no real military threat.

This lesson was not learned by the US military establishment, which interpreted the peaceful resolution of the crisis in a different way. [1] Its opinion is best rendered by Raymond Garthoff, at the time an intelligence analyst in the State Department: "If we have learned anything from this experience, it is that weakness, even only apparent weakness, invites Soviet transgression. At the same time, firmness in the last analysis will force the Soviets to back away from rash initiatives." The crisis is thus perceived as the eyeball to eyeball confrontation of two players, a macho game of "chicken," where the one with more toughness, inflexibility and resolve wins. (This view, of course, does not fit reality: a whole series of details demonstrate Kennedy's flexibility and his to the Soviet need to save face by way of salvaging something positive from the crisis. In order to buy some time and avoid a direct confrontation, he permitted on October 25 a Soviet tanker to proceed through the quarantine; on October 28, he ordered no interview should be given and no statement made which would claim any kind of victory; furthermore, he offered up removal of the US missiles in Turkey, as well as a guarantee that the US will not invade Cuba, in exchange for the withdrawal of the Soviet missiles from Cuba.)

The Soviet perception of the crisis was different: for them, it was not the threat of force that ended the crisis. The Soviet leadership believed the crisis ended because both Soviet and US officials realized they were at the brink and that the crisis was threatening to destroy humankind. They did not fear only for their immediate safety and were not worried merely about losing a battle in Cuba. Their fear was the fear of deciding the fate of millions of others, even of civilization itself. It was THIS fear, experienced by both sides at the peak of the crisis, which enabled them to reach a peaceful solution; and it was this fear which was at the very core of the famous exchange of letters between Khrushchev and Fidel Castro at the climax of the crisis. In a letter to Khrushchev from October 26, Castro wrote that

if the imperialists invade Cuba with the goal of occupying it, the danger that that aggressive policy poses for humanity is so great that following that event the Soviet Union must never allow the circumstances in which the imperialists could launch the first nuclear strike against it. / I tell you this because I believe that the imperialists' aggressiveness is extremely dangerous and if they actually carry out the brutal act of invading Cuba in violation of international law and morality, that would be the moment to eliminate such danger forever through an act of clear legitimate defense, however harsh and terrible the solution would be, for there is no other.

Khrushchev answered Castro on October 30:

In your cable of October 27 you proposed that we be the first to launch a nuclear strike against the territory of the enemy. You, of course, realize where that would have led. Rather than a simple strike, it would have been the start of a thermonuclear world war. / Dear Comrade Fidel Castro, I consider this proposal of yours incorrect, although I understand your motivation. / We have lived through the most serious moment when a nuclear world war could have broken out. Obviously, in that case, the United States would have sustained huge losses, but the Soviet Union and the whole socialist camp would have also suffered greatly. As far as Cuba is concerned, it would be difficult to say even in general terms what this would have meant for them. In the first place, Cuba would have been burned in the fire of war. There's no doubt that the Cuban people would have fought courageously or that they would have died heroically. But we are not struggling against imperialism in order to die, but to take advantage of all our possibilities, to lose less in the struggle and win more to overcome and achieve the victory of communism.

The essence of Khrushchev's argument can be best summoned by Neil Kinnock's anti-war argument, when he was the Labour candidate in the UK elections: "I am ready to die for my country, but I am not ready to let my country die for me." It is significant to note that, in spite of the "totalitarian" character of the Soviet regime, THIS fear was much more predominant in the Soviet leadership than in the US leadership - so, perhaps, the time has come to rehabilitate Khrushchev, not Kennedy, as the real hero of the Cuban missile crisis. - Castro answered Khrushchev on October 31:

I realized when I wrote them that the words contained in my letter could be misinterpreted by you and that was what happened, perhaps because you didn't read them carefully, perhaps because of the translation, perhaps because I meant to say so much in too few lines. However, I didn't hesitate to do it. Do you believe, Comrade Khrushchev, that we were selfishly thinking of ourselves, of our generous people willing to sacrifice themselves, and not at all in an unconscious manner but fully assured of the risk they ran? No, Comrade Khrushchev. Few times in history, and it could even be said that never before, because no people had ever faced such a tremendous danger, was a people so willing to fight and die with such a universal sense of duty. /.../ We knew, and do not presume that we ignored it, that we would have been annihilated, as you insinuate in your letter, in the event of nuclear war. However, that didn't prompt us to ask you to withdraw the missiles, that didn't prompt us to ask you to yield. Do you believe that we wanted that war? But how could we prevent it if the invasion finally took place? /.../ And if war had broken out, what could we do with the insane people who unleashed the war? You yourself have said that under current conditions such a war would inevitably have escalated quickly into a nuclear war. / I understand that once aggression is unleashed, one shouldn't concede to the aggressor the privilege of deciding, moreover, when to use nuclear weapons. The destructive power of this weaponry is so great and the speed of its delivery so great that the aggressor would have a considerable initial advantage. / And I did not suggest to you, Comrade Khrushchev, that the USSR should be the aggressor, because that would be more than incorrect, it would be immoral and contemptible on my part. But from the instant the imperialists attack Cuba and while there are Soviet armed forces stationed in Cuba to help in our defense in case of an attack from abroad, the imperialists would by this act become aggressors against Cuba and against the USSR, and we would respond with a strike that would annihilate them. /.../ I did not suggest, Comrade Khrushchev, that in the midst of this crisis the Soviet Union should attack, which is what your letter seems to say; rather, that following an imperialist attack, the USSR should act without vacillation and should never make the mistake of allowing circumstances to develop in which the enemy makes the first nuclear strike against the USSR. And in this sense, Comrade Khrushchev, I maintain my point of view, because I understand it to be a true and just evaluation of a specific situation. You may be able to convince me that I am wrong, but you can't tell me that I am wrong without convincing me.

It is obviously Castro himself who (purposefully) misread Khrushchev here: Khrushchev understood very well what Castro wanted the USSR to do - not to attack the US "out of nowhere," but, in the case of the US invasion on Cuba (still an act of conventional war, and a limited one, at that - attacking a recent ally of the USSR, not the USSR itself), to retaliate with total nuclear counter-attack. This is what the warning that the USSR "should never make the mistake of allowing circumstances to develop in which the enemy makes the first nuclear strike against the USSR" can only mean: that the USSR should be the first to deal a decisive nuclear strike - "once aggression is unleashed, one shouldn't concede to the aggressor the privilege of deciding, moreover, when to use nuclear weapons." To put it bluntly, Castro is demanding Khrushchev to choose the end of civilized life on earth over the loss of Cuba... (Castro's premise, according to which "the destructive power of this /nuclear/ weaponry is so great and the speed of its delivery so great that the aggressor would have a considerable initial advantage," is very problematic: it is a safe bet - and the presupposition of the MAD logic - that the surprise nuclear attack of one of the nuclear superpowers will fail to destroy all the opponent's nuclear arms, i.e., that the opponent will have enough arms left to fully strike back.) There is, nonetheless, a way to read Castro's demand as a case of "rational" strategic reasoning - what if it was sustained by a ruthless and cynical calculation with the following scenario in view: the US army will invade Cuba with conventional forces; then, the US and the USSR will destroy each other (and, perhaps, Europe with it) with nuclear arms, making the US occupation of Cuba meaningless, so that Cuba (with most of the Third World) will survive victorious?

[...]

It is precisely the paternal references of (some) "totalitarian" leaders (Stalin as the Father of his people...) which testify to the underlying fact that the logic of this leader is thoroughly anti-patriarchal, i.e., that it implies the radical disjunction between Father and Leader:

The liberation of the modern subject from the figure of the Patriarch as Fatherleader (Perechef) /.../ evidently opens up a large space of freedom with the multiplicity of the objects of identification where anything is possible, including leaders who want to be fathers, which is in no way the same as a father who is from the outset leader. It is because, in the modern crowd societies, there is no longer the Fatherleader, that the crowds can put a leader at the place of their Ego Ideal. [2]

What did the trauma of 1935 (the public campaign against his "Lady Macbeth" triggered by the Pravda article "Muddle instead of music") do to Shostakovich? Perhaps the clearest indicator of the break is the change in the function of scherzo in Shostakovich's work in 1940s and early 1950s. Prior to 1935, his scherzi can still be perceived as the explosive expression of new aggressive and grotesque vitality and joy of life - there is something of the liberating force of the carnival in them, of the madness of the creative power that merrily sweeps away all obstacles and ignores or established rules and hierarchies. After 1935, however, his scherzi had clearly "lost their innocence": their explosive energy acquires a brutal-threatening quality, there is something mechanic in their energy, like the forced movements of a marionette. They either render the raw energy of social violence, of pogroms of helpless victims, or, if they are meant as the explosion of the "joy of life," this is clearly intended in a sarcastic way, or as an impotent maniac outburst of the aggressivity of the helpless victim. The "carnival" is here no longer a liberating experience, but the explosion of thwarted and repressed aggressivity - it is the "carnival" of racist pogroms and drunken gang rapes... (The outstanding cases are the Movements 2 and 3 of the 8th Symphony, the famous 2nd Movement of the 10th Symphony ("Portrait of Stalin"), and, among the String Quartets, the 3rd Movement of the Quartet no. 3 (which, today, almost sounds like Herrmann's score for Psycho) and the "furioso" Movement of the Quartet no. 10.) [3]

Notes:

[1] James g. Blight and Philip Brenner, Sad and Luminous Days: Cuba's Secret Struggles with the Superpowers after the Cuban Missile Crisis, New York: Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc., 2002.

[2] 1 Fethi Benslama, La psychanalyse à l'épreuve de l'Islam, Paris: Aubier 2002, p. 102.

[3] 1 See Bernd Feuchtner, Dimitri Schostakowitsch, 125-126. Kassel, Stuttgart and Weimar: Barenreiter/ Metzler 2002.

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Mladen Dolar: "The Smoking Communism"

The smoking communism

Mladen Dolar

for Dominique and Oxana

A group of people is gathered outside one of those glamorous skyscrapers in Lower Manhattan, at a proper distance from the entry, which is duly manned by a security person checking the measured distance with a keen eagle eye and with a serious mien meaning business, a group composed mostly of employees from the offices towering high over the street, but also some tourists and some odd homeless looking persons. The purpose of this small gathering, comprising a dozen people or so, is smoking. The group is heterogeneous, the employees are in a rather formal attire, one can easily imagine them placed somewhere in the intricate workings of financial capital, tourists wear some incongruous informal multicolored gear, making a brief stop-over on their well planned route through the highlights of the city, the homeless are wearing some baggy crumpled clothes, each group duly corresponding to the cliché. We smoke in silence, standing relatively close to each other, for the place seems to be cordoned off by invisible strings, no doubt abiding by some rules issued by god knows what authority, but we look in different directions, feeling vaguely ashamed or at least not at ease, for the designated place is both located out of the official ways, keeping this nuisance at bay, and at the same time on display, for it can’t be quite hidden in this heavily frequented area and one feels like exhibited, the passers-by and the people on the way to the grand entry casting suspicious side-way glances at the new pariahs, not of approval. This is a haphazard congregation of strangers gathered for five minutes, for the duration of a cigarette, flocked together to a designated spot, having just one thing in common. Then someone says, out of the blue: “First blacks and Jews, now us.” There is an immediate outburst of laughter and merriment, the total strangers instantly becoming friends, for these brief minutes, cigarettes are short-lived and so is our friendship, but there is a surge of solidarity, a sudden human tie, and the brevity of the precious moment reaches far beyond the gathering, beyond the schedule which soon makes us disperse in all directions. It all evaporates in smoke, just as the cigarettes, but the brief moment has a curious staying power and reaches beyond the dictate of time, beyond the pressure of jobs, obligations, survival and allotted social slots. And it is clear that by laughing together we have won a small victory over the disapproving crowd that vastly outnumbers us and over the carefully designed regulations that isolated us on this spot. The excluded and the ashamed have turned the tables, at least for these moments, we are the winners.

The remark is of course made in the spirit of the smokers’ cheek, or rather their tongue-in-cheek. It would be a bit much to put in line centuries of slavery and pogroms with this new figure of outcasts and it would take quite a bit of conceit to claim such ancestry. But smokers always tend to speak tongue-in-cheek. There is a couple of blacks in the gathering and as it turns out also a couple of Jews (and yes, you have guessed right, they belong to the ‘financial capital’ part of the group, one can doubt anything except for clichés). The blacks and the Jews are particularly amused by the remark, the Jewish person smilingly adding: “We haven’t yet reached the point of the holocaust”. Some smokers can actually be blacks and Jews into the bargain, and we all turned temporarily into honorary blacks and Jews. There is a sudden swopping of life stories, one actually grimly stretching back to the holocaust, the other to the pre-Martin Luther King days. An elderly black man, I suppose belonging to the maintenance staff of the building, says, to the general approval: “In all my life I have never been so oppressed as a black man as I am now as a smoker.” And he has lived through the times before the civil rights movement when at least in New York it wasn’t so bad to be black as it is now to smoke, the one exclusion mirroring the other in their very discrepancy and in a strange connivance. The homeless have some stories of police chasing them for smoking in some perfectly legal places, the new handy excuse for harassment. The rather wealthy looking Jews suddenly look at the homeless with new eyes, almost in appreciation, with the incongruous specter of the common fate of exclusion in the air, connecting for a brief moment its widely disparate ways. The Spanish tourists tell of some tricks of guerilla tactics smokers employ in Spain after the anti-smoking measures were introduced, although far less serious than in the US – but the US are, as always, leading the way and we agree that soon we will all be there, partaking in the promised land.

Smokers of the world, unite. But we are already united. We have collectively managed an incredible feat of traversing the social divisions, of conjuring the specters of history and its antagonisms and laying them at rest, of finding some bits of solidarity across boundaries, laughing together and having fun, complete strangers in just a few minutes, standing off the main course in Manhattan, at the heart of the world power, at the center of financial capital, an unlikely collectivity based on smoke, and smoke alone. It became perfectly clear: smokers live in communism. They create communism wherever they are, even a few minutes from Wall Street. Smokers have started the Occupy Wall Street movement long before, only nobody noticed. They don’t wait for a future classless society to appear, they instantly make it happen. Smoking is an instant pleasure that requires instant solutions, it can’t be relegated to some distant future. Two smokers are already enough for a budding communist cell, when two or three smokers congregate the (unholy) spirit of communism flashes in their midst. Smokers form a party with a very simple membership token, everybody is welcome to join in, and they gladly accept honorary non-smokers in their gathering. This is a party that immediately starts to dissolve hierarchies at the stroke of the lighter. Iskra, the spark, was famously the title of Lenin’s political newspaper, and smokers take it literally, the spark is all it takes. Lenin based its title on the line that the spark is there to ignite a big future flame, but smokers thrive just on sparks and very small present flames, their future may indeed be uncertain, given their habit. This is communism without a future, for they will all die young, afflicted by lung cancers and heart attacks, to say nothing of impotence and wrinkled skin. They use weapons of mass destruction destroying their users, who accept their fate with cheerful equanimity.

The smokers’ party doesn’t have a program, except for what is immediately put into action. Their deeds precede their words. But this is not to say that their community is based just on pleasure and instant gratification, shying away from intellectual demands, quite the contrary. There is nothing like smoking together to instigate reflection, one is there sharing a break from the usual turmoil of life, looking at it from a distance, reflecting on it, all kinds of programs spring up in the space of few minutes, wild ideas circulate freely, just as the smoke, one looks back and looks forward, excepted from the immediate pressures and obligations, in a non-discriminatory community of friends and strangers alike. Crazy stories and good jokes are generously shared along with the smoke. One can suddenly hit upon a solution to a problem that one couldn’t find by a sustained intellectual effort, precisely because this is a non-productive pause from the requirements of production, and it takes more for the mind to work than effort. Smoking is the time of serendipity, gratuitous and unexpected gifts. It is essentially social, smoking alone never tastes the same (well, just as sex). The more it aims at the bodily pleasure, the more it arouses and invigorates the mind, it is a non-Christian activity par excellence, constantly testifying against the division into body and spirit. The craving of the body goes hand in hand and coincides with the craving of the mind, the one enhancing the other. The smoking party doesn’t start with a program in order to instigate action, but with an act in search of a program, and the moment a few smokers gather programs start mushrooming. They interpret and they change the world for the time it takes to smoke a cigarette.

Being social smoking is never socially neutral. Its social and historical connotations stretch in all directions, some far away from the communist one. But under present conditions of ban and the growing political anathema, against the backdrop of the excessive campaign and ever new regulations that epitomize something like a caricature of ‘biopolitics’ in its link with exclusion, smoking as a rule emerges as a metaphor, it mirrors and refracts all other exclusions in a miniature model, it traces a line of division which assembles and brings together multiple dividing lines. Smokers state and represent. They represent e. g. the cancer on the healthy social body, and enjoyment is increasingly treated like a cancer on the prescribed normative bodily demeanor. There was always something in enjoyment that reached ‘beyond the pleasure principle’, something recalcitrant and indifferent to the aims of survival. Smoking promotes enjoyment in the bosom of a pleasure-seeking society, against the backdrop of its hedonistic injunctions. It pursues pleasure a bit too far, to the limits which invoke the specter of the lethal, and what the society promoting health and pleasure is allergic to is, in one word, enjoyment. Freud, another great smoker, knew it well. So did Lacan, another smoker, who established a stark opposition between pleasure and enjoyment.

Of course the smoking communism dissolves just as quickly as it emerged – it all goes up in smoke. In the first step, with the magic power of cigarette smoke “everything solid melts into thin air”, following Marx’s (another smoker’s) line from the Manifesto, all social relations are momentarily a bit dislocated and shaken, and then in the second step the specter of communism that emerged in the process melts into thin air in its turn. Leaving no traces, just as the smoke? There is of course the danger of romanticizing the fleeting moment and extol its charms, the moment when everything seems momentarily possible, although through a smoke-screen. Oh, the passing beauty of the passing, the Sirens’ call of the instant sublime. There is the firm intellectual impulse to resist any such penchant as well as to resist the feel-good self-congratulatory move of turning something banal into something deeply subversive, with the bunch of self-aggrandizing quick-and-easy revolutionaries, dispensing with the need for discipline, pursuit and organization. But perhaps one should also resist this impulse to resist and allow for a moment of fancy.

Smokers, like proletarians, have no country, but they instantly create liberated territories wherever they appear. Smoking always represented liberty, a fickle freedom against the chains of survival, it is an anti-survivalist stance. It states: I am free in chains, while being chained to this habit that I can’t give up, but these chains allow taking a bit of distance to the overwhelming other ones and I am willing to pay the price. Smoking makes a statement, which can be read in all kinds of ways, cynical, spontaneous, relaxed, neurotic, psychotic, perverse, obsessive, compulsive, guilty pleasure, sinful, dandy, bon-vivant, desperate, anti-stress, aggressive, arrogant, seductive, available, mark of class, mark of lack of class, sociability, anti-social behavior … But against all odds and in a wild fancy I would like this statement to read: communism has a chance.