The Tactic of Linguistic Exile between Political Emergency and Poetological Programme

Pavel Arsen’ev

Free voices or constraint of the context?

The portal on which this text is published is entitled Free voices in the USSR. This formulation obviously somehow organizes our attention and provides some understanding of the possibility of free speech in the Soviet context — as exceptionally rare or opposed to circumstances, resisting this unusual context or existing in spite of it (at the same time as if it were the only remaining interesting part of this strange epoch). Even more ideologically labeled, “freedom of speech” as we know should resist and ultimately defeat “totalitarian conditions” – with a small share of the economic expansion and ideological influence of competing systems. But as a political-epistemological requirement, “freedom of speech” is certainly perceived better than its unfreedom, than its existence under coercive circumstances and even more so under existential risks or a direct threat to life and liberty. It is precisely in order to have such an exclusive opportunity as free speech that, if the overthrow of totalitarian regimes is delayed, fighters for it move to “democratic countries”, where their voice can finally find complete freedom, and speech can pour forth freely without encountering obstacles. Either no comparable amount of attention, no focus on it. As emigrant writers disappointingly note in their memoirs: “They didn’t publish there <in soviet context>, but at least secret police read. Here, we are published, but no one reads”. The change of environment forces the (anti)soviet author to recognize such an institutional factor of the “Soviet mode” of literary production as the constitutive attention of the censorship (“not published, but read”), and after emigration, with the move to an environment supposedly devoid of any coercion, the unexpected disappearance of such “felicity conditions” of literary expression (“published, but not read”)^[1].
We would like to dwell more closely on this strange effect of the loss of existential stakes in speech – when it becomes free in a world also free of any constraint – except economic coercion, which somehow determines the amount of attention given to any speech. However, in addition to bearing this effect in the historical sociology of Soviet literature (let’s call it the “Dovlatov-Voinovich effect”), we can move deeper and find something similar in the pre-revolutionary history of literature as well. Shklovskii, in his text On the Writer and the Production, notes that “Dostoevskii did not respect the novels he wrote, but wanted to write others, and he felt that his novels were feuilletonist; he wrote in his letters, ‘If I were paid as much as Turgenev, I would write no worse than he did’. But he was not paid as much, and he wrote better. Great literature is not the kind of literature which is printed in fat magazines; it is literature which makes proper use of its time, which makes use of the material of its time”. Hence, the matter is not reducible to the allegedly distorted topology of the Soviet literary process, and this or that form of censorship has always existed. And to use or even enjoy the pressure of one’s time and to be aware of and take into account the constraints of the environment may not only be the forced fate of the unfortunate inhabitants of totalitarian “context”, but the obligation of any inventive writing.
The constitutive communicative capacity for the subject is always mediated by certain political contracts and the materiality of communication. Always in history, informed citizens have been not only the merit of enlightened policies or even goal of ideological indoctrination, but also the result of successful negotiations between culture and technology (R. Debré). The dissemination of what is commonly called “free speech” is accompanied by both concrete ways of appropriating information (R. Chartier) and by the collusion of the message with the medium (M. McLuhan), while the right to voice and the ability to speak (G. Spivak) is accompanied by training in new media techniques of speaking and is ensured by the speed of sending messages (F. Kittler). The institution of “freedom of speech” is therefore nowhere and never reduced to a transcendental special operation; rather, one way or another of speaking most often turns out to be not so much a civil right, but even an obligation^[2].
Media- and, more broadly, cultural techniques precede all subjectivity, the public sphere, and other liberal virtues. Media-history excludes the kind of consumerist optics in which everything exists only for citizens’ private communication until the state intervenes there, and technology only begins to exist at the moment the “friendly interface” enters the market^[3]. The “Soviet context” is interesting already in that it removes the illusion of “free voice” spontaneity, and the always-already existing ideological or technical constraints more precisely reveal the fact that the context and the techniques of collective communication determine all the content conveyed (by “free voices”). No one from the “Soviet context” is in any doubt about the fact that the ideological apparatuses of the state lag behind (in relation to the desire of “free voice”) or lack technical materialization in a country where Soviet power has gone hand in hand with electrification since its inception.
In this sense, poetry and more broadly literature, on the one hand, always strives for verse libre and parole in libertà (not without political correlations of such freedom of expression), and on the other hand, always experiences self-imposed formal and combinatory limitations and is well aware of the need for each time personally obtained – in dense bargaining with political and technological constraint – freedom of voice^[4]. In this sense, the poetry of the Soviet era may prove particularly useful here for understanding the basic conditions of “freedom of voice” in the context/era of geo-positioning speech.

Geoposition of speech

I would like to pass now by precising my own geoposition of speech. The latter not only depends on a geography – so where I am staying, for example, in Pisa, or from where I came, whether in the sense of this time, last year or originally, – but likewise how zones of interaction are imagined and established in relation to others. Thereby, they get symbolically charged from both or multiple sides, which seem all the more important nowadays. To render it clearer, I have to say Marco and I know each other from St. Petersburg and had met last time there at the Prigov Readings in Pushkin House.
Dmitrii Prigov was a figure of unofficial literature, who may have been the first to record the changing rules of speech behavior in sam- and tam-izdat publishing. While traveling with his poems and artworks around the world, Prigov continuously presented himself as a “Beliaevskii Academician”. The name refers to the metro station Beliaevo in Moscow which is one of the most remote one from the center. In doing so, Prigov declared his position as one of a speaker from the periphery (Beliaevo), which should one day seize the central power (Academician). Unfortunately, it didn’t happen yet and now even the fresque of his text in Beliaevo are destroyed by central or even municipal power.
This periphery-centre relation underpinned not only positions of speech of those poets who was trying to poeticise their location. A similar pattern or self-fashioning regulated also tactical departures from the Soviet Union into emigration. At the time, the most important thing was this action, was a suitcase which could operate as an ark or sanctuary for manuscripts, a material and symbolic capsule with which one definitively leaves the city. Whether it was one’s own manuscripts (Brodskii’s case) or texts of some circle (Kuz’minskii’s case), the writer’s suitcase was taken out from Leningrad once and forever. After abandoning the city physically, they somehow packed the essence of it in their suitcase symbolically and travelled always through their life with it. Depending on its content, it provided the base for a further trajectory in American universities in the role of a poet-laureate or at least the one who tries to sell his anthologies. They could negotiate and either exchange their capital for the chronic intonation of an expat or for the one of a messenger from a sunken continent. But since then, they could never come back for holidays. We may summarize, the position of speech of émigré was as well one for the whole life.

Already our generation has noticed important changes in writing and publishing behavior in relation to transfers over long geographic distances. The Leningrad tradition of manuscripts being saved in a suitcase-ark – through war and blockade or emigration (as well as the anthology as a genre derivative of this physical object) – is undergoing noticeable modifications. The figure of a poet who once leaving the city for strategic exile – with this suitcase of manuscripts – is replaced by the figure of a shuttle movement of a poet-editor who simply brings a new issue from overseas, or a poet-performer demonstrating his new video works at the next international conference on (post)soviet poetry.
Anyway, since the breakdown of the Soviet Union and Free World established, it seemed to be not too important to reflect on, clarify and even rigorously declare one’s geographical position in relation to speech. However, the events of the last years, and much more accelerated in the last year, have induced a drastic change in our perception of parameters of communication. First, of course, was Covid, which transformed our poetic revue from hardcopy to online laboratory, and I guess you noticed the similar changes in your practice of education, when now its necessary to mention not the class where the seminar will take place, but timezone when it will take place and provide the link through which you may access^[5].
And here we are finally after February 24th. As you can guess, the first intellectual reflexes after this event reproduced to some degree the repertoire of gestures and discourses from the Cold War biopolitics. The new wartime censorship law suggests that any form of criticism is not legal and hence possible without risks again. So that if you don’t agree with the general political line and want to express it publicly, you have to (be ready to) go to jail. The majority however decides to leave the country. To stay ‘inside’ the country started to mean that you either fully embrace or just accept the main political course (in a painful or helpless way)^[6].
But, of course, the current situation does not just repeat the cultural and ideological split between those leaving for real emigration and those descending into the underground or so called “inner emigration”. For our nowadays situation, it structurally differs at least because biopolitical control operates less personalised and more algorithmically. Simple example of more personalised censorship is when, according to legend, Stalin could ask poets to rate how talented their colleagues are (Pasternak about Mandel’shtam). Even cases of “at least the secret police read us” are impossible anymore. There is no equivalent communicative infrastructure in which one may be imprisoned for the anecdote told in the kitchen as in the Stalin era, but now one could be imprisoned for reposting, being detected automatically. The formula for determining the degree of danger of a statement today also includes the coefficient of the number of subscribers – purely quantitative and thus algorithmicisable indicator, excluding semantic analysis. The reason of it is that speech circulates through other devices and at a different speed. Thus, its different kind of speech.
The old ideological framework prevents us from grasping the rules of circulation of affects in contemporary communication. So, there are still statements “from there” (totalitarian state) and statements “from here” (free world) are being produced in social networks. The only problem is that now they are existing in a strange electronic neighborhood with each other^[7]. Now as then they are strongly distinguished not only by the context of origin, but by a fundamentally different existential value. Being severely limited in the choice of expressions, those who speak publicly (including poetically) “from there” and experience risks, are incomparable to those who speak “from here”^[8]. But being listed in our newsfeeds, such a proximity of people in the same virtual and sometimes formerly similar geographical bubbles, but already in very different situation, is now disappointing.

It is this sharp limitation of the capacities in speech that depends more than ever one’s location on a map which I tried to formulate in the title of our last issue – in Russian, but written in Latin letters^[9].  It indicates the emergence of multiple censorship. One particular type of censorship forces us to evaluate and consider most statements – primarily about war – not on the basis of their propositional meaning and the thoughts expressed in them, but solely on the basis of when, from where and by whom this statement is made. The latter are commonly considered pragma-linguistic indicators which are here opposed to the semantic capacity of speech.
In the case of poetry, for example, we can observe that it has become much more important from where the poem is written – from the trenches, from the sofa or from the resort, and not what it says (any thoughts or experiences could be borrowed). Once this level of content was already questioned or destabilized by formalists and their question how. Now even how is not so important as from where.
Imagine formally radical poem but which is written from the place which is safe physically or even comfortable institutionally. And then imagine the same poem written during the war. Would it stay the same appreciation for its formal radicalism?
Furthermore, we need to consider media-technological parameters of circulation and reception. Now everything – from opinions, reflections to poetry – can now be published instantly on social media platforms, but those publications themselves are amenable to tracking, meaning the identification what the place of enunciation is outside of the virtual space. Therefore, it is possible to propose such a category as the “geoposition of speech”, which now determines, if not everything, then a lot in the value of what has been said (and how). It seemingly pre-endows everything that can be said with greater or lesser significance. And, of course, there are competing moral frames of reference, which feed of and charge this status of a geo-position of speech. Understanding its discursive and symbolic, political and poetic function is an epistemic necessity.
Like most arguments of the state of emergency, this idea of evaluating a statement in relation to the speaker’s geoposition features now everywhere but existed before in different shapes. The cancel-culture before the war (or during the war, whose frontlines were still slightly different in the beginning) had some structural parallels. The value of everything pronounced, for example, by a white cisgender man was automatically knocked down by similar pragmatic circumstances in the eyes of some “interpretative communities”. In turn, it also automatically endowed value to other speakers. And if said speaker also turned out to be dead, a figure with an assigned historical values and legacy, maybe even commemorated by a monument, then the monument also should be knocked down. Apart from any just ethical and epistemic struggles of revising our attention economy, the underlying mechanisms have to be reflected as they are vehicle and symptomatic expression of ontologising the who and structurally even prepare the significance of the from where.

Notes:

^[1] For more on the actor-network situation of late-Soviet literature, see our essay «Писать дефицитом»: Дмитрий Пригов и природа «второй культуры».

^[2]As a contemporary researcher suggests to transform Spivak’s formula, “the oppressed must (learn to) speak” – right out of a specific discursive infrastructure, in the early Soviet case this was the newspaper (and later the radio). Kalinin I. The Oppressed Must Speak (Mass Appeal to Literature and the Formation of the Soviet Subject, 1920s – Early 1930s) // There, Inside. Practices of Internal Colonization in Russian Cultural History M.: Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie, 2012. С. 587-664.

^[3] In this, we methodologically follow the media-archeology of Bernard Siegert, who studied cursus publicus, the postal service of the Roman Empire, created by the Emperor and initially excluding private use (Siegert B. The Fall of the Roman Empire // Materialities of Communication, 1994. P. 303–318).

^[4]We already treated this material-ideological correlation at: Arseniev P. The power of the word and its socio-technical amplifications (report on the poetry conference) //#23 [Транслит]: Материальные культуры авангарда.

^[5] Some intuitions about this new forms of communication and humanitarian education were discussed at #24 [Транслит]: Карантинное (ново)образование.

^[6] Already back in 2014, the annexation of Crimea and the Donbas war created a split in the opposition groups. Instead of unified opposition, two camps emerged – those who were for “our Crimea” and those who were against. But it was still possible to criticize nationalist and imperialist positions of those were for “our Crimea” and physically co-exist with them. In 2022 this split has reached an existential character. See more about that in our interview with Humboldt scholar Natalia Grinina: Speechlessness: Conversation with Pavel Arsenev about Russian anti-war poetry.

^[7] As if Brodskii and Evtushenko need to positionate both of them in relation to kolkhoz, which led to rather peculiar results as we know.

^[8] The absence of such constraints, meaning to speak not from “there” in Russia, is also experienced with greater or lesser disappointment – now as then.

^[9] See the cover and description of the last issue of “Translit” http://www.trans-lit.info/vypuski/25-net-slov.

Pavel Arsen’ev
[31^st May 2024]

The text is taken from the lecture the author gave on 15th March 2023 as part of the PhD course in Linguistic Disciplines and Foreign Literature at the University of Pisa.

Author thanks Sophia Buck for comments and discussion on this text as well as help with rendering it in better English.