Balancing the Body Politic

As a young gay man in Margaret Thatcher's Britain, Barker took the then-radical step of centering “In The Hills, the Cities” around two gay men without making their homosexuality the source or object of the horror. Nonetheless, it was a choice with thematic resonance. As cisgender men, Mick and Judd share the isomorphic symmetry of Popolac and Podujevo; there is no way the story can be read in terms of the tired metaphor of the "battle of the sexes."  But they are also almost mirror opposites of each other: Mick is a journalist who "was obliged to have an opinion on everything under the sun. Especially politics; that was the best trough to wallow in."  The dance instructor Judd, to Mick's horror, is somehow both "to the Right of Attila the Hun" and infuriatingly uninterested in politics--all he wants to do is see the endless procession of holy virgins who decorate the infinite supply of churches in the Yugoslav countryside.   Yet the incompatibility of their world views only inflames their passion, leading them to have intensely satisfying sex in that very same countryside. Their relationship is an obvious parallel to the intimate, fundamentally physical antagonism of Popolac and Podujevo, who are obliged to let off steam every decade.

Barker's story rests on a familiar, almost Freudian connection between eros and thanatos, or, more specifically, sex and violence. Two sets of male bodies are in conflict: Mick and Judd, and Podujevo and Popolac, and each chooses between the two options most conventionally available for male bodies: fighting and fucking.  We know far more about what divides Mick and Judd than we do about the longstanding grievances of Podujevo and Popolac, and, tellingly, they are both personal (their general disposition) and political.  Mick gravitates more towards the fascist side of the spectrum, but (if you should excuse the expression in this context) passively.  Judd is a leftist who needs to engage. With Mick dead, Judd makes the odd, but consistent choice, to join Popolac. Mick needs to be part of a larger (political body), while Judd's body is left by the wayside, wrecked and ready for decay.  [1]

As a work of fiction, "In the Hills, the Cities" reminds us of what should be obvious, but is easily forgotten:  the fundamentally imaginary nature of the nation, the country, the state, and the people.  We treat them as both bodies that move and subjects that have agency.  What does Russia "want"? Where is it (or, worse, "she") going?  Consider the only recently abandoned British habit of referring to entire peoples as if they were a single person:  in two world wars they were fighting "the Hun." Both Barker's and Mayakovsky's extended metaphors place these imaginary constructs in a simulation of space, to fascinating results.  They  involve a metaphor whose slipperiness I wish to acknowledge upfront:  proprioception.  Proprioception generally refers to an individual's sense of how their body both takes up space and moves within it. 

Good proprioception is what allows us to move about in the world without constantly looking at everything around us, and allows us to dodge obstacles because we know (or think we know) precisely how much space our bodies occupy.  Proprioception's relationship to our actual physical bodies is not as straightforward as one might think, because it is a sense that can extend beyond the corporeal.  Anyone who (successfully, comfortably) drives a car knows that we relax behind the wheel when we know just how big our vehicle is, allowing us to turn it and park it.  When a car runs into ours, we might say "That car hit me," because the car has become a proprioceptive extension of our self.  All it takes to become acutely aware of proprioception's role is to start driving a moving truck after years of owning a subcompact: initially, it feels as though our body (our vehicle) has become a stranger.

To speak of a country's proprioception is, on the face of it, absurd: countries are not bodies, and they do not pick up and move about.  But we personalize geopolitical entities all the time, especially when they are an object of strong emotional attachment.   When we imagine Russia as a bear, when we talk about a country  "faltering," or "overreaching," in its military adventures, when Russia "grabs" land from a neighbor, tries to gain a "foothold," or "tramples" borders, we are not actually that far off from Mayakovsky's depiction of Russia as a kind of folksy, peasant version of the monsters from Attack on Titan. If Russia (or any country) "strides confidently" across the world stage or if it "stumbles," we are attributing a metaphorical proprioception to an imaginary body.  And an imaginary body can be immobilized.

Sorry, wrong movie

Note

[1] Four decades later, Barker's choice of setting looks inspired, if not prophetic: there is no such town as Popolac, but Podujevo is a real city located in Kosovo, the Albanian-majority region Serbs consider central to their national identity. Now known by its Albanian name of Besianë, the town, according to a  recent report on the Serbian television program "Pravo na sutra," is entirely Serb-free.  On the subject of Popolac, "Pravo na sutra" is predictably silent.  The Serbian/Albanian framework is both anachronistic and overdetermined. On the one hand, even though the Wars of Yugoslav Succession started several years after the story saw print, the Serb/Albanian conflict was not exactly new. On the other, Barker makes no explicit reference to it, nor is there any reason to expect he knew anything about it.  The animosity between Serbs and Albanians to disinterested Westerners is just as obscure as the battle between Popolac and Podujevo is to Mick and Judd. It is conflict distilled down to essence, shorn of historical conscious while gesturing to a historical stereotype (the intramural feuds that plague the Balkans).

Next: Phantom Limbs

The Geography of the Body

As far-fetched as the comparison may seem, "Fixation" does help us come up with an answer, precisely because the question is embodied in an area so far from the brain.  By this I don't mean that the reasoning that led Russia down such a terrible path was faulty (though it certainly was that); rather,  the very idea of "reasoning" sends us down the wrong path entirely.  While many of the decisions made by those in power in and around the Kremlin reflect an understandable form of self-interest (particular decisions leading to personal enrichment), the discourse surrounding Russia's place in the world, as well as the politics both generated by and sold to the broader public, is primarily about affect.  How does it feel to be a Russian citizen in the aftermath of the Soviet collapse? 

The Russian Federation is not unique in the primacy of affective politics, or in the elites' manipulations of popular sentiment.  Playing on the public's fear, resentment, and anger is a tried and true method for the authoritarian accumulation of power. But while there are certainly many points of commonality among authoritarian governments and movements in the 21st century (anti-globalization, fear-mongering about migrants, the exploitation of economic insecurity, and the stigmatization of minority or foreign groups), the local context is always just that: local.   Or, in Russia's case, post-imperial.

I am far from the first person to suggest that one of the root causes of contemporary Russia's woes is the country's complicated relationship with its Soviet past.  In fact, this isn't even the first book I've written that takes the post-Soviet condition as its premise.  Unidentified Russian Objects is, at least in my own head, the final volume of an unofficial trilogy about Russia's inability to address its post-Soviet hangover.  Soviet Self Hatred dealt with the stigmatized identities that have played a prominent role in the Russian imaginary since well before the Soviet collapse, while Unstuck in Time explored the fantastic and science fictional preoccupation with Russian and Soviet history, be it through time travel, the creation of alternate Soviet futures and presents, or the willful denial that the USSR even ended. Under the umbrella title Russia's Alien Nations (a title that exists primarily in my own imagination, but also on my blog), these books were intended to be my final statement on the matter.  I sometimes think of them as a twist on the classical Aristotelian unities of action, time, and place,  although that would suggest that the world I am describing is the well-wrought result of a guiding artistic sensibility. The first book dealt with identity (substituting for "action"), the second with time, and the third (that is, this one) with space.

By "space" I mean actual, physical geography (and the imaginary constructs that accrue to it), as well as the metaphors that such geography generates.  In order to render the scale of nation, empire, and international conflict legible, these metaphors recast geopolitics in terms of the body.

As an illustration of this process, I'd like to introduce two fictional texts, only one of which is actually about Russia. The other story is  "In the Hills, the Cities," which concludes the first book in Clive Barker's ground-breaking, six-volume horror collection, Books of Blood.  A bestselling author whose early work was closely identified with the rise of "splatterpunk" (intensely graphic, transgressive, and often literary horror fiction), Barker is probably better known as the creator of the Hellraiser series and its iconic monster, Pinhead.   "In the Hills, the Cities" is about Mick and Judd, two British gay men unhappily vacationing together in rural Yugoslavia, where they stumble upon a bizarre ritual. Every ten years, the cities of Popolac and Podujevo each band their entire population together into a collective giant. Each city becomes a grotesque Balkan kaiju composed entirely of the bodies of its residents:

It was a masterpiece of human engineering: a man made entirely of men. Or rather, a sexless giant, made of men and women and children. All the citizens of Popolac writhed and strained in the body of this flesh-knitted giant, their muscles stretched to breaking point, their bones close to snapping.

When Podujevo collapses (resulting in a horrifying death toll), Popolac goes insane, marching through the countryside and accidentally killing Judd.  Mick catches onto Popolac's foot and joins the giant collective body on its trek through the hills.

Yeah, this’ll end well

Barker was not the first to exploit the metaphor of the body politic in order to create a collective national body; my second text is a bit closer to home. In 1921, Soviet poet Vladimir Mayakovsky composed an epic poem about the standoff between Soviet Russia and the capitalist West, 150,000,000, with the entire population of Russia (along with its flora and fauna) combined into the form of a giant named "Ivan," so that Ivan could enter into hand-to-hand combat with the West in the figure of a giant Woodrow Wilson. A century later, imagining international conflict as a struggle between enormous national Megazords looks rather dubious, but Mayakovsky was merely doing what Mayakovsky usually did:  deliberately exaggerating a familiar notion or extending a metaphor further than usually thought advisable (in this case, the body politic).

But "In the Hills, the Cities" takes things into territories that, under Mayakovsky's pen, never made it further than subtext.  The story is unforgettably evocative, and remains a minor touchstone of geek culture.  [1] But it is also a triumph of the extension of a dead metaphor:  just what, exactly, is the body politic?

Note

[1] As Ruthanna Emrys notes in her insightful commentary on the story, Popolac has gone on to inspire a heavy metal song by Halo of the Void, a custom Magic: The Gathering card, and countless illustrations on Tumblr. Not to mention an outstanding issue of Alan Moore's classic run on the Swamp Thing comic just three years after the story was published. 

Next: The Proprioceptive Body Politic

Introduction: Self/Inflicted

On November 10, 2013, a 29-year-old performance artist named Petr Pavlensky took off his clothes, sat down in the middle of Red Square, and nailed his scrotum to a cobblestone. Pavlensky had already gained a good deal of notoriety for his previous concatenations of political artistic spectacle and self-harm:  the year before, he sewed his mouth shut for an action he called "Seam" in protest of the state's persecution of the feminist anarchist Pussy Riot collective. Just four months before "Fixation" (his Red Square scrotal extravaganza), he lay naked in front of the St. Petersburg legislature, wrapped in barbed wire as a statement about the increasingly repressive laws adopted by the Russian government (this action was called "Carcass").  Eventually, he would go on to cut off an earlobe while sitting on the roof of the country's most notorious psychiatric facility and set fire to the doors of the FSB headquarters, before leaving the country to continue his political art activities in Europe. 

All of Pavlensky's actions were designed as political commentary, but, with the passage of time, it is "Fixation" that has proved to be the most cogent and enduring, if perhaps not entirely in keeping with the author's intent.  Deliberately coinciding with a national holiday in honor of law enforcement ("Police Day"), "Fixation" was, in Pavlensky's words, "a metaphor for the apathy, political indifference and fatalism of contemporary Russian society. As the government turns the country into one big prison, stealing from the people and using the money to grow and enrich the police apparatus and other repressive structures, society is allowing this, and forgetting its numerical advantage, is bringing the triumph of the police state closer by its inaction.”.

Well, perhaps, but the uninitiated observer could be forgiven for having difficulties connecting the action's form to its content. The objects of Pavlensky's ire were certainly well-known social and political ills (at least in Russia's liberal, progressive, or opposition circles). The form of his critique might not be immediately obvious or legible (what, exactly, does the rise of a police state have to do with testicular piercing?), but there is a historical precedent.  As Anastasia Kayiatos points out in her essay "Penile Servitude and the Police State," prisoners in the Soviet Gulag sometimes resorted to self-mutilation in response to the excesses of camp life, including nailing their scrotum to benches or planks. Self-harm becomes a violent precursor to passive resistance. In Pavlensky's case, the police confronting him were stumped. They wanted to arrest him, but they couldn't move him without either causing serious damage or having a much more intimate encounter with a noncompliant body than they ever signed on for.

My point is not that "Fixation" missed its target. Quite to the contrary, the performance of violence on the artist's own body a powerful if not uncontroversial means of highlighting the violence inherent in Russian political and governmental life.  Younger Russian artists and scholars have since argued that the use of violence as a critique of violence is a dead end, and that political artistic production must escape the cycle of reinforcing discursive violence by instrumentalizing it even for the purpose of satire or protest. Their conclusion that such violence ends up implicating all involved is part of an internal debate, but it, like Pavlensky's protest, ends up turning back once again to the State and its official discourse.

This critique has only been reinforced by highly troubling accusations made against Pavlensky. In 2017,  a member of the Russian Teatr.doc political art group accused Pavlensky and his partner, Oksana Shalygina,  of sexual assault.  They denied the charges, declared the accuser an informer, and fled to France with their children.  Just three years later, Shalygina published a book called He Never Hit Me in the Face (По лицу он меня не бил), detailing years of physical and emotional abuse at Pavlensky's hand (Pavlensky denies the charges).  Now Pavlensky's violent art begins to look even more self-referential than the self-harm initially suggests;  Pavlensky's artistic blurring of the boundaries between the subject of violence and its object takes an an air of (unconscious) self-accusation.

Three years into Russia's brutal full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Pavlensky's art in general, and "Fixation" in particular, start to look less like a criticism and more like a diagnosis.  Outraged Ukrainians and guilt-ridden Russian liberals have been reexamining the Russian cultural legacy, including calls for the "cancellation" of Russian culture entirely. [1]  Highlighting Russian artistic achievements on stage, screen, or even in print does not feel right, but nor does an outright ban, particularly of work produced by opponents to Putin's war.  Within the Russian Federation, the room for dissenting political and artistic expression has dwindled to virtual nonexistence.  Russian culture is stuck, fixed in place in a state of abjection.

But it is not just the opposition that has lost its room to maneuver.  The expectations for a quick victory in Ukraine, fed by woefully inadequate intelligence, unrealistic assumption, and a system that does not encourage the bearing of bad news to the country's leaders, were rapidly dashed. Rather than immediately taking Kyiv and removing Zelensky, the Russian military has (at least so far) been unable to sustain a serious advance while unwilling to undertake a serious retreat, relying on a population of prisoner "volunteers" and ethnic minorities from the provinces as cannon fodder.  Russia is stuck in Ukraine, and, as in the case of Pavlensky, the wound is self-inflicted.

"Fixation" was also prophetic in the choice of male genitalia as the site of pain and paralysis.  Putin's presidency has been notoriously masculinist, even phallic, from the ubiquitous picture of a bare-chested Putin on horseback to his appropriation of the rhetoric of sexual violence.  The opposition has turned this trait against him, with the slogan "Putin Is a Dickhead"  ("Путин—хийло”) making its way from Ukrainian street protests to the Russian Internet to an episode of The Simpsons over the course of a decade.  Pavlensky, however, chose to put a nail through his scrotum rather than his penis; one imagines that even he was willing to suffer only so much for his art.  The scrotum and testicles are also often used as signs of masculine toughness ("Putin's got balls"), and yet they are the site of maximum masculine vulnerability ("Ukraine's got Putin by the balls").

Though it might be too great a weight to rest on Pavlensky's tortured scrotum,  "Fixation" ends up standing for Putin's folly in Ukraine, a Russia trapped in a war that it can neither win nor lose, a culture with no place to go, and, for that matter, a population of men who face the prospect of mobilization and death in a senseless war by virtue of nothing but their biological, assigned sex.  And whether we think of the subject as Putin himself, the Russian elites, or the broader population that has assented to Putinism through apathy and cynicism, the victim is primarily to blame.

This is not Mother Russia, calling her sons to action, but Father Russia,  trapped in a humiliating, compromising position.  One imagines him, exposed, suffering, and unable to move, asking himself:  how did I ever get to the point where this seemed like a good idea?

Note

[1] I use the term "cancellation" reluctantly, because of the instrumentalization of "cancel culture" discourse by the right wing.  Nonetheless, this term has been ubiquitous in the context of Russia's war in Ukraine.

Next: Balancing the Body Politic