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