What We Talk About When We Talk About Russia
Naming and claiming a territory is no doubt a political act; indeed, in the history of international relations, what could be more of a signature move than that? But it is also a philosophical question. When we apply a name to something, what, exactly, are we doing? And what is the nature of the name and its relationship to the named?
In semiotics, this question has an easy answer: Ferdinand de Saussure, the founder of the discipline, declared that the relationship between signifier and signified is arbitrary. This is what distinguishes the sign from the symbol, for which this relationship usually has a logical or metonymic basis. A nation or idea is slippery and vague enough to constitute what is often called a "floating signifier;" following Claude Levi-Strauss, post-structuralist theorists have connected this term with the varieties of ideology. Certain, the "Soviet" was and is a floating signifier, as is "Russia," but the same could hold true for any nation, state, or empire.
Look, honey! It’s a floating signifier!
But for every assertion made by a critical theorist, there is an equal and often opposite assertion on the part of an analytic philosopher. Perhaps analytic philosophy might lead us in a different direction? In 1970, the philosopher Saul Kripke delivered a series of public lectures that, in 1980, were collected and published as Naming and Necessity, which, among other things, argued against what was then the reigning paradigm among philosophers of language when discussing names and naming: the descriptivist theory of proper names. Associated primarily with Bertrand Russell, Gottlieb Frege, Lutwig Wittengenstein, and John Searle, this model (also sometimes referred to as the "Frege-Russell view" or "mediated reference theory"), posits that names effectively function as containers of descriptions of the given person. "Lev Tolstoy," for example, would be a phrase that collects such well-know facts as "Russian author," "philosopher of nonviolence," "died at a train station," and "had a long beard," among many, many others. This explanation does not do descriptivism justice, nor does it account for the differences in the approaches taken by Russell, Frege, Wittgenstein, and Searle.
It is enough to know that Kripke was arguing against what he saw as fundamental flaws in descriptivism, proposing (though never quite endorsing) what would come to be known as the "causal theory of reference." Kripke argued that names initially gain their referent through the inaugural act of "dubbing" (or "initial baptism"); a for instance, a parent names a newborn girl Svetlana, causing others to use the name in reference to her from then on. The name accrues new significance over time, based on Svetlana's own qualities and actions; if Svetlana gets glasses at age 7 and subsequently wear them all the time, she will not always have been the girl with glasses, but those who meet her later in life will inevitably see this as one of her distinguishing features. Svetlana will continue to be Svetlana if she loses a leg, and also if she starts using a prosthetic. For Kripke, most proper names function as "rigid designators:" they always refer to the same thing. This is usually discussed in terms of "possible worlds" (is water always water in every possible world), but a more relevant way of looking at it for our purposes might go back to its constituent parts: like the paradox of the Ship of Theseus, is it always the same thing when its components are swapped out?
"Russia" is a proper name. Does that mean it also qualifies as a rigid designator? Yes, to the extent that there is some commonly-understood "Russia" at which people point when they say the word. It would take a great deal of geographical ignorance to place "Russia" in South America, or to call the Russian Federation "Brazil." But countries can be poor examples of object permanence: there is no longer a country called "Yugoslavia" or the "Soviet Union," though they still function as rigid designators because we know what they were in the past. After the repeated partitions of Poland in the 19th century, Alfred Jarry's Father Ubu announced his intention to invade Poland because "there is no Poland." It is unsurprising that sovereign states want very much to insist on their own persistence, or even on their eternal essence: they want their countries to be rigid designators. Or, more to the point when it comes to Russia, there are political forces that very much want the population to believe "Russia" is a rigid designation: Russia is whatever was at one point Russia, or what the leadership declares to be (and always have been) Russia. Hence the repeated declarations that "there is no such sovereign country as Ukraine" (shades of Ubu!), in part because Ukraine as a recognized state is a relatively recent historical phenomenon. The claim is totalizing, and much order than Ukrainian statehood: Kyiv, after all, has long been claimed as the "cradle of Russian civilization," even as, geographically, it might be more proper to declare it the "cradle of Ukrainian civilization." To the ears of a Russian nationalist, this sounds like a punchline.
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