Poor but Sexy: Culture Clashes in Europe East and West (32 page)

Lukács wrote that ‘socialist realism is in a position both to portray the totality of a society in its immediacy and reveal its pattern of development’, a form of art that had ‘the ambition to portray a social whole’. Is it then that the success of
The Wire
or
Mad Men
lies in precisely their focus on the totality, that links every form of our being, every possibility – capital? One of the main features of
The Wire
is it’s classical narrative – the show operates within the present, develops linearly in time, and also quite slowly, never really using any devices like flashbacks - it stubbornly stays in a dead end, just like the lives of its characters. The serial takes its form from a novel, furthermore, a novel, as it was in its golden era, the nineteenth century: a “low” form, printed in a newspaper, in episodes. Many of the greatest novels of all time were published in episodes: Balzac, Dostoyevsky, Dickens. The novel was “low” in comparison to the metaphorical language of the heroic epic literature, instead talking about everyday life. One of the milestones in the modern novel was
Don Quixote
, a satire on heroic romances detached from the world. The novel was always a tool for social critique and satire, it was fictionalized but realistic. Even extreme examples, like Laurence Sterne’s
Tristram Shandy
, have an experimental form, which use the idea of the world that is impossible to tell to a positive, constructive effect, enabling one to see the production of clichés and stupidities within the process of storytelling. We can argue that representation of reality is always different from fiction, a failure of someone who tries to tell their life story as fiction. That’s why
Tristram Shandy
was loved by Russian formalists, as a work that is about constructing, about technique, about devices.

Modern works of art always strive to cognitively map the world, says Jameson, to explain it.
The Wire’s
apparent ability to depict totality more successfully than experimental cinema or engaged art can help us in explaining the relation of socialist realism to the avant-garde, and effectively explain the current weakness of art as a tool in cognitive mapping. The televisual form (all-available, democratic) makes it popular. Each of the serials I mentioned is produced in specific conditions: by a private channel, with a big budget. Can you really compare it to art that is made in different conditions? But you can compare it to the work of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, a former underground director who produced several works for television in 1970s West Germany. Most of his
films concern the left movement, Germany’s Nazi past and its repercussions on the present. Fassbinder never questioned ‘repre-sentation’ as such, as did the more radical part of the New German Cinema, and never produced a ‘film-essay’, but instead always created realistic narratives.

Situations and performances from Fassbinder’s movies often seem nearly comically overwrought, over the top, where the grotesquely exaggerated dialogue and acting serves as a running locomotive of stereotypes, even if the behaviors of his characters are often non-conformist and non-normative. Fassbinder often took his situations from pornographic movies: but here sexuality is rather a way of driving certain attitudes present in the society to their radical end. In his films relationships between men and women, but also between men (not always, but mostly, homosexual) and men, full of sadism, masochism and hatred, are depictions of the real power relations within society. Despite actors who are often compelled to act out in the most hysterical way the schizophrenic relation within society, Fassbinder remains genuinely sympathetic to his characters. This director emerges today as one of the most acute critics of the post war capitalist Germany, as a residuum of un-dead fascism, racism, greediness, which expresses itself in radical violence and cruelty.

In the novel, Peter Weiss attempted a similar radicalized realism. Weiss was one of the most sensitive and complex artists to comment on the Cold War reality of a split Germany. His monumental 1980s trilogy
The Aesthetics of Resistance
is a retrospective look at the German past, to create possible scenarios for the German future. In the novel he follows a fictitious anti-Nazi resistance group, who spend their time in intellectual disputes, and meet up in galleries and museums, to link their ideas of radicalism with the past ideas of art and ethics. The author does resist the bourgeois individualism often evoked by such discussions (as we know from the modernist novel, from Mann to Proust) by replacing a singular individual character with a collective political mind of the resistance
group. In doing so, Weiss was looking at the aesthetic premises of sotsrealism: heroism, grand scale, nineteenth-century realism. Yet his novel is not simply a repetition of the previous realism, with its academism and conservatism, but instead manipulated consciousness by using devices and provoking specific emotions. It is a rare example of a historical novel, which for Lukacs was the pinnacle of realism.

So, at least in my language, the call for new kinds of representation is not meant to imply merely a return to Balzac or Brecht. Realism and the avant-garde are historical concepts, rooted in their time and place, and it’d be impossible to bring them back as they were without falling into quite obvious forms of kitsch, as it is clear from so many post-Soviet artists, who were, especially in the 90s, making “liberation art”, endlessly recalling the years of the regime. A new realism will include the new ways we live our lives today, unknown to the previous generations; the ways neoliberalism is perverting the spaces of our work and privacy; a new precarious aesthetic. The reason we exclaim often while watching
The Wire
or
The Sopranos
at the aptness and intelligence is that in fact they are syncretic.
The Wire
shows the full spectrum of the changing social classes, the personal is always attached to some wider impersonal structures: politics, union, police, financial. The world of
Sopranos
often uses oneiric, retrospective elements and unrealistic devices, but always in the end to enrich and nuances of the portrayal of the reality of its inhabitants. But what politics is produced by these serials? Might it only produce the protests like those against ACTA, when the thing that finally spurred young people was the ban on endless free downloads of their favorite serial? The availability of TV online, especially in this really refined latest form, only deepened the already existing retreat into the private zone. In the end, in the current climate, even the most intelligent television may transform your politics, but it won’t make you act.

German artist Hito Steyerl, in her essay
Is the Museum a Factory?
asks a question about the growing harmlessness of political art
today, which is closed in the safe space of the museum. She even quotes Godard himself, who said recently that “video artists shouldn’t be afraid of reality” which suggests that they obviously are. This made me think about Wajda again, as
Man of Marble
and
Man of Iron
interestingly compare to Harun Farocki’s
Workers Leaving the Factory
as oppositional “archaeologies of (non) representation of labour”, as Steyerl describes Farocki’s film. Wajda wilfully fabricates the images of workers at work: in the factory, laying bricks or even starving and being beaten - and confronts that with the facadism of work shot “as newsreels”. Farocki doesn’t strictly shoot anything, putting together footage from eleven different decades depicting workers all over the world after they finish their day. Yet nobody in their right mind would call Farocki’s film ‘realistic’, just as Wajda’s film is realistic in an obvious way, shot in a “traditional”, historical movie manner.

Both depict the life of a worker living in the time of a manipulated world-image. Farocki’s work uses documentary and absolutely realistic parts, it uses unrealistic devices, and it’s neither a documentary nor a fiction film, but an installation, created in a way similar to the avant-garde – via editing, defamiliarization, the old avant-garde techniques. Maybe there are two kinds of realisms at play: while the traditional realism of Wajda or
The Wire
continues the old Story, the Great Narrative, the artist, whoever it is, will try to engage the viewer on a more intimate way. “Every spectator is either a coward or a traitor”, Steyerl quotes Frantz Fanon, postulating greater political closeness instead of spectatorship. The cinema which will embrace such intimacy, must be secondary, not primary, to the political space that emerges.

(‘MDM’)
(A song on the flagship Socialist Realist estate in Warsaw)

Fragments of various popular songs from early 1950s

In recent decades, notions of center and periphery have become completely central to so-called ‘subaltern studies’, and are seen as the most revealing way to analyze our seemingly naturalized ways of seeing the world. And despite the tremendous effort of thinkers and philosophers to make the periphery more interesting than the center, as a citizen of a post-communist country I experienced how these categories can have a direct influence on your life. It goes without saying that Western Europe is Center, and Russia, for example, which probably produced the greatest amount of outstanding artists in the twentieth century in the world, is not even considered ‘Europe’ by many.

Europe…is not Russia!
exclaims Croatian journalist Slavenka Drakulic in her dramatic essay from
Café Europa
, one of many post-Soviet memoirs, written soon after 1991, when “explaining” the former East to the West - in a double sense of guilt and revelation - was suddenly considered necessary. As an “expiation” for the pitiful life we lead during
komuna
, we now greedily appropriated everything that was Western. That it was better than anything we could possibly produce went without saying. The transition to
capitalism happened in Eastern Europe at the worst possible moment – the system imploded after years of financial crisis, misinvestments and as a result of a massive debts taken decades earlier. The patient was nearly dead, so it’s no wonder that in this state, after everything was pumped out of him, he died immediately.

Europe’s Cold War borders were decided through the cruel geopolitics of the Yalta treaty. Some countries were thus attached to the Eastern Bloc against their will, like Poland; others were included against the popular will into the capitalist camp, like Greece. The West supported fascists in Greece against the communist partisans, to eliminate the possibility of communist governments arising outside the agreed-upon Soviet Bloc. This divide was reinforced by the Marshall Plan, where American money was lavished on a ruined Europe. Communist countries were also offered Marshall Aid, yet they were forced by the USSR to reject it, mainly because it meant opening up the books of the economy to American examination. It’s not like this aid to Communist states was proposed realistically - it was proposed in such a way that the East had to reject it.

Western Europe had massive investments from America, creating a huge boom.

Although the communist economies grew throughout that period, especially Yugoslavia and USSR, they were basically still command economies, with all the inefficiency that entailed. The post-war order was established so rigidly and with such a great support from the USA that it ensured communism would be once and for all confined to the East. It is common to believe within the ex-Bloc, that it was the lack of Marshall Plan financial help that decided our belatedness. A popular conviction today is that because of this it was actually the Western countries who could really afford to put into life elements of the socialist programme, realized as the welfare state.

It is not the ambition of this chapter to decide whether the
compromised version of monopoly capitalism that occurred in Western Europe was a real solution, but to look at what the alternative to it was, or could have been. We’re so used to thinking of the economy in the whole Eastern Bloc as obviously inefficient, that we’re now shocked when names of Polish and Soviet economists, like Nikolai Kondratiev or Michał Kalecki, are called upon as to explain the capitalist crisis. Yet in the post-war years, the Soviet Bloc not only produced an outstanding economic theory, it had its own ideas for socialist-led economy. Most famously, market socialism in Tito’s Yugoslavia and the whole Non-Aligned Movement fought for an economy of the ‘third way’. But also during the post-Stalinist years of the Thaw, scientists had Nikita Khrushchev’s permission and enormous amounts of money to work on new, alternative methods of directing the economy without resorting to capitalist methods, in the specially designed Academic Towns, like Akademgorodok, just outside Novosibirsk, the subject of Francis Spufford’s scientific-historical novel
Red Plenty;
“closed cities” you needed permission to visit, devoted to the development of science.