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Elena Trubina
I DO BETTER WHEN I IMPROVISE: COPING WITH UNCERTAINTY IN POST - SOVIET RUSSIAN "LIFE - STORIES" NARRATING.
There was recently a story in the Wedding section of New York Times about Russian woman Oksana who just happily married a wealthy and adventurous American man, Douglas. She is 26. He is 53. But this is not what matters. What does matter is how she lived before this happy encounter happened while she was exploring the Americans on One&Only, an international matchmaking site. Here are some details: she "was earning the equivalent of $20 a month designing computer programs to track nuclear materials at a government institute. She occupied a tiny dormitory room there, and like most people she knew, she barely scraped by financially". No wonder, that "she was dreaming of escape".
Douglas, in turn, was fascinated with an excitingly broad selection of potential brides. He was surprised to find there "highly educated Russian women...including a laser physicist and a lawyer". Here is his conclusion: "...tens of thousands of Russian women are on the Internet trying to leave and better their lives"1. The story is not at all exceptional. It is interesting to notice how Western man figures here as a unique individual against an amorphous collectivity of women. Having read it, one is left wondering about whether different life scripts were possible for Oksana or is there, indeed, anything left to do for "tens of thousands of Russian women" except browsing the Internet in a desperate hope to escape the dreadfulness of their existence. This phantasmatic picture brings to mind the image of a huge, deserted space and its gloomy occupants incapable of seeing any sense in what they do and how they live. How humble and insignificant their lives should seem to them!
A version of this article was delivered at the Davis Center for Russian Studies (Harvard University) Seminar on Culture and Literature in the spring 2000. I thank the participants of this seminar for their criticism. I would like to thank Seyla Benhabib, Svetlana Boym, Virginie Coulloudon, Janet Vaillant, Stephen Melville, Richard Read, Ronald Tinnevelt for their expert assistance, suggestions and commenting on various drafts of this article.
I gratefully acknowledge the following sources of support for this project: the Fulbright Foundation Grant, as well as an Individual Research Support Scheme Grant RSS (No. 1124/1999)
Their future seems up for grabs. And this is what leads me to the problem I'd like to discuss.
It is the problem of understanding of self-identities of post-Soviet Russians from a philosophical perspective. General and particular, normative and descriptive, constructive and contextual, performative and narrative - these are the dichotomies through the lenses of which I try to consider my material, the stories of those I relate to so differently. My project draws on the Western philosophy, which is also brought into question by the use of perspectives that are usually excluded from academic debate. The background against which I want to address this problem is the postmodern condition of a decline of meaning and markers of certainty, a sense of loss of legal and ethical values.
One might ask: why Western philosophy? Don't you have your own philosophical legacy, say, Vladimir Solovyev, Nicolai Berdyayev and many others? The problem is not only in an enormous rupture that divides the culture these thinkers belonged to and the one I belong to. The problem is how not to let particulars (the names and ideas you were introduced to since your youth) close you off from an openness. The problem is how the universal (philosophy) and particular (Post-Soviet culture through the stories of its bearers) can be related or thought against each other. This twin reaching toward contemporary philosophy and ordinary Russian lives has also something to do with my wish to do justice to some of the phenomena that embarrass all of us today (the decline of a public space, value uncertainty, the consequences of globalization) and make me distrust any philosophy which leaves one without any means to understand the dynamics behind these tendencies.
The pertinence of eudaemoniain the post-Soviet times
Whomever you talk to today in Russia in these troubled times, whatever you discuss, you hear almost always one and the same: "It is hard to tell", "Who knows what is going to happen tomorrow." Some lives have been severely fractured by ideological conversion and chronic social instability. The socio-economic and cultural flux during the past decade has caused many, shorn of community, tradition, and shared meaning, to experience apathy, despair, and a fundamental emptiness. Yet it is not living «from hand-to-mouth» that makes today's situation especially difficult. Rather it is that society no longer agrees on what is valuable and worth living for. Therefore, persons, even those with the best education, find it difficult to decide what values apply. Some cannot organize their lives; cannot make sense of their lives; some cannot even relate to other people without regarding them as prey to be deceived or mastered. As a result their actions are often confused, contradictory, and even senseless. At one extreme, they may view themselves as merely doing a job, with no interest in the larger implications of their professional roles; at the other, they may express concerns for spiritual and moral values, but be incapable of incorporating these values into their lives. These attitudes of cynicism and helplessness are consciously and unconsciously communicated to the younger generations, to the detriment of all concerned.
Does this have only to do with a particular situation of a "country in transition" or has it something in common with the space of modern culture in general, which is so tellingly compared by Max Weber with an arena for the warring gods? In other words, are the values assessing problems contemporary Russians face similar to those all modern people struggle with? Each of them, before making his or her choice, "can ask her prospective god ‘In what ways will you enhance my life?’, ask each realm of value that demands our unconditional and undivided allegiance; ‘What will my life be like if I serve you?’ (Ferrara, 1999, 191). This is not only about which moral or aesthetic values or values of justice can enhance life as such, but a problem of what kinds of values matter. As Alessandro Ferrara puts it, "Would a human life lived without concern for justice be as well lived as one which included such a concern?" (1999,191). It seems that "my" Russians are oscillating between such "prospective gods" as the values of self-fulfillment and the values of success but is this a sort of dilemma that is Russian-specific?
We all suffer in our lives from the disappointments, frustrations and denials. There is always fear in us to end up with nothing to remember, to share, and to cherish. And this is so natural that images of alternative forms of existence are always there in our mind, the ideas of the life we anticipate or hope for. The ancient notion of eudaemonia, of a human life well lived is getting strangely relevant these days. As a rule, these ideas and images remain vague, somehow waiting for specific situations in order to become concrete. Ironically, it is anticipations of Americans - their fantasies about a good life -that seem to be located nowhere. While Russians aspirations have a pretty concrete shape: most of them are related to the "West", the "America": once you are there, that is it. It seems that this naive concreteness of our anticipations blocks our reflection on what makes our Russian situation specific and what allows considering it as something we share with the others. As if "West" in general and "America" as its most tangible embodiment have come to signify (to represent, to mean) not only what is normal for all people but also what is universal. Where in the people's longing for the West does the "practical" end and where does "metaphysical" begins? How did it happen that the common project of human existence turned out to be split in our imagination: its richer possibilities seem to be located on the one side of Atlantic, and its unhappy and even savage aspect remain on the other side. So the challenge to contemporary theorists is to learn to deal with this contradiction. The challenge is to learn to see both the ideals and the savageries.
Narrative as a way to re-think relation between universal and particular
It was shown in the works of those who were most sensitive to the complexities of action and moral reflection in human life (in thelight of the tragic experiences of the Twentieth Century) that in order to be capable of satisfactory pursuing its own aim of understanding human existence philosophy should no longer be written in the way its tradition insisted on: deductive relation of universal and particular. The idea of "the unity of theory and practice", on which the Marxist philosophy famously insisted, reflects the essence of theoretical analysis not only in Marx but in Plato, Hobbes, Hegel's understanding: theoretical science provides an accurate description of the "true essence" of the just society, human nature, from which various prescriptions for action are derived. Thus imperfect reality is brought into accord with what Nature or History demands (Villa, 1999, 80-86) The "law of history" or the "law of nature", as Jean-Francois Lyotard has impressively shown, provide a metanarrative which totalitarian regimes attempt to bring reality into accord with. Still politicians and decision-makers legitimately try "to realize in practice" the ideas that are hold in theory
Hannah Arendt was among those who opposed this mimetic understanding of relation between universal and particular. She has shown that in this logic "judgement is reduced to the activity of subsuming particulars under theoretically derived universals, is reduced to a deductive exercise in which pregiven truth or theoretically derived standards are applied to "the realm of human affairs" (Villa, 1999, 88). First, she opposed the Hegelian philosophy of history. In her account on "The Origins of Totalitarianism" she refused to see in the history of Twentieth Century any dialectical continuity with the past in favor of a radically new approach. This new approach, is, in words of Seyla Benhabib, to "break the chain of narrative continuity, to shatter chronology as the natural structure of narrative, to stress fragmentariness, historical dead ends, failures and ruptures" (Benhabib, 1997, 88). Second, she has shown that the rise in the modern era the phenomena of the social, and instrumentalization of existence that accompanies it, imposes a number of constrains on free action. Arendt states that "It is decisive that society, on all levels, excludes the possibility of action, which formerly was excluded from the household. Instead, society expects from each of its members a certain kind of behavior, imposing numerable and various rules, all of which tend to "normalize" its members, to make them behave, to exclude spontaneous action or outstanding achievement " (Arendt, 1957, 40). Arendt's observation, at the level of global development, is important because it draws our attention to the possibility of a future world that she describes as the world deprived of individual human dignity, in which "masses of people are continuously rendered superfluous". It is not only totalitarianism that can lead to such a condition; other social and political tendencies can add to this condition, too, as it is getting obvious today. From that point of view globalism can be seen as a kind of misleading Esperanto (like reading a computer manual instead of Gogol)2: the assumption that we are 'all the same' is only the fugitive impression created by a shared language of internationalism that is so narrow and superficial that it cuts out the reality as well as the richness of dynamics that are likely to play a quite disturbing role in a long-term relationship. This is not an argument against 'mixed marriages' for genuine curiosity about the cultural difference of a partner can be a sustaining turn-on.
Arendt, at the level of individual consciousness, allows us to see the devastating contradictions many feel about tendencies of calculation, self-organization, self-discipline, on the one hand, and tendencies of spontaneity, free play, improvisation, on the other. It is social discourse they fall victims to, something like the one Max Weber discussed in The Puritan Ethic: Victorian bourgeois capitalist society felt itself to be rational, selfless, philanthropic, while its actual spontaneous behavior was luxurious, self-satisfying, predatory and massively exploitative. Calculation and obedience to the rules and spontaneity were the extreme poles of behavior. At the time Weber describes spontaneity was the enemy, calculation the salvation. Today I think it possible that the poles are the other way around: so called economic rationalism is the wildest religion. So-called 'deregulation', the determination to force a country to behave in accordance with the 'reality' of market forces (considered as a kind of 'nature') is the most absurdly inhibited attachment to an absurd dream of prosperity as the only worthy human goal3. What some people try to resist is what seems to them to be just another attempt normalize them, to shape them into more disciplined, self-relying, self-organized laborers.
Third, Arendt distinguished between three kinds of human activity: «work» (activities that produce artificial objects out of natural materials); «labor» (activities that satisfy biological needs); and «action» (activities that establish or change personal relationships without accompanying tangible benefits) (Arendt, 1957, Chapter V. Action). She was against understanding action in instrumental terms. What makes action meaningful rather then purposive is the fundamental «plurality»of actors and the interdependency of their «conflicting wills and intentions». By defining action as 'a disclosure of the acting and speaking agent» (Arendt, 1957, 182) she also emphasized the significance of story telling in the quest for personal and communal identity. According to her, the «who» people is revealed in the narratives they tell of themselves and the others. Personal identity thus is, firstly, always achieved intersubjectively, or interpersonally. It is largely through discourse that we achieve a sense of individuated selves with particular attributes. Arendt emphasizes that the humanist notion of autonomous self-created subjectivity has come to the end: "all notions of man creating himself have in common a rebellion against the very factuality of human condition - nothing is more obvious that that man...does not owe his existence to himself" (Arendt, 1969, 13). Moreover, "nobody is the author or producer of his own life story...Somebody began it and is its subject in the twofold sense of the word, namely, its actor and sufferer, but nobody is its author" (Arendt, 1957, 184).
Arendt's idea that storytelling is the means by which people make sense of their lives and the lives of others signaled the recent shift in social science and humanities toward a new understanding of narrative not only as a time-tested qualitative methodology but as a fundamental concept, as a construct, and as an idea applied to human life. Those whose specialized task has been to grasp the ways in which certain texts lend meaning and value to human life include M. Bachtin, P. Ricoeur, J. Bruner, A. MacIntyre, J. Habermas, S. Benhabib, R. Shafer, D. Carr and many others. Taken together their works mark the emergence of a new trans-disciplinary analytic to which the idea of narrative model of identity is central. When people recount their histories, they are not just reporting history. They are also constructing meaning out of those lives past and present, projecting on the stories a consistent image of the narrator and, in many cases, justifying their own lives. But what if some practices were really mistaken, and what if some large stories they find important for their own stories were wrong? And wrong in what sense? Because they are "untrue" or because they don't work well for their lives? The philosophical issues of normativity and universality applied to everyday life, leads many in my country to ask themselves: in comparison with the "people in the West", are we, indeed, broken, damaged, spoiled by the pitiless regime?
Troubles with personal identity
These questions are among those I hear quite often when I teach philosophy at the Urals State University and when I discuss things with my friends or relatives. These questions relate also to a larger project I am currently engaged in, involving two major agendas. First is the continuation of the work on self-identity as my main research interest. Second is my volunteer work in the Ekaterinburg educational community. In trying to recast the questions about self-identity in terms that make them interesting beyond the confines of philosophy and wishing to address in particular the current "identity crisis", I have, during past three years, been collecting life-stories from members of my professional discussion group. This group, which deals with the challenges of educational policies, is composed of teachers from universities and schools in the Sverdlovsk Region. In all, I've gathered and transcribed 15 personal narratives (12 from women, 3 from men). Here are some of the problems I face when applying the conceptions of personal identity I am most familiar with to the stories I have collected.
Firstly, according to the social constructivist position there are no bad or good stories since stories merely reflect social conventions. It regards stories as the realization of a culture's general and narrational norms. The question is how do the culture’s narratives work their way inward to the people’s biographical anticipations? What happens to story telling when state ideology rather than the culture, or, largely ideologized culture, for a long time determines the content of the stories people tell? Given the extent to which a monological state master narrative was imposed on the individual lives, should one expect to find in the stories told that some participants' identities are constructed by being put in the story of the state, something like a romance with the state? Of course, in everyday conversations one can trace the features of this unhappy romance: "Everything was all right till recently when They not only stopped paying anything but made us feel absolutely abandoned." "The state betrayed us." Yet the most striking feature of the stories I've collected is that the people don't mention the state as, however perverse, a significant other. At the same time, those who still seek to rely on a collective ideology or worldview are in jeopardy today because the narratives that are generally accepted are so weak. Neither state, nor society today tells a coherent story of itself. Without this larger context, the individuals have lost their frame of reference, in which one's personal story has meaning. Surely, it is unlikely that the state ever entirely disappears from formed consciousness, even if it mutates, fragments and privatizes itself. But is there any way to prevent people from merely dwelling unreflectively in the out- of- date stories of suffering victims; to make them think of their lives as of their own lives; and to realize how the lives of their closest ones affected them and vice versa? That is, to tell (or at least try to tell) their own stories. Whether their own stories would be ones of love and care remains an open question. At least it seems quite possible to encourage people to maintain a certain reflective distance between themselves and the state, which used to tell them comfortable stories of themselves. Then a search for what is wrong with certain narratives would have to be directed to what is wrong with the ways of being. But how is the critique of personal narratives possible?
Secondly, many theorists (A. MacIntyre, C. Taylor, P. Ricoeur, G. Watson, and H. Frankfurt) rightly insist on the predominantly moral nature of personal identity. But there are a few ideas I question. For one, C. Taylor claims that "our identity is defined by our fundamental evaluations" (Taylor, 1992, 34). But, it seems to me, it would it be too much to require that one make an explicit reflective judgments about the values in order to achieve identity. Otherwise, how could we analyze the distortions and self-serving ideological misrepresentations sometimes contained in people's stories? Would it be sufficient to explain them only in terms of individual moral weakness? For another, A. MacIntyre says that to be willing one thing, to have a single purpose during a whole life-course, is what establishes a personal identity (MacIntyre, 1981, 189). Does it imply that those with "broken" lives must not - or cannot - seek integrity and identity? Is it possible that concern for interdependence is essential for achieving identity? Is a less ambitious, less strong view of personhood, of self-identity then those implied by these authors possible?
Finally, what if someone simply doesn't wish to reveal herself to the others, cherishing some kind of unspoken, unsayable in principle, core self or experience? Would it be correct to suppose that the process of self-narration does not happen easily or naturally? Is it possible to think of this process as of constantly mediating between being/experiencing and giving accounts of experience? Do the stories tell us something about "facts" of human life? Perhaps, they may give us a hint to what Heidegger called "facticity". The things we come from do not define us, and we are not able to determine which and what part of us do they create. It seems that categories of universal and particular, however tempting the first and exotic the second, do not determine everything in us, we are something that is neither first, not second.
Criteria of a good life in two "cheese" stories
In one sense this research project was hijacked by the narrators and pointed in a direction whose importance overrode any academic plans I might have had. In another sense, this redirection was inevitable and I can only illustrate its inevitability by describing the one recent episode. My mother lives in a small town near Ekaterinburg, she is in her late sixties and she still teaches literature and Russian language just like so many others of her age. She belongs to the group of people for whom continuing working is important not only because otherwise they’d have to wait endlessly for chronically delayed pensions (the wages are chronically delayed too, though) but because they want to feel useful, to use their skills. She is also a member of a group of long time friends, mostly teachers, doctors, engineers. One day one of her friends would came over with blotchy face. She was to a grocery shop where she only had money to buy 100 grams of the poorest cheese they had. Next to her the mayor of this small town was doing his grocery shopping which included about of pound of a best ham, about of pound of Swiss, olives and sardines and other nice delicacies. Stung, desperate, having no money and a paralytic husband on hand, mom’s friend calmly said to him: Could you at least do your shopping in some other place? You better then anybody should know that its been three month that we don’t receive neither pension nor salary...” The reply was” “What is wrong with my shopping? Today is my birthday after all. Can’t I treat my guests the way I wish?” To my surprise, my mother and her friend ended up arguing about whether it was proper to say anything to him at all. Would it be better if mom’s friend just kept what we call “a proud silence”? Would it be better if the mayor having said something like” I am sorry, we are working on this question, I am sure that very soon you’ll be able to shop, too” and then didn't keep his promise afterwards? It seems that what is most painful for these women is that they sense that egalitarian narrative they have gotten so used to is of no use anymore. And yet they see a deep injustice in the way the scarce resources are distributed. It is against the background comprised from stories like these one can see how simplistic and one-dimensional most explanatory models are.
This little episode like many, many others keep haunting me when I hear and read quite a lot of stories about Russians while abroad. Sometimes it is impossible to recognize the culture to which I belong in them. Does it mean that I know better, does it mean that I understand better what is going on? It is difficult to define exactly what is wrong with a certain representation of way of living, but one can sense when some representation or interpretation is wrong. Those who tell the stories do their best to reach the depths of the country they study if they are experts, or else they are content to share some shocking or disturbing episodes. One, describing his recent visit to Russia, says that a part of the voters feel nostalgic for the times when they had a stable salary, cheap kielbasa and three kinds of cheese. The voice from the audience objects: no, that was a time when they had only one kind of cheese. And you get the feeling that part of the stories told about your country and your people occupies a very important place in the imagination of Americans, as if they were designating a certain “bottom’ of living, that one likes to have on his or her mental map as something that couldn’t be worse. These two “cheese” stories are interesting from the point of view of criteria which one applies to judge a certain way of living: availability of a broad grocery selection and, in a sense, availability of justice. What criteria of a good life do these "cheese" stories imply? Does it really make sense to raise a voice in circumstances like these? Who is going to hear this voice except a close friend? Is there recently a place, or space in which the voices like this one could be heard? People don't believe that their voices, their opinions might be of interest to anybody except their close ones. And yet people are willing to follow their own thought and judgement in moral matters rather than rules or traditional values. Be it about the cheese or about justice the stories told here and there become intertwined…
‘Public’ and researcher
The ethical issue "my" Russian heroines encountered, namely, how best to keep one's dignity when one faces injustice - by keeping silence or by raising a voice - has an especial importance in virtue of a largely problematic state of "publicity", or public space, presently in Russia. First, the "open space" needed for reflective and independent exercise of judgement, human faculty, as Arendt puts it, " to tell good from wrong, ugly from beautiful", is eliminated. Ironically, the features of Western publicilty which is more and more driving from its political/critical dimension towards its consumerist/ aesthetizing one, as they has been recently described, seem to be quite relevant to Russian situation. Contemporary mass media blur the border between external and internal human life. Passive swallowing of highly biased news and apathy one can so often observe among Russians gets combined with reinvention of public "as an urban space of aesthetic self-presentation, sociability, theatricality and pleasure" (Robbins, 1993, ŐIŐ). This observation seems to me equally important in the Russian context.
The existential consequences of this state of publicity are that in an era, when everything changes constantly on all levels of social life individuals are finding it more and more difficult to distinguish their own past, present and future from the communal ones and to understand what is most essential in their own past and present for self-understanding. The social and cultural demands on individuals are so numerous and conflicting that many find it extremely difficult to feel that they are whole persons with a core personality.
When individuals reflections on their social and personal existence are blocked or impoverished, effective collective action are paralyzed or disoriented. This is a major political problem.
But there is one more specific dimension of "public" which has to do with bringing personal "voices" to the domain of public knowledge. The public without the researcher cannot hear these "voices". A social scientist, the role of which I seem partly eager to eschew for good reasons, might see certain limited patterns of selection crop up in them (the interviewees). If I were indeed a social scientist with a special obligation to establish comprehensively representative maps of social attitudes to gender and the state (to take just two coordinates), the selection of my subjects would be broader. One would be correct to infer that there is a (perhaps almost merely statistical) bias in favor of, say, female Russian teachers. I am aware of it and can only, more or less carefully, qualify it in terms of self-situation (I myself am Russian, female and a teacher like my mother and many I know). This, I hope, can be counted as strength of my approach and allows me not to make excessive claims for the validity of my conclusions. I choose a group within a society whose links with other groups could be highly illuminating.
The stories I have collected vary greatly. There are in them, of course, many colorful signs of a new times, ranging from experiences of those Russians who had to leave a now- former Soviet republics when perestroika came to the description of the strategies the girls in elite school use nowadays to pursue boys. The stories, it seems, have staked out a kind of territory: the milieu of uncertainty. One can discern several layers of uncertainty here: the unpredictability of future in general, the situation of the country in a state of chronic transition which has lead to a certain "storylessness", the uncertainty of each of us about our own life (what is it about after all) and uncertainty of its discursive expression (uncertainty of a narrative itself). Most of the stories told have the irregular shape of incidents, remembered or learned. These incidents stick together, unpredictably but somehow naturally. The themes which are unfolding in the stories are those of hard work, destiny, choices made. They do not contain discussions of the objects of class, or the economic climate of the time. Rather, they are told in terms of individual character, ability, cleverness, and desire for self-fulfillment.
Larisa’s story: never-repeating performance as a way to be yourself
For this article I've chosen the story of Larisa. She is a high school teacher, in her forties, married. What unites her story to many others is that she wanted to avoid becoming a high school teacher and wound up in school. It's an unprestigious and difficult profession, she thought. She had a chance to see what it is like being a teacher because she (again, like many others) comes from teachers families. It is she who tells about that most straightforwardly
“I was born in a family in which my mother was a teacher. And this fear of being a teacher haunted me, so to say, from my early childhood. I mean, what is it like to be raised in a teachers family? It is awful because a child never sees his own mother. There was no motherly warmth or love or feeling that this is home, because mom was always at school. When I was a child it was said in my family many times that one must do anything to avoid becoming a teacher. The sense of what was said was: you see - this life is so difficult....
I'd say that about 90 percent of those I studied with had this same fear of school, fear that we'd have to go to some school. I believe that this fear was mostly caused by that fact that many of use came from teacher's families. So, to avoid our parents fate... I went practice teaching then and I'd say that there wasn't anybody professionally helpless among those who came with me. Yet we all cherished a dream - not to end up in school. Not to end up.
It is even difficult to say, what I was thinking then. We had perfectly fantasized expectations that after graduating all the theaters would invite us to manage their repertoire. That there exist masses of magazines where they eagerly wait for us...What was serious at that time was that there existed a state-imposed distribution of graduates. One hundred per cent of them were supposed to go to school. And there existed a nearly standard way to avoid it. Most of my fellow students (including me) got married. Married people were eligible for so called free distribution. To look where to apply one's skills and knowledge absolutely independently."
To avoid becoming a teacher was then to avoid mother's fate. It seems that for Larisa her major motivation was her children well being. School seemed to be a threat, an obstacle, something to avoid by all possible means. Larisa is most politically sensitive, she is one the few narrators who directly relates her current problems to the political situation:
"It was quite difficult at the beginning because it was the case that I might not to meet their expectations. How much I needed to do to get prepared! And the students were checking me, they would throw names at me just to check, if I knew.
These first years I recall with great pleasure. First, school became more liberal. There come liberal epoch. I didn't know the way school was before, and it is difficult for me to compare but I didn't feel any strong pressure. Thank God, they didn't check any plans. It was up to me to decide what to teach about and, at the beginning, I put special emphasis on foreign literature, perhaps, at the expenses of Russian. But nobody was going to punish me. I was taken from the very beginning as truly interested in my subject and they didn't bother me. Then some success came. My kids started performing well at the different contests and Olympiads and so it went."
This is how she describes the beginning of 1990s. And that is how she feels in the end of the decade:
"Suddenly I began feeling very strongly that this side of my work, not only personally mine but teaching activity in general - as giving lessons, as working with the subjects - doesn't interest anybody nowadays. I don't think this is a problem only in our school, it is a problem of Russian school in general, because the amount of instructions and documents we are obliged to fill in leads me into a state of depression, to such an extent that I simply don't want to do it. I don't want to do it. It is bitter. Why? Because each of us gets evaluated according to this criteria - how skillful you are in writing these papers and if you do it in time... There is getting more and more of them, and you are reminded of them constantly, it is said that this is what defines you as a teacher, how good you are in this. I feel awfully depressed."
What I find intriguing is how different and yet fundamental something like performance or theatricality (it is not my concern here to reflect on the differences in their usage) figures in many stories. For instance, in Olga's case it is above all a powerful motivation of her youth that was marked by pursuit of a theatrical career and that same motivation keeps sheds light on everything she does and thinks ever since. In Mila's case we seem to be dealing with a peculiar version of a theatricalized, hystrion behavior when one tries to impress others with the degree of her suffering by seriously considering suicide. (Unfortunately, there’s not enough room to show it in detail by quoting the fragments of Mila and Olga stories)
It is Richard Sennet and, again, Hannah Arendt who draws our attention to the way theatricality is itself constitutive of public life. It sounds quite banal that the whole world is a theatre and the ways in which it isn't are not easy to specify, as Ervin Goffman says. It was a long time that we all in Russia, regretfully, had to see in our former president Boris Yeltsin, in words of one journalist, "a mixture between an invalid and a puppet, his strings jerked by master behind his throne". When nearly everything is a performance in that, not a very attractive sense of the word, what happens to the ethics, what happens to spontaneity? What I find especially important that for Sennet and Arendt, in phrase of the one scholar, "not all theatricality is spectacle, and not performance is manipulation" (Villa, 1999, 147). For Arendt who believed that "Total power can be achieved and safe guarded only in a world of conditioned reflexes, of marionettes without the slightest trace of spontaneity” (Arendt, 1951, 457), theatricality was a way to oppose "marionette" like type of behavior, was a way toward spontaneity.
In Larisa's case "theater" is something very close to a never-repeating performance she does at school. It is important for her to be different, not to rely on once-found standards and ways to teach but to take into consideration what kind of people are her students in this or that class and meet this difference in a way she teaches.
She says: "In general, I must say, that my friends and colleagues joke: I can give twenty-five lessons but it is difficult for me to write down at least one of them. Which means that I do better when improvise, when I fly internally, I do it better. I never did, you know, work out a sort of folios some teachers keep for years, they work using them, and it gives them a chance to avoid preparation. Whatever open lesson I give, I never write it down. There are only some patches, some fragments. I always did well (the "open" lessons -E.T.), but later I wasn't able to restore it and, moreover, it seems, it is a shame to do it, because you should deal differently with each class. The kids are changing and it is impossible to study one and the same way some theme or some author. It is impossible in principle".
Protests against bureaucratic paper work that takes more and more of her time and energy and thus prevents her from improvising provide for Larisa both the symbolic focal point and the metonymic substitution for all the frustrations she experiences in her life. After all, aren't papers the challenge every teacher in every country faces? School bureaucratic structures have persisted even as the world has moved into the postindustrial period because of inertia specific to state schools. The organization of educational system seems to be opposed to change of any kind. It seems that everywhere teachers suffer from the need of schooling to standardize pedagogic messages, preserving them through years of meaningless education.
When packing for summer school in which, as a good professional, she was given absolute freedom from writing reports, she told her husband how much she was looking forward to it. His only reply was: "How much are they going to pay?" "That's all he is interested in", concludes Larisa bitterly. It is she who overworks in this family; it is she who is most concerned about an extra-income. But, to be fair to her husband, he lost his job and has done everything possible to find a new legal job with which to help support his family. Is his question an example of male oppression or is that just wounded pride? Did he really try everything to improve their family situation? Or, is it what he expects her to do? Could it be that he, to compensate for being a loser (of facing a constant failure) half-consciously touches on her most painful problem: how can one remain to be a decent man in that country, that is not turn to criminal occupations, and yet earn enough to support family?
In Larisa's story her school audience is changing every day, and this is what gives her the pleasure of experiencing her own mastery. She makes what she manages to make: an ensemble, a social fact that both depends on individual narratives in some way and secures them by making them more than individual, by bringing their performances into some larger articulation. At least through the lens of this story, my question starts to sound like both, "Can philosophy do something like Larisa's work?" and "What would philosophy become in doing this?"4. The criteria for reading narratives--whether one takes this as a matter of the correctness of the reading or of the capacity of the reading to, in some sense, "correct" those narratives, free them of what is paralyzed or paralyzing in them, would be not only the improvisations evident within them but the ways they open toward the improvisation of an ensemble, community. It's in this way that my reference to "my Russians," with all its distance from the stories "observers" of Russia tell, seems crucial--as also the sense it assumes that the position of the philosopher must be placed in question. This criterion is not theoretical, and is met only in a reading or readings that exercises practical effects (of some kind: what kind seems harder to say, what it means to fall short of this criterion seems clearer than what it would mean to satisfy it--although it seems to me to be close to what I take from Ferrara on "prospective gods.").
One would be surprised to know where the extra money Larisa earns goes. To subscribe a "thick" literary magazine? To go to a theater performance? Yes, sometimes. But the larger part is spent on the clothing for her daughter and for herself. She and other Russian women (me included) could talk for hours about silk and wool, about good brands and real bargains. She pays a lot of attention to the way she dresses for school because she knows that to win the hearts of those brand-conscious kids, she should look impeccable. She dresses, she reads, she teaches, she tries, she makes mistakes, and she interprets her daily routines, dramatic decisions and critical thresholds.
Totalitarian reality taught her to read between the lines, to look behind what shows itself, but also deprived her of being able to choose what things to wear and what books to read, forcing her, quite violently, to pay attention rather to the hidden than to the visible. In fact, Marxist ideology presupposed a constant search for the hidden forces of History behind appearances. Could it be that through her performative transformations, through the acute interest in the, so to say, spectacular possibilities of the world (the sound of her voice, the touch of physical material, behavior which was previously impossible) she produces and reproduces themselves responding to the ever-changing world.
Perhaps, one can object my preoccupation with appearances by saying that although there is tremendous excellence in spontaneous performativity, but there is so in other less glamorous (if that is not too hard a word) mental capabilities as well.
I have attended a few classes of Larisa. A first surprise came that she doesn't use any textbooks, it is only primary sources that reign in her classes. Being in full command of Bachtin and Tomashevski, Shklovski and Nepomnyashii, she nevertheless doesn't overload her students with the literary theory. They read closely and they are expected to transform into the characters they "study". Today their assignment can be to write an essay "My encounters in Dante's Divine Comedy, tomorrow they write a review of the opera performance of Borodin's Prince Igor and compare Igor figures in the opera and in Skazanie o polku Igoreve, next day they are asked to write a court speech in defense of Raskolnikov. What she encourages in them is independent judgement, not derived from any authoritative source, daring-ness, fearlessness, and awareness of how full of cliches one's speech and thinking can be unless he or she consciously tries to get rid of them. I couldn't believe that it is possible to produce such an excitement in those students, skeptical, ironical, and somewhat spoiled by chaotic multiplicity of mass media and computer games. And how does she do that! She knows that there is no way she could be too exalted or too sentimental even discussing the most moving episode. Ironical herself, she relies on subtle gestures: raised eyebrow, hardly noticeable smile. Her elegant appearance not only expresses her personality but also helps draw the student's respect. By performing well she manages to push them toward reading the things they would never have read otherwise.
Conclusion.
Before I offer my conclusion I would like to express some of my own uncertainties. It is evident that I am interested in that remarkable woman who performs her working life without the means-end orientation of the society around her. Do I move convincingly from general issues and theory at the beginning of my talk to analysis of particular stories at the end? I myself am slightly suspicious about what perhaps only seems like an aestheticizing attitude toward her life. This point about the importance of appearance and performance is very important to me. Yet if her teaching is performance, what isn't performance, including abject failure, demoralized alienation, suicide, decay and death? I ask myself whether I'd be prepared to consider my own story in terms of performativity. I think my answer would be that this is one plausible and effective way of understanding behavior, but that there are probably other important ones too. I think they might have to do with the deeply imbedded structures of unconsciousness. How do deep and fundamental alterations in personality take place - for good and ill? I realize there are problems once one dares to insist on "depth" and "fundamentals".
Jerome Bruner once said that most lives in the process of being told are rather notable for their uncertainties. The identities to which we are born and those that other people force upon us do not completely define us. We are shaped by these identities, we cannot pretend that they do not exist. Yet we ourselves are confused about what these identities actually mean for us but we have a part in determining what they mean. There are other identities which we have chosen that are also significant in determining who we are yet fact that they are chosen do not secure our knowledge or understanding what they mean for us. They are neither universal nor unique yet they put limits on what we are. We also know that there remains an irreducible dimension in us that makes us irreplaceable that is the source of our individual dignity.
Let me conclude by returning to the story with which I began my article. Wishing all the best to Oksana and Douglas, I, out of sheer curiosity, cannot help but speculate about what is going to happen after the honeymoon is over. Will their different pasts be involved in the process of getting to know each other? Will Douglas need to know about Oksana's past for reasons different from self-indulgence? Or, will Oksana, detached from the context of her daily activities, relations, home, poverty, be rendered simply as on object of his masculine erotic interest? His romantic longing for a mysterious and exotic Other?
This episode, like many others, reflects complicated relationship between the harsh economical necessities) and the imaginative and emotional investments the Russians and Americans have been making in one another. Oksana and Douglas belong to strikingly different cultures if, of course, we at all may speak here about the American and the Russian cultures. All cultures are not monolithic or static, they contain many strands. And this is exactly this process of incorporation and hybridization of trends and influences that make the results of cross-cultural encounters so unpredictable. I am aware that my study might not sufficiently take into account the specialized nature of the American-Russian cultural relationship. To put it crudely, at least America is aware of Russia, if only as the economic opposite to its own amazing wealth. As far as economics are concerned, Wall Street has a very effective knowledge of most of the world; whatever one may think of how it chooses to use it. And as far as military might is concerned, there is a sense in which the government agencies (even the US government itself on occasions) plays an informed and creditable role as self-appointed policeman of the world which risks losing votes from the poor electorates of its own country. But as far as social fantasies of the good and bad life are concerned, what are the chances of an African woman (unless she's white and comes from the South) attracting the attention of that married-minded white American millionaire, even if she has access to the Internet. Surely on both sides, American and Russian fantasies of each other are massively mediated by their special shared history of the Cold War, however many other countries that involved (and perhaps none were untouched). What I'm suggesting is that the Cold War might have spawned an incredible mythology which still defines identities, albeit very differently, on both sides, and that this is worth looking at itself, for its metanarratives might be quite discernible.
And yet, we can easily see here the features of the stories that are common for both cultures, I even tempted to say, for most people. For in nearly every culture men, driven by a simple biological plot, seek the company of younger, healthier looking women. The richer the man, the more broad his choice. Take the other story: Oksana's situation seems to resemble the story of every woman's life seen from the traditional point of view. Henry James words from The Portrait of a Lady suffice for the story of women's lives: " Most women did with themselves nothing at all; they waited, in attitudes more or less gracefully passive, for a man to come that way and furnish them with a destiny"5 . The next question arises: are there the aspects of Oksana's dreams she couldn't have realized anywhere just by virtue of being a woman?
Considering the plight of women as a whole around the entire globe encompassing the massive realms of the poor where women still do most of the work and men make most of the decisions,that might be true. Yet I hope that even prosperous men are not so unhappy that they are incurious about the experience and potentiality of the women in their lives, including their daughters.
1 New York Times, Sunday Nov.21, 1999, Section Style, p.9
2 I owe this comparison to Richard Read.
3I am grateful to Richard Read for making this point.
4I am grateful to Stephen Melville for drawing my attention to this point.
5 Henry James, Portrait of a Lady (London: Oxford University Press, 1947), p.VII.
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