Soviet Consumerism (10 Aug 2009)

Someone on Metafilter had linked to Real USSR, which offers essays and photos of Soviet material culture. It seems like a useful resource in imagining what a postconsumer (or non-consumer) society might look like. The Soviets apparently failed in achieving a positive example of such a society; its citizens, at least in Western representations, were hungrier than their non-Communist counterparts for branded goods and the world of status consumption from which they were by and large excluded. Their seemingly dismal lack of consumer goods was possibly the best propaganda weapon for the U.S. during the Cold War: Dowdy, nondescript proles standing in lines outside gray, barren Soviet distribution centers would be contrasted with the glitz of shopping malls and the endless opportunities for self-aggrandizement. Who wants to work for a collective goal when we can enjoy a solipsistic reverie in which all causes begin and end with ourselves?

Consumerism in Western society, at any rate, is strongly associated with atomistic individualism, offering the illusion of transcending social reciprocity for a higher convenience, in which pleasure is served directly to us through various purchases in well-stocked retail outlets. Pleasure is presumed to be a matter of accumulation -- is constructed to be that sort of thing, a matter of developing the richest self through consuming and mastering the greatest amount of stuff. In Soviet culture, consumerism must have meant something else entirely, carving out a space for subjectivity -- for an alternate currency of information, about goods and what they might signify -- in an authoritarian state premised on surveillance and information control.

Anyway, the posts at Real USSR give a glimpse of the resourcefulness of Russians in the face of deprivation and the ideology that was meant to justify it or excuse it. This resourcefulness is the kind of thing I tend to sentimentalize as what's lost in consumer societies -- only the Soviets probably didn't experience it as pleasure, despite the faint nostalgia of posts such as this one about DIY fashion. It was likely felt as necessity pinching in, complicating everyday life. It was official ideology impinging on autonomy in ways that symbolized how dominated the populace was:

During the Soviet times fashion was first and foremost, an instrument of propaganda of hard work attitudes and education of good taste. Therefore the way people were dressed was very strictly regulated – just like anything else, fashion had to be “planned” and “approved”.

In other words, old-fashioned sumptuary laws were in place to discourage fashion from becoming a medium for suggesting social mobility. The link between autonomy and personal display is maintained where ideally it would be dissolved. The inescapability of invidious comparison is still implied. The post mentions the "fashion neighborhood watch" -- a sort of inverse of the feeling I have when I walk around the East Village feeling helplessly uncool. I tend to aspire toward sartorial anonymity for very different reasons than the Soviets might have -- but then again maybe they are the same, a yearning for safety. Invisibility in a socialist society is suspect because everyone is supposed to be responsible to every one else (in reality, the state) in the collective project of society -- you have to be visible but undifferentiated. In a consumer society, visibility traps one's aspirations to individuality in the realm of fashion -- judgment of who we are remains on the surface level, and can't break through to the aspects of personality that are not so easily displayed. Consequently, the culture industries work hard to produce legible symbols for every possible personality trait, de-authenticating them in the process so that all identity can be regarded suspiciously as pretense.

This post, about Soviet brands, surprised me, because I had sort of assumed that there were no brands in the USSR. The post highlights a perfume called Red Moscow, the name of which suggests how branding was co-opted for propaganda purposes -- of course it makes sense that the state would invent nationalist brands. I tend to take it for granted that brands of products function only to help individuals brand themselves, to allow them to project certain traits along the lines described in the previous paragraph. (For producers, brands allow for the elaboration of differences between competitors' commodities where there are more or less materially indistinguishable.) But Red Moscow suggests that brands could be contrived to close off avenues for the development of a superficial self. Nationalist brands would enlist users into helping complete the ideological project of the state, not the self -- a state that may not allow for an autonomous self. Such brands would demonstrate conformity and obedience in a much more direct way than our brands, which entice us to show off our conformity to the general significance of participating in fashion and having a lifestyle. Consumerism is soft coercion in that sense; it allows for a space where conformity can comfortably coexist with rebellion -- the revolution is reduced to continually turning over one's personal affect within a game whose rules are thereby protected from change.

Cold war nostalgia (24 Feb 2007)

A while ago in a thrift store in Vancouver (sad how vividly I remember the provenance of these things) I bought a beat-up paperback copy of Journey into Russia by Laurens Van der Post. It's an account of his tour of the Soviet Union in the early 1960s, and it's well worth the penny it's selling for if you are at all touched with Russophilia or have any interest in what image the Soviet Union tried to project of itself. The book is suffused with a sense of the Soviet regime's permanence, which inspires now a sort of awe at how history overtakes us. I haven't read the book straight through; I pick it up now and then and read paragraphs at random -- a conversation at an airport, a description of mosque minarets at Tashkent, train travel across Siberia, his admiration for scientists at Lake Baikal, drinking out of politeness with Georgians in Tbilisi, an account of a May Day parade. Van der Post records all his encounters with ordinary citizens, trying to feel out how deep state propaganda has sunk into their consciousness, and you come away with the impression that every Russian is an able and complex critical thinker, having been forced by the absurdity of totalitarianism to develop multiple levels of ironic expression as well as a thorough understanding of a wide range of perverse incentives. The socialist state seems to have made people's thinking more dialectical, though by a method no one preferred: the state was so awful and intrusive that Soviet citizens were required to be in a perpetual condition of private opposition and interior doubleness -- the lived a continual critique of everyday life by necessity. We bourgeois in America have the luxury of far less cognitive dissonance and hence an underdeveloped critical apparatus.

Growing up in the 1980s I always thought it was bizarre to consider the Soviets as enemies; it seemed like we should feel sorry for them since so much of our indoctrination involved demonstrating to us how good we had it in America, how much freedom we could take for granted. As a 14-year-old I didn't find their state tools of oppression very intimidating, as was exemplified by a skit about the KGB I wrote and performed with my friend John as a World Cultures class project -- we made KGB spies out to be bumbling Keystone cops with an Abbott and Costelloesque interrogation style. And I wasn't upset by Marxist ideology, which actually seemed pretty appealing as I understood it then -- a welcome respite from any need to be ambitious. Ignorance was bliss for me, I guess. The Chevy Chase film Spies Like Us pretty well captures the attitude I had toward the cold war -- basically that it was not a tenuous balance of world power in the face of the threat of nuclear apocalypse but a sloppily constructed comedy. To have to wonder whether the Russians loved their children too seemed really ridiculous.

But that many Americans took the threat very seriously indeed is made painfully obvious by reading the essays in Hofstadter's Paranoid Style in American Politics -- Hofstatder has an unusually strong stomach for right-wing demagoguery, and he illustrates the role the communist threat played in allowing for the development of what he calls "pseudo-conservatism", a ultrareactionary pose that regards the chosen enemy as all-powerful and insidious, capable of infiltration and threatening the homeland from within and thus calling for the systematic rooting out of all sorts of internal enemies and the rigorous enforcement of conformity. (Essentially it is the mirror image of Stalinism.) Of course, Islamic terrorism has replaced communism as the all-powerful threat, and this is an even more dangerous form of pseudo-conservatism: no longer must we fight to preserve American values so much as the Christian supremacy that right-wing ideologues believe to be synonymous with America. (This makes it easy to imagine Jews and atheists eventually being classified as internal enemies, along with every variety of brown-skinned people.) Hofstadter attributes this intolerant tendency in a small segment of Americans to a perverted form of status seeking in a society where social aspirations outstrip the actual rags-to-riches possibilities.

He also provides the appropriate Tocqueville quote: "Democratic institutions awaken and foster a passion for equality which they can never entirely satisfy." Perhaps it's a universal human tendency to conflate the people we specifically envy with a widely accepted set of enemies, always a way to interpret our jealousy as their elitism or immorality. Reactionary politics become another one of the hidden injuries of class in America -- is that too patronizing to say? Communists, terrorists: they become inexact proxies for a shadowy power elite who are making value systems intolerably pluralistic.

Passing through the offices of the magazine I work for was a DVD set called Animated Soviet Propaganda. It's a conflicted package; despite campy design drawing on 1930s Russian poster style, it wants to dignify its subject and escape accusations of kitsch, so it features an essay by Igor Kokarev, a Russian sociologist, on how the films played into the Soviet oppression. Kokarev likens Soviet society to a religious cult (as does Van der Post on a few occasions) and enumerates how the people were kept down: "We were kept apart"; "We were forced to conform"; "We were ruled by fear"; "We were hemmed in by secrecy and censorship" etc. It sounded a little like a rundown of conditions in suburbanized War on Terror America. Kokarev describes how "language was stilted" in the Soviet Union, perverted by Leninist ideological discourse. Americans are no less immune to stilted language, though, it's only ours takes the form of capitalist dogma: the marketing rhetoric and trendy neologisms that n+1 was complaining about taking over the blogosphere. We don't always recognize that as propaganda or take it very seriously or attribute much efficacy to it; it seems more like nuisance, probably how state propaganda struck Soviets, even as they began to talk like Ninotchka.



But this passage from Kokarev's essay struck me:

Personal modesty was a prized virtue in Soviet society as was a lack of pretentiousness in one's home and a certain disdain for comfort and fanciness. The natural human desire for better conditions, more consumer goods, and a higher standard of living was delayed, put off until the future. Monotonous gray clothing ... was the normal conditions of life for everyone. Young people who tried to dress stylishly were derisively nicknamed "stilyagi" and were publicly insulted in the street.

This is the vision of the USSR I tend to romanticize -- a world without fashion. But I should count my blessings: fashionability probably meant much more in a society that regarded it as a threat to stability rather than wasteful diversion. My suspicion of fashion would have no meaning in a Soviet culture; here I can construe it into a political position (one that requires nothing more from me but to dress badly). Maybe I need to adopt the attitude of Gavin McInnes, editor of Vice magazine: "I hate looking at metrosexuals wearing flip-flops with a suit but I usually get over it when they walk out of view. It's only annoying for a very short time. The truth is fashion is boring and only stupid people genuinely care about it." Sometimes I worry that my preoccupation with criticizing "style" consumerism makes me into one of those stupid people.