Judith Butler writes:
***** And how do we account for _attachment_ to precisely the kind of state-linked individuality that reconsolidates the juridical law? To what extent has the disciplinary apparatus that attempts to produce and totalize identity become an abiding object of passionate attachment?...In particular, how are we to understand, not merely the disciplinary production of the subject, but the disciplinary cultivation of _an attachment to subjection_? (Judith Butler, _The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection_, Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1997, p. 102) *****
Butler's conservative answer is that it is the very attachment to subjection that produces individuality in the first place & therefore that we should look to the "re-formation" of the subject through "the possibilities of resignification": "I am led to embrace the terms that injure me because they constitute me socially. The self-colonizing trajectory of certain forms of identity politics are symptomatic of this paradoxical embrace of the injurious terms. As a further paradox, then, only by occupying -- being occupied by -- that injurious term can I resist and oppose it, recasting the power that constitutes me as the power I oppose...This is not the same as saying that such an identity will remain always and forever rooted in its injury as long as it remains an identity, but it does imply that the possibilities of resignification will rework and unsettle the passionate attachment to subjection without which subject formation -- and re-formation -- cannot succeed" (104). This is, in essence, the path toward a post-modern turn to secular religion (= a symbolic solution to an imaginary understanding of a real problem).
However, there is no reason to accept her answer & to eternalize a historically specific cultural response to a historically specific political defeat (e.g., the collapse of the USSR). There is no reason that we should be forever stuck with masochism, ressentiment, moralism, etc. (political mobilizations of which tend to express yearnings, at the periphery, for spiritual renewals of nations &, more disturbingly at the core, for the Progressive Empire).
Butler gives a fitting subtitle to her book: "Theories in Subjection." One of the most important -- if little recognized -- duties of today's intellectuals on the Left may be to emancipate theories from demoralizing experiences of political defeats, as well as from mass-produced cynicism that "Marxism" reduced to the bureaucratic jargon produced in the minds of the masses under the then actually existing socialism in the Eastern bloc.
***** World Politics 51.3 (1999) 323-358
Liberal Elites, Socialist Masses, and Problems of Russian Democracy
Judith S. Kullberg and William Zimmerman *
Strong showings and outright victories by antireform and conservative parties in several elections in Russia--most notably the 1993 and 1995 Duma elections--and in other postcommunist East European countries in the early and mid-1990s raised concerns about the long-term prospects for democracy in the region. Western analyses have largely explained these election outcomes as popular reactions to short-term economic costs arising from reform of command-administrative economies 1 or as protests against radical restructuring by voters preferring a more moderate pace of reform. 2 Such interpretations are essentially optimistic in that they do not question the commitment of postcommunist publics to democracy: they suggest that with improvement in economic conditions, support for communists and nationalists will evaporate.
In contrast to the general optimism of Western assessments, much of the commentary in the East has been more pessimistic. East European analysts have been inclined to interpret the victory of antireform parties as the explicit rejection by mass publics of the liberal ideology and leadership of westernizing, reformist elites. 3 Such interpretations suggest that the dissatisfaction of publics with liberalism and the emergent postcommunist political order is indeed deep, too deep to be generated merely by short-term economic decline or opposition to reform policy.
Evidence presented in this paper from parallel Russian elite and mass opinion surveys, conducted at the end of 1992/early 1993 and from late 1995 through the summer of 1996, is consistent with the contention that an elite/mass ideological divide exists in certain postcommunist societies. In the survey data we find evidence of a considerable gap between elite and mass worldviews. Whereas elites overwhelmingly opt for liberal democracy, the Russian mass public is thoroughly divided. Although Boris Yeltsin triumphed in the 1996 presidential election...it is nevertheless clear that a substantial segment of the Russian electorate has not accepted the westernizing liberalism of those who led the democratic revolution and has instead opted for socialism or authoritarian nationalism and the corresponding "red" or "brown" political parties. 4...
[Endnotes omitted; the full article is available at <http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/world_politics/v051/51.3kullberg.html>.] *****
There is a ground for optimism, though, in that the politically & economically disenfranchised masses, unlike the elite, have _not_ accepted liberalism yet in post-socialist nations. The question is what organization -- red or brown or black or green, nationalist or regionalist or internationalist, or something else altogether (like Falun Gong?) -- will emerge to give a direction to the still illiberal masses' inarticulate discontent, when the masses begin to rise up in spontaneous militancy.
***** The results clearly demonstrate that those citizens with the least opportunity to engage in and benefit from the market--those who are less educated, female, and older, and who reside in rural regions and smaller towns or cities--are most likely to prefer a Soviet-type system. Thus, the limited economic opportunity of these groups is directly undermining the legitimacy of the present Russian political system. (Judith S. Kullberg and William Zimmerman, at <http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/world_politics/v051/51.3kullberg.html>) *****
Those who seek to become the tribune of the oppressed in Russia (& the periphery in general) have a difficult task cut out for them: to represent the interests of women at the same time as to champion residents of small towns & rural regions in practice.
Yoshie