Beyond Desire

Abstract

In the winter of 2020 the transgender science-fiction author Isabella Fall published a story that reimagined a pervasive transphobic internet quip—that one’s gender identity may be an attack helicopter—into an engrossing tale of a woman physically and mentally transformed into a multimillion-dollar piece of military hardware capable of providing close air support to ground troops and delivering antitank and antiair missiles. Fall’s story demonstrates how the most intimate aspects of ourselves—our gender, our sexuality, and our desires—are not necessarily liberatory but indeed malleable according to the dominant forces in our societies: economic systems and the states that govern us.Two recent academic studies by Keti Chukhrov and Bogdan Popa pose a similar question, examining the role of Cold War ideology in shaping Western critical theory’s perspectives on the “libidinal economy,” desire, gender, and sexuality. Both authors seek to critically reexamine the dismissive attitude of leading Western social and critical theorists toward Soviet and Eastern European Marxist epistemologies in constructing their own anticapitalist thought, with special attention paid to the relationship between gender, sexuality, and systems of private property. Chukhrov and Popa, in their own distinct idioms, demonstrate how a wide range of leading thinkers—Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Judith Butler, and others—have rooted their anticapitalist critiques not in the context of concrete experiences of building socialist society, as in Eastern Europe, but in a latent desire for capitalist alienation itself as a disruptive and therefore positive force. Thus, they argue, Western anticapitalist critiques themselves need and desire that which they ostensibly repudiate, all the while projecting and affirming Cold War dichotomies. This second point of critique has clear antecedents in the writings of Mark Fisher, Boris Groys,1 Fredric Jameson, and Slavoj Žižek, to name just a few, but Chukhrov and Popa’s books offer a truly impressive breadth of cross-cultural readings between Western theory and Eastern European Marxism, cinema, object design, psychology, and aesthetic theory. Despite sharing similar critical foundations, however, Chukhrov and Popa take different approaches. Practicing the Good casts a wider net, analyzing political economy, sexuality, aesthetics, and the “ontics” (PG, 9) of communism, whereas Popa trains his focus through the topic of sexuality and interrogates the origins and political assumptions of gender and queer studies in the West, a phenomenon he terms “Cold War gender.”Keti Chukhrov is a poet, philosopher, and theorist of art at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow. Her work covers literary analysis, poetry, contemporary art, Soviet philosophy, and Soviet and post-Soviet gender and sexuality. She has been called “one of the most important theoretical voices to emerge from post-Soviet Russia” and was previously shortlisted for the Bely Prize.2Practicing the Good exemplifies the full range of Chukhrov’s scholarly and critical breadth, combining rigorous philosophical analysis with thoughtful readings of Soviet literature and film.Chukhrov’s thesis in Practicing the Good is twofold. First, she argues that since the 1960s Western theorists, in their attempts to formulate their own anticapitalist ideas, have neglected, misunderstood, and even dismissed Soviet and Eastern European experiences under socialism as well as the contributions of key Marxist theoreticians in the region, along the lines of the Cold War. Second, she maintains that in doing so, they have located their anticapitalist thought in distinctly capitalist experience, namely alienation. Boris Groys, in his foreword to Practicing the Good, summarizes this phenomenon bluntly, writing that “one might describe this time [i.e., the decades after the collapse of the USSR] as a transformation of the Cold War rather than [its] end,” and that “today the Western Left still wants to remain inside the West—and, thus, it is still defined by Cold War divides” (PG, 11). Chukhrov demonstrates this point throughout the book effectively, exploring how Western theorists’ uncritical dismissal of “really existing socialism” curtails their own anticapitalist imagination. She writes: “Historical socialism is exactly that ‘outside’ from which one can see how the aberrations and fallacies in the critique of capitalist subsumption are overlooked by the token of their own entanglement in the logic of capital” (PG, 21). In other words, the Soviet socialist experience serves as a lens to challenge or correct the capitalist underpinnings of Western theory. Where Chukhrov’s book excels is in the breadth, depth, and insight of its readings of the superstars of Western theory vis-à-vis Soviet philosophers, psychologists, theorists, novelists, and filmmakers.Chukhrov begins by exploring the political and economic assumptions of major Western poststructuralist and psychoanalytic thinkers. Early on she introduces one of the book’s major arguments: that while Western anticapitalist theory nominally denounces the phenomenon of capitalist alienation, it simultaneously, and perversely, desires it. Chukhrov cites Cornelius Castoriadis’s Imaginary Institution of Society, Deleuze and Guattari’s Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Jean-François Lyotard’s Libidinal Economy, and Foucault’s History of Sexuality as primary examples, examining how they conflate Marxist concepts with the psychoanalytic notions of “desire” and “libidinal economy.”3 Her reading of these texts using Marx and Engels’s Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 is convincing, arguing that the concept of “surplus value,” signifying the contradiction between the forces of production and the relations of production, as it is taken up in poststructuralist and psychoanalytic theory, is “ontologized and seen as an innate force of the libidinal” in poststructuralist theory, conflating the material and libidinal (PG, 29).4 While these thinkers often accurately diagnose the negative effects of capitalism, she contends, they subconsciously accept its conditions when their primary mode of resistance to capitalist alienation is to exaggerate and intensify its most alienating features. Chukhrov contrasts this translation of Marx’s thought with the concrete anticapitalism of the Soviet state, namely the criminalization of private property, surplus economy, fetishized consumption, and thus the ethics and aesthetics of libidinality. Thus, Chukhrov writes, “in the very act of repulsion there is a fascination with the repulsive” for these thinkers (PG, 28). Capitalism, in other words, is the toxic partner they cannot quit.One of the more interesting applications of this idea is found in Chukhrov’s exploration of Soviet thinkers to attempt to create a materialist theory of language, focusing on the works of Lev Vygotsky, Aleksei Leontiev, and Evald Ilyenkov through the applied lessons at the Zagorsk Internat, a school for deaf-blind children founded in 1963 and the site of linguistic and pedagogical research and experimentation throughout the 1970s. Alexander Mershcheryakov, the founder of the school and a student of Vygotsky, and Ilyenkov were interested in the students’ severe alienation from all they deemed human, existing in a world “where there is only matter, but not mind, spirit, psyche, and consciousness, volition, thinking, speech, [or] image and idea of an outer world.”5 Researchers and instructors developed a tactile language for students as well as techniques for them to use everyday items and attain a degree of self-sufficiency. Chukhrov examines how a materialist philosophy of language, one which is not abstracted from reality and materiality as in poststructuralism, guided the pedagogy at Zagorsk. Unlike the famous example of Helen Keller, who was taught to repeat words before associating them with external stimuli (a priori), students at Zagorsk built language on their sensations a posteriori, reflecting Vygotsky’s notion that “the word is ready when the concept is ready” (PG, 51). Chukhrov asserts that the school made strides in proving that “pedagogy in the social context of communism was capable of constructing a full-fledged social subject with social consciousness, even despite gravely impaired physiological and sensory capacities” (PG, 49); she cites a particularly emotional statement by Alexander Suvorov, a student, that “we see and hear by the eyes of all our friends, all people, all humankind.”6Though Chukhrov’s examination of the Zagorsk Internat would be enriched by including work from disability studies, particularly given these psychologists and philosophers’ use of students’ experiences as a metaphor of consciousness, her reading of Ilyenkov and materialist theories of language is cogent. Her enthusiasm for the experiment—as well as Ilyenkov’s—shines through and serves as an intriguing case study not only for materialist conceptions of language, but indeed as an almost utopian model of transcending one’s physicality through community with others. The section encapsulates Chukhrov’s fascination with cosmism—a cultural and philosophical movement originating in nineteenth-century Russia that sought to synthesize natural philosophy, spirituality, and an unwavering belief in the spiritual and scientific future of humanity—which greatly influenced the Soviet avant-garde and efforts to build a distinct proletarian culture and society, and which defines much of her writing. Chukhrov returns throughout Practicing the Good to the Marxist notion of the “productive body,” which emphasizes the role of the body in realizing society’s emancipatory (and often transhumanist) potential and stands in contrast to theories of libidinal economy and Western gender theory that posit the body as primarily a vehicle for articulating one’s desires and individuality. While her critique of Western theories of desire and the body are compelling, they would be served by further critical examination of the “productive body” as a category, a topic addressed frequently in the works of disability theorists.Another highlight is Chukhrov’s chapter on Soviet films, titled “Too Much Socialism: the Non-cinema of Soviet Film.” She asks why the Western, libidinally conditioned subject finds the idea or representation of life in a planned, nonlibidinal economy dull, weaving observations about daily life under Soviet socialism with thoughtful analysis of the aesthetic-political sensibilities of post-Stalin cinema. As anyone knows who has taught nondissident Soviet fiction and film to nonspecialists (often, even specialists!), the most common complaints are that they are boring, lacking in recognizable conflict and character development, and austere or even ascetic. Chukhrov argues that the function of Soviet film is not aesthetic innovation but “finding out how the already established noncapitalist modes of production can be fully incarnated and inscribed into the texture of social production” or, in other words, “how reality can be realized as real” (PG, 93). While the Western subject, conditioned to capitalist alienation, may find these films boring because they lack legible conflict, it does not mean that they are artless or devoid of action. Using Giorgio Agamben’s concepts of metanoia and halo, Chukhrov asserts that Soviet cinema possesses “too much socialism,” requiring protagonists to “exert almost superhuman ethical deeds posited by de-privatized social systems and infrastructure” (PG, 94). Her arguments bear similarity to aspects of Katerina Clark’s “modal schizophrenia”—referring to the need of Soviet art to simultaneously depict a positive, realistic present and evoke a utopian future—and to E. A. Dobrenko’s assertion that Soviet cinema’s aesthetic was to produce socialism itself through representation;7 but Chukhrov presents a convincing explanation of why Soviet cinema’s characterization plots, to borrow a modern idiom, are to “do better,” and why this is so difficult to understand through the lens of Western critical theory.Chukhrov’s film interpretations, particularly of the Ukrainian Soviet director Larisa Shepitko’s films Wings (1966) and You and Me (1971), are well written but fairly conventional and echo the work of Clark, Dobrenko, Groys, and others on Soviet art. What makes this section interesting, however, is its use of “boring” Soviet films to deconstruct erroneous assumptions about Soviet society as lacking, informed by theories that conflate private property, fetishized consumption, alienation, and sexual desire. The section also serves as an effective counterweight to the more futurist and transhumanist elements, demonstrating how the Cold War mindset of Western theorists failed to comprehend not only the utopian elements of Soviet ideology but its prosaic realities as well.Popa’s critique of Western theorists of gender, sexuality, and queerness in De-centering Queer Theory unfolds along lines similar to Chukhrov’s, but the author differentiates his project from Chukhrov’s, which, in his words, “suggests a total rejection of queer performativity” by attempting to “generate a new Marxist queer model that captures the progressive potential of a queer critique” (DQ, 14). He does not reject Chukhrov’s analysis, indeed affirming much of it, but does orient his project in a distinct, activism-informed direction. Popa, a senior researcher in the Department of Literature and Cultural Studies at Transylvania University of Brasov, has published two earlier books, Sexul şi capitalul: O teorie a filmului românesc (Sex and the Capital: A Theory of Romanian Cinema, 2017) and Shame: A Genealogy of Queer Practices in the Nineteenth Century (2017), which examine the political and labor dimensions of gender, sexuality and race and carefully explore the aesthetics and practices of resistance.8 In De-centering Queer Theory he sets forth an ambitious critique of queer theory, arguing that the field needs both “a deeper materialist understanding of its emergence and theoretical production” and consideration of Soviet and Eastern European Marxisms (DQ, 1). Like Chukhrov, Popa contends that queer theory (through its roots in psychoanalysis and poststructuralism) remains intertwined in the values and aesthetics of anticommunism, and that this has impeded studies of gender and sexuality in communist and postcommunist nations. While the simplistic formulation of the communist East as sexually repressed and the capitalist West as sexually liberated is certainly long overdue for critical reassessment, Popa responds to recent efforts to reconcile materialism, Marxism, and queer studies by David Eng, Jasbir Puar, Stryker, and others, who lack area expertise in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union.9Popa begins by advancing a provocative yet convincing argument about the Cold War itself as “the driving social formation for understanding categories such as gender and queer” (DQ, 3). He focuses on the centrality of the categories of personal identity and freedom that permeate Western social theory in general, gender and sexuality studies being no exception. This inscribes the central conflict of the Cold War, Popa argues, within the field, an attack “not only on the economy of socialists, but also on the types of sexed bodies and sexuality forged by Soviet Marxists” (DQ, 7). He contends that focusing on the differences between gender and sex when directed toward the goals of individual and collective liberation, respectively, constitutes an important theoretical contribution to the academic study of gender as well as a practical advance in reconciling the politics of race, class, and queerness.Popa substantiates his concept of “Cold War gender” by contrasting American and socialist conceptions of a “productive body.” Rather than serve as a vehicle for articulating one’s individuality, as in the Western concept of gender, he asserts that the Marxist conception of a body views it as a “device that generated a collective and dialectical process to achieve communism” (DQ, 45). This closely resembles key points of Chukhrov’s argument that a socialist economy created new conceptions of self and citizenship and engendered different relationships between gender, sexuality, and desire. Popa, too, turns to the thought of the cosmist Alexander Bogdanov, Proletkult, and the productivists, who all believed that the revolution and dictatorship of the proletariat would create not only a new proletarian culture but indeed a new Soviet human. This model of the “productive body,” Popa asserts, stands in opposition to the Western notion of the “social body,” which reflects, rather than dictates, the conditions of society. To demonstrate this point, Popa provides several interesting case studies from socialist cinema, most notably the Soviet film Alone (dir. Grigori Kozintsev and Leonid Trauberg, 1931). In Alone the heroine Kuzmina completes her teacher training and hopes to remain in Leningrad, where she can enjoy comfortable living and ample consumer goods, but receives orders to relocate and teach in Altai. Although there are certainly colonial overtones to the film, best embodied by the conflict between Kuzmina and the Altai bey, it is the hardworking Altai people, completely removed from the consumer economy, who inspire the teacher to become a “true” communist. As Popa explains, the film “captures the move from a desire of commodities to a socialist experimental world” in which Kuzmina becomes a “body-thing whose value is given by her rejection of a profit-oriented world” (DQ, 51). Kuzmina forsakes her individual sexual-romantic and consumerist desires, and in some measure her own culture, and finds satisfaction in being an agent of building socialism. Popa’s analysis dovetails nicely with Chukhrov’s reading of Soviet cinema through Agamben while providing additional explication of socialist concepts of the relationships between body, object, desire, and sexuality.Popa’s writing also intersects with and responds to Chukhrov’s critique of gender studies and queer theory. In her section on sexuality, Chukhrov begins by asserting that the major theorists of gender and sexuality in the West—Foucault, Jacques Lacan, Deleuze, Butler, Julia Kristeva, and so on—do not fully “take into account the conditions of the socialist non-libidinal economy in retrospectively analyzing gender composition in classless society,” specifically failing to grasp how the economy of sex and sexuality exists outside the concepts of private property and surplus value (PG, 122). Her critique of Butler is provocative, asserting that Butler’s major concepts—gender, performativity, melancholy, and subversion—reflect a capitalist logic in which the individual and their experience remain the primary analytic locus. Chukhrov makes the case that Butler’s idea of “trouble,” rooted in difference, loses its edge when applied to the Soviet context, where productivist models of the body outside the surplus economy sought to redefine gender “in terms of equalized neutrality, [functioning] as a virtue of the common” (PG, 128). Thus, while Soviet society never achieved gender equality, it did posit a system in which the generic citizen-subject’s individual gender identity was ostensibly irrelevant to their role in constructing socialism, creating the conditions where “social markers of gender always prevailed over the biological or sexual ones,” eliminating the foundational social dynamics of Butler’s “gender trouble” (PG, 129).10 Just as poststructuralists locate their anticapitalism in experiences of capitalist alienation, Chukhrov stresses, so too does Butler’s theory of gender performativity. She further links this perspective with post-Soviet scholarship on women and sexuality, in particular, which assumes the existence of a powerful, underground sexuality that was repressed by the party and the state, and that the realization of one’s sexual desires or identity is synonymous with freedom and emancipation. Notably, these assumptions have been challenged elsewhere recently, such as in Kristin Rogheh Ghodsee’s claim that women had better sex and more orgasms under socialism because of the relative lack of material precarity and reliance on men in Soviet society.11 While Chukhrov’s writing lacks the anthropological specificity of Ghodsee’s work, it makes an intriguing theoretical counterpoint to pervasive assumptions in post-Soviet gender studies.While Popa presents several Western counterexamples to Marxist models of productive bodies, his most interesting concerns the work of John Money. Money’s research on gender, gender identity, sexual dimorphism in humans, and transsexuality was both controversial and influential. He coined the terms gender role and sexual orientation, phrases that still exist in common speech, and cofounded the Johns Hopkins Gender Identity Clinic in 1965.12 Popa cites works by Jemima Repo and Stryker who, among others, have explored how Money’s writing and clinics posited the desirability of whiteness, cisness, heterosexuality, and Anglo-Americanness in his conception of gender and sex that posed blackness, indigeneity, and disability as characteristics needing correction. Repo writes that “gender” was “forged by psychiatrists in order to discipline the minds, bodies, and selves of intersex children and trans-people,” a sentiment most famously encapsulated by the case of David Reimer.13 Reimer was born male in 1966, but because of a botched circumcision, lost his penis. Money convinced the child’s parents to let Reimer undergo vaginoplasty at twenty-two months and to raise him as a girl. Though Money touted the experiment as a success, demonstrating the sociality of gender, Reimer resisted femininity as a child and later transitioned to male. Popa does not delve into the Reimer case specifically14 but cites Money’s theories as the product of social constructivism, which assumes that one’s sense of self is acquired and therefore that deviancy is malleable. He presents a compelling reading of Money’s gender epistemology—which assumes one has a hidden, “true” identity at the core—vis-à-vis the Cold War practice of exposing communists and other undesirables, explaining why Money and his colleagues viewed transness and homosexuality as deviancies that need to be cured or redirected and channeled into existing binary categories. Popa’s analysis effectively highlights that even though Cold War gender adopts the idioms of personal expression and individual liberty, these discourses have shaped—and continue to shape—gender and sexuality on the basis of the ideological desires of the state.Popa’s most radical and original insights come in the latter half of the book, as he applies insights from Eastern European Marxist epistemology to contemporary queer theory, queer antiracism, and Western film. He draws heavily from the Cuban American queer theorist José Esteban Muñoz’s theory of disidentification, which poses minoritarian subjects as “tactically and simultaneously work[ing] on, with, and against” dominant cultural forms, as well as from the works of Dobrenko and Groys to argue that Stalinist art demonstrates a “vital abolitionist imagination,” both in regard to its depictions of a world without private property (something Western anticapitalism lacks) and in its widespread availability and currency on the internet (DQ, 137).15 A reading of The Cruise and The Fiddlers, two Romanian films on Roma enslavement in Wallachia and Bessarabia, makes a strong case for the antiracist interpretive possibilities of socialist cinema, although it would be strengthened by reading against depictions of slavery in Western cinema which, as Popa argues elsewhere, often struggles with the artistic and ideological representation of collective struggle.Also noteworthy is the chapter “Trans,” which builds on Stryker’s linking of trans rage and collective action in opposition to capitalism vis-à-vis two vastly different films, It Came from Outer Space (dir. Jack Arnold, 1953) and Tangerine (dir. Sean Baker, 2015). Popa’s reading of It Came from Outer Space is straightforward, examining how the working class in the film is often not only ideologically suspect but portrayed as sexually ambiguous, susceptible to alien manipulation, and generally incapable of understanding or acting on their class interests. The analysis of Tangerine, a film about two trans sex workers and their Armenian driver, complements Popa’s observations on It Came from Outer Space. The film follows sex workers Sin-dee and Alexandra. Sin-dee has just been released from jail after taking the fall for her pimp and lover, Chester; she soon discovers, however, that Chester cheated on her and cheated her out of money, and she seeks revenge. Popa effectively makes the case that Sin-dee and Alexandra, much like the heroines of socialist cinema, seek to unify their desires to reconcile their labor with personal-sexual fulfillment; he argues that this resonance demonstrates the usefulness of socialist realist aesthetics for building across class and racial lines, as embodied by the cooperation between Sin-dee and Alexandra and with their cab driver, Razmik. The juxtaposition of these two films is unexpected but productive, as is Popa’s film analysis as a whole.Practicing the Good and De-centering Queer Theory highlight the limitations of Western scholarly frameworks for understanding Eastern European and Soviet Marxisms and socialism building, particularly regarding desire, gender, and sexuality. Both Chukhrov and Popa make the important methodological argument that notions of “desire,” which pervade Western critical theory, have their own cultural and historical particularity in capitalism that must be accounted for, particularly when applied to notions of gender and sexuality in nonsocialist settings. Chukhrov and Popa, however, diverge sharply at several junctures in content and methodology. Chukhrov’s writing is more focused on theorists and theory from a philosophical perspective, whereas Popa’s text additionally makes a bold—and in this reviewer’s opinion, persuasive—claim about the relevance of Eastern European Marxist thought and art for contemporary queer activism.Though both books present effective arguments, certain topics would benefit from further exploration and development. In particular, Chukhrov and Popa could do much more to examine transgender and transsexual identities, which have become a major political point of contention in West and East in recent years. While Western governments have used homosexuality and queer acceptance as a diplomatic weapon against Russia, often deploying the language of the Cold War in doing so, this dynamic has shifted as Western conservatives now look to Russia as an exemplar of state-sanctioned homo- and transphobia—a phenomenon that poses interesting questions for both authors’ works. Chukhrov, notably, makes no mention of transness, nor does she engage with recent writing on it from Butler or other contemporary queer theorists. While this subject is somewhat outside the purview of her study, it does offer an interesting point of comparison to her sections exploring the sublation of masculine and feminine identities in Marxist ideology, as well as an opportunity to address more contemporary Western queer theorists and politicians who often revert to Cold War discourses and erroneous conceptions of gender in postcommunist Russia and the Soviet Union while opposing Putin’s state-sanctioned homo- and transphobia. Although Popa engages the subject of transness explicitly, citing trans scholars and trans media, this reviewer wishes he had delved further into the materiality and biological realities of transition. While the sections on Money and Christine Jorgensen are well written, they would benefit from additional inquiry on how transition transforms the material reality of gender identity. What is transition, after all, if not an individual seizing the means of gender production for themselves?In all, however, Practicing the Good and De-centering Queer Theory are timely and valuable scholarly contributions that synthesize work from philosophy, critical theory, film, literary studies, and Slavic studies. Very few academic works display such range, and, most important, these books place voices that are rarely heard between these fields in conversation with one another.