its petroleum and gas were rendered visible. Even so small a gesture as Europe’s passage of its own Magnitsky Act 2 would be important in principle, its implications primarily moral. A boycott of the 2014 Sochi Olympics could likewise serve as an expression of ethics. Instead, the world’s continuing collusion in Russia’s resource-based economy shows implicit support for, even approbation of, the Russian regime (not in words, of course, but rather in the flow of capital). It demonstrates a desire to protect the global economy’s status quo and division of labor, that is, the current economic and political hierarchy. This is ample cause for concluding that the scope of anti-hierarchic trends in contemporary capitalism has been significantly overstated by Western theorists.
You quote Marx saying “all that is solid melts into air.” Here I sit, in a country where the ten people who run andprofit from the most important spheres of the economy are quite simply Vladimir Putin’s oldest friends—buddies from school, the people he plays sports with, cronies from his KGB days. What could be more elitist, more deadening than that? What else to call it except feudalism?
And then, Marx adds: “all that is holy is profaned.” In a country where even a passing mention of religious images, ideas, and understandings might carry with it the threat of three years’ hard labor, this characterization of the “bourgeois epoch” (made in 1840!) can’t but elicit nervous laughter.
My idea’s pretty simple: I think it would be helpful for Western theorists to set aside their colonial Eurocentrism and consider global capitalism in its entirety, encompassing all regional variants. Maybe then some of them will come around to my perspective that the “mad flux” of “late” capitalism is in fact one of the most successful and far-ranging maneuvers in the history of humanity. I’m in no way suggesting that anti-hierarchic trends don’t exist. For that matter, far be it from me to essentialize all advertising as superficial, inauthentic, and insincere. But advertising does impose a structure on commodities, and is in this sense a part of the process of production. So while I’m not calling for the rejection of advertising as a “false mask,” I am calling for us to remember that all advertising has something to keep silent about, something it must render absent. And public critical theorists, inasmuch as they’re engaged in critique rather than PR for “late” capitalism, should be studying the workings of this silence, exposing it to the light of analysis (rather than unreflexively parroting as their own theoriesglobal capitalism’s image of itself—this seems to me what we see happening in Hardt and Negri).
Very seductive, an idea like “hyper-dynamic deterritorialization.” From time to time, I succumb to its charm. But I guess I’ve been saved from overindulging, and from the kind of depression Guattari suffered, by living in a country that over and over again confronts me with palpable evil, staggering in its enduring, deep-rooted corporeality. I think I know exactly “what body, what mind is going through transformation and becoming” (Berardi) as I serve my “deuce” 3 (Putin) in lockdown.
All my sincere thanks to you, Slavoj, for this correspondence; I impatiently await your reply.
Your Nadya
1 In late 2011, Moscow’s Bolotnaya Square became the epicenter of vocal anti-corruption protests. Among the leaders was Alexei Navalny, a Russian lawyer, blogger, and activist. A consistent critic of Putin’s government, Navalny has been arrested repeatedly. In July 2013 (the month this letter was written) he was sentenced to five years’ forced labor on charges of fraud and embezzlement; the following day he was released from custody. Later that year, he came in second in Moscow’s mayoral elections.
2 Sergei Magnitsky was a Russian accountant who, after alleging that government officials had overseen the
You quote Marx saying “all that is solid melts into air.” Here I sit, in a country where the ten people who run andprofit from the most important spheres of the economy are quite simply Vladimir Putin’s oldest friends—buddies from school, the people he plays sports with, cronies from his KGB days. What could be more elitist, more deadening than that? What else to call it except feudalism?
And then, Marx adds: “all that is holy is profaned.” In a country where even a passing mention of religious images, ideas, and understandings might carry with it the threat of three years’ hard labor, this characterization of the “bourgeois epoch” (made in 1840!) can’t but elicit nervous laughter.
My idea’s pretty simple: I think it would be helpful for Western theorists to set aside their colonial Eurocentrism and consider global capitalism in its entirety, encompassing all regional variants. Maybe then some of them will come around to my perspective that the “mad flux” of “late” capitalism is in fact one of the most successful and far-ranging maneuvers in the history of humanity. I’m in no way suggesting that anti-hierarchic trends don’t exist. For that matter, far be it from me to essentialize all advertising as superficial, inauthentic, and insincere. But advertising does impose a structure on commodities, and is in this sense a part of the process of production. So while I’m not calling for the rejection of advertising as a “false mask,” I am calling for us to remember that all advertising has something to keep silent about, something it must render absent. And public critical theorists, inasmuch as they’re engaged in critique rather than PR for “late” capitalism, should be studying the workings of this silence, exposing it to the light of analysis (rather than unreflexively parroting as their own theoriesglobal capitalism’s image of itself—this seems to me what we see happening in Hardt and Negri).
Very seductive, an idea like “hyper-dynamic deterritorialization.” From time to time, I succumb to its charm. But I guess I’ve been saved from overindulging, and from the kind of depression Guattari suffered, by living in a country that over and over again confronts me with palpable evil, staggering in its enduring, deep-rooted corporeality. I think I know exactly “what body, what mind is going through transformation and becoming” (Berardi) as I serve my “deuce” 3 (Putin) in lockdown.
All my sincere thanks to you, Slavoj, for this correspondence; I impatiently await your reply.
Your Nadya
1 In late 2011, Moscow’s Bolotnaya Square became the epicenter of vocal anti-corruption protests. Among the leaders was Alexei Navalny, a Russian lawyer, blogger, and activist. A consistent critic of Putin’s government, Navalny has been arrested repeatedly. In July 2013 (the month this letter was written) he was sentenced to five years’ forced labor on charges of fraud and embezzlement; the following day he was released from custody. Later that year, he came in second in Moscow’s mayoral elections.
2 Sergei Magnitsky was a Russian accountant who, after alleging that government officials had overseen the
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