Performative Objects

Contents List of Illustrations ix Preface xi Foreword: Performing Russia W. B . W o r t h e n Introduction: Thinking through Performance in Modern Russian Culture J u l i e A . B u c k l e r , J u l i e A . C a s s i d a y , and Boris Wolfson Predstavlenie: Representation and Cultural Imagination xiii 3 21 Aleksei Venetsianov and the Theatricality of Russian Painting Mo l ly B ru n s o n 24 Performing Obligation John Randolph 33 The Album as Performance: Notes on the Limits of the Visible O k s a n a S a r k i s o va and O l g a S h e v c h e n k o 42 Performative Objects: How Things Do Things without Words Serguei Alex. Oushakine 54 Performing Russian Success? The 1770 Exhibition at the Imperial Academy of Arts R o s a l i n d P. B l a k e s l e y The Silver Wreath: Jubilees in Russian Public Life, 1880–1910s Anna Muza 64 74 Pencil Marks on a Field: Form and Support in Late Soviet Participatory Performance by Collective Actions Yelena Kalinsky 82 Dancing the National Idea: Reception and Appropriation of Lezginka in Russia Tat i a n a S m o r o d i n s k a 92 Neo-Judaic Performance and “Russian” Identity in the Jewish Autonomous Region S. I. Salamensky Vystuplenie: Performers and Interventions 102 111 Live Poetry: Doubled Performances on OpenSpace Stephanie Sandler 114 From Text to Act: Tchaikovsky’s Songs as Embodied Emotion Philip Ross Bullock 123 Playing the Public: Karamzin, Rostopchin, and S. Glinka, 1802–1808 B e l l a G r i g o r ya n 131 Borders Unpatrolled: Imaginary Geographies and the Spaces of Performance in Russian Viral Video Eliot Borenstein 139 Vystuplenie i nakazanie: Performing Political Protest in Putin’s Russia (Voina, Pussy Riot, Pavlensky) L i lya K a g a n o v s k y 148 Architectonic Supersagas: Tatlin Stages Khlebnikov’s Zangezi Michael Kunichika Arousing Patriotism: Anna Chapman and the Curious Case of the Sexy Spy Julie Hemment 156 165 The Performative According to Prigov M a r k L i p o v e t s k y and I l y a K u k u l i n 175 Performing Commodities: The Fabergé Imperial Eggs Julie A. Buckler 186 Ispolnenie: Action and Agency 197 How Brezhnev Era Animated Films Queered Stagnation Anna Fishzon 200 Voice as a Performative Phenomenon in Early Soviet Sound Films O k s a n a B u l g a k o wa 209 The Case of The Dying Swan: The Performative Evolution of a Dance D a r i a K h i t r o va 218 The Actor’s Task as a Philosophical Quest in the Russian 1920s: Two Case Studies Caryl Emerson 227 Text and Antitext: Dividing the Labors of Performance Alaina Lemon 235 The Object as Prosthesis and Performer in Russian New Drama Susanna Weygandt 244 Performing Family Unity: Holiday Celebrations in the Labor Camp Correspondence of Arsenii Formakov E m i ly D. J o h n s o n 252 The Performative Stakes of the Tchaikovsky Music Competition Boris Wolfson 262 Glamazons en travesti: Drag Queens in Putin’s Russia J u l i e A . C a s s i day 272 References 283 List of Contributors 313 Index 319 k Performative Objects How Things Do Things without Words Serguei Alex. Oushakine Experience exists even for the person undergoing it only in the material of signs. Outside that material, there is no experience as such. —Valentin Voloshinov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language On February 1, 2014, in the midst of the Maidan revolution in Kiev, a large group of regional Russophone politicians conducted an urgent meeting in Kharkov. Concerned with developments in the Ukrainian capital, participants in the meeting announced the creation of the Ukrainian Front, an organization designed to consolidate opposition to the new pro-Western majority that formed during a bitter three-month face-off with President Viktor Yanukovich. Referring to the first Ukrainian Front associated with the victorious advancement of the Soviet Army in 1943–45, Mikhail Dobkin, head of Kharkov’s regional administration, explained, “Just like their fathers and grandfathers in the remote 1940s, the participants of a new Ukrainian Front will liberate our lands seventy years later” (“V Khar’kove sozdali ‘Ukrainskii front’” 2014). The new front did not last long, vanishing together with the ousted Yanukovich; however, it is not its short-lived history that makes the new front interesting. Most striking in this story is the choice of the St. George ribbon as the new front’s main symbol (Fedorkova 2014). The stage of the February 1 event was swathed by an oversized black-and-orange band, and participants wore the ribbon on their lapels. The decision to use as the official icon of their movement a symbol originally introduced in Russia in 2005 as part of the celebratory campaign for the sixtieth anniversary of Victory Day initially appeared unproblematic. Linking Moscow and Kharkov, as well as World War II and the current conflict, the St. George ribbon functioned as a talisman guaranteeing yet 54 Oushakine / Performative Objects 55 another victory. Telling a story that seemed clearly comprehensible to all, the wordless ribbon appeared more effective than wordy slogans. O bjects Instead of Memory The speed with which the St. George ribbon has become omnipresent is striking. In the last decade, I have seen it attached to a bridge in the center of Paris and to a sacred shamanic pole on a remote island in the middle of Lake Baikal. Since 2005 positive and negative stories about the ribbon have saturated news reports and social media networks alike. Perhaps the most decisive sign of the ribbon’s social and political significance is the wave of symbolic mimicry that erupted in several post-Soviet countries in conjunction with the seventieth anniversary of Victory Day in 2015. To emphasize the local origin of festive rituals, the governments of Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan introduced their own “ribbons of Victory,” using colors from their national flags. By and large, the ribbon’s presence in the world is a function of its portability: attached to a handbag or car antenna, the ribbon travels with the individual, making itself instantly available for an impromptu symbolic gesture. Due to their seemingly endless supply, St. George ribbons are easy to get and, presumably, just as easy to dispose of. Their sacrifice is cheap, and their replaceability contributes to their ubiquity. Although this material object has become a major tool for activating bonds of positive and negative solidarity in post-Communist Russia and beyond, the Ties of mimetic desire: the red-and-green ribbon “Blossoms of the Great Victory” from Belarus, the blue ribbon of Victory with a national yellow ornament from Kazakhstan, and the red-and-yellow ribbon of Victory from Kyrgyzstan, 2015. 56 Predstavlenie: Representation and Cultural Imagination St. George ribbon offers no coherent history of its own. The ribbon, I argue, is not a symbol with an inert meaning. Rather, it is an actant whose function is to “move” things around. Unlike, say, a state flag or a cross, the ribbon offers no metonymical connection to the phenomenon it is meant to represent. Nor does it offer a new metaphorical code to refresh a worn-out meaning. Nonetheless, it generates strong feelings and passionate reactions. Through its public presence, the St. George ribbon does not just say something; it does something (Austin [1962] 1975, 65). It performs an act of social linking by marking people’s belonging or by offering itself as a target for their affects. The very process of the ribbon’s citational display, the very act of its appearance, produces a “performative reorganization” of space and/or narrative (Butler and Athanasiou 2013, 126). As the case of the new front demonstrates, the ribbon can be used positively as a manifestation of people’s solidarity. However, it can be used just as effectively to establish a negative distancing. For example, in March 2014 the Russianlanguage community on Facebook fervently debated a symbolic act performed in Odessa by Alena Balaba, the press secretary of the regional chapter of the proreform party Strike (Udar). During a march in support of the revolution in Kiev, Balaba burned St. George ribbons in the eternal flame at a memorial to the Unknown Seaman. She explained her action on Facebook, insisting on the symbolic emptiness of the ribbon, which, she claimed, had nothing to do with the victory in Kiev. As Balaba (2014) put it, this symbol “pritianutyi za ushi simvol, a ne lenta pobedy” (was dragged in by the head and shoulders) by Moscow PR experts (Tkachev 2014). Although Balaba was quickly fired by her party’s leaders and the Facebook debate died down, the question remains: Why did a vague or even “false” symbol have such a strong impact? And how, in fact, does this particular symbol symbolize (Geertz 1973, 208)? The performative success of the ribbon, that is, its ability to mobilize and to affect an audience, arises from its semantic porosity and material capacity to tie disparate elements together on at least three different levels. Structurally, the ribbon acts as a link in a chain of signifiers, connecting various signs into a story. Psychologically, it provides a material screen for collective and individual projections. Socially, it originates various forms of interaction, display, and circulation. Although those wearing the ribbon or placing it on their car antenna might be unclear about its precise symbolic content and origin, they nonetheless have no difficulty exploiting the ribbon’s material qualities. In effect, the St. George ribbon functions as a tie that activates bonds, and the object’s activating power proves ultimately more important than its representational capacity. The St. George ribbon is not a piece of memory; it is a piece Oushakine / Performative Objects 57 instead of memory. A mnemonic object par excellence, it is good to think with, not about. Providing access to the past, the ribbon leaves it up to individuals and collectives to choose the stories they want to tell about that past. In his article “Thing Theory,” Bill Brown proposes a move away from the dominant striving to reduce things to their “ideological and ideational effects” toward a focus on objects’ ability “to organize our private and public affection.” As Brown explains, “The question is less about “what things are for a given society” than about “what claims on your attention and on your action are made on behalf of things” (2004, 7, 9). From this perspective, the St. George ribbon provides a perfect example of “vibrant matter” (Bennett 2010), a dynamic thing whose materiality shapes relations, affects, and communities. Rather than being given ahead of time, the identity of the ribbon has emerged in the process of its use. Through “a performatively enacted signification”—be it a proud display or an angry burning—the ribbon’s symbolism has gradually come into existence (Butler [1990] 2002, 33). Neither permanently departing from the world of things nor successfully merging with the worlds of signs, the ribbon resists its complete incorporation into the Symbolic order, originating contradictory interpretations. Valentin Voloshinov’s distinction between the “ideologically neutral” materiality that constitutes the sign and its “evaluative accentuation” solidified in “the process of social intercourse” proves helpful here ([1929] 1998, 13, 22). As a material thing, any sign is a shared substance that accrues value in the process of circulation. With time, this value stabilizes, and the sign transforms into a symbol with a story to tell and a meaning to display. However, mnemonic objects add an important complication to this process of semiosis. By and large, their performative impact depends on the mnemonic object’s ability to sustain a constant shift of “accentuation” from the material to the symbolic and vice versa. Objects with “weak” biographies and “vague” meanings facilitate this shifting accentuation, emphasizing such aspects of materiality as texture, size, and color. In turn, objects with established meaning tend to minimize the importance of their materiality by privileging semantics. The two uses of the ribbon described above reflect both performative strategies of the mnemonic object: if members of the Ukrainian Front turned the ribbon into an oversized version of a security blanket, then the press secretary of Strike reduced it to a symbol with a false identity. Depending on the context, the ribbon effectively foregrounds either its objectile or its semantic potential. Yet, unlike most ritual objects, the St. George ribbon does not clearly indicate the nature of the ritual in which it partakes. The performativity of the object, its ability to create a meaningful impact, differs 58 Predstavlenie: Representation and Cultural Imagination significantly from the classic performative speech act described by J. L. Austin, whereby “in saying something we are doing something” ([1962] 1975, 91). As a material thing, the ribbon activates interpretive strategies without articulating them. Turning an O bject into a Symb ol In the short history of the ribbon, its conservative adoption by opponents of the 2014 Ukrainian revolution represented a new trend. Originally, the ribbon was intended as a step in the long process of fabricating traditions for a new post-Communist Russia (Oushakine 2013). When the state-owned information agency RIA Novosti announced on April 14, 2005, the celebratory People’s Action called the Georgievskaia lentochka (St. George ribbon), it did not hide its constructivist approach to memory and tradition (RIA Novosti 2005a). The campaign’s slogans unabashedly urged, “Let’s create a tradition together” or “Turn the ribbon into a symbol” (RIA Novosti 2015). The agency’s press release emphasized the indexical nature of the ribbon, placing responsibility for generating content onto participants in the campaign themselves. The action aimed to give Muscovites a chance “to signify [oboznachit’] their attitude toward the celebration of the great Victory, to mark their respect and gratitude toward veterans . . . , their feelings of pride and recognition of the colossal role that our country played in fighting global Fascism [mirovoi fashizm] and in liberating Europe during the Second World War” (RIA Novosti 2005b). As the vehicle for expressions of solidarity, the agency distributed ribbons with three black and four orange stripes (50 centimeters long and 3.5 centimeters wide), suggesting participants attach them to their lapels, handbags, or car antennas. Supported by major Moscow companies, the agency promised to distribute eight hundred thousand ribbons free of charge. RIA Novosti’s language of marking and signification proves symptomatic: a mark is not the same as an actual “attitude” or genuine “respect.” Rather, a mark provides a reminder, a trace of something not really present or materializable, functioning as a material embodiment of a deferred commitment, of an action or meaning that might or might not emerge. The original poster for the action similarly pointed to the deferral of meaning by listing the types of concrete gestures that might generate significance. As if following Pascal’s classic formula— “Kneel down, move your lips in prayer, and you will believe” (Althusser 1971, 168)—the poster invited participants “to make the St. George ribbon a symbol of memory,” didactically suggesting behavioral patterns intended to unleash the process of symbolization. Oushakine / Performative Objects 59 Natalia Loseva, a journalist from RIA Novosti who apparently authored the ribbon, explained in a 2007 interview that the idea of the St. George ribbon emerged “by chance.” The visual memory of Soviet childhood (posters, postcards, holiday publications) played a role in this process: the ribbon was a standard item of decoration, a visual enhancer whose own history rarely received explanation. However, the most important motivation, as Loseva (2007) framed it, was an attempt to counter “the officialdom and the inescapable pathos” of state celebrations of Victory Day. The variety of expression offered by the ribbon, along with its semantic fluidity and physical flexibility, proved crucial for quick success. The social efficacy of this floating signifier arose precisely from its ability to resist attachment to any particular signified, official or otherwise. Originally planned as a small-scale event, the 2005 action quickly grew into a major social campaign. Loseva (2007) recalls that, a week after the beginning of the action, “the building [where our office was located] was literally stormed by crowds of people. There were lines—24/7—made up by people who wanted to get the ribbon. . . . [One year later] Russian diasporas joined in. . . . The biggest number of ribbons went to the Baltic states and Crimea. For people there the ribbon had an additional meaning—it was a link to their past, to the lost Motherland and lost common history.”1 Despite their chromatic laconicism, the ribbon’s colors point to a complex and contradictory history. With minor modifications, today’s St. George ribbon replicates the palette of the St. George Award introduced by Catherine the Great in 1769 to recognize major military and civic achievements. Eventually, the award evolved into the St. George Cross (of several degrees), the highest military award in imperial Russia. After the Bolshevik revolution, the St. George Cross was banned. However, in 1943, in the middle of the Great Patriotic War, the Soviet government revived the award as the Order of Glory (Orden Slavy of three degrees), using the same color scheme. By 1945 the Soviet government had instituted yet another award using the colors of the St. George Cross: the Soviet medal “Za pobedu nad Germaniei v Velikoi Otechestvennoi voine 1941-1945 gg.” (For the victory over Germany in the Great Patriotic War of 1941–1945). After the demise of the Soviet Union, the award fell into oblivion until its revival in 1992, now under the original name of the Order of St. George, as an award for exceptional military heroism. However, it would take another eight years to specify the official status of the award and yet another eight for the first such orders to be bestowed: President Dmitry Medvedev decorated several officers for their participation in the campaign of “forcing Georgia to accept peace” 60 Predstavlenie: Representation and Cultural Imagination An informational leaflet created by the RIA Novosti news agency presents various historical awards associated with the St. George ribbon: (1) banners, (2) St. George trumpets, (3) decorated arms, (4) the medal “For Courage,” (5) the St. George Cross, (6) the medal “For the Victory over Germany,” and (7) the Order of Glory (RIA Novosti 2015). in August 2008. The convoluted history of these awards, as well as the associative connection of the ribbon with them, reveals the structure that determines the ribbon’s performative success with multiple audiences today. As a mnemonic object rather than a full-fledged symbol, the St. George ribbon exhibits a possible connection with history. It presents a particular trajectory of remembering rooted in various operations of dedifferentiation, historical blurring, and temporal amalgamation. The sequential order of a linear narrative is replaced by the logic of palimpsest, which allows the ribbon to retain incompatible and even contradictory meanings within a single framework. Catherine the Great and the Bolsheviks, Stalin and Yeltsin, Putin and Medvedev, colonial wars and victories over the Nazis are all tied into a single complex knot. The layered history of the ribbon’s colors undermines any attempt to finalize its semantic and historic identity. Even if the ribbon’s colors stir visual memories of military signs and awards from the Great Patriotic War, its religious undertones are at odds with a war that was decidedly Soviet.2 Similarly, the easy availability of the ribbon in post-Soviet Russia contradicts its symbolic genealogy in awards that recognize exceptional achievements. In short, the ribbon promises meaning without revealing it; it indexes rather than signifies. These semantic ambiguities have not affected the immense popularity of the St. George ribbon. In April 2010 Krasnaia Zvezda (The Red Star), the leading publication of the Russian army, reported that since 2005, more than fifty Oushakine / Performative Objects 61 million ribbons have been distributed throughout Russia and sixty other countries (“Ia pomniu!” 2010). Accompanied by two main slogans, “Pobeda deda— moia pobeda!” (My grandpa’s victory is my victory!) and “Ia pomniu! Ia gorzhus’!” (I remember! I’m proud!), the campaign constitutes a sociosymbolic community united not so much by shared experience as by a newly acquired vocabulary of public gestures. The performative nature of the ribbon is perhaps best seen in the ritual gesture made on May 9, 2005, during a concert titled “Songs of Victory” in Moscow’s Park Pobedy (Victory Park). Marking the 1,418 days of the Great Patriotic War, organizers produced a 1,418-meter-long St. George ribbon and then asked audience members to write commemorative messages on it (“Georgievskaia lentochka” 2005). An organizer of people’s activities and thoughts and simultaneously a palimpsestic writing pad, the ribbon offered spectators a vehicle enabling stories yet to be written. M aterialit y versus M at erialism Although it does not determine the frame of its own signification, the St. George ribbon continues to originate new public practices. Despite its increasingly structured production and distribution, the ribbon’s semantic ambiguity means that its social status has, unsurprisingly, come under periodical challenge. Made possible through the sponsorship of large corporations, the ribbon nonetheless is supposedly noncommercial, that is, completely nonexchangeable. When companies decided to use St. George ribbons to promote goods and services—for instance, by attaching the ribbon to bottles of vodka—the movement’s organizers publicly announced that any attempt to associate the ribbon with commercial activity would face strong moral condemnation. Campaign organizers even went so far as to create the “Code of the Ribbon of St. George,” which explicitly states its “noncommercial” and “nonpolitical” status (“Kodeks aktsii” n.d.).3 This resolute insistence on nonexchangeability plays a crucial role in sustaining the performative efficacy of the ribbon. By blocking the ribbon’s exchangeability and accentuating its pricelessness, campaign organizers have turned a piece of fabric into a gift. However, the ribbon’s social value arises not only from the fact of being given. The indebtedness created by the gift is repaid through the ribbon’s constant circulation in public. A formal signification of the individual’s connectedness, the ribbon also acts as an icon of the obligation— disguised as a form of gratitude—to display the ribbon. The desire/obligation to repay activated by the ribbon sometimes takes unusual forms. For instance, in 2006 a leading St. Petersburg newspaper reported that Victory Day festivities 62 Predstavlenie: Representation and Cultural Imagination in the city reached a new height when Mikhail Bobrov, an eighty-two-year-old war alpinist, scaled the spire of the Peter and Paul Fortress in order to tie a St. George ribbon to its top, one hundred meters above the ground (Smol’skii 2006). Interestingly, the combination of semantic vagueness, material flexibility, and moral obligation that the ribbon brings together differentiates it from comparable mnemonic objects. Scholarly studies of war-related ribbons in the United States document how such symbols undergo a process of instrumentalization, emerging as signs of awareness intended to trigger a monetary contribution. The range of activities these mnemonic objects can activate becomes purposefully streamlined. The history of the yellow ribbon’s gradual transformation from a vernacular sign of hope into a consumable item provides a good case in point. Originally a homemade symbol displayed to spark public solidarity with the American hostages in Iran from 1979 to 1981, the yellow ribbon was reappropriated during the Persian Gulf crisis and Gulf War (1990–91) as a manifestation of unity with American troops abroad (Heilbronn 2007). Following the success of the yellow ribbon, in 1991 the Visible AIDS campaign distributed red ribbons as a sign of AIDS awareness at public awards ceremonies (Heilbronn 2007, 175; Ponte, Richey, and Baab 2009). In the same year, cosmetic heiress Evelyn H. Lauder and philanthropist Alexandra Penny introduced the pink ribbon as a fund-raising tool. Proceeds from pink ribbons studded with silver, gold, and gems help fund the research and treatment of breast cancer (Vineburgh 2004). The widespread commercialization of material ties of solidarity eventually influenced the original yellow ribbon, which, with the beginning of the war in Iraq, went commercial. In April 2003 the company Magnet America started producing yellow ribbons as magnetic bumper stickers with the message “Support Our Troops” (Lilley et al. 2010). Available in stores and by special order, the magnets became a fund-raising mechanism that replaced political participation via symbols with political participation via consumption (Walker 2004). So far, the Russian ribbon of St. George has avoided both commercial commodification and semantic closure. The ribbon’s symbolic porosity allows it to perform various and even contradictory roles—from a sign of remembrance of those who died during the Second World War to a symbol of Russia’s neoimperialism. Its physical plasticity continues to generate public events by materializing the idea of connectedness in a wide variety of ways. Perhaps the persistence of the sign’s materiality, that is, its ability to disrupt any attempt to finalize its meaning, to stabilize its function, and to solidify its ritual significance, constitutes the most important lesson of the St. George ribbon’s brief history. Lacking its own story, the St. George ribbon instead capitalizes on its ability to activate Oushakine / Performative Objects 63 and to embody “differently oriented accents” (Voloshinov [1929] 1998, 23) by turning its vibrant matter into a substance that can link or separate people and events, past and present. Notes I am deeply thankful to the editors of this volume for their help and persistence with the preparation of this essay. My special gratitude goes to Julie Cassiday for her tact, advice, and incredible editorial skills. 1. For more details about the ribbon’s authorship, see RIA Novosti 2005a. 2. The semantics of the ribbon are complicated by the inclusion of an image of St. George slaying a dragon in the official emblem of post-Soviet Moscow. 3. The code states clearly that the ribbon cannot be bought and sold; it is distributed free of charge.