The Thinking Reed

The authorities endeavour to submit to themselves the entire life of the Soviet citizen and to supervise everything he does. But cultural creativity, as I have said, is less submissive than anything else to external control. How can one control a poetic image or an actor’s gesture? It is easy to control the worker at the bench, for the production process is regulated and the result known beforehand. But how is one to control the artist before his canvas, if the result of his work is not known in advance even to the artist himself? Adequate criteria and methods of control do not exist for this purpose, and the bureaucratic mentality is incapable of inventing them; this is true not only of art but of all branches of culture. The art critic, the art historian, the culturologist and the philosopher can easily be censored, but here too there are difficulties. The chief complication consists in the fact that the meaning of the part often differs from that of the whole. In cultural creativity the whole not only cannot be regarded as the sum of the parts (such an approach to any problem leads to very defective and inaccurate conclusions), but is also sometimes a negation of those parts. Any current, ‘running’ control has to be a control of parts. Suppression of the whole is a repressive measure which shows that running control has suffered fiasco: it reveals the presence of a conflict and proves that manipulation has failed; that the object of manipulation has escaped from control or has simply refused to submit.

It is natural that the cultural sphere, being ‘remotest from the reality’, the least controllable, and consequently the freest, becomes the last (or first) refuge for opposition to the regime.49 The process of constant politicization of art goes on, as a rule, independently of the will of either the rulers or the ruled. Striving to subject culture to itself, the statocracy intensifies its pressure, imposing obligatory norms, and the result is that a mere attempt to evade this control — to ignore these norms — is seen as a political protest: ‘When independent political opinions are suppressed, it is aesthetic value judgements, abstract problems of philosophy and social theory and the evaluation of the remote historical past which assume political significance.’50

Antonio Gramsci drew, in his Prison Notebooks, the very important conclusion that such processes are to be observed in countries ‘where there is a single, totalitarian, governing party.’ There,

the functions of such a party are no longer directly political but merely technical ones of propaganda and public order, and moral and cultural influence. The political function is indirect. For, even if no other legal parties exist, other parties in fact always do exist and other tendencies which cannot be legally coerced, and, against these, polemics are unleashed, and struggles are fought as in a game of blind man’s buff. In any case, it is certain that in such parties cultural functions predominate, which means that political language becomes jargon. In other words, political questions are disguised as cultural ones, and as such become insoluble.51

In this way the political struggle is shifted to the sphere of art and culture generally, where it becomes ‘chronic’, because for the contradictions to be resolved, real, non-mystified political activity is needed and the intelligentsia finds itself in constant, chronic opposition. There is another aspect to this. A number of concrete problems need to be studied by the social sciences, but owing to the censorship they cannot be studied completely enough. Art then begins to reflect upon these problems — employing, of course, its own specific methods. As a result some very distinctive artistic productions make their appearance, marked by a special analytical approach to the subjects they describe.