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Feminism as a Buttress
irina aktuganiva
key words: Internet of life, death, birth,motherhood, a thirst for novelty and the instinct of self-preservation, Post-Informational Utopia
I am very interested in that Russian feminism which sometime arose in the bowels of the totalitarian state--not as a subculture or a philosophy, but as an attitude. It was taken up by those young people from Soviet intelligentsia families who were adolescents during the seventies. We lived then in very quiet times, in a one-dimensional world altogether bereft of cultural or ontological imperatives. There were many systems in this world, many points of view,many stories unfolding outside the window, and we could try all this out onourselves: each incarnation had its own appeal. We had cinema and nearlythe entire gamut of world literature, and we ate it up without rhyme orreason. Within us dwelt a hatred towards quiet family life, towardsanything bourgeois, towards the norm, towards definition and a definitivechoice, towards naming ourselves.
We had the Internet of life before us: our imaginations were filled withcountless clusters of cultures, circumstances and identities, and itmadeour heads spin. This was the beginning of the process that wouldeventuallylead us to surfing the Net. The media themselves would later beconstructedin the image and likeness of this new consciousness.Our consciousness was not structured like a language. Language no longer meant anything to us. Nor was our consciousness structured like an ideology--ideology had been castrated; the big ideas were nowhere to befound. We were left with only our national peculiarities and fragments of meanings which we could combine as our nature or our personal problems dictated: there wasn't any goal as such. It was the process thatthrilledus, the flow of life, in which you got your bearings with the aid ofsomething hat resembled instinct more than anything. The principalcriterion for judging the results was a sense of harmony and happiness.Ourexperience of interacting with culture, society and our own egos was insome sense unique. We whimsically synthesized within ourselves a Russianmentality, Orthodoxy, atheism, state feminism and personal experience. Moreover, a number of circumstances combined and led to the phenomenonknown in physics as resonance.This creeping reality, multiplying into countless worlds and systems andlater receiving various culturological labels, this formless, essentiallyfeminine pseudo-reality, coincided with our, female, participation in it,and at the same time with the ideological, political and socialcataclysmsthat accompanied the disappearance of the Soviet Union: by themid-ninetieseven the most radical mind could no longer withstand this vertiginousdissipation and disembodiment. Some kind of buttress was needed. People react differently in such situations: some look to the church, or to parapsychology and supernatural forces, for support; others lean on the extant party, family and cultural narratives. Having lost along the way all identities, we have come to the only conclusion possible for the timebeing: only ontologically disputable things are real--death, birth,motherhood. Traditionally, woman has been in charge of these things:they are her secret knowledge, her stronghold, her buttress.
It might seem that the kind of feminism I have just described is a form of neoconservatism. Is this really the case?The philosophers of the Russian Silver Age knew that two traits are happily combined in woman: a thirst for novelty and the instinct of self-preservation. The former helps woman to bravely conquer new socialspaces; the latter, to avoid self-destruction. It was precisely youngRussian women who, in the early nineties, were the first to begin to play with the Internet and the new media as a new socio-cultural space. By the mid-nineties they had dubbed themselves cyberfeminists.In between doing virtual, Internet projects and developing cyberfeminism,Gallery 21 undertook the project "Post-Informational Utopia" and thepublication of the newspaper "New Philistine" (these titles speak forthemselves). Thanks to the intellectual efforts of their participants the following series of synonyms was generated: post-informational,nonconceptual, extraverbal, extraintellectual, nonbinary,non-audiovisual,perceptual-corporeal, slow experiencing, duty, pain, existential,ontological, nonsymbolic, feminine, cyberfeminism, unarticulated, unambitious.These synonyms reflected our feeling of apathy towards current artisticpractice and our weariness with universal virtualization. Thisrejection ofthe ambition and cultural activism to which all is sacrificed isperceivedas a complete departure from the stage, a stage on which nowadays thelatest neoconservative card is being played with an emphasis on triedandtrue narratives and discourses (Neoacademism, Orthodoxy, Bolshevism,etc.).By finding support in cyberfeminism, we are relying on something thatforour culture appears to be nonsense and frivolity. Somethingnondiscursiveand indeterminate. For us, who have experienced the death of language,itis one of the pseudonyms of reality itself. Thanks to our pastexperiencewe have as it were scraped away cultural layers and interpretations from reality. On the other hand, thanks to the name cyberfeminism, those verysame conservatives see us as frisky pseudo-avantgardists of the Western persuasion. But since the post-informational cyberfeminist is lazy when it comes to self-promotion (and the rules of the game dictate that sheshouldn't be engaged in self-conceptualization and the fanning of ambitions), there simply isn't anyone to shed light on this entiretangled proposition. In our context, the cyberfeminist is a mature lady. At thesame time, she is radical to such a degree that no one is able to see this:she has lost interest in playing at art and spends her time raising children, going for walks, testing various methods for improving health;she turns away with disgust when she hears the words Internet and television. A genuine Russian cyberfeminist is someone who has made some sense for herself of cyber, of feminism, of gender, of liberalization--she's become so bored with all these things that she just wants to live.
In stable societies the new alternative media are becoming a space for play and freedom, for adventure and disembodiment. The ideology of the Tactical Media proclaimed by Western media avantgardists is founded on the freedom to push through gaps in the crystalline bars of society. When an entire society plays by the rules, some people can play between the rules.The current post-Soviet situation is such that from President Yeltsin to the homeless person on the street no one knows anything: the law, the constitution, rules, honor, conscience are all unknown--i.e., every one plays with Tactical Media. Thus, the virtuality of consciousness, power, laws, media, gender and identification have forced us to search for embodiment.
Translated, from the Russian, by Thomas Campbell