About four books

Adventures of the "Keeping Eye"

M. Stollais. Eye of the Law. The story of a metaphor. Per. with him. A. V. Doronina. - M.: Russian Political Encyclopedia, 2012. - 87 p.

Michael Stolleis asks a question that at first glance is purely linguistic: where does the metaphor of “the eye of the law” come from in Friedrich Schiller’s poem “The Song of the Bell”, which does not close at night, protecting respectable citizens? After all, the word “law” in German is neuter and does not initially imply any associations with a living organism.

The simplicity of this image, as the German historian shows, is imaginary, and it can only be correctly understood in the philosophical and political context of its time. Putting the “puzzle” together piece by piece, Stolleis makes all sorts of excursions. It turns out that in antiquity a fair judge was called “the eyes of the goddess Dike” or Justice, and the “all-seeing eye of the Lord” is also mentioned in the Bible. However, the “watchful eye” becomes one of the central symbols only in the 17th century, according to Stolleis, as a result of a deliberate mixture of political and theological discourses. It was then that the combination of a luminous eye (the all-seeing eye of the Lord and at the same time the inner eye of the soul, contemplating the true world) and a triangle (the Holy Trinity) appears both in churches and in princely symbolism. The “Wakeful Eye” becomes a symbol of the power of the omniscient absolute monarch, standing above classes and confessions. It was not without reason that statistics that arose at that time received its name from the word “state” and initially provided secret and at the same time comprehensive knowledge of the ruler about his subjects.

After the American and French revolutions, the monarch was replaced by a constitution designed to equalize all citizens before the law, and the eye inscribed in the triangle becomes primarily its symbol. However, as the German historian shows, despite Schiller’s enthusiasm, the desacralization of the symbol was inevitable: in the 19th century, both the law and state supervision, instead of serving the common good, often stood guard over the power of a selfish minority.

According to Stolleis, the repressive components of the state vision were visible from the very beginning. Michael Stollais considers it deeply logical that it was precisely at the end of the Enlightenment that the project of the Panopticon appeared - a prison where all cells were viewed from one point. According to the author, the idea of ​​supervision for educational or correctional purposes is very close to the nightmare of totalitarianism. No matter how high above our heads the spy satellites are now hovering, Stolleis convincingly proves that in the space of values, the all-seeing eye has long since descended from the mountain heights to the sinful earth. This image no longer evokes sacred awe. At best, a smile, like a policeman peeping through a keyhole from a German political cartoon of the first half of the 19th century, or Foolov’s mayor Vasilisk Wartkin, who at night frightened his own wife with his watchful eye.

Metamorphoses of literary ceitrism

V. E. Was empty. Thick criticism: Russian prose in current generalizations. - M.: RGGU, 2012. - 411 p.

Valeria Pustova’s book is the result of almost ten years of author’s work in thick-magazine criticism. The work consistently analyzes various areas of modern literature: military prose (Zakhar Prilepin, Arkady Babchenko, Denis Gutsko, Alexander Karasev), modern fairy tale (Petr Bormor, Olga Lucas, Lyudmila Petrushevskaya, Marina Vishnevetskaya), dystopia and alternative history (Dmitry Bykov, Olga Slavnikova, Andrey Volos, Pavel Krusanov), literary criticism (Kirill Kobrin, Dmitry Bykov, Oleg Pavlov), works by finalists of the Debut Prize (Sergey Shargunov, Denis Osokin, Oleg Zobern).

Of course, both the selection of prose works and their analysis are subject to a certain logic by Valeria Pustova: in essence, they continue her study of the post-Soviet Russian intelligentsia. The author proceeds from the fact that for two centuries literature has largely replaced politics and philosophy in Russia and assumed the role of a moral teacher. Valeria Pustovaya writes mainly about “realistic” prose, one way or another connected with this tradition through attempts to break with it or, conversely, to continue it.

For many of the characters in this book (Prilepin, Bykov, Senchin, Pelevin), a novel is not just self-expression, but also a form of more or less conscious intervention in what is happening around them. With their artistic gesture, they are all trying to achieve something - to recreate a great country, to undermine from within the dominant types of political discourse in it, to expose the idyll of consumption, to show their compatriots the right path to enlightenment, etc.

The only problem is that in the current cultural situation, all these revelational sermons can only pretend to be universally valid, since the readership in our country over the past twenty years has decreased quantitatively and broken up into non-overlapping groups.

In addition, as Valeria Pustovaya shows with many examples, in modern Russian prose, private life, as a rule, is placed above any public matter. Collective existence is equated in it with mass, that is, a blind, absurd and disastrous herd impulse.

The ideal writing strategy, according to Valeria Pustova, is extremely far from politics, prophecies and any kind of media activity. This is a kind of asceticism, the liberation of the writer and reader from the idols of society and introduction to the timeless and universal peaks of the spirit.

However, this type of spiritual quest, according to the critic, is becoming obsolete: in our time, any cultural texts are being replaced by life-creativity, that is, by some alternative to artistic creativity and passive perception of finished works by psychotherapeutic or religious practices.

On the benefits of “principled unprincipledness”

F. Ankersmit. Political representation. - M.: State University - Higher School of Economics, 2012. - 288 p.

The Dutch philosopher begins his book on representative democracy with the question of the relationship between ideal and practice in politics. As a professor of intellectual history, Franklin Ankersmit cannot ignore the experience of past thinkers. To support his argument, the author uses two conflicting traditions of political thought: natural law philosophy (the line leading from Hobbes to Rousseau) and historicism (the line leading from Niccolò Machiavelli to Edmund Burke).

The models that Ankersmit extracts from the writings of the classics are still relevant today: the US Constitution, immutable by definition, is based on the principles of natural law, while politicians in democratic countries often turn out to be spontaneous Machiavellians. After all, the traditions of democracy require a politician to compromise, and therefore, to a certain extent, systematically renounce his own ideals.

Ankersmit himself is undoubtedly closer to the pathos of historicism in Burke and even Machiavelli. Already by the 17th century, followers of the extravagant Italian came to the conclusion that his principles were completely compatible with Christian ethics. The main lesson that Machiavelli taught his contemporaries (“those who carefully delve into the past will easily guess the future of any republic”) was firmly learned by his followers and was never revised by them. Another thing is Jean Jacques Rousseau. This natural law theorist believed that history is a source of prejudices that only corrupt people.

However, according to Ankersmit, ignoring history is extremely dangerous. Every form of government and every political institution, no matter what excellent theoretical basis is provided for it, is, first of all, a historical response to a specific problem. In his opinion, representative democracy, like, for example, an absolute monarchy, has a limited lifespan. And the beginning of its end, according to Ankersmit, is the transformation of representative democracy into plebiscitary: citizens, instead of following the discussion of issues of the common good, prefer to speak out once every few years, approving or disapproving of the current government policies as a whole, in presidential elections. According to Ankersmit, this (plebiscite) form of concentration of power threatens to remake man through the adoption of certain laws that correspond to modern versions of natural law. Ankersmit is convinced that, no matter how democrats the supporters of natural law consider themselves to be, this is violence under the guise of consensus. The latter, according to the author, is actually unattainable, unlike the good old compromise that worked so well in the 19th century.

As Ankersmit shows, in those days, democratic representation rightfully symbolized the nation as a whole, since it required each participant in the political dialogue to necessarily abandon their positions in favor of some common course. And, according to Ankersmit, humanity has not yet come up with anything better than the “principled unprincipledness” of politicians assumed by representative democracy.

Imaginary patient

V.V. Zvereva. “Real life” on television: studies of modern media culture. - M.: RGGU, 2012. - 224 p.

The title of Vera Zvereva's book refers us to the ideas of Jean Baudrillard and Guy Debord. In the age of mass media, only what is captured in the camera is “real.” Accordingly, the picture of the world created by television is the most widespread in modern society. Another question is that it is not uniform, but varies somewhat depending on the genre to which the television product belongs (advertising, concerts, TV series, talk shows, reality shows, popular science and sports programs).

Of course, this set of formats has been borrowed from the West over the past twenty years. But what kind of transfer to Russian soil is possible without more or less serious mutations? Zvereva’s work is largely devoted to their description. The author examines the deformations of both individual genres and the system they form as a whole, analyzing the trends of the last ten years.

Programs about animals and sports programs have the least national specificity, but now in talk shows and reality shows, also often foreign in origin, it begins to appear. This type of broadcast is designed to magically move the passive viewer to the other side of the screen and then transform the “ordinary person” into a “star.” However, Russians are surprisingly bad at verbally describing their own experiences and experiences. So the role of scriptwriters and “disguised” actors portraying “people from the street” in Russian shows is increasing.

However, according to Zvereva, this is far from the most striking distinctive feature of Russian television. Analyzing the features of Russian television series and entertainment programs, the researcher reveals a strange duality of values ​​that domestic television fosters. On the one hand, valiant law enforcement officers in domestic TV series usually work as a friendly team and are full of warm memories of the Soviet homeland, while businessmen and oligarchs are often selfish and vicious. In other words, collectivism reigns supreme by default. On the other hand, the television program is replete with advice programs on how a person can arrange his private life (make repairs, find his other half, choose the right style of clothing), and the creators of the corresponding shows have been swearing for many years to assure us that Russians are tired of politics and seriously only interested in himself.

Zvereva believes that all this is highly natural. Consumer glamor fills the gap that arose after the disappearance of serious analytical and socio-political programs from the airwaves in the 2000s. Accordingly, no one suspects a Russian who watches TV series and shows that carry opposite values ​​of schizophrenic duality. Nobody seriously even considers him an individualist.

However, there are concerns that such a broadcasting structure will, in turn, change social reality, and not for the better. Our compatriots will turn out to be individualists in the worst sense of the word, that is, incapable of self-organization and collective constructive action when the interests of the entire country really require it.