Kirill Kutalov-Postoll. Reports from the litfront

The issue unexpectedly turned out to be a magazine issue.

In the sense that all the news is about magazines.

A new issue of " Periphery " has been released. In the issue, first of all, I advise you to pay attention to two materials - the story of M. Kudimova “ Dvinyaninov ” and revolutionary correct in the light of the current moment “ The First Manifesto of the Society of Free Caste Rights ”.

The manifesto is structured entirely in accordance with the laws of the genre. Only one thing is surprising - namely, that there is not a word in the manifesto about the Internet, while it is difficult to imagine another place where everything declared could be implemented. And it’s still not very clear where, besides the Internet, someone might need all this.

And so, “in general” is well said:

“We are affirming a new caste system, because every story is interesting. You just need to present it from the right angle. There are no repetitions, there is the look of a tired person. Bad taste does not exist, there is the delight of a clinical idiot. We declare war on fatigue and satiety, pathos and moralism.” .

Especially about the right angle.

Also, Mitin's Journal was updated in a very timely manner. It is timely because, as knowledgeable people threaten in the "Book Review", the next brainchild of V. Erofeev 1 will soon be published under the title "Time to Give Birth", and the preface to the brainchild already published in the same "KO" gives reason to assume that with In compiling the brainchild, V. Erofeev was guided almost by feminist principles. In particular, the preface says that “a woman’s age is opening in Russian literature.” In "Mitin" there are just two articles on gender - " Gender Marking " and " Natural Thinking " by Monika Witting.

The first article is devoted to the issues of language as a discriminatory system. By “language” here we mean actual, active language, but not language as a medium for the formation of an absolute subject. The latter, naturally, is not marked, since it is impossible for an absolute subject to distribute himself into relative registers (the category of gender). Marking occurs later, and its results enter into everyday use, masquerading as the natural properties of language, while there is nothing natural in such a division. It seems, however, that talking about this using the material of English or French is somewhat easier than relying on the reality of the Russian language, which is extremely loaded with this very gender.

The second article is basically about the same thing, but the question is posed more globally: the text is not about differences at the level of personal pronouns, but about how the process of labeling itself occurs, about institutionalized discourses aimed at substantiating and further consolidating them in culture ( through everyday use in language) of false discriminatory models.

One quote from "Gender Markings":

“The result of imposing the category of gender, which acts as a negation at every moment of speaking, is to deprive women of the authorship of speech, forcing them to enter language with a crab walk, simultaneously identifying themselves and asking for forgiveness every minute. As a result, they are denied any claim to the abstract, philosophical, political discourse that defines a social being. The species must be destroyed. The possibility of its destruction is given to us through the very use of language."

Just like that. The race must be destroyed, and not the “woman's age”.

In a word, a useless feminist from V. Erofeev.

Now the best news. The networking community can be congratulated on the fall of " Babylon ". The efforts of our small but united detachment were crowned with the first victory - the matter of demonopolization of literature moved from a dead boiling point.

A long-awaited event, this event took place on September 11 on the pages of a propaganda leaflet entitled “ Literary Diary, a free platform for professional writers .” On that day, the leaflet published an article by the free professional writer Mr. Zosimov, dedicated to advertising on domestic TV. To answer the question of what relation TV advertising has to literature and professionalism in it, you need to know the background. The latter can be found directly here , here and here , or you can be content with the short version below.

The Babylon project, which has existed on the Internet since the 9th century, has recently increasingly encountered one problem. Young writers and critics, one after another, refused to believe that only “Babylon” had an understanding of literature and the situation in the literary process. Moreover, young writers and critics refused to believe that such understanding could be possessed at all. Seeing in such behavior the dangerous germs of anarchy and by that time not having any mechanisms of pressure on the literary process (neither monetary nor the notorious “administrative resource”), the curators of the “Babylon” project (among whom the most widely known are the literary magnate and monopolist Dmitry Kuzmin and the patriarch of the archaic critics Danil Davydov) nevertheless made an attempt to call the unruly youth to reason, taking out from a distant shelf the tablets of context and indulgences, given to them in 1812 somewhere near Smolensk by a drunken regimental priest of Napoleon’s retreating army. As it turned out later, the tablets and indulgences were fake, and the priest in fact turned out to be a famous Hamburg swindler named Gutenberg (who also had nothing to do with the inventor of the printing press). For some time, the curators made desperate attempts to save the situation, declaring themselves investigators for literature. Having subsequently seen that the youth also did not respond to the red book of the literary chief of police, the curators resorted to the last resort - to declare the apostates enemies of the people, for which purpose the free professional writer Mr. Zosimov was involved.

The technique used by Zosimov is well known. Two parts are easily distinguished in the text: the first is empty in content and serves to create a context, telling about things that most readers perceive as obvious due to their repeated repetition over the past ten years (“Pepsi-Cola advertising is bad”, “the use of historical images in advertising figures are always profanation" and so on). In the second part, the prepared reader must finally identify himself with the author, who complains that all his thoughts about advertising on TV are nothing more than “intellectual stupidity” : thus, everyone who reads the article is automatically accepted into the camp of supporters and is enrolled as an intellectual (since Every intellectual should understand that Pepsi-Cola advertising is bad). To disagree with the author means to automatically leave the category of intellectuals. This allows the author to finally strike a blow - to shift the conversation from advertising to the situation in the literary process, and to translate as if by chance, simply to hint to the prepared reader at the final link in the chain. Thus, the reader should form the following associative series: “Pepsi advertising - profanation of history - moral degradation - corruption in power - devastation in the country - Lev Pirogov.”

Someone may have the wrong opinion that this is not the end, but only the beginning, and Lev Pirogov should sue Babylon for libel (after all, he was declared guilty of non-payment of pensions and benefits). But, knowing the situation from the inside, I hasten to reassure you: this is the end. The end - because the arguments are over. The end - because moralizing pseudo-arguments were used. The end - because the “Babylon” project has been exhausted, having turned, on the one hand, into a rarely updated electronic library , and on the other, into a place for showdowns (meaning a “ free platform for professional writers ”). The end, after all, is because, as we know, “Context is dead.”

Well, in case of some future monopolist, I declare with full responsibility: if anything happens, we are ready to take on the challenge. Like Chip and Dale .

Yes, also M. Kudimova’s story “ Dvinyaninov ”. In a nutshell: unhappy is the graduate of a philological university whose IRL teacher was a normal, average professor. Such a graduate does not know anything about the Russian language, even if he remembers what palatalization is, having worked for 10 years as a leading manager in an automobile concern.

“And only in rare moments of fearlessness, which is snakingly and emptyly called “freedom,” I repeat, almost without hearing myself, almost forgetting the warning intonation of Dvinyaninov’s falsetto, this appeal of the present to the unknown and cold-blooded futurum, the awareness of guilt before it: “Time passes, but the Word is not studied!" And the future comes and arrives every day, every moment, never leaving a single debt, and futurum spills over into fate, even more impersonal and cold."

Notes:

1 By the way, the possible beginning of an article about Viktor Erofeev for “ART-AZBUKA” by Max Frei: “Viktor Erofeev, a citizen of the Russian Federation, has never been brought to justice and has hardly received public censure for publishing books by other authors under his own name. At the end of 2000 There were two such books - “Russian Flowers of Evil” and “Time to Give Birth”, in both of them V. Erofeev only had prefaces, while on the cover there was his name without the specification “edited”, “compiled”, etc.”