Andrey Elagin. Stagnation

Stall
To the 20th anniversary of the death of L.I. Brezhnev

Andrey Elagin

Publication date: November 18, 2002

Polytalfavit. H

“Transitional periods have all the hallmarks of a threshold, that is, a boundary between two spaces where opposing foundations collide [...] The rituals associated with these moments... are aimed at reconciling the mythical chronology with the climatic chronology, with the leaps and whims of the latter. .."

P. Bourdieu. "Practical sense"

The word “stagnation” is one of those that are intended to affirm some exclusively negative interpretation, moreover, to curse the absolute negativity of any phenomenon. In this case, we are talking about a phenomenon that, in a positive interpretation, without any special tricks, is called “stability.” This somewhat vague term can hide a lot. In particular, first of all, it seems that under the name of “stability” stagnation can easily lurk: irreversible stagnation .

However, only political thinking in the spirit of naive realism can create an idea of ​​stagnation as a substantial characteristic of a certain state of social relations.

In fact, the very topic of irreversible stagnation arises as a tool for breaking the existing mechanism of social reproduction, as a special policy aimed at equating the forms and manifestations of such reproduction with malicious or thoughtlessly “treading water.” At the same time, there is nothing more reminiscent of stagnation than “renewal” , implicated in the systematic destruction of the reproductive institutions of society. Having entered our political thesaurus with the beginning of the Andropov-Gorbachev reforms, criticism of the “stagnant phenomena of our life” acted as both a sign and a reason for the historical decline of that once powerful civilization, which was designated by the abbreviation “USSR.”

In general, stagnation is nothing more than a general name for long-term historical processes associated with slow development cycles, a gradual transition from one state to another. Stagnation can also serve as the name for that form of forward movement from the past to the future, which results in various strategies for the withdrawal or abolition of the principle of variability. Brezhnev's stagnation was a chance to endow the Soviet model of historical existence with the features of a long, prolonged history. That story in which gradualism becomes the formula for any achievement.

From this (and precisely from this) point of view, the USSR of the Brezhnev era is similar to Denxiaoping’s China after the early 1980s.

History within the framework of stagnation is not at all devoid of eventfulness, but fills any series of events with historicity, opening up for them the path of gradual genesis (which determines the dominant events of any stagnant era). This is why it is wrong to assume that nothing happens during times of stagnation. On the contrary, the intensity of the historical movement can be significantly greater in these times than in the so-called eras of change , when the events themselves acquire ( in and thanks to history) an ahistorical cumulativeness, as if being called upon to happen according to the logic “now or never.”

To avoid the oscillation between “now” and “never”, which marks any era of change, is possible only by consistently expanding, making the very border of transition more and more uncertain. Stagnation is, among other things, the name of such an erased, shaded border that has lost its clear outlines and has become transparent and accessible. Softening the transitional moment is the task of social rituals and in itself indicates a specific ritualization of social life.

The question, in other words, is the difference in the status of historical events in stagnant times and eras of change. Changes acquire epochal significance only when eventuality in history is mythologized and any minimal historical event begins to personify Dynamism, Variability and Transience. On the contrary, stability can be epochal only when the myth itself becomes historical, beginning to emerge through the inconspicuous, familiar, completely familiar fabric of everyday life, which becomes practically indistinguishable from it.

The mentioned ritualization of social life takes place under the sign of the unity of nature and culture , when time fits into a series of planned accomplishments that make up the historical principle of everyday life. However, unlike “traditional” societies, modern societies of stagnation do not at all derive the regularity of their own life routine from the routine of natural phenomena and do not coordinate the periods of their own activity with climatic cycles. On the contrary, the unification of nature and culture now occurs in an anti-traditionalist perspective. It is “culture”, and not “nature”, that provides existence with a cyclicality that is more immutable than the cyclicality of the natural order.

The collapse of any stagnation does not lie at all in the preference for revolutionary transformations to the evolutionary procession of historical milestones; this collapse lies in repression in relation to everything that belongs to the realm of everyday life, to that culture that appears as the first and basic “nature” of a disappearing “stagnant” civilization.

Since the “space” of the epochal nature of any stagnation exactly coincides with the limits of the all-encompassing spread of everyday life, such repression is addressed to the entire everyday picture of the world. From an aesthetic point of view, any features of a “stagnant” canon and style are repressed; from an ethical point of view - any manifestations of “stagnant” norms and foundations; from the point of view of ontology - the entire “stagnant” way of life, its entire organization.

The crisis of legitimacy is expressed primarily in the fact that the very object of legitimation disappears. Everything - from the shape of door handles and the shape of architectural structures to the shape of the political system - is, of course, not at all denied in one fell swoop. A more terrible transformation is taking place: this “everything” is losing its attractiveness - losing that share of “reasonableness” that endowed both the above-mentioned political system and the above-mentioned door handles with minimal rights to be considered “valid”.

In other words, the ritual begins to be perceived precisely as a ritual, losing the qualities of a magical procedure and not acquiring the properties of an effective technology.

This is what happened to the Soviet Union in the last period of its existence - the communist ritualization of existence did not lose any of its pomp, but it turned out to be less and less able to produce anything, turn into anything, lead to anything. Ritual increasingly begins to serve only as an indication of itself, increasingly becoming completely autonomous from the Soviet social universe.

Spells gradually lose their power: words are mobilized only by inertia, and the very utterance of words turns only into an exemplary inertial action. The formational exclusivity of the USSR, which until recently seemed to be a symptom of an achieved a priori ahistoricity (if socialism assumed involvement in history, then only in a history of a fundamentally new type), now (still purely tacit) turns out to be no less a priori evidence of backwardness. No matter how uncertain the extent of this lag may be, their very obvious fantastic nature is accepted as an inexorable indication of world-historical doom.