The effect of authenticity

There is no need to list the forms characteristic of the post -Soviet period and methods of instrumenting political utterance, breeding the statement and acting actually. All of them are known under the general name of "political technology."

The “camps” and “parties” were destroyed, denigrated, surrounded by spoilers and negative doubles, simply hidden and censored. The reaction to this was total cynicism.

But the displacement of discursive policy also gave rise to a request for "authenticity". In order for the political statement to become significant, it was necessary to surround the aura of authenticity. The creation of such an aura in itself has become a certain technique.

The popularity of Alexei Navalny is largely based on the fact that all his statement is “exposing” with an indispensable demonstration of “evidence”: scanned copies of documents, videos, etc. Such “evidence” not so much perform the direct role of evidence as the very aura that allows you to read the statement as universally valid.

Navalny seeks to be not a politician, but a public prosecutor scouring corrupt officials and businessmen. Nevertheless, the non -political nature of his activity remains a rhetorical illusion, if only because the transition from individual cases to concepts is impossible as the transition of “quantity to quality”, and those statements that Navalny does about such things as corruption cannot be reduced to specific examples. The concepts used by him are universal, which means political. At the same time, the “non -political” aura of authenticity inherent in them ensures confidence in them, although in how Navalny operates with concepts, it is no different from other opposition politicians. It’s just that, unlike them, he guessed in time that here and now it was necessary to reject the “labels” and “-rahs”, talk exclusively about “specific problems”.

Politicalization of December-March is a continuation of the same logic of authenticity.

I think it is wrong in the spirit of a critical theory to reduce the movement to some unconscious objective interests of the protesters, the ideological form of which was the slogan "for honest elections." People really went out to protest against falsification of elections. First of all, because this topic itself is not political and allows you to declare the entire movement “civilian”, and its participants to maintain a disgust distance in relation to “politicians”. But also because the facts of falsifications themselves are surrounded by an aura of authenticity, “eyewitnesses of eyewitnesses” and all the same videos that quickly replaced the footage of an unfinished pipeline in Siberia, designed to “illustrate” the political thesis about the corruption character of the Russian state. The protest against falsifications is based on “genuine evidence”, but it is important not so much that, in fact, these evidence proves, but the fact that the authenticity they created makes the protest of the protesters by the protesters themselves.

Finally, the rallies themselves became truly turning off in terms of a request for authenticity. In conditions of complete absence of general “social problems”, protests as such became a universal reference point. Society, like Munchausen, stretched itself out by the hair. There was an opportunity to “talk about your actions” and “act, following your words.” The public sphere took the form of concentric circles diverging from the only nephe-stalls, non-instrumental, non-instrumental-“genuine”-and at the same time a truly mass political event in Russia-rallies for honest elections.

Hence endless jokes about the "State Department". The ironic distance in relation to the cynical view of politics as a arena for “manipulations”-and until recently few decided to raise their voice against such a look-it is called to confirm the “authenticity” of that, by and large, the only political statement that the protesters do: “We are ourselves, we are not here, our rally is real .”

Bourdieu wrote that on processions, rallies, demonstrations “the group is the most as such”, mass actions are representations in the theatrical sense of the word, “where the whole group plays and goes on stage, constituting as a spectator of a visible performance” (“practical meaning”). It is precisely such a performance in which the “public” is the most as such, are the rallies of December-Mart.