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   The Dead Ends of One-Dimensional
Thinking Mikhail Piotrovsky on the attacks on the Bolshoi Theater and the Hermitage. Who benefits from them and why? One of the most popular words today, especially beloved by economists, is “transparency”. When it comes to bank transactions, the operations of companies, the income of members of parliament and politicians, transparency is indeed an excellent medicine for the social ills that we have all experienced first-hand. But all of a sudden, transparency has ceased to be a term and has become a metaphor, and people have begun to demand transparency for our personal lives or the off-stage life of a theater, for example. At the same time, it is obvious that the audience that is interested in the provocative details of how one artist was the paymaster behind the attack another and who exactly he was is equally indifferente to either dancer’s performance. The art of ballet and theater simply has nothing to do with it. In a word, it turns out that when we say “the Bolshoi Theater” we imply the tragedy of Sergei Filin, which the media have turned into a long-running series. It is also unfortunate that human misery becomes “raw material” to stir up the audience and hunt for rating and that the meaning of art is pushed to one side as useless. It is obvious that there is always a ready-made answer available: it is the readers and viewers that are at fault. They’re the kind of people described in Galich’s song. Remember? “From the hall they shout, ‘give us the details! Tell it like it is... Just like it is!’”. If that’s the case, then we have a lot to look forward to, since the most successful event, the one that got the highest rating in antiquity, was a public execution in the square. The modern version is a live death on the air. The images of the death of Muammar al-Gaddafi, shown ceaselessly on television channels the world over, shows that we are much closer to the Middle Ages than we think. It seems to me that the problem is not that the audience has “low” desires. It is not even that many media outlets are playing to the audience. At the end of the day, the owners of those media outlets have their commercial interests, and the man in the street in every age has the well-known demand, so famously phrased, though not by us, as “bread and circuses!”. The problem is something else: why is there no alternative to the man in the street today? In this case, society is sharply polarized; on one side are those in power, on the other side is the great mass of supposed members of a consumption community, who are primarily distinguished by the brand of car they drive and their bank accounts. At the same time, the alternative was built over the course of centuries. I mean a currently unpopular part of society, the intelligentsia. Twenty years ago we were told that we don’t need intelligentsia anymore. Either they were the ones who ruined everything, or they can’t do anything. I must note that this is not the first time that the Russian intelligentsia was thrown from the “steamship of modernity”. It is not accident that the famous steamship of 1922, on which the Bolsheviks sent the flower of Russian philosophical thought to greener pastures was called “philosophical”. But, as is well known, before that, the famous 1909 anthology, Vekhi, in which (I am, alas, indeed drawing a parallel) laid the blame for the revolutionary events of 1905 at the feet of the intelligentsia. In this case, it is curious that the intelligentsia, as it turns out, did not meet the expectations of either the conservative part of society or the Bolsheviks, who were not inclined to discuss things. Both groups were “disillusioned” with the intelligentsia. This was due to the fact that it was unwilling to give up its independent thought. Strange as it may seemed, the half-contemptuous attitude towards the intelligentsia as an “ancillary” labor that we would be much better off without, if only that were possible, has survived in the post-Perestroika era. People love to replace the word “intelligentsia” with the western synonym “intellectuals”. Intellectuals are those who produce an intellectual product, the intelligentsias are those who consume it. But this is, in essence, a ruse. One cannot “produce” an intellectual product without reading books, discussing problems with colleagues, talking to friends and rivals at conferences… One cannot exist without the other. The cause of this substitution is clear: intellectual labor is viewed as a “service”. A university is an educational “service”, a museum is an entertainment “service”... It winds up looking like the utilities, except it services the business elite. What’s wrong with that? Perhaps the fact that we want to reduce the multidimensional complexity of lively intellectual labor to a one-dimensional “service”. The fact that we are therefore cultivating a one-dimensional person doesn’t seem to worry anyone. There is another curious substitution: instead of “intelligentsia,” people say “creative class”. But the creative class was born of business, specifically the demands of companies and corporations in advertising and promotion, the creation of image technology and the need to manipulate the consumers of goods. Do we need people to do that? Certainly. Is their labor intellectual? Absolutely. Can we say that they alone make up the intelligentsia? I don’t think so. Schoolteachers and university instructors, doctors, engineers, museum workers; in my opinion, they are the foundation of the intelligentsia. They are the people who do complex intellectual work, and they are not inclined to make simple, one-dimensional judgments. For example, we are discussing what kind of universal history textbook we should have. We don’t need a universal history textbook. There should be a book of historical facts. Chronology, events and “days of past anecdotes from Romulus to today”. But we need teachers of history who will teach children to master all of that material, expose them to various points of view, positions and approaches to the study of history. That may have its pluses and minuses, but the most important thing is that it be done professionally. Speaking of which, the lack of professionalism that now flourishes everywhere is also a price we are paying for contempt for the intelligentsia. If we have decided that we can vote on what a museum or theater should show or what theory of the origin of the universe or humanity is correct, why not vote on the Higgs boson or the solution to a mathematical problem? Or on how to perform a surgical operation? It’s absurd from beginning to end. The idea of breaking down open doors is ridiculous. But the thought that intellectual labor also demands appropriate preparation seems to need repeating. The inability to operate complex concepts, or even understand metaphorical language, leads to the kind of public comedy that we can see today in the polemics between one respected member of parliament and the no less respected editor in chief of a Moscow newspaper. http://www.rg.ru/2013/03/21/piotrovskij.html |
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