Overcrowded Russian Prisons and Hannah Arendt (?)

Philosophers do not have the answers to our problems; nevertheless, considering philosophical accounts in times of crisis is of dire importance, as they force us to think the current predicament instead of indulging into our darkest fears. I decided to juxtapose Hannah Arendt's insights with the political unrest in Russia -which intensified after Putin "won" the presidential election - through observing the Russian blogosphere; mainly because the blogosphere (to some degree) captures the emergence of an identity-crisis that has been accompanied by a series of protest, a feminist punk-group behind bars, a former political contestant in Astrakhan on hunger-strike, and a poet Kirill Medvedev arrested on 19th of April.

Why Arendt?

In her "Concept of History" Arendt states that the subject of history is the remembrance of various interruptions of our daily lives, or in other words the extraordinary.[1] The current political situation in Russia offers a plethora of such interruptions, which have been magnified and gained prominence through the blogosphere. The pussy riot (a nice link for those who can read Russian can be found here) incident was turned into a case (delo in Russian) due to the harshness of the sentence the members of the punk-group received after performing a song at the Christ the Savior Cathedral. Russian bloggers were very active in covering the story as well as circulating the letters the members of the group wrote in prison cells, when the mainstream media successfully ignored the details of the case. Furthermore, political representatives such as Irina Hakamada aptly pointed out that the unrests are labeled as provocations by the regime as an attempt of active de-legitimization, where the pussy-riot incident is just one among others. The "among others" part is particularly interesting as the protests against electoral fraud in February and March, the emergence of the "white-ribbon" movement, civil resistance activities such as the hunger strike of Oleg Shein, the mockery of the NTV channel when they aired a mockumentary entitled "The Anatomy of Protest" (covered in a previous post) by bloggers and not only, and finally, the imprisonment of the pussy-riot supporters (more than 30 people including Kirill Medvedev) shows that the extraordinary becomes the norm in the Russian context as people re-discover perhaps their power and political might...(?)

Here, Arendt's insights on power and violence are also extremely helpful as we ponder the Russian situation. When she was writing "On Violence" the thread of her thought was swirling around the global student protest movement. She felt compelled to point out the nuanced meanings of the words "power", "strength", "force", "authority", and of course "violence". For her power is not an individual property -in contrast to strength that rests upon a person's character- but power "dwells" in the human ability to act in concert.[2] Such common-action initiatives have been fervently discussed and organized through the Russian blogosphere, as people who took part in various protests, subsequently, blogged their experiences. Going back to Arendt, power requires legitimacy, where its antipode -violence- can never be legitimized because it constantly requires justification! Violence "appears where power is in jeopardy, but left to its own course it ends in power's disappearance."[3] Does that signify the "end-point of the horizon" for the  current power constellation in Russia?

A monolectic response to the above question is absolutely not appropriate, since the issue is much more complex than mere popular dissatisfaction (The Open Society Foundations hosted a really interesting panel in this regard!) However, the blogosphere as a personalized example of the network-structure offers an alternative organization of power, and as such acquires authority...at least of some kind.

This post is dedicated to the poet Kirill Medvedev, who briefly taught in the Russian Department of  Dickinson College 


[1] Hannah Arendt, Concept of History in The Portable Hannah Arendt, p 279
[2] Hannah Arendt, On Violence, 52
[3] Ibid, 56

The "Anatomy" of the Russian Bloggosphere- a brief sketch!

About a week ago, the Russian Politics section of the Economist covered an incident that was fervently discussed among the Russian bloggers: a pseudo-documentary aired on the NTV channel “shedding light to” the Anatomy of Protest, insinuating that the main reason the people took part in the protests in March and February was the promise for pechenki (biscuits in Russian). This incident triggered an online outcry, which was “flavored” with a heavy dose of humor –pictures of a young woman holding a sign with the following message “SO NTV, where are my biscuits?” and the public “ceremony” of the NTV’s funeral- but also served as a study case for the blogging dynamics of this post. Following a qualitative path –due to a low number of blog entries as well as a limited online context- I decided to re-visit the argument of Eugene Gorny purporting that the Russian blogosphere is a substitute for the public sphere, as it reproduces social atomization, negative attitude towards official institutions, informality, symbolic action and most importantly, laughter.[1]  

Qualitative mini-take on the “Anatomy”

The concomitant consequences of the NTV’s documentary exhibit all the above mentioned characteristics of the Russian blogosphere noted by Gorny, albeit accompanied by an enormous BUT…Undoubtedly, the negative attitude towards official institutions is prevalent in Russian politics (and not only in Russia!), and attempts to channel such frustration through creativity and humor are also present BUT the incident demonstrated something greater than mere reproduction of Soviet byt (in a very rough translation byt refers to “the way of life”). Furthermore, the question whether the Russian blogosphere constitutes a public sphere- or its substitute for that matter- is necessarily sterile in intellectual interest (my apologies to the Habermasian fans…). The most interesting/puzzling aspect of this incident is the emerging language-practice, which aspires to establish/strengthen/reinforce the identity of the“Russian bloggers.”

A prominent example is the repetition of the phrase “the bloggers are discussing (insert any topic that is relevant, for example the hunger strike in Astrakhan!),” which fosters the “sense” of bloggers’ group-identity. Furthermore, the incorporation of pictures and videos establishes a stronger link between the content generator and the observer as it taps the aspect of validity and truth. Consequently, there are two dimensions of identity creation at place: endogenous and exogenous. Here, the former captures the dynamics of the bloggers’ group “feel”, since they engage in common action (discussion) publicly; while the latter refers to the outsiders' validation of reality, or in other words any observer -and even bloggers themselves- can affect the bloggers' identity by just "viewing" their posts, since pageviews carry special significance for the blogging community. 

The struggle of establishing oneself as a blogger is utterly understandable given that journalists proper have been extremely good in adapting to the new medium, but this is not the end of the story. The striving desire to become recognized is imbricated with political significance, which leads inevitably to a process of rediscovering the political. Therefore, in order to take the Russian blogosphere seriously we need to see beyond the Habermasian conception of communicative rationality in the public sphere, but instead go back to the processes which transform the political, in this case blogging itself. In order to achieve such understanding, I believe that the work of Hannah Arendt and Chantal Mouffe would be extremely helpful, BUT the women will “speak” in the next post.

PS
There has been a promising qualitative study on the Russian Blogosphere conducted by the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, which surprisingly utilizes the format of a BLOG itself! The results look like this:

---

[1] Eugene Gorny, “Understanding the Real Impact of Russian Blogs” in Russian Analytical Digest, Vol. 69 2009, 8.

Я БЛОГИРУЮ! А ТЫ БЛОГИРУЕШЬ? If yes, we both belong to the museum!

“The genealogy of weblogs points not to the world of letters but to the early history of museums “a random collection of strange, compelling objects, typically compiled and owned by a learned, well-off gentleman” reflecting European civilization’s dazed and wondering attempts to assimilate the glut of physical data that science and exploration were then unleashing”

(Dibbell, 2002) in “Blogging as Social Action: A genre Analysis of the Weblog", by Carolyn R. Miller and Dawn Shepherd.

I have to admit that I didn’t expect such a compelling genealogical “turn” on the blogging history, nevertheless it makes some sense in the Russian context, especially if the question posed is “Why Russians blog the way they do?” Miller and Shepherd (a brief review of their article can be found here) approach blogging as a genre in its own right but not quite; given that blogging is cursed with a plethora of “ancestors” (a commonplace book, museum, clipping service, pamphlet, journal, diary etc.) it is characterized as a “complex rhetorical hybrid…with genetic imprints from all these prior genres.” So far, so good! However, as Eugene Gorny aptly observed, the Russian Live Journal community was not populated by teenage girls, but rather “by mature professionals, predominantly male, including internet workers, journalists, writers, philosophers and artists.”[1] Thus, blogging as a process/medium/message in Russia –as Gorny argues- has a Russia-specific character… But how is this character manifesting itself online?

THE ECHOING EFFECT:

 

As the LiveJournal community was growing, the navigation hindered by the increasing number of users and posts, thus on June 1st 2010 a new website was launched called besttoday.ru, which served as a “filter” site of the LiveJournal. In other words, users backing besttoday.ru were reading ALL OF THE POSTS on LiveJournal and “indulging” in blogs’ cherry-picking (that’s why it is called besttoday after all!) However, besttoday.ru is not the only website that solves the coordination problem in the blogosphere http://www.chaskor.ru/ is another website that performs the same function. Nevertheless, the coordination problem emerged in other blogging communities as well; and was solved by the elite bloggers who have ties to mainstream media and whose blogs serve as a first point of reference (Andrew Sullivan would be one such example). But the resolution of the problem results into “googlearchy”, which assumes that hierarchy in a networked structure, is absolutely necessary due to the time constraints of the readers. The most interesting part in their study of “googlearchy” though is not why/how the problem emerges, but in what cases it does not. More specifically, their study overtly excludes the cases of universities, newspapers, and public companies because these groups represent “a high degree of mutual recognition among actors.”[2]

Is there such trust among Russian bloggers or the well-off gentleman (more specifically Alexander Lebedev who owns Novaya Gazeta) from the initial analogy pulls the strings behind the Russian blogosphere?


Special credit goes to Jim Franklin, Drew Ryans, and all the members of the group Russian at Dickinson College! Last but not least, Im thankful to Prof. Alysa DeBlasio for initiating the social-network platform solely dedicated to Russian topics, which served as a point of reference for my research!


[1] Eugene Gorny, “Russian LiveJournal: National specifics in the development of a virtual community” in Russian-Cyberspace.org, published on 13th May 2004
[2] Mathew Hindman, Kostas Tsioutsiouliklis, and Judy Johnson, “Googlearchy: How a Few Heavily-Linked Sites Dominate Politics on the Web”, March 31, 2003, http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~kt/mpsa03.pdf

So why have I decided to refer to the Central European University -my current educational affiliation- if I am really interested in blogging in general and Russian bloggers in particular? That’s simple. Every single blogger –to some extent- refers to his/her personal projects, affiliations, groups etc. in order to gain the trust of the readers (at least that’s what I think, of course among these cases you have the Super-Star bloggers who just indulge in self-advertising or others who carry out ANY TYPE of advertising!) and make the entire experience of blogging a personal affair. Since my first ACTIVE steps as a blogger start in CEU, there is a multitude of reasons why I felt compelled to include it!

I first heard about the University from my beloved Professor Elena Borisovna Duzs who was working in Buda-Pest as a graduate student during the late Soviet times. (just a side note! There is a great documentary entitled “My Perestroika” which is screened at Dickinson College as I type! Now, since eight months have literally galloped over academic stress, pressure, and deadlines, I can definitely compare CEU to a physical prototype of the KhanAcademy (if  of course you want to check those lectures...), because of the global reach it has accomplished over its 20 year-old existence. My colleagues (other fellow sleep-deprived students) and my professors are coming from Kyrgystan, Canada, Iran, Russia, Rumania, HUNGARY(I was extremely happy to meet Hungarian people!), Armenia, Ukraine, Estonia, Croatia, Serbia, the US, and so many more. They have taught me just as much I have learnt in the classroom through the random coffee-breaks outside the library. Actually, I have never imagined that such a small place can host such a range of conceptual languages! One can hear students discussing diametrically-opposed topics, in the range of “what did you do over the weekend” up to “Trotsky was a genius but he was constrained by his dogmatism!” (the Trotsky comment came from a lecture delivered by Joshua Rubinstein on February 23rd, 2012: http://www.ceu.hu/node/28188) One of the concomitant consequences of being in this environment was the spiraling of my interest in blogging as a form/medium, a process, and a message. Mainly because bloggers do exactly what the students are doing in that public space outside of library: they are sharing their thoughts.

I said “spiraling” because my first “encounter” with blogging was through P.J. O’ ROURKE; who referred to it in his interview on Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty in 2010 

 One quote in particular is worthwhile considering extensively:

“… I do see one pernicious trend, which is blogging. I don't care much for blogging because it is undigested thinking, because it comes straight from the heart, or the lizard brain, or the mouth without due consideration. Very little that gets blogged is of very much worth. Almost everything should be thought over. Don't we all know it from things that we've said to our spouses? That you should think twice before you say anything.”

For O’Rourke, writing is a slow process and one must think very carefully before blogging about his/her thoughts. And by comparing it to “what we usually say to our spouses” I guess he wants to make his remark stronger and underline its dire importance. I paused for a while when I first read it. First of all, does it mean that there is a universal way husbands talk to their wives, after all? But this is beyond the point. According to O’Rourke blogging is a “thing” people do without really thinking. Going back to my CEU colleagues and our discussions, we were pretty much conscious about what we were saying to each other. Moreover, bloggers like Andrew Sullivan, Sergei Morozov and Daniel Drezner (the latter two both write for the Foreign Policy Magazine) and their Russian “colleagues”, such as Alexander Navalny, Andrei Malgin, and Oleg Kozyrev think about the content of their blogs reasonably much. Sullivan elaborated quite extensively on the reasons why he blogs. 

Sullivan treats blogging as a new literary form, easily comparable to diary entries which are virtually available for anyone who has the time or/and the will to read them. For bloggers like Drazner, blogging is a new medium for “framing” media issues and a tool for double-checking the mainstream journalists’ conduct. The arguments are “out there” waiting for us; but what is so special about blogging in general and Russian blogging in particular? This is the question my Thesis supervisor started with, while he was sipping his coffee and I was starring at my notes. There were many things swirling in my head at the time, but I decided to be honest and respond with a big “I don’t know” to his question. Hopefully, after actively engaging in blogging and keeping an updated blog for two months I can describe this “blogging-frenzy” in more detail and discover its significance for the Russian context!