Art, Touched by War

Today, on October 23, 2022, the writer Serhiy Zhadan, delivering a speech at the Friedenspreis des Deutschen Buchhandels, worried about memory and language after the war. He evoked the Adorno question:

Poetry after Bucha and Izyum is certainly possible, moreover, necessary. However, the shadow of Bucha and Izyum, their presence will weigh too much in this post-war poetry, largely determining its fullness and tonality. This is a painful, but necessary awareness that from now on the context of poems written in your country will be common graves and bombed neighborhoods – this, for sure, does not add to optimism, but it adds to the understanding that the language needs our daily work, our constant touchedness, our involvement.¹

Ukrainian word “touch” (dotyk) forms the substantive “touchedness” which means implication, belonging, complicity. So, the tangent² somehow gives the involvement. And at the end Zhadan, again, returned to the memory and language in this clear image: “We are all bound by this flow that carries us, that does not let go, that connects”.
It immediately made me think of the painter Vlada Ralko – Ukrainian female Francis Bacon in times of bombs – who indicated, as it seems, the same sense of touchedness: “Art is a sensitive thing. Even if Morandi made still lifes during the war, they as yet kept an atmosphere of despair and suffocation. When I was currently creating an exhibition in Lviv, I thought that it was also about the war. For the exhibition, I chose works from different periods, which, despite the year of creation, somehow highlight what is happening to us today. Because artwork is brought up-to-date at different times in different ways.” Her interlocutor and collaborator, the famous artist Volodymyr Budnikov, 73 years and from another generation, retorted by making an observation: “I was recently struck by a report from Syria. It was about a destroyed city, but suddenly the journalist says that, despite everything, a gallery with contemporary art has opened there. Unbelievable! It is like a flower that bloomed in the midst of horror. An exhibition that could happen in Berlin or New York. And who knows, maybe in 5 years the war will end there and the center of world culture will be in Syria?”
There is another kind of touchedness. In Irpin, a lovely township next to Bucha, a contemporary art researcher and curator Kateryna Yakovlenko held an exhibition organized in her apartment which was destroyed by shelling. The title was “Everybody fears the baker, but I thank him”. Each day, the local baker used to ride under fire from his village to the store in order to bake bread for the people. They stood in long queues, annoyed by the wait. But Kateryna was feeling gratitude – for this everyday work, their shared stories, and the fight of the warriors. She asked the artists she knew to bring their works that would convey the traumatic experience of destruction. And the main refrain of the exhibition was “Thank you” (Dyakuyu). This word appears on several works in different rooms, as gratitude to all those who defend our society and life, Yakovlenko said. She dedicated one of these words of gratitude to the volunteers who cleared the rubble and gathered her personal things that remained safe³.
The image of the flowers in the midst of horror is revealing. In these times you start to value precarious things, close human circles, affinities, comrades and relatives, frank feelings. The observers noticed a trend towards small exhibitions, here and there. Several new galleries have been opened recently in the provincial cities. People attend lectures on art while simultaneously donating to the volunteer initiatives to support the army. Strategically, the activity of residencies seems most noticeable and important. For instance, the activities like at the “Assortment Room” in Ivano-Frankivsk with residencies for temporarily displaced artists (there was a kind of commune of seventeen ones) who remained in Ukraine and its consequent exhibition “Working Room”, together with video-performances at the local theater⁴. After the full-scale invasion, many initiatives were proposed for artists who went abroad, but a considerable part of them was looking for housing and personal safety inside the country. So, the project was supported by private patrons and a number of Ukrainian and foreign partners. Thanks to them, a fund was created for urgent expenses for the needs of artists in trouble. There is one more Emergency Residencies residency program created by “Khashchi” (Kyiv Biennial). The latter brings help to the cultural sphere as an Emergency Support Initiative. It reports on their work via the useful website⁵.
These and some other initiatives also try to create a place for reflections raising important issues and discussions⁶. Here, what strikes the most is a difference in the perception of the actual war among Ukrainian and Russian intellectuals, artists and cultural figures. The main difference that catches the eye is the extreme abstractness and sleekness of discursive schemes among Russians, and the sharpness, the often confusing narrative of vivid experience among Ukrainians. Russians, even the most progressive ones, fail to “notice” Ukrainians, flying above their heads, each time sliding to talk about themselves, about special Russian culture, fate and guilt, etc. placing themselves directly against the backdrop of the West. Is it a lack of an instant solidarity, or something else? I remember Boris Groys’ first public response to the war in Ukraine: let’s wait who wins, and then we’ll draw conclusions – “the Owl of Minerva arrives at dusk”⁷… On the contrary, the Ukrainians tend to start “from the earth”⁸, referring to the concrete places, practices and events. At the same time, it is extremely imperative to keep finding the theoretical grounds. I think that, we should reflect, firstly, on some crucial transformations in the nature of war itself and, then, on the contemporary forms of extreme violence. The art is, finally, interconnected with them in its direct sensitivity and resistance.

From hybrid to total war

The Russian invasion in Ukraine takes place, first of all, with the wildest, excessive transition to violence. Apart from the outbreak of archaic forms, we see a lot of extremely contemporary ones. There is a strange connubium of “classical” and “new” forms of total war, mixing the “smooth” (mainly economic) and the “striated” (territorial) war machines⁹. The war in Ukraine demonstrates the unprecedented use and interweaving of all types and shapes of military action known to mankind until today. So with full right we can talk about waging a “total war” of a new type. It seems that the first who used the term “total war” in the present context, however, speaking of economics and finance, was the French Minister of Economics Bruno Le Maire¹⁰, a sophisticated and renowned writer, by the way. Still, we are dealing not only with an economic war of capitals, markets, resources, and sanctions; the stakes are also high in the field of politics, geography, technology, culture, mass media, cybernetics, ecology, identity, psychology, civilization, humanism, human rights, history, memory, theology, worldview, subjectivity and, of course, art.
Yet the constitution of totality is always incomplete and delayed; its “impurity”, effective imperfection (especially when it comes to war) is the very essence of this totality. It does not know clear boundaries, many parts are disconnected and not synchronized, neither in space nor in time. Somebody is waging war “in the old school way”, another one is simultaneously inventing new war machines and behaving in a new military paradigm. This anxious blurring of the boundaries between war and its opposite, which makes it “total”, is constituted by a series of “negativities” and blind spots. For instance, many people in Russia refuse to acknowledge the very reality of war: look at some Freudian objections concerning Ukraine, gradually: “We are not at war” (recall Putin’s answer to withdraw the Russian troops in November 2014: “It is impossible to do because we are not there”); later on: “We are not at war with the Ukrainians” (but supposedly with the bad ones, banderites, nazis, mercenaries, foreign instructors etc.); and recently (after grave defeats): “We are not at war with Ukraine (it’s too weak and secondary), but with the Western world and NATO”...
So, Putin has started a full-scale invasion of Ukraine on the basis of several negations. And foremost, in the guise of “special military operation”. Even to spell the word “war” in Russia is strictly prohibited, it risks legal or administrative prosecutions, not to mention some public anti-war protests. People use abbreviations, euphemisms, emblems (like odious semi-swastika Z), or the ironic term “unwar” (which means exactly the opposite!). And many Russians believe that indeed there is nothing of the kind. There is a special operation and its very secret plan. For the disappointed ultra-militarists this lack of evidence gives a possibility to proclaim at least that “we have not even started seriously”.
Either way, warfare as a “special operation” perfectly characterizes the police character of everything what happens in Russian politics. Former but never-ending KGB officer, Putin is obsessed with rhetoric of so-called security and protection. Under the putinocratic system – as an organic symbiosis between business, politics and media – all the organs of power, staffers, ministers, judges, clerks and ideological engineers, are altogether involved in the police machine. However, in the guise of reestablishing “order”, we observe the dissemination of chaos and destruction. It seems that Russia is deliberately creating a humanitarian disaster in order to fix it later by itself.
The interconnection between modern police order and the spread of violence has long been noted by analysts: according to many of them¹¹, all over the world, traditional notions of war and peace are currently being replaced by ideas of intervention and security. But this does not imply an end to violence. On the contrary, this reconfiguration results in new forms of violence (terrorist attacks, armed groups jockeying for territory, the use of precision missiles, and the dangerous belief that conflict can be undertaken without casualties, etc.). We will return to this in the case of Russia. Basically, these arguments rely on historical-conceptual findings of Michel Foucault, who reverses Clausewitz’s classical formula “war is the continuation of politics by other means”; in our present neoliberal age, it is, on the contrary, politics that becomes a continuation of war by other means. The Modern State used to ground security on the means of army and justice (on war and the law) for the sake of defense of the citizens and territorial integrity; today, the new age enlarges the role of the police in the form of the securing of individuals and the control of circulation. Police politics has become the continuation of warfare: on one pole of securitization there is a surveillance of human bodies, on the other – regulation and organization of the population.
Foucault differentiates four dominant ideas of security, each of which is dominant in one or another period, and now, as we discover, they co-exist in a new symbiosis. Firstly, in ancient times security was understood as sine curae – no troubles, no cares; the Greeks perceived it on the spiritual level as a-taraxia (no worries or unrest) – nowadays it is largely managed by the mass media. Secondly, security is provided through a sovereign state in relation to other sovereign states within the framework of the so-called diplomatic-military dispositif, which gives us the classical understanding of politics as distinction between friend and enemy; thirdly, in the neoliberal era, contemporary (in)security is fundamentally bio-political: it focuses on issues of threat to life and the free passage of flows. And lastly, what particularly characterizes the politics of Russia, security is formulated in theological terms: it is based on the idea of empire – particularly, the medieval idea of Empire of the last days, a myth based on Christian millenarian doctrine – the famous motto “pax et securitas” taken from interpretation of the Apocalypse of Saint John and the Pauline Epistles, particularly the letter to the Thessalonians; it gives a synthesis between the ideas of Empire, peace, and security. In Russia this political myth was very influential under the doctrine of the katechon (from Greek τὸ κατέχον, “that which withholds” or “the one who withholds”), meaning that empire and tsar play the role of bulwarks that hold back the chaos of the Last Days and impede the coming of the Antichrist. But in this conception, there always is a paradox: the coming of the Antichrist is a condition for the redemption promised by the Messiah, so the katechon also impedes the redemption.
No wonder that the Russian imaginary stages the military defeat as something absolute and apocalyptic. If the great Russia loses to the small Ukraine, it will be no less than the Russia’s disappearance. In addition, this mythology is closely connected with sacred geography. As Putin announced during the 2014 annexation: “Crimea, ancient Korsun, Khersones, Sevastopol – all of them bear an enormous civilizational and sacral meaning for Russia, just as the Temple Mount of Jerusalem does for those who profess Islam and Judaism”. Yet, according to the strongest political belief, Kyiv city is the heart of Holy Rus’ (“the mother of Russian cities”), so, an offensive campaign has a legitimacy of Holy Crusade.
The basic role of the Antichrist in the Russian imagination has got one more consequence for the image of enemies: for Russia, they are identified with Satanism and perversion (constant blaming of Western liberal fallacy, democratic disorder, threat of LGBT, or unnatural transhumanist change, etc.). This picture is perfectly understandable. But, in fact, the status of the enemy is dual. There is a normal enemy, structurally inscribed in the very system of representations and which is necessary for the very existence of the status-quo, and there is another, extra-structural enemy, which threatens to destroy the coherence and existence of the system. From this perspective, what is the normal adversary for Russia? Surely, it is the West, and Russia willingly admits that it is waging the war against it. Whereas a new and unprecedented Ukraine obviously poses an absolute threat to Russia which denies the very possibility of its existence. Ukraine is too mortally scandalous as a model for other little countries.

From restricted to general economy of violence

But in a contemporary biopolitical regime, according to Foucault, the classical adversary image is also being transformed: the enemy shifts to the suspect. Now, it is not only soldiers or activists, but every Ukrainian individual who becomes an eternal suspect, carrying a potential threat by the very fact of his or her life.
Therefore, the Ukrainian revolution (the long one – out of the past centuries – which has intertwined with the new one that became, in the 2010s, the last powerful splash in the tide of “Arab Spring” rebellions¹²) carries an existential threat to Russia and a bad example for other post-Soviet satellite countries. It must be suppressed and punished. By the way, this is also an echo of the medieval justification of the Crusades: castigation of sinners. In considering all these different senses, the attack on Ukraine is a punitive operation in order to suppress a popular uprising. Etienne Balibar aptly characterized this type of action as a “preventive counterinsurgency” (which sooner or later leads to exterminism)¹³. Yet its specificity now is that the chasteners do not seek anymore to conquer the “minds and hearts” of the local population, to convert them to their side. Classically, “counterinsurgency is essentially politico-military”; yet the terror against people (in the guise of antiterrorist operation) “fundamentally has to do with policing and security”¹⁴. It suppresses any symbolic exchange with local civilians, acting according to the principle of a periodic reaping: “Kill enough of them and the threat goes away… the yield from a policy designed to terrorize and eradicate now takes precedence over any consideration of its political effects on the population. So what if the drones make the population turn away from us? Who cares?”¹⁵
This terror visibly has very clear biopolitical characteristics: mass expulsion, eviction, deportation of population on the occupied territories to Russia; deprivation of living conditions; destruction of houses and vital infrastructure; demolishing of monuments of history, culture, religion, and education (urbicide); dispossession, robbery and looting; disappearance of individuals and specifically civil activists; abduction and transportation of children; systematic rape of women, forced mass mobilization of men, filtration camps... This mass crimes lead to ecological damages, especially the pollution of water, poisoning of the soil with unburied corpses in a large quantity… These regions of occupation are becoming death zones. Biopolitics turns into necropolitics¹⁶. Death, instead of being fast, as in the warfare, is slowing down or being postponed for a certain time. The transformation of life into something unbearable, undesirable and repulsive is identical to the creation of conditions of slow death (“slow death refers to the physical wearing out of a population and the deterioration of people in that population that is very nearly a defining condition of their experience and historical existence”)¹⁷. Ukrainian journalist Stanislav Aseyev described this experience of being detained and tortured in his famous testimony¹⁸.
Unable to succeed on the battlefield, the Kremlin “bunker man” orders to direct missiles and drones to the peaceful cities thousands of miles away from him. This will not affect the course of military warfare, but it is of fundamental importance for the expansion of necropolitics. “Warfare, by distancing itself totally from the model of hand-to-hand combat, becomes something quite different, a “state of violence” of a different kind. It degenerates into slaughter or hunting. One no longer fights the enemy; one eliminates him, as one shoots rabbits”¹⁹. Why are they bombing power plants today, on the threshold of winter? It is imperative to spare the inhabitants of light, warmth, water, communications, sleep, faith… They should be freezing and starving.
That is the paradigm of generalized TORTURE. Why shelling for the sake of shelling? To force people to bury themselves into the living tombs, cellars, holes, undergrounds, subway tunnels. To turn torture into the mode of everyday being. From time to time the kamikaze drones arrive just to circle over the night cities, without bombing but sowing endless angst and fear, roaring the ominous death sound, that of the “mopeds”, as they were called by people, after which they return to where they came from. Thrifty economy.