T. Adorno / Notes to literature. Commitment

A. Baraka / Slave Ship

A. Baraka, James Hatch / Afro-american revolutionary theater

B. Brecht / Sports, Epic, et al

J. Butler / Performative acts and gender constitutions

H. Cruse / Revolutionally Nationalism anв the Afro-american

S. Dixon / Digital Performance

E. Diamond / The Performance and Cultural Politics

F. Fanon / Fact of Blackness

С. Fusco / The Other History of Intercultural Performance

J. Genet / A Note on theater

M. Muller / Hamletmachine

M. Pearson / Theatre/Archaeology

P. Phelan / Onthology of theatre

J. Roach / Kinship, intelligence, and memory as Improvisation

R. Schechner / Between Theater and Anthropology

S. Ford / Situationist International

Taylor / The DNA of Performance

Taylor / The art and the repertoire

V. Turner / From Ritual to Performance

E. White / Genet. A Biography

 

1. The Dialectic of Victories and Defeats

Alexei Penzin (AP): Hope, which we have decided to discuss with reference to the present political moment, would appear to be an important and attractive theme, but it simultaneously contains a number of traps. Hope has long been part of mass culture’s standard set of sentimental banalities. It forms the basis for psychotherapeutic normalization techniques that aim to adapt individuals to the fragmented society of what has been called “late capitalism,” a society replete with anxiety-inducing uncertainties, by persuading them of the need for “positive thinking” as a guarantee of personal and career success. Old and new populist politicians employ the rhetoric of promise and hope as a means of mobilizing the masses, exploiting their longing to belong to one or another (as a rule, national) identity.[1] But what is hope if not an abstract form that everyone can fill with their own content? Hope contains a transcendent, religious element primarily associated with the Judeo-Christian tradition. But it arises from our everyday secular experience: we hope for an important encounter, for an answer, for an inspiring collaboration, for the realization of our plans and expectations. We share our hopes with others, thus infecting them with our own enthusiasm. The question is how to make this general sense of hope something capable of transfiguring reality, rather than just a realm of passive, unconscious collective fantasies and utopias—or daydreams, as philosopher Ernst Bloch would have put it.

In contemporary societies, hope goes beyond religion: it has become a complex of affects associated with political struggle, although perhaps it continues to be informed by theology surreptitiously. In fact it is difficult to free oneself completely from the “theology” of hope, which always implicitly presumes an inscrutable, almighty Other (God, Master, savior, etc.) that must come to our rescue. But we can turn this attitude upside down by locating an activist impulse in orthodox theological thinking about hope, as philosopher Alain Badiou does in his book about Saint Paul. Badiou argues that Paul sees hope not in the promise of the Judgment Day, the promise of heaven or hell, but in the affirmation of persistence and faithfulness in the here and now, in the activist realization and universalization of truth despite everything, even the most desperate circumstances. Hope is not the hope for an “objective” victory, that is, for retribution or compensation in the future. On the contrary, it is “subjective” victory that produces hope, even if this victory is neither global nor final. This is definitely an important aspect that shapes the subjectivities of activists in modern anti-capitalist movements, for example.

The historical experience of emancipatory politics, however, is filled not only with victories but also with defeats. If we reject “victory” as a capitalist transaction, as compensation for expended effort, then can we rely on elusive subjective experience? If we reject all figures of the transcendent Other (including its theoretical equivalents such as the “ironclad logic of history” that should lead ineluctably to the realization of our emancipatory goals), can we rely only on ourselves? Doesn’t this lock us—artists, intellectuals, and cultural and political activists—within ourselves by excluding the emergence of something new and unexpected, of radical subjectivities whose genesis might simply beincomprehensible to us? Even if our experience is a collective one, don’t we always risk lapsing into purely sectarian enthusiasm? Should we limit our notion of the production of hope in politics to the heroic figure of “victory”? These are all quite tricky questions, particularly under current conditions, when many things that were once clear have become opaque. I think that in our conversation we could focus on two issues: attempting to define hope while taking all these contexts into account, and trying to understand what specific processes and events give us hope.

Dmitry Vilensky (DV): I once wrote a short essay entitled What Does It Mean to Lose? As you’ll recall, this was the title of an issue of our newspaper dealing with the experiences of perestroika.[2] For me, perestroika is a vivid manifestation of a process in which the subjective experience of victory via participation in a liberation struggle ends up being co-opted by the forces of reaction.[3] Hence what is in the foreground is the issue of one’s readiness for particular historical transformations, as well as the need to renew the struggle on the basis of a cogent analysis of what has happened. We should always be vigilant towards the dialectic of victories and defeats demonstrated by any liberatory process or revolution. Nevertheless, “leftist” political consciousness has historically tended to be heroically dramatic, and this has been its strength. It is based on the analysis of cruel and often bloody defeats: we learn from the experience of loss. Even the seemingly most vivid chapters in this history—the Paris Commune, the October Revolution of 1917, the collapse of the USSR in 1991, and a multitude of other particular episodes of the struggle—are simultaneously defeats and betrayals. But if humanity is still capable of contemplating it, the experience of these defeats is more important than capital’s meaningless victories. It is through these defeats that we can genuinely question ourselves and the society in which we live. Each defeat that we have comprehended contributes to the potential for a renewal of the struggle, a potential that works toward creating a new historical breakthrough. But right now we find ourselves at a point where the most sublimely tragic interpretation of history is called into question. To a great extent this predetermines the crisis of the leftist position in general after the collapse of party politics, which has rejected the possibility of a grand, universal narrative right at the moment when reactionary forces continue to cynically employ it by exploiting patriotism, the idea of the nation, militaristic zeal, etc.

AP: I agree: we need not only to take the figure of victory into account, but also to think hard about the phenomenon of defeat itself and the possibilities for reviving a mobilizing, tragic vision of history. But the crisis of the leftist position in the past decades doesn’t only have to do with a shift in ideological or narrative strategies. The ontology of late capitalism itself changed. Its historical foes (alternative social formations, which is what the countries of “actually existing socialism” were, for all their faults) quit the field, and capitalist relations have even more aggressively seeped into all the pores of society, subjugating it to their own functions. What matters is the question of the limits of this penetration by capital and the resources for resisting it and developing activist “spaces of hope,” to borrow social theorist David Harvey’s expression. Of course people do not want to be only machines for maximizing profit, as neoliberalism’s primitive anthropology would have it. Between this unwillingness and an active anti-capitalist stance, however, there are a huge number of obstacles—from liberal ideology, which fosters the illusion that private space, ethics, and “human values” are beyond capital’s power, to direct disciplinary and punitive interventions on behalf of our “alternative-less” order.

I’m more interested in a different question: in connection with all these transformations: how has the mechanism for producing mass militant subjectivity—a subjectivity that is optimistic, hopeful, triumphant, and simultaneously (as you correctly note) unafraid of defeat—been weakened or even partly destroyed? How is it changing now with the advent of new movements and experiences of resistance? As you know, I am partial to the approach elaborated by Michel Foucault in his final lectures at the Collège de France in which he analyzes the subjectivation techniques transmitted within various philosophical schools during antiquity. The subjectivation achieved via these practices involved self-possession, the establishment and formation of the self as a force set against externally imposed, institutionalized governance. Using this as our starting point, we can speak as well of contemporary subjectivity, which is bound up with the evolution of liberalism and biopolitics as doctrines and practices. This is a set of techniques for forming individuals and masses as objects of investigation and analysis, as well as the interiorization of control mechanisms such that power no longer has to resort to the mass application of harsh discipline and punitive measures. Departing from several uncompleted fragments in Foucault’s work, we can also speak of the most important alternative model from our viewpoint—the model of revolutionary subjectivity, which is discussed in several passages in the lecture course The Hermeneutics of the Subject.[4] The entire ensemble for the production of militant subjectivity (agitation, collective action and struggle, protest techniques, self-education, alternative modes of daily living) is a vital part of nineteenth- and twentieth-century history, something that we still have to study, comprehend, and make relevant again.[5] In fact we can speak of the process by which the old mechanism of political subjectivation broke down by employing the coordinates of our “post-communist” society. The discourse about the “religious” or “messianic” character of communism has long been a liberal banality and propagandistic cliché. But perhaps we can use this ambivalent play of analogies in our own discussion. If the October Revolution was an incarnation of the hopes of millions of impoverished people, then the “Judgment Day” of Stalinism that followed (beginning with the notorious show trials of the 1930s) did not lead to the establishment of heaven’s reign on earth. The thesis of a kind of political atheism springs out of this experience: “There is no communism!” In post-Soviet society, political “faith and hope” gave way to apathy and political disenchantment, and not just with communism but with capitalism as well, which after a short period of consumerist temptation and fascination with global mass culture suddenly revealed itself as the selfsame merciless “hell” that Soviet propaganda had so fondly depicted. Of course, this doesn’t affect the ruling elites, who enjoy their exorbitant profits.

DV: I beg to differ with you when it comes to the merciless “hell” of the current period. I detect a certain traditional rhetoric common to many leftists, a rhetoric that in my view is quite bogus. I think that if contemporary reality were really like this— if a critical mass of people had nothing to lose—then these people would organize themselves and demolish the existing order immediately. The problem is that capital has learned from centuries of class wars and national-liberation struggles, and so now it quite subtly regulates the disposition of the masses by always leaving them with the sense that any change might deprive them of what little they have now. We need to understand clearly that even workers in a wretched third-world sweatshop, who labor for miserly pay, are grateful to have those jobs because there is no other work available. We face a situation in which it is quite hard to radicalize people in the struggle for their rights. When we conscientiously analyze the situation, it always turns out that everyone has something to lose. But I agree with you that one of the main problems today is that people are losing the horizon for imagining a different life. The Bolsheviks, say, had a much easier time producing ideas capable of mobilizing the working class, who lived in inhumane conditions and were simultaneously open to a broad spectrum of messianic ideas about final justice, harmonious cooperative living, and egalitarian labor.

2. The Symptomatology of Hope

AP: I recall that during a bitter argument with certain disillusioned members of the post-Soviet art scene, you said something like, “Let’s wait and see: history will put everything in its place!” As an artist, do you perceive this connection to the history writ large of aesthetic experiments and political struggle we touched on earlier in the form of hope? Doesn’t it seem to you (I say this mostly in jest) that this postponed-until-the-future putting of everything in its place is somehow reminiscent of Judgment Day?

DV: I’ll explain what I meant. It’s probably the case that we—the last artists raised in the Soviet dissident school—are guilty of a certain old-fashioned attachment to history. You find this in Ilya Kabakov’s work, with his famous slogan “Not everyone will be admitted to the future,” and his quite serious attitude to the history of art and thought as the most brilliant manifestation of the heights of the human spirit, something that many of us absorbed in childhood.

The seemingly endless stagnation of late socialism, when the viscosity of time left no chance for any sort of meaningful realization, forced us to think in terms of other temporal and historical categories. That is in part why our practices were always correlated not with the sad, gloomy “today” but were aimed at the future. And it was this future-directedness that produced such energy of struggle and rage—“We Shall Overcome.” It is no wonder, by the way, that this song became the anthem of the 1989 Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia. Its lyrics, which were adapted from the refrain of a gospel song, are essentially a grammar for a subject-formation based on the cultivation of hope:

I do believe / deep in my heart / We shall be free / We are not afraid / We are not alone / The whole wide world around / We’ll walk hand in hand / We shall overcome…Perhaps this is why, in the early 1990s, when Francis Fukuyama’s notorious hypothesis about the “end of history” began to be discussed widely, we were so stunned by it. It seemingly deprived us not simply of reference points, but of the very hope that meanings and truths would one day take their rightful place. For me, hope is primarily the feeling that many things are possible, that many things are under our control. Despite everything, we create the future today. Genuine hope arises from the clear sense that not everything is determined and there is always a certain supply of freedom, of insubordination, that there are no such things as purely external circumstances. “Externality” does not come ready-made and immutable: it is the space of struggle, confrontation, and movement. Hence it is always the case that “all is not lost.”

AP: This is quite important: to think of the situation not as static but emergent—that is, as something that is not closed, as something to be pried open. Many twentieth-century thinkers based their work on these premises. For example, in the 1970s Foucault conceived of the state of society as a shifting balance between the forces of power and resistance. Nothing is frozen; even the “stability” of the most reactionary order is just an ideological cover for millions of unseen clashes and conflicts. If we regard the term seriously, then hope is the subjective optics of a gaze shaped by this moment of emergence and dynamism in the present, not by the fantasies and pipe dreams of a desperate individual in search of consolation. This is a gaze founded on a view of society as a configuration of dynamic forces, not as a dead, petrified, and hopeless order that seems insurmountable. At any moment there exists a certain balance of power and the struggle against it, of constituent forces. The problem is that nowadays this struggle does not emerge onto the level of fundamental, “strong” schisms, contradictions, and subjects capable of radically changing society. Hence the importance of the capacity to distinguish hopeful symptoms: this makes it possible to plug into lines of struggle, to feel them out, and thus to work to strengthen them. If we look at society from the position of hope—that is, as a dynamic of forces, as becoming—then we are no longer hobbled by the melancholic, hopeless image of defeat.

DV: But I insist that defeat is not melancholy or hopelessness! It is the desire to gather strength, learn lessons, and “give as good as one got.” This is what produces the formative effect.

AP: Here I should clarify: I was talking about a banal image, the representation of defeat. You’re suggesting that we rethink it as an active state, and I agree. Capitalist management aims to secure itself against threats by neutralizing previous techniques and subjects of resistance. So you are right that each time the desire arises to fight back, and to concentrate one’s forces and act in a new way in order to accomplish this, one can find productive potential.

I would say that as a political optics, a point of view, hope is a symptomatology. That is, it is the subjective ability to see and distinguish signs, social symptoms that point to maturing lines of struggle. We can single out several types of such symptoms. For example, there are symptomatic events, which might include large-scale events such as revolutions. Immanuel Kant’s discussion of the French Revolution is well known: he regarded it as a “prognostic sign,” referring to the history of progress and emancipation, which inspired enthusiasm and hope, moreover in subjects who were more likely to be in the position of observers (in other countries not affected by the revolutionary events). This same logic can be applied to the October Revolution, which at first provoked a rising of hopes for liberation throughout the world.

In our reactionary times, the logic of “progress” is far from obvious, although the revolutionary events of the past occupy an important place in our memory and thought. Therefore we should speak of symptoms smaller in scale. These are the symptomatic people who inspire hope, and if we speak of our own milieu, then we know many such people personally. Each particular activist “unit” is vital in our extremely reactionary post-Soviet conjuncture. It is not a question of the banal “role of the individual in history.” These people or collectives, however small, bring something more than their own private identities. These are “disinterested” subjectivities that emanate prognostic signs.[6] They refer us to the history writ large of the anti-capitalist struggle—its past, present, and future.

DV: Doesn’t it seem to you that this continuity amongst leftist movements has been disrupted by the radical self-criticism occasioned by the experiences of “totalitarianism” in the twentieth century? This self-criticism leads to a rejection of hegemonic politics, which is suspected of being always on the verge of switching to a politics of domination and violence. Can we say, for example, that in the context of post-Soviet forms of struggle this continuity with history is being thought in a new way and without nostalgia?

AP: To answer this complicated question about continuity with history under present conditions, I would like to recall our recent discussions about the practice of “communal life seminars” (obshchezhitiia) as an example of this renewed continuity. These are the temporary experimental communities that members of the collective Chto Delat?/What is to be done? have recently been trying to create in order to combine the experiences of activism, theory, and political art (which, strictly speaking, is the task our group posed itself from the very beginning).[7] On the one hand, the communal seminars attempt to alleviate the abstractness of critical theory by rejecting formal academic representation. On the other hand, they also attempt to inspire activists to eschew the anti-intellectualism common to many of them and to try and comprehend forms of political coordination in a new way. The figure of the artist is also important here: I would say that it is connected with what has been called the “art of political life,” with sensitivity to the possibilities of living together.

We’ve only begun this experiment, of course, but it provokes some fairly interesting reflections. All three of these modes—activist, theoretical, and artistic—seem essential, whereas in the leftist tradition only the first two (theory and activist practice) have usually been taken into account. Using Jacques Lacan’s terminology, we can relate activism to the register of the Real, and theory to the Symbolic register, while the artistic mode can be imagined as the register of the Imaginary. Each of the three modes links up differently with history, singling out different moments in it: activism has to do with the present; art (the Imaginary), with anticipation of the future; and theory, with interpreting the past experience of struggle. This configuration also enables us to rethink hegemony as a politics in which knowledge, action, and imagination act in concert, and not simply as intellectual struggle, the war of position, and the forging of alliances.

3. Dritte Sache

DV: I would like to take off from your reflection that our reference points are people or collectives who surpass their own private identities. During Soviet times practically all individuals lived with consciousness that their life was not of great value compared to a larger narrative. This “grand narrative” could be communism, art, your professional or moral development, or defense of the Motherland from fascism. All these and other ideas and notions were unambiguously imagined as common values whose significance surpassed the significance of a finite life inevitably doomed to death. Moreover, it goes without saying that then all this was articulated from a thoroughly atheistic stance. It is worth recalling Brecht’s quite striking and simple description, in his book Me-Ti, of the existence of two people who love each other. This existence only acquires meaning and integrity when a third thing—dritte Sache—emerges between the two people. This third thing can only be some kind of cooperative action such as participation in a revolutionary struggle, the striving towards truth via the practices of knowledge and art, or something else that grows out of this relationship but renders it meaningful and overcomes its limitations. It is curious that Brecht did not include the raising of children in this list. Today, people are prepared to struggle for their hope that their children will be better off than they are. For this they are willing to sacrifice their own prosperity and career prospects so that their children have a chance to surpass their parents and have a better life. This cannot be reduced to competitiveness or the struggle for survival connected to “bare life.” Here we can find a minimal guarantee of human dignity and even resistance. I think that this unconditional love and care is an important common cause, there is also a fundamental human quality in this projection of people within their own children, and we will hardly be able to understand anything about the contemporary world without taking this quality into account. Strictly speaking, all our speculations about education begin here, with the conditions in which our children are raised, with what we invest in that undertaking.

AP: I think that the dritte Sache is quite an important anthropological and political principle. It is definitely materialist: Brecht speaks not of abstract “ideas” that unite people, but of practices, causes, and things. This is especially important now, in an age that is reactionary in many ways, because it enables us to see—as in your example about children—that in the behavior of people seemingly crushed by the unshakeable hegemony of contemporary capitalism we can detect the desire for a different, more dignified life.

DV: Within what is conventionally called “western civilization” there is, of course, the recognition of serious values outside the limited framework of individual existence. Once again, Badiou provides us with a supreme example of the critique of this kind of consciousness: “Love teaches in fact that the individual as such is something vacuous and insignificant.”[8] But such opinions are rare exceptions. In the contemporary world, ideas like these have begun to be reassessed as a kind of archaic “rudiment,” as a factor that suppresses the radiant ideas of personal freedom and pleasure.

And here we arrive at a definite political dead end. Yes, of course one can easily argue that “supreme values” are what should be overcome. In the form of the hegemonic western construction of subjectivity, the “ironclad logic of history” has already succeeded in deconstructing these values. But then what remains? If we disregard the details, what remains is exactly that very same end of history, which presumes that our society has found its supreme, final meaning in the model of hedonistic bourgeois self-consciousness. If you think about it, this conception of the subject as something consumed by its own personal life and pleasure is, strictly speaking, the portrait of the bourgeois egoistical subject that all radical thinkers from Marx to our own time have criticized so furiously. From my point of view, it is exactly this conception that is hopeless. And today, to paraphrase Chekhov, we should engage not in squeezing out the slave within us drop by drop, but rather in destroying this very same petit-bourgeois subject within ourselves. This isn’t a simple process insofar as we have still not entirely overcome the slave within ourselves. To do this, we need to undertake a radical revaluation of the entire concept of desire, to see that real desires arise where there is a place for “postponing” or delaying their fulfillment. I would say that capitalism is the destruction of all forms of sublimation. When it is consistently developed, it leads to a condition in which every desire has to be realized instantly, posthaste. Hence any form of non-realization generates near-childish hysteria. In its ideal form, capitalism is this monster of instant gratification. In this sense, the idea of hope might be interpreted as the constant demand for what cannot be realized right now. This means we should always demand more than we have. And even if we succeed at something, we should “think bigger” all the same.

AP: I welcome your ambitious theoretical passion! But here we’re getting involved in the quite extensive and complicated philosophical debate about desire that arose in twentieth-century thought. I’m not certain that we can dot all the i’s within the confines of this dialogue. . . But I like your intuition that desire has to be re-examined from the perspective of a new, non-repressive asceticism. On the one hand, desire is associated with prohibition and lack, which are conditions of desire. The paradox is that asceticism, usually understood as a system of prohibitions and rules, is ordinarily linked to repressive bourgeois culture. Hence one of the demands of 1968 was liberation from those constraints. As Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello proved in their well-known book The New Spirit of Capitalism, this critique of prohibitions, of critical-mindedness itself, was successfully integrated into contemporary hedonistic, innovative capitalism. Appeals to liberate desire were depoliticized and successfully realized instead on the economic level, having become part of the post-Fordist productive mechanism itself.

DV: This is an important observation: if we see everywhere the triumph of false desires which have no need for any prohibition, then probably our only hope is non-repressive asceticism! I say this not without a certain amount of bitter irony, as you understand.

AP: Today, it really is vital to rethink asceticism outside the hedonistic logic of the “liberation of desire” from prohibitions and as a means of politically transforming subjectivity.[9] For the activist subjectivity, hope is a way of controlling forces and energies. They are directed not toward the distant, abstract future, but toward the present, which is seen as implicated in history and the dynamic composition of society as a whole.

If we speak on a “fundamental” level, then the phenomenon of hope has to do with the human subject’s anthropological structure itself, something about which many twentieth-century philosophers had a lot to say. Unlike animals, humans are not “programmed” in terms of strict rules and codes that govern their reactions to external, environmental stimuli. Humans are as it were dislodged from the structure of the world: they have no “place” of their own, a place that would belong to them according to the “natural” biological order. Hence they are not attached to their own “niche”—that is, they have no determinate, fixed habitat. Their habitat is the entire world, and their relationship to it is not set by precise programs; it is always bound up with uncertainty, with the play of possibilities. This reminds me of the description of the proletarian in Marx and the subsequent tradition, which, of course, is produced in a political rather than ontological context. The proletarian is deprived of everything, but the whole world lies open to him or her. That is, the human subject is a kind of “proletarian” of the world. It is clear that this is a risky hypothesis. Of course, on another level, the sociological, a specific individual or class of people might occupy a dominant, exploitative position. People have something to lose. The individual might have property, and it might exterminate those same animals, which have their own natural, territorial belonging, their own “property.” Even more, the individual is capable of having a more or less fixed “habitat” (established networks, circles of friends). But, at the possible risk of coining a paradox, I hold that it is precisely the ontological proletarianization of humans that enables us to speak with hope of history writ large as the movement towards a more just order. And hope (whose instantiations are the possibilities of one sort or another that people see in a situation) is the subjective form of this human condition. (Its negative form is fear or anxiety.)

Moreover, the anthropological structure I’ve outlined comes to the forefront precisely in the contemporary age. Theorist Paolo Virno thus argues it is this “human nature” itself that is the “raw material” for contemporary capitalism. Anthropological “invariants”—first and foremost, the human subject’s potentiality and openness to the world—become the sociological traits of the post-Fordist workforce, expressed as permanent precarity, flexibility, and the demand for the capacity to function in unpredictable situations. Previous means for alleviating the agonizing indeterminacy and instability of human behavior (via the ritual mechanisms and institutions of traditional society) are on the wane. Contemporary capitalism does not “alienate” human nature, but reveals it at the very heart of contemporary production, at the same time exposing it to the apparatus of exploitation and control.

4. A Paradoxical Hope 

DV: In touching upon precarity, you’ve singled out a supremely vital trait of human beings—their “ontological proletarianization.” This is because precarization means precisely a form of borderline, unstable existence where nothing is guaranteed to the individual—it turns out that all of us have been ejected from settled social, class, gender, and national frameworks. Yet we ought to regard this condition primarily as a challenge, not as a threat against which we should all close ranks with the demand to bring everything back (that is, the guarantees of the social welfare state, which are based on a dubious compromise between the classes). Even if we confine ourselves to the pragmatic logic of the development of productive forces, it seems more important to me to demand decent pay for temporary contracts instead of trying to revive long-term or lifetime contracts for the “aristocracy” of immaterial labor.

That is to say that I’m trying to understand why flexibility and the demand for the capacity to function in unpredictable situations provokes such a panic not only amongst “simple people,” but also amongst creative workers. As I see things, they should realize that precarity is a chance, that it is precisely the pre-condition of hope. We shouldn’t demand “stability,” but rather more openness to the new, the radicalization of the struggle to reappropriate the commons produced by the “general intellect.” We remember perfectly well that hope for salvation appears where there is danger.

AP: I agree that contemporary capitalism spotlights our ontological proletarianization while also enabling critics of capitalism to speak of the hope of overcoming it. Of course this overcoming doesn’t mean a return to some absolutely reliable, guaranteed order of nature itself. It is a matter of liberating the colossal innovative and creative energy that has its origins in the “eccentricity” of human beings, its dislodgement from the natural order. We need to lead it out from its subjugation to the accumulation and expansion of capital and direct it towards the needs of everyone, not just those of the ruling class. That is, we really do have to stop being afraid of uncertainty, which after all is the source of the capacities that make us human! However, this fear can disappear once and for all only in a non-capitalist society. Sociologically speaking, in our time the all-embracing “creative industries” constantly exploit the hopes associated with unpredictability, invention, innovation, and risk. Leftist politics really must also activate these hopes, not to invest them in personal careers, but in that dritte Sache of which you spoke.

DV: I’m appealing here, rather, to the positive, constituent element that in my view exists in precarization. I have in mind those pre-conditions for the commons in the form in which they are now being produced. But I’m afraid that we risk lapsing into an apology for the contemporary model of capitalism by linking it directly to hopes for renewal. Like many people, I’ve always been bothered by Marx’s argument about the inevitability of industrial capitalist development on the road to the “bright future,” which is bound up with the emergence of the industrial working class. Of course Marx condemns the incredibly cruel ways in which peasants and artisans were herded into the factories (so-called primitive accumulation). But from his theory it also follows that this was an inevitable stage of development. The repressive collectivization of the peasantry in the USSR (a class that in many ways secured victory for the revolution in Russia) also fit into this logic of inevitability. And of course in Marx (as in Lenin) there was not even a hint of sentimentality towards the old way of life.

Can we project a similar position onto the current period? As I’ve already said, we have to take a paradoxical stance by, on the one hand, demanding that all working people be protected, while at the same time insisting on the historical necessity of being open to emerging innovations, instabilities, and new risks. It is right here that the main front of the struggle is located. It seems to me that a topic raised by Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt in their latest bookCommonwealth, when they speak of the forces of “altermodernity,” wholly meshes with the logic of this paradox. It is a matter of striving to give up hope that a progressivist development of the means of production will inevitably lead to new forms of class conflict. I think that we need to reject such thinking, and the concept of altermodernity precisely shows the possibilities of thinking along these lines.

AP: That’s quite an ambivalent claim… and I am not sure how to use Negri and Hardt’s terminological experiments with “altermodernity” appropriately From their text on these matters one can hardly extract more than appeals to quote, “new values, new knowledges, and new practices” (understood as different both from capitalist modernity and conservative resistance to it), or a new “dispositif for the production of subjectivity,” a notion that we already talked about in our context.[10] Yes, we all would agree on that! But how can we make a “real movement” from these values and dispositifs, which “abolishes the present state of things”? Could we imagine these hopes and values, affirmed not in a purely discursive context or in some presupposed ironclad historical “logic,” but in subjectively articulated struggles and resistances—in short, in a multitude of conflictual relations of forces of labor and capital?

Thinking through these complex questions, I recently revisited an old text by Ernest Mandel called Anticipation and Hope as Categories of Historical Materialism, devoted to the memory of Ernst Bloch.[11] Written at the end of 1970s by an orthodox Marxist theoretician, it might appear archaic or trapped in the same developmetalist logic we discussed above. But Mandel clearly argues against any historical-fatalist interpretations of Marx writing, “Capitalism does not lead to the inevitable victory of socialism, only to the dilemma of a socialist victory or a regression to barbarism.” Indeed, Mandel discusses hope as not something teleological but as “survival instinct,” as an “unconscious correlate of the compulsion to produce and reproduce material life to which humans are subjected.” I think this materialist positioning of hope in the context of not sublime “values” but the basic productive needs of “survival” understood broadly in the present historical conjuncture is very close to the focus of our talk now. Again, this understanding does not presuppose, as it might seem, a reactive, weak position of precarious “victims”—and here I fully agree with you—but makes hope an active, vibrant part of our struggles, open to the new and unprecedented. We are all survivors in contemporary neoliberal “disaster capitalism” and hope is to be our “basic instinct” in resistance to contemporary barbarism.

 

 

 

The idea for this issue arose when we begin working on our film A Border Musical, whose screenplay is also printed here. This film is based on a study of the situation on both sides of the Russian-Norwegian border: we were interested in how a range of differences, which inevitably serve as sources of conflict in border areas, shape the subjectivity of people in daily contact with each other.

Borderlands always aggravate differences – political and social, behavioral, linguistic and economic, and so on. The border’s physicality, particularly in the form of rigid paramilitary zones impeding the free circulation of people, causes anyone who becomes caught up in their force fields to re-examine the world and themselves. On the map of the world, such areas have always been not only the focus of geopolitical tensions, but also special habitats encouraging the development of new forms of language, behavior and culture. The border is a place for experiment, a zone of mobility and change.

The history of state borders has always been a history of violence: a history of wars, militarization, securitization, bureaucratic control, biopolitical regulation, forced displacement, flight and migration. Historically, state borders are shaped by the balance of violence. The winners dictate them to the losers, without taking into account either real geography or ethnicity. Borders separate “us” from “them,” and these divisions are set down in documents determining state loyalties and citizenship. Paradoxically, borders, which are always artificial forms, are an essential factor of existence, shaping not only the lives of people, but also impacting the natural environment and the animal world.

Familiar to anyone who has ever participated in European protests, the slogan “No borders, no nations. . .” (which can be continued in various ways as tactics demand) is a radical utopian response to the current delineation of the modern world. It says that one and the same common extraterritorial border runs everywhere – the boundary separating the world of prosperity from the world of poverty. This border runs both along the real boundaries of the so-called First World (e.g., Fortress Europe) as well as within it, generating ever-new ghettos and zones of exclusion. The fall of the Berlin Wall was a celebration of the hope that the Cold War’s division of the world was over, and the whole planet would be a single home for everyone, with people united by a common, global citizenship. It was a foretaste of the performative unity of the world described by Alain Badiou in his text “The Communist Hypothesis,” which we have excerpted in this issue.

More than two decades have passed since then, and we see this beautiful utopia has turned into its opposite: borders and walls have multiplied, inequality has grown, and the freedom of globalization has given way to the total freedom of global financial speculation and the establishment of new forms of market colonization and imperialism. It is not worth indulging in pessimism, however; the true dialectician always strives at history’s most depressing moments to identify those potentials that emerge despite everything (or are concealed on the flip side of all reactionary processes) and work on implementing the prerequisites for alter-globalism. It was this movement for as-yet-untested grassroots forms of globalization that, despite its current downturn, was able to outline a range of ideas and initiate a series of political processes that are still alive and evolving.

Constantly keeping in mind the sociopolitical problems of the modern border, in this issue we have decided to focus primarily on an analysis of linguistic differences and show that, in the fight for a new unified world, it is also important to take into account the structural features of human consciousness, its intrinsic limitations. And here our understanding of the dialectics of subjectivity is formed not only in the search for unity, but also by the insurmountable limitations imposed by one’s body, one’s language and one’s finitude.

It is in this context that crossing the border is problematized not as a universal right to equality and a decent life, but as the fundamental human desire for another, unknown experience, the desire for an encounter which conceals the potential for love and the possibility of death, the possibility of arriving at a place where everything would be different. The experience of the border as an experience of sublime knowledge of the world is how Johan Schimanski describes this state of being in his text for this issue.

The desire for a harmonious existence with oneself, with others and with the world, in which all barriers and borders would be removed, is a vital trait of human beings as a species. Existing boundaries constantly remind us of how far we are from that lofty ideal. At the same time, it is their everyday oppressive presence within and around us that stimulates our search and our thirst for transformation. As the song has it, “If you press with your shoulder, / And you and I push together, / The walls will crumble, crumble, crumble, / And we will breathe freely.”

Dmitry Vilensky

Radio broadcast and the song “I Love My Cold Land” by Jesper Alvaer

 

The Characters

Characters from the Russian side of the border:

• Tanya, wife of Ola Nordmann. Former director of the children’s choir in the Russian town of Nikel, she plays the accordion. She still has a poor grasp of Norwegian.
• A Chorus of Miners. Manifestations of Tanya’s conscience, her “inner miners,” the men double as workers at the local mine and processing plant.

Characters from the Norwegian side of the border:

• Ola Nordmann (“John Q. Public”), Tanya’s husband. Owner of a trucking company, Ola himself enjoys getting behind the wheel of a big truck from time to time.
• A Friend. Ola Nordmann’s schoolmate, he currently works in the civil service.
• Child Welfare Inspector
• First Neighbor Lady
• Second Neighbor Lady
• Third Neighbor Lady

 

Scene 1

Starting on the Norwegian side of the border, the camera slowly pans across the scenery. It gently tracks over the quaint streets of Kirkenes and enters a cozy Norwegian house. First, we see a well-equipped workshop, equipment for underwater hunting hung on its walls, then a living room with a large window and, finally, a tiny kitchen. When the camera pans across the living room, we see two border posts, Norwegian and Russian. This is their first and last appearance in the film. After passing through the house, the camera enters the Russian side of the border and slowly tracks through the town of Nikel, whose landscape features black clouds of smoke puffing from the plant and trees disfigured by acid rain. The camera settles on the Chorus of Miners, who sing.

Miners

Our work is not for the weak.

Our work

Is for strong men.

Nickel forges our character,

The character of miners,

Of northern men.

Tell me, miner,

What do you have?

What wouldn’t you betray

Or abandon?

I have everything

A man needs.

The shoulder of a friend

Who won’t let me down.

The heart of a mother

Who waits.

And the hands of a loving woman

Who has graced me with her care

Every day, in grief and in joy.

Whence this pride

Of yours, miner,

In being a real man?

Nickel will not let

Our souls go to ruin.

Rust will not penetrate them

Nor corrosion consume them.

And all because

Nickel forges our character,

A firm character,

A northern character.

Tell me, Miner,

In what do you believe?

What gives you strength?

I believe my son will grow up

And take my place,

To maintain our character,

Our firm character,

Our northern character.

Tanya appears on camera, carrying an accordion.

Tanya

Your songs are a pack of lies, enough!

Miners

Uh, hello, Tanya.

Tanya

What a joke—

The masculine character!

Just look at yourselves, miners!

Your work is dangerous and tough,

But you’re paid pennies.

Why?

Miners

The laws of survival are well known.

Shut up and work: it could be worse.

Everything’s a lie,

But it isn’t forever.

We are real men,

And we know what is fair and just.

The day will come when we rise up and. . .

Tanya

It’ll never happen!

You’re lazy slugs!

And drunks to boot!

Miners (confused)

We drink on occasion

Because our work is hard. . .

Tanya

You defend the family!

Really?

You hide behind your women’s backs!

Miners

The things you say, Tanya!

Tanya

The nickel you dig up, miners,

Has long ago corroded your souls!

You’re only specters of mighty labor.

I’ve had enough!

I’ve had it!

I’m leaving town.

Miners

Where are you going?

Tanya

To Norway,

The country where everyone is happy.

Miners

Who’s expecting you there?

Tanya (takes accordion from case and gets ready to play)

My new husband is waiting for me.

A Norwegian!

Now there’s a real man for you.

(sings)

He doesn’t drink

Or beat his kids.

He respects women

And goes to work in his car

As if he were going on holiday.

Miners

What about your son?

Tanya

I’m taking him with me.

Miners

You can leave of course,

But you can never escape yourself.

You will always be

A girl from Nikel.

Tanya

Don’t kid yourselves.

Miners

We’re the miners of your heart, Tanya.

Tanya (not listening to them, playing the accordion)

I’ll be singing different songs

In that marvelous land

Where everyone is happy.

Miners

We are the miners of your heart.

We dig the ore of your soul

And bring to the surface

From out of your depths

Your songs, Tanya.

Tanya

Goodbye!

I’ve had it.

I’m leaving

For that beautiful country

Where everyone is happy.

Tanya leaves, taking her accordion with her.

Scene 2

A typical living room in Kirkenes. The photos and posters on the walls reveal the owner’s commitment to the environmental movement. A Tom Waits concert tour poster is also visible. Ola Nordmann is alone. In a close-up, we see him tuning a radio. He finds a local news program. The announcer first reads world news—reports from Palestine and Russia—before segueing to local news—cute, insignificant events.

The news broadcast ends with a report about a concert the evening before by the local church choir. It featured the premiere of a song by a local amateur composer, “I Love My Cold Land.”

Radio

Despite your long winter’s night,

Home’s warmth and embrace suffice,

And the aurora’s rays;

You dance over us

Unity grows here in your arms,

In work and leisure, night’s sleep,

Sea, mountains and barren soil;

With nature, we are one

Last stop, where ocean reigns

In cold silence; alone now,

I downshift, and you show me,

Stormy wind and plain warm us

We bear a common dream.

Diversity is when everyone has his or her place,

Even far from where townsfolk live,

In wilderness and by the sea

From underground you pour out

Your treasures that were hidden,

Gas and oil, iron ore, gold, yes,

From prehistoric times you give more.

Last stop, where ocean reigns

In white silence; alone now,

In new snow, the ruts show me,

North-northeast you show the way

Everyone gets an equal chance here,

Freedom responsible and boundless,

Daily chores and obligations,

The weekend free, and one’s own time

Let’s go. There is some (a little) difference:

Everyone cares for one another, it’s common sense

Yes, you give a little and get some of mine,

We are a big family

Last stop, where ocean reigns

In comfy silence; alone now,

I look in the rearview mirror, and you show me

Here is where I’ll be nor will I forsake you

We will tell our young

What they saw, your old ones now,

In the generations before us

Their hard work we now reap

Last stop, where ocean reigns,

Proud Finnmark, you rise up

My headlight shows me

My cold home, I love you!

All this time, Ola Nordmann moves about the room. He goes in and out of his workshop to fetch something, then hangs a framed portrait of Tanya (she is depicted with the children’s choir and holding an accordion). As the music plays, Ola puffs up the pillows and straightens the curtains. He is waiting for Tanya.

It is evident he likes the song. There is a knock on the door and the sound of the radio cuts out.

Scene 3

Ola Nordmann meets Tanya at the threshold of the living room. They hug. Tanya speaks broken Norwegian.

Ola Nordmann

It’s you! Finally!

Tanya

I’m so happy!

Ola Nordmann

Me, too!

They kiss.

Ola Nordmann

Welcome to your new home. (He spreads his arms, proudly showing off the house.) I built it with my own hands, but without you it was empty. But now a happy family will finally live in it.

Tanya (uttering a phrase she has evidently memorized)

I’ll be the best wife to you, and my son, the best of sons.

Ola Nordmann

Our son, Tanya. Our son. He’ll become a real Norwegian. I’ll teach him to drive a truck. What happiness it is, Tanya, to travel the snow-covered roads, delivering goods to people and being at one with nature.

Tanya looks at him admiringly.

Tanya

How well I understand you.

Ola Nordmann

And I you!

Tanya (having trouble pronouncing the word “understanding”)

Mutual understanding is the most important thing, right?

Ola Nordmann

Of course.

They look at each other, holding hands, and kiss.

Tanya (taking her instrument out of its case)

Here. This is my accordion.

Ola Nordmann

I wanted to ask you. Are you sorry you quit your job?

Tanya

My children’s choir? No, because my music is always with me. (She points to her accordion and laughs.)

Ola Nordmann

You can form a new choir here. We’ll sing Russian songs.

Tanya (laughing happily)

How nice! Russian songs are good, yes?

Ola Nordmann

Tanya, play our favorite song. (He hands her the accordion.)

Tanya plays her own arrangement of Tom Waits’s “Russian Dance” as Ola Nordmann dances passionately. As Tanya plays, she turns toward the window (and the camera) and sees the Miners standing outside. Continuing to play, she addresses them. (Ola Nordmann cannot see them, of course, and continues to dance.)

Tanya

Is that you, miners? You see how happy I am without you?

The Miners say nothing, but they mock Ola Nordmann’s fervent dancing. Tanya smiles and continues to play. When the song’s last chord sounds, Ola Nordmann freezes.

Scene 4

The camera pans across the lovely townscape of Kirkenes: illuminated by different lights, the scenery imparts a joyous, festive feeling. The camera zooms in on the War Mother’s Monument, where two women, the First Neighbor Lady (who is radically minded) and the Second Neighbor Lady (who is more thoughtful), are chatting.

First Neighbor Lady (continuing the conversation)

. . .yes, that’s right. Not parents, but pedagogues. We have to get over our dependence on biology.

Second Neighbor Lady (haltingly)

I agree, of course. . .

First Neighbor Lady

All children in Norway are the property of the state.

Second Neighbor Lady

Even the children of tourists? Or of foreigners who’ve come here to work temporarily? There was recently an incident—

First Neighbor Lady (interrupting her)

Definitely! Every child’s welfare is more important than the biological rights of parents.

Second Neighbor Lady

But how do we strike a balance between not interfering in people’s private lives and society’s responsibility for posterity?

First Neighbor Lady

Professionals should decide. Experts. They have special training and can best see what’s best for the child.

Second Neighbor Lady

But parents aren’t professionals.

First Neighbor Lady

And that is why they don’t always understand what’s best for the child. Our job is to find families where the children are having problems, remove them and place them with families who have a correct understanding of the child’s welfare.

Second Neighbor Lady (ironically)

Then maybe we should immediately send the kids to children’s homes?

First Neighbor Lady

Yes, to children’s homes! I’m confident that children will be raised collectively in the wonderful future society we build.

Second Neighbor Lady

Well, you know, not all parents share your communist ideas.

First Neighbor Lady

What’s communist about them? How else can we reconcile freedom, individualism and a sense of community?

Second Neighbor Lady

It’s so simple, something our forebears have done for generations. Be like everyone else and you’ll become an individual.

First Neighbor Lady

While we’re still only building the future, we can’t waste time: we also have to create the individuals who will live in it. We must focus on children.

Second Neighbor Lady

Maybe we need to begin by educating parents?

First Neighbor Lady

We don’t have time to educate parents. We cannot risk children’s lives. Imagine how a child who hasn’t gotten a proper upbringing will feel in our future society. It will feel like an outcast!

Second Neighbor Lady

How awful!

First Neighbor Lady

We can’t let that happen!

The Third Neighbor Lady runs up to them.

Third Neighbor Lady

Hi, girls. It’s settled. I’m moving to the south, to Stavanger.

First and Second Neighbor Ladies (expressing their amazement and hugging her)

Congratulations.

First Neighbor Lady (coming to her senses)

But I still don’t get you. How can you trade our north country for the spoiled south?

Third Neighbor Lady

I’ll come back for visits.

First Neighbor Lady

I’m certain you’ll move back for good. Anyone who grows up in the north cannot betray it.

Third Neighbor Lady

I wouldn’t leave for anything, but the offer was so tempting. It’s such a good job.

First Neighbor Lady

The more so since such opportunities are opening up here. You can see yourself that money is flowing into the Arctic. With your experience you’ll be in demand here.

Third Neighbor Lady

Well, we’ll see whether the money comes or not.

First and Second Neighbor Ladies

Yeah, that’s right. . .

First Neighbor Lady (after a pause during which each of them thinks about her future)

By the way, we were at a performance by a Sámi dance group yesterday.

Third Neighbor Lady

A Sámi dance group? But I thought Sámi dances didn’t exist.

Second Neighbor Lady

Imagine, they recreated them the way they might have been in the past. It could have been that way, right?

First Neighbor Lady

It was great! I especially liked this dance. (Addressing Second Neighbor Lady) Do you remember?

Second Neighbor Lady

Uh-huh, like this!

She begins to dance and is joined by the First Neighbor Lady.

Third Neighbor Lady

How do you do it? Show me! Is it like this?

She joins their dance. All three women laugh, dance and goof around. Tanya walks past. She stops to look at them, and they draw her into the dance. Everyone laughs and falls in the snow.

Scene 5

Ola Nordmann is in his workshop going through his fishing tackle. The radio is playing a literary program entitled “The Life and Work of Aksel Sandemose: The Law of Jante.”

Radio (begins in mid-phrase)

As you know, of course, the Law of Jante is a set of rules for the typical Norwegian. Aksel Sandemose described it in his 1933 novel A Fugitive Crosses His Tracks. Today we’d like to examine certain problems of growing up vis-à-vis the Law of Jante. Our first guest has recently published a book that has garnered a lot of reaction in the media. The book is entitled Humiliation: An Inconvenient Pride, and it deals with the dark side of the anti-individualism common in our society. What could be bad about wanting to be like everyone else? Writer Per Anders Juvik will help us answer that question. Welcome!

Hello! Thanks for inviting me.

The second guest in our studio is head of the national parents organization Respecting Children. Welcome to the program, Linda Ramm. My first question is to you. What is the place of the Law of Jante in today’s society?

We see that the Law of Jante is, thankfully, on its way out of the Norwegian popular consciousness, but there are still many problems, especially with children and adolescents. . .

Tanya runs into the room, excited. When Tanya sings in Norwegian, she mangles the words in a Russian manner, so that they sound funny and unrecognizable. Ola Nordmann remains seated while Tanya whirls around him in happiness.

Tanya

Dear! First prize! Imagine, first prize!

Ola Nordmann (looking at her puzzled, turning the radio down)

What did you say? There’s an interesting program on the radio now. . .

Tanya

Yes, yes. Listen, I just got a phone call. My choir took first place at the competition in Murmansk. I’m so happy.

Ola Nordmann

Your choir? The one you worked with in Nikel?

Tanya

Yes, my kids from the culture center. I gave so many years to them. I put so much inspiration into them. The money was bad, but that’s not even important.

Ola Nordmann

I still remember your concert in Kirkenes.

Tanya

You remember?

Ola Nordmann

How could I forget? That’s where we met.

Tanya

You see how much music means? Music brought us together.

She twirls around the room, knocking things over. Ola Nordmann picks them up.

Tanya (singing in Russian)

Music brought us together. Music la-la-la-la-la. . . (Turning to Ola Nordmann) I’d really like to be with my choir.

Ola Nordmann

What’s the problem? You definitely should go.

Tanya

Do you think? What about my son? Will you look after our son?

Ola Nordmann (correcting her)

On the radio, they said it would be more correct to say our “nurturee,” Tanya.

Tanya

Yes, yes, I forgot. Will you look after him?

Ola Nordmann

I’ll look after him, of course.

Tanya (singing)

Thank you, thank you, thank you.

Ola Nordmann

By the way, have you noticed anything strange?

Tanya

Strange? (Singing) Strange, strange, strange, la-la-la. . . Strange about what? (It is clear she is thinking about something else.)

Ola Nordmann

About the boy’s behavior?

Tanya

His behavior? No, I haven’t, la-la-la. . .

Ola Nordmann

Nothing of yours is missing?

Tanya

Mis-sing, mis-sing, mis-sing. Nuh-uh-uh-thing. . .

Ola Nordmann (looks puzzled at Tanya and realizes she doesn’t understand him)

Okay, go. I’ll take care of things here myself. I’ll consult with someone I know.

Tanya (almost not listening to him; in Russian)

I’m going! I’m go-ing! I’m go-o-o-ing!

Ola Nordmann turns up the radio.

Ola Nordmann

Tanya, I caught a fish. Look, it’s in the kitchen.

Tanya darts into the kitchen and sees a fish on the table. It is breathing. She gazes at it. Then she grunts and flies off in the direction of Nikel.

Scene 6

Ola Nordmann continues listening to the radio program on Aksel Sandemose and the Law of Jante while going through his fishing tackle.

Radio

So where is this place where we can enjoy success, our own or that of others?

Wherever it is, it isn’t Norway! Even in the Old Norse Hávamál we find such admonitions as, “If you speak too softly, they will think you stupid; if you speak too much, they will think you a fool.”

That means everyone should be the same, eh?

Social equality can play an oppressive role. We’re talking about humility, when recognition of your outstanding abilities is experienced as “inconvenient pride,” a sense of guilt.

For example, one should not seek to be too successful in school. . .

Ola Nordmann continues working for some time. Then he looks at the clock, removes his apron and turns off the radio. It is evident he is waiting for someone. The door opens and his Friend walks in.

Ola Nordmann

Thanks for coming. I really wanted to talk with you.

Friend

How could I not come? That’s what friends are for!

They shake hands warmly and hug.

Ola Nordmann

Let’s go into the living room. Would you like some coffee?

They go into the living room.

Friend

Sure, thanks.

Ola Nordmann brings in the coffee. It is clear he is a little embarrassed, so instead of getting straight to the point he talks about the radio program.

Ola Nordmann

There was a program on the radio just now about the Law of Jante. Do you remember it?

Friend

How could I forget? (Begins quoting the Law of Jante.) “You’re not to think you are anything special. . . You’re not to think you’re smarter than others.”

Ola Nordmann

Yes, yes. That’s what I meant. What do you think about that?

Friend

I think it hasn’t gone out of date.

Ola Nordmann

Really?

Friend

Well, yes. It needs to be reinterpreted, of course, but. . .

Ola Nordmann (working up his courage)

I wanted to get your advice. I really love Tanya, you know. And her son too. I meant to say our “nurturee.” (Looks to his friend for support.)

Friend

Yes, you’re right to say “nurturee.” It’s the new trend in child rearing.

Ola Nordmann

I keep thinking about what a complicated job I have, bringing him up to be a real Norwegian.

Friend

I have no doubt you’ll cope. Your older kids are full-fledged members of society.

Ola Nordmann

Listen, it’s not the same. This boy is completely different.

Friend

Oh, come on!

Ola Nordmann

It’s true! He’s not an open person somehow. . . He doesn’t smile at people, doesn’t look them in the eye, doesn’t want to be friendly. He hit a boy in his class!

Friend

You don’t say!

Ola Nordmann

He steals cigarettes from his mother.

Friend

That’s not good.

Ola Nordmann

He doesn’t like sports.

Friend

Unbelievable.

Ola Nordmann

He doesn’t go snowmobiling with me.

Friend

He doesn’t go snowmobiling?

Ola Nordmann

No, he doesn’t. And I’m even afraid. . .Don’t get me wrong, I might be mistaken. . . I’m afraid he doesn’t like the scenery here.

Friend

No kidding. . . Have you talked with him?

Ola Nordmann

How can one talk to him? He doesn’t say anything. And Tanya yells at him in Russian.

Friend

She yells at him?

Ola Nordmann (embarrassed)

Yes, she yells. It’s quite awful.

Friend

It’s forbidden to yell at children.

Ola Nordmann

Yes, I know. . . And there’s another thing. . . I saw her hit him once. Well, not exactly hit him, but still.

Friend

Yeah. . . It’s a tough situation.

Ola Nordmann

That’s why I wanted to ask you what I should do.

Friend

Let me think.

Ola Nordmann

Please do.

Friend (after a pause, expressing his expert opinion)

Yes. . . First, you can’t forget where the boy grew up. Have you been to Nikel?

Ola Nordmann

You ask? I’ve been there many times.

Friend

Then you know what things are like over there: total irresponsibility and environmental disaster. They’re welcome to pollute themselves, but the acid rain splashes on our area too. (He gradually gets carried away, talking about what really worries him.) And they want to buy our mines to boot. Their church burned down, but they can’t rebuild it. Our community gave them money for it. The mine owners buy themselves villas and yachts while the workers die in the mines. And no one could care less. (He calms down.) Whatever. Those are the conditions in which the boy grew up. Not particularly favorable ones.

Ola Nordmann

It’s not right.

Friend

And his mother has been no help to him. Yelling at the boy! That’s unmotivated aggression.

Ola Nordmann

Tanya’s actually quite kind. . . Don’t judge her too harshly, she’s had a hard life: her first husband was an alcoholic, and her father was killed in a mine accident.

Friend (almost not listening)

Yeah, that’s bad. . . So what must we do? We have to rescue the boy.

Ola Nordmann

You think it’s that bad?

Friend

Yes, it’s clear you can’t handle this alone.

Ola Nordmann

Do you think?

Friend

I’m sure of it. The whole community needs to be involved in this.

Ola Nordmann (repeating his words)

The whole community needs to be involved. . .

The camera does a close-up of Ola Nordmann’s brooding face.

Scene 7

Tanya and the Chorus of Miners stand with the Nikel scenery in the background. Tanya plays the accordion. She is happy.

Tanya

Oh, how my soul sings!

Like a bird soaring into the sky!

My work, my love,

All the energy

I invested in the choir,

It’s all been recognized: our choir was named the best!

The kids didn’t let me down.

Miners

Well done, Tanya, of course.

We very much respect song,

But how did you prepare the children

For a miner’s hard work?

Tanya

The mine? No!

The road leading to success

Is open to them!

Miners

In the mine!

They will go work in the mine!

Tanya

They’ll sing on stage!

Miners

How does your music matter?

You think it has the power

To change the course of events?

Tanya

I believe it does!

Miners

No, Tanya,

Our sons will go work

In the mines,

And continue our dynasty.

But the weaker ones,

The ones spoiled by a soft upbringing,

Will sink to the bottom.

They’ll turn into

Scumbags

Drug addicts

Faggots

Fascists

And, maybe, murderers.

Then they’ll go to prison.

Tanya

The love I gave them

Will make them wonderful people!

Miners

The belt is the basis of a good education.

The father’s hand is the key!

Tanya

Children aren’t beaten in Norway.

Miners

And that’s a bad thing!

Tanya

There’s no violence there against the person.

Father and son are equals.

Miners (chuckling)

You don’t find that funny yourself?

The father is the head of the family.

Tanya

I’m happy I’m going home

To Norway,

Where everyone is happy.

Miners

And tell your husband

That the son should fear the father.

Otherwise he’ll grow up a sissy.

Tanya

No way!

Miners

See that you don’t have to be ashamed of your son.

Tanya

In Norway, it’s people like you who make people ashamed.

I’m in a hurry now.

Good luck staying here!

Miners

Okay, see you later!

You’ll be coming back.

Tanya walks off into the snowy-white distance; after a time, she begins to dance. Then she turns and shouts to the Miners.

Tanya

Miners! Be a bit more positive!

Scene 8

Humming “Oh, How My Soul Sings,” Tanya walks in the door and sees a confused Ola Nordmann and the Child Welfare Inspector.

Ola Nordmann

Dear, this is the child welfare inspector. She has come to check how your son is doing, but he is not home.

Tanya

My son? What happened? Where is he?

Ola Nordmann

Don’t worry. He just up and left, and I don’t know where he is. He doesn’t pick up his phone.

Tanya (worried)

But what happened?

Child Welfare Inspector

I’ll explain everything. The thing is that your nurturee has serious problems at school. And, as we’ve learned, he also has problems at home.

Tanya looks inquiringly at Ola Nordmann.

Ola Nordmann

I didn’t say anything.

Tanya

What problems? Tell me what the problem is.

Child Welfare Inspector

He has hit a classmate.

Tanya

A classmate? But all boys fight.

Child Welfare Inspector

He has been lying to his teachers.

Tanya

Lying?

Child Welfare Inspector

He steals.

Tanya

Steals? Did I understood that word correctly?

Child Welfare Inspector

Yes, he steals. That means he takes things without permission. He takes cigarettes from

you without permission.

Tanya (confused)

Cigarettes. . . But that’s not serious!

Child Welfare Inspector

It always starts with the little things. But don’t you worry: we will not leave you in lurch now. We will monitor your family and help you, of course.

Tanya

Our family is all right. We love each other, and everything is great. . . We’ll show you how wonderful our family is.

Child Welfare Inspector (hands her papers)

Read these papers and sign them, please. We’re counting on your cooperation with our agency.

Tanya freezes, turns towards the window (the camera) and addresses the Miners, who are standing there.

Tanya

I know what you want to say to me, but I don’t want to listen! I know who will help me. Tomorrow I’ll go get help there.

The Miners shake their heads and sing wordlessly.

Scene 9

Tanya runs through the pretty Kirkenes scenery. She runs to the War Mother’s Monument, where the three Neighbor Ladies are once again standing.

Tanya

How good you’re here! I need your advice.

The women are glad to see her. They interact half by dancing, half by speaking—as if they were continuing their earlier dance, and Tanya had again come to dance with them.

Tanya (switching from Norwegian to Russian as she becomes more excited)

The inspector came yesterday, but my son wasn’t home. The inspector said he steals, but this is unfair: he only takes cigarettes sometimes. I got very upset, and when he came home, I gave him a slap on the face. (I’m his mother, after all.) We got into a big fight and shouted. (She switches to Russian.) But then we made up and cried. We asked each other for forgiveness, and my son promised me he wouldn’t do it again and from now on things would be okay. Only I don’t know how to convince the inspector of this, because she probably thinks we’re wild, uncivilized people, you know? But we’re actually really okay. Or at any rate, we’re trying real hard. (Switches to Norwegian again.) But my son really wants to be a real Norwegian. Maybe it’s not working out now, but it will work out! It’s not clear who snitched on us to the child welfare agency. It’s not a good thing to snitch, is it?

The women listen attentively to Tanya. They react dramatically to what she tells them. They repeat the movements she makes and do not interrupt her when she strays into Russian—everyone has the right to speak their own language. But then it turns out they have misunderstood everything.

First Neighbor Lady

Look, she beats her kid!

Second Neighbor Lady

Good God, it is her son who beats her.

Third Neighbor Lady

It appears she’s happy about this.

First Neighbor Lady

We must do something!

Second Neighbor Lady

We cannot let this be!

They turn to Tanya, hugging and comforting her. They repeat her movements.

Third Neighbor Lady

Maybe it’s her husband who is beating her?

First Neighbor Lady

You have to stand up for your rights.

Second Neighbor Lady

You have to throw him out!

Third and First Neighbor Ladies

Throw him out!

All

You get it? Throw him out!

The women all show Tanya that she needs to throw her husband out by making throwing motions.

Tanya (not understanding but pretending she does)

Throw? Throw what? Ah, throw. . . I get it. Thank you! I understand everything. I have to stand up for my rights. That’s for sure! (Switches to Russian.) But who snitched? And what do I have to throw?

The scene ends with a close-up of Tanya. Snow is falling.

Scene 10

Tanya enters the house, lost in thought. Ola Nordmann is reading a newspaper.

Tanya

Honey, I wanted to ask you something. How do you think child welfare found out my son steals cigarettes?

Ola Nordmann (slightly embarrassed)

You see, I asked my friend for advice, and he advised going to child welfare and getting help from them.

Tanya

And you went?

Ola Nordmann

No, no: it wasn’t me. No, I didn’t go there. He must have gone there on his own.

Tanya

But that’s no good!

Ola Nordmann (huffily)

No, you’re wrong! Here in the newspaper it says there are no uncaring people in our society. We are responsible for everything that happens in our society, what happens in every family.

Tanya (looking at him intently)

Now I know what I have to throw.

Tanya leaves quickly. Ola Nordmann goes back to reading the newspaper. Suddenly, he hears the sound of breaking glass. Alarmed, he goes to the window (close-up).

Scene 11

Tanya is outside. She throws open her coat and pulls out her accordion. As she plays a very shrill, tired tune, the Miners appear.

Miners

Why did you throw the stone?

Why did you break the window?

Tanya

Oh, it’s you, miners. . .

He’s a traitor.

Miners

Didn’t we tell you

There are no real men there?

Tanya

Now they’re going to take away my son.

Miners

How can one take away someone’s son!

Tanya

Now they’re going to take away my son

And they’re right to do it:

I’m a bad mother.

Miners

Grab your son and run back to Nikel!

Tanya (speaking mostly to herself)

You don’t know what happens

When they come to take away children?

How many of them will there be?

Will there be police with them?

What if my son doesn’t want to leave?

Miners

Tanya, come back home!

We won’t let them hurt you!

Tanya

I think he’ll just disappear

In this lovely world,

And I’ll imagine

How he’s happy with other people.

Miners

A mother’s love and one’s own family

Are the most important things in the world!

Tanya

I wonder whether he’ll forget me.

Or will he never forget me?

Miners

Run while you still can!

Tanya (remembering they are there)

What? No, I won’t escape to Russia.

Let my son become a Norwegian.

I can cope with that.

And now leave me,

My miners.

Farewell. . .

My soul’s ore is exhausted,

And I’m no use to you anymore.

Now I will sing other songs.

I don’t know their words yet,

But I know for sure

They won’t be by you.

They won’t come from my heart.

Farewell. . .

Snow falls on the Miners as the camera bids them farewell.

Scene 12

Tanya returns home, where all the Norwegians are waiting for her. Ola Nordmann is distraught, his Friend is grinning, the Neighbor Ladies are excited. The Child Welfare Inspector is calm and friendly: she has done her job.

Ola Nordmann

Tanya, just don’t worry.

Child Welfare Inspector

I’m authorized to inform you that the child for whom you had nurturing responsibility will be transferred to another family for upbringing.

Tanya (exhausted and ready for this turn of events)

Why?

Child Welfare Inspector

For a variety of reasons.

Neighbor Ladies

Don’t you worry. Your child will be fine with another family. And you can visit him.

Child Welfare Inspector

Of course you can—under supervision of child welfare agency employees.

Tanya

Okay. I’ll go along with it. I’m a bad mother. I really hope my child will be happy with another family.

Neighbor Ladies

See that! She admits it all! She’s on the road to recovery!

They begin singing, with all the characters gradually assembling into a single, handsome chorus.

First Neighbor Lady

See that!

Second Neighbor Lady

She admits it all!

Third Neighbor Lady

She’s on the road to recovery!

Neighbor Ladies

We know that everyone

Gets another chance.

First Neighbor Lady

Everyone can improve.

Child Welfare Inspector

We believe everyone

Can correct their mistakes

All

And join the family

Of impeccable citizens.

Ola Nordmann

Thank you, Norway,

For never leaving

Your citizens alone,

For always rushing

To the rescue.

Friend

Like a good mother, you are

Ready to lend us a helping hand.

All

Join the family

Of impeccable citizens!

Neighbor Ladies

Thank you, Norway,

For all that we have:

Third Neighbor Lady

For our educations,

Second Neighbor Lady

For the right to an abortion,

First Neighbor Lady

For our freedom!

Neighbor Ladies

How it hurts us to know

That not all of our sisters

In the world have it so.

All (addressing Tanya and waving invitingly)

Tanya! Come to us!

Join the family

Of immaculate citizens!

During the next stanza, Tanya goes to the window in which the Miners have previously appeared and draws the curtains shut.

Child Welfare Inspector

Thank you, Norway,

That each of us

Can do good.

Friend

Thank you

For teaching us

What is good,

And what is bad.

Child Welfare Inspector and Friend

The whole world

Looks up to us,

For we’ve got our hands

On the Nobel Peace Prize.

Tanya joins the chorus and begins singing with them.

All (including Tanya)

Join the family

Of impeccable citizens!

Friend

Thanks, Norway,

For our wonderful present

First Neighbor Lady

And for our belief in a future

That will be even more

Wonderful.

Ola Nordmann

We will build houses that can walk.

Third Neighbor Lady

With the birds we will talk.

Second Neighbor Lady

We will find new meaning

In the simplest things.

All

We have things to do, Norway!

(addressing themselves directly to the audience, in close-up)

Filling our hearts with love,

We invite everyone

To join the family

Of impeccable citizens!

The End