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Singer, a social Darwinist with a collectivist socialist face, starts innocently enough, trying to argue that people will be happier if they lead lives committed to ethics, for a life spent trying to help others and reduce suffering is really the most [[moral]] and fulfilling one. He radicalizes and actualizes Jeremy [[Bentham]], the father of utilitarianism: the ultimate ethical criterion is not the dignity ([[rationality]], soul) of man but the ability to suffer, to experience pain, which man shares with animals. With inexorable radicality, Singer levels the [[animal]]/human [[divide]]. Better to kill an old suffering [[woman]] than healthy animals. Look an orangutan straight in the eye and what do you see? A none-too-distant cousin, a creature worthy of all the [[legal]] rights and privileges that humans [[enjoy]]. One should thus extend aspects of equality, including the right to life, the protection of [[individual]] liberties, the prohibition of [[torture]], at least to the nonhuman great apes (chimpanzees, orangutans, gorillas).
Singer argues that "speciesism" (privileging the human [[species]]) is no different from [[racism]]; our [[perception]] of a difference between humans and (other) animals is no less illogical and unethical than our one-time perception of an ethical difference between, say, men and [[women]], or blacks and whites. Intelligence is no basis for determining ethical stature. The lives of humans are not worth more than the lives of animals simply because they display more intelligence (if intelligence were a standard of judgment, Singer points out, we could perform medical experiments on the mentally retarded with moral impunity). Ultimately, all things being equal, an animal has as much interest in [[living]] as a human. Therefore, all things being equal, medical experimentation on animals is immoral. Those who advocate such experiments claim that sacrificing the lives of twenty animals will save millions of human lives. However, what about sacrificing twenty humans to save millions of animals? As Singer's critics like to point out, the horrifying extention of this principle is that the interests of twenty people outweigh the interests of one, which gives the green light to all sorts of [[Human Rights|human rights ]] abuses.
Consequently, Singer argues that we can no longer rely on traditional ethics for answers to the dilemmas that our constellation imposes on ourselves; he proposes a new ethics meant to protect the quality, not the sanctity, of human life. As sharp boundaries [[disappear]] between life and [[death]], between humans and animals, this new ethics casts [[doubt]] on the [[morality]] of animal research while offering a sympathetic assessment of infanticide. When a [[baby]] is [[born]] with severe defects of the sort that always used to kill babies, are doctors and [[parents]] now morally obligated to use the latest technologies, regardless of cost? No. When a pregnant woman loses all brain function, should doctors use new procedures to keep her [[body]] living until the baby can be born? No. Can a doctor ethically help terminally ill [[patients]] to kill themselves? Yes.
Capitalism has created an accounting apparatus in the shape of the banks, syndicates, postal service, consumers' societies, and office employees unions. Without big banks socialism would be impossible… Our task here is merely to lop off what capitalistically mutilates this excellent apparatus, to make it even bigger, even more democratic, even more comprehensive… This will be country-wide book-keeping, countrywide accounting of the production and distribution of goods, this will be, so to [[speak]], something in the nature of the skeleton of socialist society. [Quoted in L, p. 145]
Is this not the most radical expression of Marx's notion of a general intellect regulating all social life in a [[transparent]] way, of a postpolitical world in which the administration of people is supplanted by the administration of things? It is, of course, easy to play against this quote the tune of the critique of [[Instrumental Reason|instrumental reason ]] and the [[administered world]] (verwaltete Welt): the totalitarian potential is inscribed in this very form of [[total]] social control.<ref>See [[Karl Marx]], Grundrisse, trans. Martin Nicolaus (New York, 1973), p. 706.</ref> It is easy to remark sarcastically how, in the Stalinist epoch, the apparatus of social administration effectively became even bigger. Furthermore, is this postpolitical [[vision]] not the very opposite of the [[Maoist]] notion of the [[eternity]] of the [[class struggle]] (suggested by the axiom, everything is political)? Are, however, things really so unambiguous? What if one replaces the (obviously dated) example of the central bank with the World Wide Web, today's perfect candidate for the general intellect? [[Dorothy Sayers]] claimed that [[Aristotle]]'s Poetics is effectively the theory of the detective novel avant la [[lettre]]; because poor Aristotle didn't yet know of the detective novel, he had to refer to the only examples at his disposal, the tragedies.<ref>See Dorothy L. Sayers, "Aristotle on Detective [[Fiction]]," Unpopular Opinions (New York, 1947), pp. 222-36.</ref> Along the same lines, Lenin was effectively developing the theory of the role of the World Wide Web, but, since the net was unknown to him, he had to refer to the unfortunate central banks. Consequently, can one also say that "without the World Wide Web socialism would be impossible… Our task is here merely to lop off what capitalistically mutilates this excellent apparatus, to make it even bigger, even more democratic, even more comprehensive?" Under these conditions, one is tempted to resuscitate the old, opprobrious, and half-forgotten Marxian dialectics of productive forces and relations of production: it is already a commonplace to claim that, ironically, it was this very dialectics that buried really existing socialism. Socialism was unable to sustain the passage from an industrial to postindustrial economy. However, does capitalism really provide the [[natural]] frame for the relations of production for the digital universe? Is there not also in the World Wide Web an explosive potential for capitalism itself? Is not the lesson of the Microsoft monopoly precisely the Leninist one: instead of fighting its monopoly through the state apparatus (recall the court-ordered split of the Microsoft corporation), would it not be more logical just to socialize it, rendering it freely accessible?
The key antagonism of the so-called new (digital) industries is, thus, how to maintain the form of (private) property-the only one within which the logic of profit can be maintained (relevant to the Napster problem, the free circulation of [[music]]). And do the legal complications in [[biogenetics]] not point in the same direction? The key element of the new international trade agreements is the "protection of intellectual property"; whenever, in a merger, a big First World company takes over a Third World company, the first thing they do is close down the research department. Phenomena emerge here that bring the notion of property to extraordinary dialectical paradoxes; for example, in [[India]], local communities suddenly discover that medical practices and [[materials]] they had been using for centuries are now owned by American companies and must be bought from them. Likewise, with the biogenetic companies patenting genes, we are all discovering that parts of ourselves, our genetic components, are already copyrighted, owned by others.
What, then, is the criterion of the [[political act]]? Success as such clearly doesn't count, even if we define it in [[Merleau-Ponty]]'s dialectical way (as the wager that the future will [[retroactively]] redeem our present horrible acts); neither do any abstract-universal ethical norms." The only criteria is the absolutely inherent one: that of the enacted utopia. In a proper revolutionary breakthrough, the [[utopian]] future is neither simply fully realized, present, nor simply evoked as a distant promise that justifies present violence. It is rather as if, in a unique suspension of [[temporality]], in the short circuit between the present and the future, we are-as if by Grace-for a brief time allowed to act as if the utopian future were (not yet fully here, but) already at hand, just there to be grabbed. Revolution is not experienced as a present hardship we have to endure for the [[happiness]] and freedom of the future generations but as the present hardship over which this future happiness and freedom already cast their shadow-in it, we already are free while fighting for freedom, we already are happy while fighting for happiness, no matter how difficult the circumstances. Revolution is not a Merleau-Pontyan wager, an act suspended in the futur anterieur, to be legitimized or delegitimized by the long term outcome of the present acts; it is as it were its own [[ontological]] proof, an immediate [[index]] of its own truth.
In spite of all its horrors, the great [[Cultural Revolution]] in China undoubtedly did contain elements of such an enacted utopia. Say, at its very end, before the agitation was blocked by Mao himself (because he already achieved his goal of reestablishing his full power and getting rid of the top nomenklatura competition), there was the Shanghai Commune in which one million workers, who simply took the official slogans seriously, demanded the abolition of the state and even the party itself, and the direct communal organization of society. It is significant that it was at this very point that Mao ordered the restoration of order. The (often noted) parallel between Mao and Lacan is fully justified here; the [[dissolution]] of the [[Ecole freudienne|Ecole Freudienne ]] de [[Paris]] in 1979 was Lacan's great Cultural Revolution, mobilizing his young followers (who, incidently, mostly were ex-Maoists from [[1968]]!) in order to get rid of the inner circle of his mandarins. In both cases, the paradox is that of a leader who triggers an uncontrolled upheaval, while trying to exert full personal power-the paradoxical overlapping of extreme dictatorship and extreme emancipation of the masses.
Let us recall the performance of "Storming the Winter Palace" in Petrograd, on the third anniversary of the October Revolution, on 7 November 1920. Tens of thousands of workers, soldiers, students, and artists worked round the clock, living on kasha (tasteless wheat porridge), tea, and frozen apples, and preparing the performance at the very place where the event really took place three years earlier; their work was coordinated by the Army officers, as well as by avant-garde artists, musicians, and directors, from Malevich to Meyerhold. Although this was acting and not reality, the soldiers and sailors were playing themselves. Many of them not only actually participated in the event of 1917 but were also simultaneously involved in the real battles of the civil war that were raging in the near vicinity of Petrograd, a city under siege and suffering from severe shortages of food. A contemporary commented on the performance: "The future historian will record how, throughout one of the bloodiest and most brutal revolutions, all of [[Russia]] was acting"; and the formalist theoretician Viktor Shklovsky noted that "some kind of elemental process is taking place where the living fabric of life is being transformed into the theatrical."<ref>Quoted in Susan buck-Morss, Dreamworld and Catastrophe (Cambridge, Mass. 2000), p. 144.</ref> We all [[remember]] the infamous self-celebratory First of May parades that were one of the supreme signs of [[recognition]] of the Stalinist regimes. If one needs proof of how Leninism functioned in an entirely different way, are such performances not the supreme proof that the October Revolution was definitely not a simple coup d'etat by a small group of Bolsheviks but an event which unleashed a tremendous emancipatory potential?
Shostakovich's redemption of Katerina's two murders as the justified acts of a [[victim]] of patriarchal oppression is effectively more ominous than it may appear; the price for this justification, the only way to make the murders palpable, is the derogation, dehumanization even, of the victims (her husband's father is portrayed as an old lecherous ruffian while the son is an impotent weakling without any clear characterization, avoided because it might have given rise to a sympathy for him in the [[murder]] scene). In a complementary way, Katerina herself is purified of any ethical ambiguity (there are no hints of an inner ethical struggle while she commits the murders, or of any pangs of [[conscience]] afterwards). She is portrayed not so much as a fighter for personal freedom and dignity against patriarchal oppression but as a woman totally enslaved to her sexual [[passion]], ready to crush ruthlessly everything that stands in the way of its [[gratification]]. In this sense, she is also dehumanized so that, paradoxically, the only human element in the opera is a collective one, the convict's chorus with its two laments in the last act. Furthermore, Richard Taruskin was right to emphasize the historical context of the opera: the years of the ruthless terror against the kulaks. Are the murdered father and son not two exemplary kulaks? In the first two years of the opera's triumphant performance, before Stalin's ban, was it possible for the public not to perceive how its violent [[content]] echoes the violence of "dekulakization"? The opera's official condemnation should thus not blind us to the fact that it is a deeply disturbing Stalinist work that legitimizes the ongoing, murderous antikulak campaign. Taruskin's conclusion is thus that Lady Macbeth is "a profoundly inhumane work of art." "If ever an opera deserved to be banned it was this one, and matters are not changed by the fact that its actual ban was for wrong and hateful reasons."<ref>Richard Taruskin, Defining Russia Musically (Princeton, NJ., 1997), p. 509.</ref>
And does the same not go for another prohibited (in this case, literally destroyed) Soviet masterpiece from exactly the same period, [[Sergei Eisenstein]]'s Bezhin Meadow (1934-36) of which the negatives themselves were burned? This veritable [[missing]] link (or, rather, [[Vanishing Mediator|vanishing mediator]]) between Eisenstein I (of the intellectual montage and brilliant dialectical use of formal [[antagonisms]]) and Eisenstein II (of Nevsky and Ivan, of the pathetic rendering of large historical frescoes in an [[organic]] form) was partly based on the story of Pavlik Morozov, a young village hero who was killed by his relatives in the northern Urals in 1932 because he had denounced his father to the village soviet for speculating. After his death, Morozov was elevated to a cult [[figure]] all around the [[Soviet Union]]. In the [[film]], Stepok, a young village boy, organizes the local Young Pioneers to guard the harvest of the farm collective each night, thereby frustrating his own father's plans to [[sabotage]] it. In the film's climax, during one of the nightly confrontations between the father and the son, the father kills Stepok. The next morning, a typical Eisenstein scene celebrating the exuberant orgy of revolutionary destructive violence takes place, when the frustrated Pioneers force their way into the local [[church]] and desecrate it (recall the similar scene from October, in which the victorious revolutionaries, after penetrating the wine cellars of the Winter Palace, there indulge in the ecstatic orgy of smashing thousands of the expensive wine bottles):
On one level, the audience is encouraged to sympathise with the peasants robbing the church of its relics, squabbling over an [[icon]], sacrilegiously trying on vestments, heretically laughing at the statuary-while Eisenstein's profound admiration and knowledge of religious art creates a parallel revulsion at the vandalism. A young [[girl]] is framed in a [[mirror]] as if in a picture of the Virgin Mary, a young child is a cherub, a statue of the crucified [[Christ]] is held as in a Pieta.<ref>Ronald Bergan, Sergei Eisenstein: A Life in Conflict ([[London]], 1997), p. 287.</ref>
When Boris Shumyatsky, the official head of the Soviet film industry (until he was, only two years later, accused of being an [[English]] spy, arrested, and shot), vetoed the film on 17 March 1937, he explained his reasons in an interesting article in Pravda.<ref>See Boris Shumyatsky, "O fil'me Bezhin Lug," Pravda, 19 Mar. 1937, p. 3; for an English [[translation]], see "Boris Shumyatsky: The Film Bezhin Meadow," in The Film Factory: Russian and Soviet [[Cinema]] in Documents, trans. Richard Taylor, ed. Taylor and Ian Christie (Cambridge, Mass., 1988), pp. 378-81.</ref> His main reproach was that, instead of locating the conflict in the concrete circumstances of the [[Class Struggle|class struggle ]] in the countryside (the "dekulakization"), Eisenstein staged the conflict in an almost [[biblical]], atemporal [[mythical]] space, as an abstract fight between good and [[evil]], elementary cosmic forces. Stepok is presented in pale and luminous tones, a wan boy in his white shirt, as if wrapped up in a halo, as a kind of spectral, innocent saint whose fate was already decided by a supernatural destiny. (In the self-criticism that followed, Eisenstein himself claimed that the father's killing of the son was "reminiscent of [[Abraham]]'s sacrifice of [[Isaac]].")<ref>Quoted in Bergan, Sergei Eisenstein, p. 283.</ref> Connected with this reproach was the standard accusation of formalism, of indulging in eccentric framing, lighting, and cuts, instead of deploying the story in a direct, psychologically realistic way that would allow easy emotional [[identification]] on the part of the viewer. From today's perspective, of course (and bearing in mind Eisenstein's [[fascination]] with and detailed knowledge of psychoanalysis), it is easy to [[identify]] this eternal mythic space as the scene in which the underlying [[libidinal]] economy of the father/son conflict (the inverted [[Oedipus]] in which the [[obscene]], corrupted father kills the innocent, asexual son) is played out. Far from being simply too intellectual, prohibiting the viewer's [[empathy]], Bezhin Meadow was so disturbing because its very formalist excess allowed the repressed libidinal tension to be directly articulated.
The reason the film had to be prohibited was thus that such a direct rendering of the underlying libidinal tensions, such a direct celebration of ecstatic and destructive sacrilegious, revolutionary violence was not admissible in the new conditions of socialist realism. Why not? Because the Stalinist ideology functioned only on condition that it did not directly display this underlying libidinal economy. (No wonder Eisenstein was enthusiastic about Alexander Medvedkin's Happiness from 1935, in which similar revolutionary obscenities abound; in an extraordinary moment, a priest imagines he sees the breasts of a nun through her habit.) And, back to Shostakovich, what if his Lady Macbeth was also prohibited for similar reasons-not because he openly depicted [[sexuality]], but because this open depiction, as well as the open support of the killing of the kulak patriarchal "oppressors" had to be publicly disavowed. And this also enables us to see why Taruskin's accusation against Lady Macbeth as the legitimization of the mass murder of the kulaks misses the point. The direct, violent aspect of it had to be publicly disavowed, which is why its direct rendering was unacceptable. The direct depiction of sex and of violence were two sides of the same coin (which openly coincide in the erotically charged, "orgasmic" [[character]] of the church desecration in Bezhin Meadow).
It is at this precise point concerning political terror that one can locate the gap that separates Leninism from [[Stalinism]].<ref>One is tempted to question the very term Leninism. Is it not that it was invented under Stalin? And does the same not go for Marxism (as a teaching) which was basically a Leninist invention, so that Marxism is a Leninist notion and Leninism a Stalinist one?</ref> In Lenin's times, terror was openly admitted (Trotsky sometimes even boasted in an almost cocky way about the nondemocratic nature of the Bolshevik [[regime]] and the terror it used), while in Stalin's times, [[the symbolic]] status of the terror thoroughly changed; terror turned into the publicly nonacknowledged, obscene shadowy [[supplement]] of the public official [[discourse]]. It is significant that the climax of terror (1936-37) took place after the new [[constitution]] was accepted in 1935. This constitution was supposed to end the [[state of emergency]] and to mark the return of the things to normal: the suspension of the civil rights of the whole strata of population (kulaks, ex-capitalists) was [[recalled]], the right to vote was now universal, and so forth. The key idea of this constitution was that now, after the stabilization of the socialist order and the annihilation of the [[enemy]] classes, the Soviet Union would no longer be a class society; [[The Subject|the subject ]] of the state is no longer the working class (workers and peasants) but the people. However, this would not mean that the Stalinist constitution was simple [[hypocrisy]] concealing [[social reality]]. The possibility of terror is inscribed into its very core. Since the class war is now proclaimed over and the Soviet Union is conceived of as the classless country of the People, those who (are still presumed to) oppose the regime would no longer be mere class enemies in a conflict that tears apart the [[social body]] but enemies of the people, insects, worthless scum, which is to be excluded from humanity itself.
This repression of the regime's own excess was strictly correlative to the invention of the [[psychological]] individual that took place in the Soviet Union in the late twenties and early thirties. Russian avant-garde art of the early twenties (futurism, constructivism) not only zealously endorsed industrialization, it even endeavored to reinvent a new industrial man, one who was no longer the old man of sentimental passions and traditions but the new man who gladly accepts his role as a bolt or screw in the gigantic coordinated industrial [[machine]]. As such, it was subversive in its very ultraorthodoxy, that is, in its overidentification with the core of the official ideology: the human [[image]] that we get in Eisenstein, Meyerhold, constructivist paintings, and so on emphasizes the beauty of his or her mechanical movements, his or her thorough depsychologization. What was perceived in the West as the ultimate [[nightmare]] of liberal individualism, as the ideological counterpoint to Taylorization, to Fordist ribbonwork, was in Russia hailed as the utopian prospect of liberation. Recall how Meyerhold violently asserted the "behaviorist" approach to actingno longer advocating emphatic familiarization with the person the actor is playing but ruthless [[bodily]] [[training]] aimed at cold [[physical]] [[discipline]], at the ability of the actor to perform the series of mechanized movements.<ref>See Buck-Morss's outstanding Dreamworld and Catastrophe, chaps. 2 and 3.</ref> This is what was unbearable to and in the official Stalinist ideology, so that Stalinist socialist realism effectively was an attempt to reassert a "socialism with a human face," that is, to reinscribe the process of industrialization into the constraints of the traditional psychological individual. In socialist realist [[texts]], paintings, and [[films]], individuals are no longer rendered as parts of the global machine, but as warm, passionate persons.
