Christina Novakov-Ritchey

Post-socialist Performance as Insurgent Pedagogy

The object of abolition then would have a resemblance to communism that would be, to return to Spivak, uncanny. The uncanny that disturbs the critical going on above it, the professional going on without it, the uncanny that one can sense in prophecy, the strangely known moment, the gathering content, of a cadence, and the uncanny that one can sense in cooperation, the secret once called solidarity. The uncanny feeling we are left with is that something else is there in the undercommons. It is the prophetic organisation that works for the red and black abolition!­­­­­¹

1 Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, “The University and the Undercommons,” in The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study (New York: Minor Compositions, 2013), p. 42-43.

An insurgent post-socialist pedagogy begins with the most fundamental dual temporality of post-socialism as a “post.” While the peculiar temporality of the prefix “post-” has been heavily investigated as signifying both an end and a continuity, such as in the cases of post-modernity and post-colonialism, post-socialism appears to have been prematurely foreclosed within the public sphere. Socialism is seen as past, and is largely conflated with Eastern Europe and/or the Soviet Union. Whispers remain of socialism in the cases of Cuba, China, and North Korea, however, these invocations are quickly followed with a list of reasons why they are not examples of “real” socialism. Within this discursive frame, socialism is an anachronism, which should have died along with the Cold War. The examples of socialism that remain are written off as ruins of that war and we are invited to forget about them. Insurgent post-socialist pedagogy refuses this amnesia and insists upon the ongoing relevance of socialist experience and significance of socialist praxis for the present moment. 

Foregrounding the persistent exchange of ideas between decolonisation and communist praxis, insurgent post-socialist pedagogy reimagines the world as post-socialist—a world which extends from Angola to Venezuela to Uzbekistan. Teaching the interrelationship of decolonisation and communist movements pushes back against the ways that both post-socialist discourse has had its anticolonial pasts erased and academic decolonisation discourses have been purged of their communist legacies. The post-Cold War reclassification of the world from three worlds into two has left communist-decolonial solidarity as collateral damage. This is distressing not only because rich theoretical contributions were generated at this intersection, but also because it makes revolution seem abstract. 

It is extremely difficult to imagine a total transformation of society—whether that revolution be decolonial or communist—if one has no historical examples to draw upon. Tjaša Kancler has described post-socialist amnesia as a process of violence: 

the ‘post’ of post-socialism, rather than celebrating the embracement of ‘democracy’ and free-market capitalism, speaks about further processes of colonisation which allow ‘former’ West to fulfill itself by deforming what is being suppressed: the materiality of our history, knowledge and memory. The reconfiguration of formerly socialist states through the deregulation of economy, the privatisation of public institutions, and its integration into the global market in an abstract way, erased the whole space, its anti-fascist, anti-colonial and feminist history, practices and theoretical reflections.²

2 Tjasa Kancler, “Speaking against the Void: Decolonial Transfeminist Relations and Its Radical Potential” (Post-colonial and Post-socialist Dialogues: Intersections, Opacities, Challenges in Feminist Theorising and Practice, Linköping University, Sweden, 2015).

Revolutionary momentum depends upon the remembering of histories of struggle. The task of an insurgent post-socialist pedagogy is to resuscitate those material histories, knowledges, practices, and memories of antifascism, anticolonialism, and feminism and to disturb the European Union’s narrative of post-socialist ‘transition’ as a neutral process.

Children playing football at Young Pioneer Camp in Ukraine, Gurzuf, Krim, 1986. Fortepan

Promisingly, the relationship between post-socialism and post-colonialism has become an increasingly popular area of inquiry for scholars of post-socialist Europe and the former USSR over the last two decades. Based on applications of Edward Said’s critique of orientalism and the critiques of the modernity/coloniality group, the most visible post-socialist approaches to post-colonialism emphasise the shared peripherality of the former Second World and the Global South. These critiques, however, largely seem to imagine themselves entering into an empty field. There remains sparse acknowledgement or citation of over one hundred years of local critics of forced dependency, including many whose analyses in the interwar period connect the material conditions of post-imperial Europe to Europe’s colonial mission abroad. Additionally, the approach to reading post-socialism through post-colonialism consistently fails to challenge the Eurocentric capture of the socialist project. Post-socialism too often serves as a euphemism for Eastern Europe, despite state socialism having characterised over half of the world’s governments at some point in history. 

The revolution is boring

In asking students to engage with post-socialist artists and theorists of communism, decolonisation, and abolition, I am asking them to confront their universalist education and the lacunae in their knowledge of the world. The specific lacuna of post-socialism is best described by Neda Atanasoski: “if post-socialism is relegated to periodising a particular moment of regional transition that at once affirms the death of socialism and consigns it to an ideological formation inferior to Western modernity and universality, it particularises what is actually a global condition in which the West situates the universal claims of human rights, freedom, democracy, that underwrite its global violence.”⁸ By grappling with how little they know about what they do not know, students can begin to see the world from another angle. Specifically, they can begin to unsettle the deeply engrained conceptual framing of the Cold War. The U.S. academy has still not had its reckoning for its cooperation with COINTELPRO and participation in the Red Scare, leaving the American Cold War mythology largely undisturbed. 

I have found teaching art to be one of the most effective ways to reach post-socialism’s points of contradiction. Provocatively broad in their claims, Bojana Kunst and Boris Groys theorise that the distinction between capitalist and socialist aesthetics can be understood as the opposition of a sceptical critique of representation versus a critical affirmation of the socialist project. While in the capitalist West, Kunst argues, the performance event is immediately suspicious of the authority of the artist, in the socialist East, there is faith that the performer’s political ideology translates into the immediate material reality. Kunst identifies this “authentic gesture” as the moment of alienation experienced by socialist artists’ Western audiences. Performances in actually-existing socialism speak to a world beyond the world of art, while in Western Europe and the Anglosphere, the political questions of the artwork most often centre around the work of art itself. This art-for-art’s sake ideology underpinning capitalist art production causes the Western spectator to consider the socialist artist as naïve, “banal...and already-seen.”⁹ To be post-modern is to be cynical of the possibility for art to produce politics. 

Knowing that my students will themselves experience the “banality” of post-socialist art is actually very useful. The reaction of boredom or the presumption of kitsch provides affective data on the perceived relationship of politics to art. In the U.S., art often employs political aesthetics, but generally does not do political work beyond the politics of representation. This depoliticisation of art has less to do with artists themselves and much more to do with the imperial/state apparatus. To be bored by the premise that one has ideological faith in the capacity of the state to move towards a just world is an obvious example of an immobilising pessimism.

Geeta Kapur’s defence of the political utility of the term “avant-garde” provides a useful vocabulary with which to understand the work of post-socialist artists. For Kapur, taking up the avant-garde is not a nostalgic act, but a strategic refusal of neoliberalism’s reclamation of l’art-pour-l’artisme and a regrounding of difference. Specifically grounding the avant-garde in its imbrication in the global histories of socialism and anticolonialism, Kapur argues that the avant-garde provides a template for radical, situational politics, which are grounded in the specific needs and histories of a location while also being able to speak to interconnections across time and space: “While the history of the avant-garde gives us a template for radical disruptions, it is important to keep alive questions of material practice: It follows that situational politics—the very site for avant-garde initiatives—should be rescued from subsumption in the global imaginary. There is a need to focus on location (as an archaeologist would) and simultaneously shift paradigms (as a philosopher would): a concept like heterotopia speaks of ‘other spaces’—spaces with several places of difference, real and metaphoric otherness, and rerouted allusions to ‘utopias.’”¹⁰ Teaching about post-socialist possibility invokes the avant-garde. While the foreclosing of post-socialism as mere regionalism fails to understand the scale of the transformation of the 80s and 90s, there is something valuable in never being able to leave the regional behind. Difference is already foregrounded in a way that is intolerable to the universalist mythmaking of Euro-imperial hegemony. Students and I are tasked with navigating between local histories and theories of the totality for the sake of making connections to other places and other times. This is a process of producing history.

11 Harney and Moten, Undercommons, p. 29.
12 Harney and Moten, Undercommons, p. 34.

Not a conclusion

1. Post-socialism is not a euphemism for Eastern Europe.

2. The tendentious connections between communism, abolition, decolonisation, and the un-professional underclass of the university (the undercommons) emboldens the insurgent post-socialist pedagogue. 

3. Every struggle is linked, but these struggles are laden with incommensurabilities. As Eve Tuck and Wayne Yang state: “opportunities for solidarity lie in what is incommensurable rather than what is common.”¹³

4. We must critique without flattening. This requires taking seriously violence against marginalised communities that persisted during state socialism. 

5. We must expose and unsettle the anti-communist prejudice that overwhelmingly undergirds post-socialist discourse and obstructs praxes of liberation. 

6. The project of post-socialist pedagogy is the practice of speaking with two tongues: one institutional, one vernacular. 

7. In a recent interview with Joy James on the popularisation of the prison abolition movement, Felicia Denaud asks James whether they should concede the ground of “abolition” to those who practice academic abolitionism or celebrity abolition, or whether they should denounce those impotent abolitionisms as “not abolitionism.” James responds saying that for herself, “I’m not gonna argue with you about words.”¹⁴ We will not argue about words, about whether a post-socialism is “true” or “false.” We find these distinctions to be self-evident. 

8. Post-socialist pedagogy is a trojan horse. What appears as distance is actually too earnest. This earnestness is dangerous, an insurgent pedagogy inside the university and the museum. 

9. The world that reveals itself in the unsettling of post-socialism is a world with a revolutionary past, present, and future.

13 Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, “Decolonisation Is Not a Metaphor,” Decolonisation: Indigeneity, Education & Society 1, no. 1 (2012): p. 28.
14 Devyn Springer, Felicia Denaud, and Joy James, “The Plurality of Abolitionism,” Groundings, accessed April 19, 2021, https://groundings.simplecast.com/episodes/joy-james.

Christina Novakov-Ritchey is a PhD Candidate in Culture and Performance at the University of California – Los Angeles, where her research focuses on peasants, communism, ecology, folklore, and aesthetics in the Yugoslav region. Her next research project is a monograph on global post-socialist video and performance art. She is the co-organiser of the (Post)Socialist Studies Group funded by the UC Humanities Research Institute and a core member of the Dialoguing Posts Network. She teaches on post-socialism, revolutionary art, feminism, critical folklore, and global colonialisms. @NovakovRitchey on Twitter