Graphic Satire in the Soviet Union by Etty John

Author:Etty, John [Etty, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781496820532
Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
Published: 2018-01-15T07:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SIX

Making the Risible Visible: The Performative Construction of Non-Soviet Ideology in Krokodil

Performance has been an important theme implicit in the discussion of Krokodil so far. Krokodil embodied some of the close connections between satire, theatrical performance, visual arts, and magazine publications, and the magazine continued to draw upon this cultural understanding of the nature of satire and performance. The remaining chapters apply a performative paradigm to consider how an appreciation of Krokodil’s performance of ideology nuances our understanding of the nature of the journal’s satire. Ideology, ideologically meaningful cartoon scenes, and ideologically infused characterizations are essential to understanding Krokodil’s visual satire, but the question of how characters’ identities or ideologies were constructed remains to be investigated fully.1

Performing was an important theme in official Soviet discourses between 1917 and 1964. Such official discourses are reminiscent of Erving Goffman’s theories of the public presentation of self (1959). This approach supposes the preexistence of the subject, who may adapt their performance to suit their environment. While Cold War-era studies assumed that Soviet subjectivity was represented as “the opposite of the liberal self, or as the death of liberal man in Stalinist Russia” (Krylova 2000: 2), post-Soviet studies employ a different methodology. Soviet subjectivity has been understood differently since Kotkin’s study of Magnitogorsk, which explained the imperative of “Speaking Bolshevik” (1997). Hellbeck (2006), Halfin (2003, 2007, 2011), and Yurchak (2005) show how Soviet discourses actually constituted selfhood and everyday reality. These approaches betray the influence of gender studies, performativity theory, and the work of Judith Butler. Following French poststructuralists, Butler considers the theory and politics of individual and gender identity. Butler disrupts anatomical gender binaries and demonstrates that gender identity is a political construction rather than an essential category. The construction of identity she describes, known as “performativity,” does not arise “as a singular or deliberate ‘act,’ but, rather, as the reiterative and citational practice by which discourse produces the effects that it names” (1993: xii). Butler argues that social and political power, felt as regulatory social norms, work “in performative fashion to constitute the materiality of bodies” (1993: xii). Bodies, in other words, do not stand outside of culture or society; instead, corporeality and identity co-create each other (see Butler 1990: 278). Deriving an analysis from Butler’s approach, this chapter proposes that we may understand Krokodil’s vision of ideology as performative in that it is enacted corporeally on the surface of characters in cartoons and is taken to be expressive of an ideological core.

Importantly, the aforementioned studies consider the construction of identity through verbal language. The “performative turn” in Cultural Studies—which is, according to Manuele Gragnolati, motivated by anti-hermeneutic urges that tend to reject assumptions about authorial intention, meaning, or essence (Gragnolati and Suerbaum 2010: 5)—has extended performativity theory to visual artworks. According to Jonathan Lahey Dronsfield, Jacques Derrida’s The Truth in Painting (1987) represents an exploration of the artist’s signature and frames as performative devices (2013). For Dave Davies, the artwork itself represents the performance (Davies 2008), while Barbara Bolt regards the artwork as a performative practice (Bolt 2010).

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