AMERICAN STIOB: Or, What Late-Socialist Aesthetics of Parody Reveal about Contemporary Political Culture in the West

Autor: Dominic Boyer, Alexei Yurchak
Rok vydání: 2010
Předmět:
Zdroj: Cultural Anthropology. 25:179-221
ISSN: 1548-1360
0886-7356
DOI: 10.1111/j.1548-1360.2010.01056.x
Popis: To those of us weaned during the Cold War there are few certainties more bedrock than the antithetical character of liberalism and socialism. For some four decades,liberal‐capitalistregimesandstate‐socialistregimesmarshaledenormous pedagogical and ideological resources to educate their citizens in this singular truth that legitimated the polarized geopolitics of the second half of the 20th century. The gist of this truth was that nothing could be farther from the constitutive liberal rights and freedoms of Western democracy than the tyranny and group think of communism or, seen from the other side, that nothing could be more opposite from the internationalist communitarian values of socialism than the predatory self-interestedness and class warfare of capitalism. It is no small testament to the success of this Cold War pedagogy that the certainty of antithesis has outlived by decades the geopolitics that inspired it. Even as the Cold War geopolitics crumbled in the years 1989 to 1991, a victorious liberalism spared no opportunity to remind the world of its fundamental oppositeness from communism’s “evil empire.” Liberal historiography has subsequently memorialized 1989‐91 as an end-of-history extinction event for socialism (Fukuyama 1992; Kornai 1992), as vindication not only of the idea that the philosophical premises of liberalism amount to human nature but also of the idea that socialism’s experiments to improve human sociality have been absolutely defunct and defrauded. Twenty
Databáze: OpenAIRE
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