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LAUGHING STALINISM: THE FATE OF THE COMIC IN A TRAGIC AGE
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LAUGHING STALINISM: THE FATE OF THE COMIC IN A TRAGIC AGE
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Journal Article
LAUGHING STALINISM: THE FATE OF THE COMIC IN A TRAGIC AGE
2021
Overview
The article focuses on what can be called \"state laughter.\" It analyzes theoretical aspects of laughter appropriated by the state and discusses its origin, nature, and functions, including the political, national, and religious dimensions. It argues that Stalinism not only instrumentalized and incorporated low culture, not only oriented itself at the horizon of expectations of yesterday's peasants. It also raised the culture and aesthetics of a patriarchal society to the level of state policy, attributed to them ideological weight, aesthetic materiality and social acoustics-it medialized, institutionalized, utilized, historicized, and endlessly reproduced the features traditionally associated with low culture. In other words, Socialist Realism created the legitimizing political subject itself: \"the popular masses.\" In its radical character such a practice simply cannot be compared to medieval carnival. The article counters Bakhtin's claims that laughter was a tool for liberation by arguing that laughter in Stalinism was a channel and a legitimizing mechanism of violence, prohibitions, and limitations. It was a tool of intimidation. Power, repression, and authority, which gave voice to, and was sanctified by, 'the carnival world view of the \"popular\" (that is, patriarchal) culture, the culture of yesterday's semi-urbanized peasants, spoke to them, and for them, in the language of laughter. A regime that does not set itself off from \"popular culture\" but rather incorporates it and adapts itself to it becomes radically popular. Stalinism and Socialist Realist art were examples of such a model.
