The Voice Over

Recently social media has become another way to pump what little air there is out of the room. Perhaps, in part, because in the absence of a free press (the few publications that have survived make the empty landscape look that much bleaker), there is a need to reconstruct its multitude of voices, this time through our own effort. But, having become our main media, like an indispensable daily newspaper, social media starts to take from us almost more than it gives. Not because it doesn’t offer criteria or filters to help us sort information. And not even because the positions and points of view to which you are trying to relate your own are entirely opposite, and yet all voices sound prescriptive. The thing that worries me has little to do with the meaning of what is being discussed; it has to do with its acoustics. Any event, large or small, runs across our timeline like a convulsing wave with a shallow or deep ripple. Every repost amplifies the weight of the initial message, grants it a broader, bell-like amplitude. The alarm bell is rung for bad news, and even more often—the foretaste of bad news, and then even more so—for someone being wrong, which is picked apart with great care, seen as a symptom, as yet another wretched headline out of many. The main thing that follows from these deliberations is that the lives of others, the choices of others (and thus life itself in its non-homogeneity) seem compromised, rotten, incompatible with a model set by someone else, and that shows not the purity of our own choices but how narrow and impassable our common path can be.

Each new calamity is not experienced on its own but acquires the traits of the final blow, the last drop. Alright, that’s it; after this one event (fill in what fits—after this or that law, after the first, third, twelfth of March, after yet another column), the life that has been spent in anticipation of the terrible will fall into its deep well. These “that’s it” moments can take place three times a week: our sense of the real caliber of events has long gotten confused, real and fake news are given the same consideration, there’s no one to look into the sources or figure them out—if you say something is fake, they’ll tell you, “That’s where we’re headed anyway.”

And so any conversation about things that are part of our everyday human affairs—situations and problems that concern the fabric of contemporary life—inevitably falls into the same pattern: “How can we talk about this trifle when we have a war going on, and Putin.” And so, again and again, a comic aberration forces us to call the raising of any issue partkom

¹² or liberal censorship or something like that. And so a picture is organized with its background (thunder, lightning, the ninth wave) depicted with much greater care than the foreground. And so, little by little, our own lives are no longer seen as worthy of our sympathy.

And so anything that proves that life is still in residence, anything that, as best it can, serves to affirm and expand it—pictures of kittens and cakes, showing off a new pair of shoes, any kind of mindless domesticity, any experience of the situation as compatible with life—turns out to be subtly or sharply compromising. It becomes a betrayal: not of a common cause but of a common feeling.

That feeling is: life is impossible

. You could say, as many in fact do, “Life in Russia is impossible,” but they can hardly be serious, several million people cannot just die, disappear, or emigrate all at once—no matter how appropriate that might seem to some. So a more accurate translation would sound like this: in a country that does this, in a country where this happens, life cannot resemble life. Life can only resemble unlife.

And I just don’t agree with this.

You hear this here and there, oftentimes even in your own head. Friends decide not to come to Russia for an exhibition or conference so that they don’t take part in what happens here—as if the exhibition and conference were not organized by the same people who are preventing what is happening from taking over entirely, from dragging its oilcloth over the entire country. And other friends accuse those who have stayed (another old-new word from the current glossary) of doing work that allows the Putin majority to pretend like life is still going on as usual.