22 12 2000
Larissa Lissjutkina: some more words


Christmas greetings to everybody by Larisa from Frechen!
Thank you, Ira Aristarkhova, Andrea and Jana, that you answered so quickly to my request to help me find the text of the cyborg-manifesto. I will write the letter now, and then I go to that site.
I have been thinking that my previous letter would be my last one, but there are still more letters coming, and I, oh no, cannot read all of them. My email is not connected to cyrrillica at all, so that I cannot read at all what is written in the window. I only can open cyrrillica when the text is attached. In that case I can convert it in the Winword system.
I am writing a finishing letter by the request of Andrea and Jana. Here it will be necessary somehow to reflect my positions and to evaluate the discussions?

In general, the work meant a big pleasure to me. In my opinion the level was high, the tone was basically benevolent. But the scattering of positions, points of view and tempers added a high tension to our field of discussion. Apart from the contents I highly value the art directing of our cyber-femin-conference. My wishes, which I had been hoping for, have been fully realized: interesting positions, outstanding personalities, creative provocation, this is the inavoidability to think about contested problems which emerge on the very first border of contemporary life and contemporary discourse.
I have not known the participants personally except Valya Konstantinova, whom at some time I have met very shortly in Moscow. Andrea and Jana I got to know and also met very shortly in Berlin. Now I have the impression that I quite well know you all, understand and feel your characters and intellectual profiles.

Now about my impressions of the stated positions in the discussion. Actually, it would be necessary to re-read all letters once again, now in retrospective, taking into account all that what sounded through our discussion. But I will be able to this after all the western, russian and jewish holidays, which I will spend visiting all my closer and not so close friends. So I am still answering in a sketchy way, from my memory and impression. The result is that from all participants the convinced cyberfeminists were represented by Ira Aktuganova only. There also was another letter by Alla Mitrofanova (13.12.), which I could not read unfortunately. Isn't it strange that the most differences and disagreements occured precisely with cyberfeminism, as it has been represented in our discussion.

We are really very different, but this makes our discussion productive. As Ira Aktuganova, I also sometimes have the impression that my words weren't taken as I had meant them - but so what, I went into dialogue with you, because I wish to step beyond the frames of my experience (of course not a universal one), and to get to know another experience, another generation, another discourse - also not universal ones, also wholly subjective, but because of this very valuable. And that hereby sometimes deformations of meanings are being produced, this, unfortunately, is unavoidably founded in the nature of communication.

In their introductory letter of the 21st of november Andrea and Jana asked us the following questions: "What is the common between cyberfeminists and feminists? What are the differences, especially in Russia?" To my extremest astonishment I must say that Russian cyberfeminism is antifeminism in its classical appearance, as we know it from mass consciousness and from many discussions, especially from the first years after the beginning of the politics of glasnost. Then, in the second half of the 80s, at all international conferences the Russian participants were appearing with argumentations of biological quality, stressing a positive interpretation of motherhood and fully rejecting everything what had been figured out by western feminism by that time: gender roles, social constructions, cliches and stereotypes, discrimination by language etc. After some time this situation has changed, today the russian specialists do not say anything like this anymore. But in the letters by Ira Aktuganova all classical argumentations of conservative anti-feminist discourse asounded again. On the one hand she is claiming what classical feminism is based on: that "all these constructions are in our head and maybe even in our own unconsciousness", that "every woman is above all unfree by herself", that women are ready to take responsibility onto themselves, etc. And here all of a sudden she is saying: "When, after having done all the neccessary body movements to free herself from social and inner family slavery, a Russian feminist finally will be alone with herself, she will find herself again at the same point as at the beginning of the way." A question arises: really? Is this the personal experience of Ira Aktuganova or some general rule? What made Iraarrive at such a conclusion? When bringing forward such a serious accusation of the uselessness of feminism, one mustn't do this without any proofs. Judging by the letter of the other Ira (Aristarkhova), this is not so at all.
"Feminism as a spiritual way for the chosen", "there is not much sense to waste time on the fight for rights", "the question of responsibility is a religious one", "maternal practices", all this is representing the classical canon of conservative anti-feminism. Of course, this is not an abusive word, also I do not agree with any of these positions. But in the given case I just regard the position of the russian cyberfeminism within the framework of the political and ideological spectrum.
Only in one single point I allow myself a little comment. It seems to me that the notion of "maternal practices" must not be used in such a monosemantical way as in the context of cyberfeminism. Yes, of course, at the base there is love - on one hand. On the other there is power. In a subjective way any mother is always thinking that her actions are dictated by love. However, human history, worldwide literature and personal experience of us all are overcrowded by examples of how monstrous, sickening violence to children is being commited by parental love itself. This is being expressed only by one mutilating of girls, being fulfilled by the initiative and under control of the mothers, aunts and other female family members, by the death of islamic adolescents on minefields, by violent marriages, and by other "delights". Of course, one can say that this is not referring to Russia in any way. But the sociologist Michail Gefter (?) has very accurately called Russia the "socium of power". All relationships are built on power, all spheres of live are interwoven by it, society practically does not know any other mechanisms. Under such conditions inner-family relationships are also penetrated by power. I wrote my article "Mother-mosters" on the material of the latest russian women's prose. But with this theme I touched real life, occupying myself with social beginnings of help to emigrants from Russia. I wrote letters to the authorities for them, helped to receive the according programmes for integration, went to doctors with them etc. Hereby - whether you want to or not - you see inner-family relations from close up, and what I saw quite often made my hair stand to end. "Maternal practices" is a tyranny of limited, embittered, maniacally powerful aunties, who ruin without hindrance the lives and the characters of their own children, who do not let them out of control, even when they are grown-up, who are pushing ("otshivat") away social workers who are trying to drag the grown-up children and adolescents into the "world". All this is of course motivated by love and live wisdom. Practically, one cannot doubt all this "maternal apocalypse", because the tyrannic, but sober, mother is looking quite respectable compared to the totally wasted drinking husband, if there is one at all personally.
In the context of the Russian culture all this is looking different than Ira Aktuganova has written inher letter. Women are really being ascribed the "most breathtaking qualities", which she is listing, but this is just one cultural pole. On the other cultural pole a quite as strongly radical devaluation of the image of woman is taking place, which is worst expressed by Russian "mat" (obscene language; baba). Not in any other European language there is anything as the russian "ideologemes" that mix up the woman with dirt precicely in its maternal hypostasis. The Russian Woman (written with a capital letter in the sense of Teresa de Lauretis) is either finding herself in heaven, or dragging herself around in the dirt, but one can say that such a space, where she just could be a normal man ("chelovek"), does not exist. This is the eternal problem, with which the Russian culture cannot come straight. In this sense everything is the same - be it Dostoevsky, Erofeev, Sorokin.
I hope that everything I said above will not lead to such a sad misunderstanding that the participants will start ascribing me a refusal of the saint and sacrifying maternal love. Even I would not claim in my dreams that all Russian women are monsters. Above all I am interested in the discourse of maternal practices, but it obviously is of no use when originating in the "holyness" of maternal love and maternal practices. These practices are representing a changeable and supremely ambivalent sociocultural phenomenon, and no biological or ontological constant. Freud has touched this topic, although he has not been dealing with the analysis of his own relationship withhis mother, Marina Cvetaeva has written a lot about this. It seems to me that neither literature critics nor culturologues have been researching on this very ticklish topic by Cvetaeva, limited only to pointing out the complicated relationship of the poetess to her mother.

At this point I am approaching Ira Aristarkhova, who is studying the problems of mother and matrixial economy of cyberspace (I really would like to read this very much), and many other themes of the field of theory and methodology of feminism, cyberspace, history of ideas.
The question marks which I have written on places of her letters are mainly referring to a specifying of my understanding (many things she made clear to me in her letter, and some things I found out by myself, brousing through my books) and to that it would be of use to find her publications and to read more in detail. I do not have any polemical remarks to her texts, she is very close and understandable to me, maybe because we both are concerned with sociology.

I couldn't open the letter by Alla Mitrofanova on my stupid computer. And in general I was able to read only about half of the material, the rest was not to be opened. Therefore I don't know whether there was any answer at all to the second letter by Irina Aktuganova. Maybe that what I have been writing here in argument with her has already been said by other participants, and I just couldn't read it.

It is very sad that Valya Konstantinova was not able to bring the views of her many years of practical work in women's organizations into our discussion out of her illness. Probably she has something to tell about some issues. Actually, practical success or failures of the women's movement in Russia were not represented in our discussion, we stayed within the frameworks of theory. Ira Aktuganova thinks that feminism does not bring the woman ahead. It would have been interesting, what Valya would have said to this matter. Her only remark was very sad - her colleagues have excluded her, seriuosly ill, from the project, concerning to what she just stated ironically: "Feminism in practice".

Andrea and Jana, for a long, time I've wanted to tell you this: Teresa de Lauretis is popular now, she is often being quoted. At the conference where you sent me, references to her were also being done all the time. But I think that her Woman with the capital letter and in general all her methodology is not different at all from the theory of "collective representations" by L. Levy-Bruehl. Of course, this does not devaluate any of her concrete ideas in any way. But when referring to her, it would make sense to find a position to the valuing of the novelty of this methodology. Or just to put her into reference to the classical tradition:
E. Durkheim - L. Levy-Bruehl.
That's all, time to finish this good-bye-letter.
Thanks to everybody, I am greeting everybody to the holidays.
Larissa Lissjutkina


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