The feminist punk rock group Pussy Riot in their signature colorful balaclavas.
Lately, whenever I have a moment to myself, I somehow feel a very real but very nebulous sense of defeat, a real inability to do anything about My Situation at all. I’m not even talking about anything personal—My Situation is really Ours. It’s the idea that there is that we are condemned to sell our labor, that we must play the game, that there is no alternative to capitalism. This idea haunts us—haunts me—every day. I have an aching feeling that my experience doesn’t matter, that ‘getting by’ today is about bending your identify to fit into the economy and a successful assimilation only mildly contorts your character, only slightly dampens your creativity, only vaguely erodes your dreams.
And then I saw Nadya Tolokno, one of the founders of Pussy Riot, speak at the Herbst Theater in San Francisco and that uncomfortable ache in my bones went away for the first time in ages: I felt like I could do something.
She walked on stage in a cool graphic tee with a light blue, short-sleeved button-up over her shoulders, and flashed a smile at us before sitting comfortably, openly, one ankle crossed over her knee. She is classically beautiful and it takes a moment to reconcile this with her manner, which is disarmingly silly. She is quick to laugh and does so with her whole body. She gesticulates passionately. While speaking, one gets the sense that a few centuries of philosophy are distilled in her head (a casual reference to Wittgenstein here, to Judith Butler there), but just before you get intimidated she starts exclaiming over something like Twin Peaks.
Nadya spent nearly two years in Russian prison as a political prisoner of conscience. She was convicted of “hooliganism motivated by religious hatred” after performing Pussy Riot song “Punk Prayer” in Moscow Cathedral of Christ the Saviour.
Almost immediately, she cut to the core of my existential dilemma as she emphasized creativity as the appropriate response to our 21st-century feeling of political impotence. She believes that we are “bombarded by shit” from every direction; that we need to curate our time, attention, and information in order to maintain a certain stillness in our lives. From that empty space, we can harness our creativity, and it is only through creative and innovative thinking that we can meaningfully address the political challenges facing us.
This assertion soon gained momentum as Nadya inveighed against the capitalist compulsion of labor. She feels that we are “too trapped in the idea that we must have a job,” and offers that she herself is “dedicated to doing nothing” (only half-joking). Since the age of 14, she has identified her ideal life as a conceptual artist and philosopher. She emphasizes self-direction; succinctly put, “the System forces you to be a douchebag” [read: exploitative, manipulative, and capital-driven at the expense of respect for human life].
Instead of working at Goldman Sachs and never leading what is really your own life, we must come up with alternative institutions that provide better solutions for actual human beings. However, she identifies ours as an “epoch of crisis of imagination” such that our minds have been circumscribed to the extent that we simply cannot think of alternatives. For this reason, we must cultivate our creativity—we must “hold vision that another world is possible.”
Another theme of her thought highlighted the significance of political art in our current moment. While most artists today are “more like jellyfish” [read: they do not think or feel critically, according to my interpretation], “real art works with the spirit of the time. And if you live with your eyes open, you have no choice but to be a political artist.” There is a need for us, for human beings, to take back the streets and disrupt the banal flow of corporate time in public spaces. (Many of Nadya’s actions with Pussy Riot and her earlier artistic group Voina took place in public spaces.) We must reconnect with the radical possibilities of human life.
Perhaps her most enduring and profound line of thought emphasized the need for global solidarity in the way that we need to encourage open communication between activists and communities in order to not only counter our postmodern isolation, but also to build a wider movement based on empathetic understanding. Her vision has no ultimate strategy apart from “being open to hearing what people have to say.”
She argues in favor of the right to support movements that one is not explicitly associated with (for her, movements like Black Lives Matter or protests against the policies of President Trump, for example) while stressing the importance of “allowing these people to be the experts of their own experiences.” To this extent, she admits that activists can and do make mistakes, that it is natural to have misunderstandings, but that we should not dismiss efforts to empathize with ‘our’ causes. She asks, “don’t reject me, tell me how to fix my mind.”
Out of these and Nadya’s additional incisive comments about feminism, descriptions of Putin’s Russia, and the veneration of the punk aesthetic, there emerges a certain dynamically naïve and recklessly sincere courage. Her willingness to actually act, to make the sorts of grand gestures that change minds, inspired me tremendously. There are few people in the public eye these days who are so admirable—who possess the voice, knowledge, and commitment to working towards a better world. At a time when so many of us cannot imagine anything but to surrender to hopelessness, Nadya reminds me, reminds us, that there are new species of solidarity waiting to be discovered.
As an ending remark, when asked what we (Americans) can do given our peculiar and particular political situation, Nadya replied with characteristic pithiness and wit: “Try to be smart when your president is super dumb,” she said. “That’s the most radical move you can make.”