Paper short abstract:

What happens when the potentialities for political change are fleeting, and what are the possibilities of it being sustained? In examining short-lived public readings that artist-dissident perform in Moscow streets, I employ insights from studies of political disappointment and utopian thinking.

Paper long abstract:

What happens when the potentialities for political change are fleeting? What are the possibilities of it being sustained, especially when social conditions push towards a hardening of authoritarian power? And, why even continue engaging in such politics when it is clear that on its promise it might not deliver? In my contribution to this panel I trace possible answers to these questions by examining the politics of short-lived performances of public readings that Russian artist-dissidents deliver in Moscow streets. While artist-dissidents read a range of texts that stretch from Lev Tolstoy to Aleksandra Kollontai, I especially attend to readings that center on works by the anarcho-socialist writer Victor Serge (1890-1947). One reason Serge matters is because his own politics and time was defined by great political disappointments and hopes, and that in his writing he confronted disappointment head-on. In being guided by research on literature, disappointment, and art, as well as untimely desire, I argue that Moscow street readings are not a sign of nostalgic affects and moods, but a longing for fundamental change that outlasts a historical moment even when it might have been fulfilled.

In analyses of protest and dissent the ephemeral and fleeting is often seen as a sign of vulnerability, instead of radical resilience – a refusal to entirely give up. It may be about time to conceptualize the ephemeral not as inefficiency, but as an emerging sense of how to think about resilience and other possibilities to inhabit this world.