Archive! © Published in pARTisan #1’2002

Partisan and Antipartisan by Artur Klinau features the mythologeme of the partisan as a unique cultural hero in Belarus. What predetermined his emergence in Belarusian culture was the singular fact that the country was situated on the borderline of European and Eurasian metacivilisations.

Having been their battlefield for over 500 years, Belarus has seen not only the nation’s physical massacre but also cultural degradation. Under such circumstances, the partisan paradigm turns out as the only possible means to preserve the authentic Belarusian cultural code and a form of national resistance. Artur Klinau reveals the actual relation of the partisan as a real referential cultural hero to his simulacrum, i.e. the Great Partisan as a warrior god of Soviet mythology. (Producing the image of the latter used to be a major task given to Byelorussian Soviet culture by Soviet government).

The article also studies Soviet mythology and its visual manifestation within the Soviet aesthetic framework. Socialist realism as an artistic method took after decadence and became one of both most elaborate and perverse phenomena in decadent aesthetics, concludes Artur Klinau. In fact socialist realism appears to be not only the means to build a new world but also the ends, the ultimate goal, the only form in which the new world existed, that is, the only product of the Great Utopia.

[Fragment]

To wide extent partisan is a person who is outside any system, but being ‘outside system’ is not being passive — it takes the form of resistance, sometimes armed uprising. Partisan does not a priori capable of collaboration with a system, except for the outside. Any internal collaboration with a system removes the determination of partisan as a socio cultural phenomenon. The partisan’s task is not destruction of s system, it is his distant goal. And when partisan approaches to it, he loses definition of partisan and is structured in a unit of an alternative system, when its activity becomes a regular motion. The main objective of partisan is to keep physically its cultural code, the opportunity to expand its presence in the territory, as unstructured systems, hasten the moment of mutual destruction.

The purpose of partisan sometimes may seem unattainable, or can be realized only in the very distant future. Then the resistance system becomes a personal mission, a feat of the hero who realizes that he did not live to fall victory.

Partisan strength is that it develops spaces, inaccessible to a system. These spaces are areas of the irrational, to penetrate the system, which is not possible because of its location a priori in the field of rational discourse. However, partisan can easily orientate in the maze of a system. Knowing its weaknesses, partisan can cause painful shocks to a system. After that he dissolves in the zone indistinguishable for a system. Partisan can be a nightmare for a system, sublimation of its subconscious fear, because fear appears when the reflection area ends and the zone unknown and unexplained begins.

Translated by Volha Kalackaja, © photos  Ihar Ciśyn, pARTisan

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