Stir it up  Of Idiots and Other Saints

Nonsense as a radical strategy of unyielding resistance to social grievances — an uncompromising form of protest? Hardly a novelty. Leonhard Emmerling explores the revolutionary tactics of history’s most defiant nonsense-makers.

Picture this: A naked, disheveled man trudges down Fifth Avenue — or perhaps Kurfürstendamm — in broad daylight, dragging the carcass of a dog behind him. He tears off his clothes in front of Kranzlereck — or Tiffany’s — defecates in the street, enters a department store, smashes display cases, and seizes a flashlight, which he waves around while maniacally laughing. When horrified bystanders confront him (as the police arrive) he cries out in desperation: "I’m looking for a human."

This figure is not drawn from a single historical source, but rather represents a composite of various archetypes, outsiders and uncompromising critics of societal norms, found in ancient Greece and the Byzantine and Eastern Christian traditions: Saloi and Jurodivyj (of the Eastern Church), and the Cynics of ancient Greece, most famously Diogenes of Sinope (the philosopher who lived in a barrel and once told Alexander the Great to step out of his light).

An archetype of absolute, unyielding resistance

Even if they blur into myth, these figures existed in reality: Simeon of Emesa (6th century) and Andrew of Byzantium (10th century); the ascetic Basil (1468–1552/57), who preached naked in the streets of Moscow and defied Ivan the Terrible (the cathedral on Red Square is dedicated to him); Xenia of St. Petersburg (1719/1730–1803), who dressed only in men’s clothing and insisted on being addressed by her deceased husband’s name; and Griša of Kochetovka (1851–1906), who adorned himself with children’s toys and saw himself as the bridegroom of Christ. They stood up to the powerful, mocked kings and tsars, and spoke truth to the corruption of drunken clergy and bloodthirsty rulers. In a world turned upside down, the madness they enacted — eating with dogs, drinking from puddles, writhing catatonically on the ground, babbling, screaming, dancing naked in public — became a mirror of a reason gone astray, and in that inversion, a memory of a truer, better, genuinely rational world was preserved. The Saloi, the Jurodivyj, and the Cynics — alongside the (Western) figure of the idiotā, embodied by Francis of Assisi — represent a type of absolute, unyielding resistance to social injustice, a protest that knows no compromise. This sets them apart from court jesters and carnival fools, who only temporarily invert the world order, often in service of the very powers they mock, and ultimately serve to entertain their masters. Nothing could be further from the Salos or the Cynic than humor, irony, or play; their concern is total, and in their mission, they show no mercy — neither to themselves nor to others.

The raw, ugly truth

One can see an echo of this archetype of protest in the figure of punks (and their predecessors in Dadaism); a punk is no longer concerned with “constructive criticism” — which engaged citizens often demand when they feel unfairly attacked. The punk is after the raw, ugly truth about an ugly and misguided world. Noise and screaming become a form of truth-telling (parrhesia) — the fearless speech of uncomfortable truths, exemplified by the aforementioned Diogenes.
Like Saloi and Cynics, punks are an undeniably uncomfortable contemporary. They cultivate a style of ugliness, provocation, and repulsive aloofness that appears to the bourgeois as a disgusting perversion, but to the punk, it is merely a reflection of a perverted society.

In post-Soviet Russia, a number of artists such as Aleksandr Brener and Oleg Kulik protested against the emerging oligarchic state in the tradition of the Jurodivyj. Most clearly, however, it is the artists of Pussy Riot who stand in this lineage. Nadezhda Andreyevna Tolokonnikova, one of the members of Pussy Riot, was arrested, charged, and sentenced to two years in a penal colony following the group’s “punk prayer” in Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Savior (02/21/2012). During the trial that led to her conviction, she explicitly invoked the figure of the Jurodivyj, thereby placing herself within a distinctly Russian tradition of resistance and protest, one that was as despised by Tsar Ivan as it is by today’s rulers and patriarchs.

Never punch down

The repulsive absurdities and scatological antics of the Saloi, Jurodivyj, and Cynics are, admittedly, not really funny. Their “revaluation of values” (it’s no coincidence that Nietzsche devoted significant attention to the figures of the Cynic and the idiot) is meant in deadly earnest. The grotesque is a façade, behind which lies a fierce, uncompromising resolve. And yet, from Simeon of Emesa to Pussy Riot, what they never lack — even if they are devoid of humor — is empathy. Their revaluation of values seeks to correct a moral order gone off the rails: The last shall be first. Or, in other words: Never punch down.