Parts of this paper were originally published in my book The Trickster and the System: Identity and Agency in Contemporary Society (Routledge, 2015). The sections ‘Definitions of the Trickster’ and ‘Common Motifs in Trickster Narratives’ appear here in abridged versions.

I am very grateful to Routledge for allowing me to include material from The Trickster and the System into this presentation. I would also like to thank Roman Leibov for allowing me use Pavlensky’s letters.

Gonzo Tricksterism vs Politics: Anarchy, Sabotage and Self-Sacrifice

This paper discusses the contemporary manifestations of the phenomenon I call gonzo tricksterism - a form of political protest, often disguised as a creative product, whose sole aim is to expose and mock the system and its operations. One of the most defining characteristics of this phenomenon is that the human agent takes upon himself or herself the role of the trickster and uses the human frame to fight against the perceived systemic oppression. In their defiant stance, gonzo tricksters are often prepared to sacrifice themselves (their body, mental health, career and social position) in order to draw attention to a particular issue. The ‘gonzo’ part of the term reflects the participatory, first hand, experience-orientated nature of their activities. The ‘trickster’ part refers to their willingness to take on the role of a bringer of change and to challenge the existing societal power dynamics.

Empowered by the immediacy of the new media, the trickster protest has become one of the most effective tools of social criticism. Recent prominent manifestations of it include the Russian performance artist Pyotr Pavlensky, the punk band Pussy Riot, the Ukrainian ultra- feminist protest group Femen, the trio of whistleblowers Julian Assange, Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning, and the extreme comedic exploits of Frankie Boyle and Sacha Baron-Cohen.

This paper also includes Pyotr Pavlensky’s prison letters in which he writes about the conflict between the individual and the state. These letters are translated by me and are published with kind permission of Roman Leibov, Associate Professor of Poetics of Russian Literature, Tartu University, Estonia.

Gonzo tricksterism, as evident from the above list, is not limited to a single profession. This difficult and controversial vocation attracts musicians, artists, IT security specialists, comedians, actors, journalists, writers and soldiers - and the list is not exhaustive. Although at first sight a motley crew, the group nevertheless have one thing in common: they reject the prescribed normative behaviour in their respective societies, recognizing it as a rigid system of rules aimed at limiting individual freedom. Moreover, their rejection is active rather than passive as they openly attack the framework and the people who maintain it (let’s call these people ‘the frameworkers’). The actions of a gonzo trickster are based on the assumption that all systems are man-made, and therefore adopting a different (an outsider’s) perspective will reveal the flaws in the ‘given’ structure which looks solid and logical from the inside. Their mission consists of delivering this different, outsider’s view to the masses and shocking them out of their slumber. They pay dearly for the privilege: many are prosecuted by their respective states (Snowden, Manning, Assange, Pavlensky, ‘Pussy Riot’ and many others).

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Even if one does not take into consideration this enlightening, idealistic, aspect of gonzo tricksterism, rebels’ activities boil down to creating a balance between change and stability, between creative dynamics and the safety of belonging to a system, between individuals and the sociopolitical framework that contains and controls them. Bordering between reckless and heroic, Gonzo tricksters take upon themselves the anthropological role of system-tamer and change-bringer, often without much concern for their own safety and security. In this sense, they are no different from their mythological and folkloric colleagues: the Greek Prometheus, the Chinese Sun Wukong, the Scandinavian Loki, the American Br'er Rabbit, the Russian Ivan the Fool and numerous other trickster figures that reflect the complex anthropological dynamics between loose and rigid elements in a social system.

Gonzo tricksters’ journeys also have structural similarities with and contain the stock elements of mythological, literary and cinematic trickster narratives: being trapped, boundary-breaking, licentious behaviour, scatological humour, bodily transformations, the presence of animals (which I prefer to call ‘the animal connection’), naming issues, loss of control over one’s body and mind, and the trickster’s dissolution/death/transformation at the end of the story. Usually, a trickster narrative starts with the cunning creature being or feeling restricted (often physically), goes on to describe the trickster’s escape and its adventures, and ends with the dissolution/transformation of the trickster. Not all of the elements can be present in one story, film or myth, and their place in the narrative sequence is certainly not fixed. However, the core sequence of events does not have much variety: the trickster challenges the system, instigates change, is caught and inoculated, and the framework deals with the inevitable change (or repairs the damage caused by the trickster).

Born in the and raised by extremely normal and conformist parents, I have always been fascinated by people who refuse to accept the status quo. There were plenty of them in the USSR: poet Joseph Brodsky, writers Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Vladimir Bukovsky, physicist Andrei Sakharov to name but a few. Regarded as anarchists and saboteurs, as dangerously a-systemic people, they were vilified in the Soviet media, publicly shamed, locked up in prisons or mental health institutions, ostracised, and expelled from the country. Yet, they remained unbreakable, stood by their principles, and waited for the tricksterless system that despised progress, change and criticism, to fold in on itself. Their patience paid off: the system did eventually crumble.

Gonzo trickster is probably the oldest profession in the world. Judging by the sheer number of trickster characters in myth and folk tales, our predecessors were very much interested in the dynamics between change and stability in social systems. Mythological tricksters and their contemporary cinematic and literary versions share a range of characteristics, united by one idea: one should never accept things ‘as they are’; one should never uncritically merge with the framework into which one is born or placed. One should question, criticise, and annoy the system. Tricksters in narratives do this in a variety of ways, from stealing fire from the gods to warning the king about possible grave consequences of being too proud and despotic. Meanwhile, their gonzo colleagues do the same in real life.

Definitions of the Trickster

There have been numerous attempts to define the trickster but this paper only has space for a few major definitions.

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For Carl Jung, the trickster is an archetype – that is, an archaic, universal image regularly occurring in myth, folk tales and dreams. In his seminal essay ‘On the Psychology of the Trickster Figure’, Jung defines him as a creature of the unconscious, the wise fool, the clown, the delight-maker who has a dual nature: half-animal, half divine. Tricksters reverse the hierarchic order, are capable of changing shape and are famous for their malicious tricks and pranks. Jung also mentions the strong link between the Trickster figure and the tradition of carnival, where the Devil appeared as simia dei – the ape of God (CW9/I: paras. 465-472).

The duality of the trickster’s nature and his mutability are also emphasized by several cultural anthropologists. Paul Radin writes in the preface to The Trickster: A Study in American Indian Mythology (1956) that the trickster ‘knows neither good nor evil yet he is responsible for both. He possesses no values, moral or social, is at the mercy of his passions and appetites, yet through his actions all values come into being’ (Radin, 1972: xxiii). He also foreshadows ‘the shape of man’ (1972: xxiv).

The folklorist Barbara Babcock-Abrahams argues that the trickster is responsible for ‘the tolerated margin of mess’; he is the kind of creature who does not respect rules, restrictions and regulations: ‘Although we laugh at him for his troubles and his foolishness and are embarrassed by his promiscuity, his creative cleverness amazes us and keeps alive the possibility of transcending the social restrictions we regularly encounter’ (Babcock-Abrahams, 1975: 147). Likewise, Andrew Samuels calls attention to the trickster’s ability to revive the ‘civilizing forces’ of society by shaking them up (either in a positive or a negative sense). As such, this figure ‘acts as a yardstick and spur to consciousness’ (Samuels, 1993: 83). Thus, the trickster describes the process of individual development and meaning-making in relation to a socializing and civilizing structure. As a psycho-anthropological phenomenon, it is of paramount importance for the balance between the social and the personal in the individual’s life.

Common Motifs in Trickster Narratives

Being Trapped Tricksters can be trapped at any stage throughout the narrative, and when they are locked up, this is usually as a punishment for some misbehaviour such as theft, lying or murder. When a narrative starts with the trickster freeing itself from his prison, the rest of the narrative is devoted to the characters’ efforts to regain control over the situation and to recapture or tame him.

The entrapment metaphor also describes the destructive potential of the trickster, who becomes more powerful the longer he is kept inside his cage. If neglected by the system, change tends to accumulate and grow. The Arabic trickster, Sakr al-Jinni from One Thousand and One Arabian Nights is stuffed into a jar and sent drifting in the open ocean for rebelling against King Suleiman. There he remains for two thousand years during which time he is ‘washed and swashed like a lake squeezed into a cup or a whale squeezed into an egg’ (McCaughrean, 1999: 35-36).

Meanwhile, Loki the Norse trickster should be locked up because his rebelliousness and unpredictability might cause Ragnarok. He threatens to destroy civilization with his anarchic

3 behaviour. When it arrives, ‘the world be in uproar, the air quaking with booms and blares and their echoes’, and all the monsters and giants will be released from Hel, the realm of the dead (Crossley-Holland, 1993: 171). Therefore, Loki is captured, placed into a cave, strapped to stone slabs, and a snake is placed above him which keeps dripping poison onto his face (1993: 169-170).

Overall, ‘being trapped’ is an important structural element which embodies a psycho- anthropological counterweight to the system’s authoritativeness and exactitude.

Boundary-Crossing

The trickster’s boundary-breaking and map re-drawing activities can be malicious, playful or heroic – and sometimes all three at once. Many tricksters are shameless thieves – which means transgressing one of the basic frontiers ever invented by civilization – private property. Hermes steals Apollo’s cattle and Prometheus steals Zeus’s fire. A Native American trickster Yehl the Raven is lazy and greedy. He appropriates a whole load of treasures – food, finest furs and walrus ivory – which he finds on a seemingly abandoned island. For his misdeeds he is grabbed by invisible hands which start suffocating him with supernatural strength as a hundred voices whisper: ‘Give it back, give it all back!’ (Erdoes and Ortiz, 1999: 249).

Tricksters’ compulsive desire to cross and break boundaries has both ‘high’ and ‘low’ meanings. On the one hand, the trickster is a pre-civilized, shameless creature incapable of belonging to the system and following the rules laid out for everyone. On the other, it is someone capable of challenging a structure precisely because it does not know its true value and is not afraid of its power. Importantly, it does not see its imprisonment and isolation from society as shameful for it simply does not understand the concept of ‘shame’. It either does not care, or sees it as an achievement to be proud of.

Shapeshifting

Tricksters are notorious shapeshifters. They frequently change their appearance, transform into various animals and objects – even change their sex. Parts of their bodies fall off, but they grow back or can be reattached onto the body. The trickster’s hands, legs, penis and anus all have minds of their own and ‘do what they want’. Tricksters’ bodies are fluid and malleable, and it is hard to damage them ‘permanently’. For instance, the trickster Veeho from a Cheyenne tale loses his buttocks for ‘giving unasked advice’ and being too curious. One day he passes a giant who is uprooting trees in order to make arrows out of them. Veeho is curious as to how trees can be used as arrows, and asks the giant for a demonstration. The tree hits Veeho on the bottom, and his buttocks fall off. The giant kindly collects them and slam them against Veeho’s backside. They grow back into their place instantly. The only problem is – he now has his left buttock on the right side, and his left buttock on the left side (Erdoes and Ortiz, 1999: 152).

It is not easy to damage a trickster permanently, for his very power lies in his unconsciousness. When murdered or challenged by gods, giants or natural powers tricksters tend to spring back to life or rebuild themselves from scratch. For instance, the Argentinean trickster Tokwa transforms into a tree and a gourd in an attempt to escape the great flood he accidentally caused. The water uproots the tree, and smashes the gourd into pieces. But ‘such beings as he’ – the tale goes – ‘can’t stay dead’. Naturally, he revives himself and goes on to introduce other big changes to the world, including the invention of fire (Sherman, 1996: 100-101).

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Many tricksters lack a stable sense of sexual identity. Coyote, Loki, Wakdjunkaga, Nixant and Uncle Tompa all change into women (usually to fool other women, and then catch them off guard). Some of them just cross-dress; others undergo ‘proper’ transformations. The shapeshifter Loki transforms into an old woman in order to catch the goddess Frigg off guard, and find out from her what object might hurt the otherwise inharmable Balder (it is mistletoe) (Crossley-Holland, 1993: 149).

Shapeshifting is closely linked to the issues of shame and identity, while the theme of resurrection metaphorically represents the individuating, identity-making component of the trickster impulse. The ‘simple’ tricksters such as Coyote and Raven have no concept of shame and no stable vision of themselves, and therefore lie and deceive without any qualms. However, the tricksters who use deception and shapeshifting for survival purposes (such as Tyl) – and particularly in tales discussing the matters of social class – discard shame in order to reclaim their identity from the system.

Creationism

Tricksters tend to be madly, unstoppably creative. Often their creative activities are linked to the birth of the world. Their creativity is not human – not directed, conscious and framed – but spontaneous, wild and random. It is the opposite of the system in that it is free and unframed. Like their endless tricks, it is part of their playful attitude towards the world. They are capable of re-arranging their surroundings, and adapting them to suit themselves. The new order is born out of mischief and play.

For instance, in a short Yokuts tale, Coyote and Eagle create the earth and people, and teach humans to fend for themselves. In a Zuni tale, Coyote accidentally ‘invents’ winter by opening a box he is prohibited to open. The box contains the moon (Erdoes and Ortiz, 1999: 6). In another tale, belonging to Miwok, Coyote steals the sun, thus creating day and night. He is also responsible for designing human beings (1999: 6-16). The Argentinian Tokwa ‘changes the face of the world’ by freeing the waters encased within one mighty bottle (Sherman, 1996: 100). Often tricksters create new power arrangements by stealing fire from assorted gods and giants – Prometheus is the best known example of this; but there are also numerous ethnic tricksters who do the same, for instance, the Philipino prankster Lam-ang (Sherman, 1996: 85). Thus they empower people and re-draw the power balance between gods and humans (and between the unlimited powers of the unconscious and the still frail human consciousness).

Loss of Control

The problem of control is symbiotically connected with the issue of shame. Mythological tricksters, being metaphorically pre-individual, do not claim to have control over their bodies or actions. Things always happen to the trickster – like they do to the Winnebago trickster Wakdjunkaga who regularly loses control over his body and does not take responsibility for his actions. He does a number of stupid things and is not ashamed of looking silly or being considered stupid by his social environment, primarily because the concept of the social environment – the world of separate ‘objects’ – is not yet known to it. For instance, Wakdjunkaga often experiences problems with various body parts being unruly and even quarrelsome. For instance, his hands start fighting with each other in the middle of killing a buffalo (Radin, 1972: 8).

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The Trickster’s Dissolution

In many trickster tales – and this is particularly noticeable in large cycles containing a series of trickster transformations – the trickster spirit is dissolved at the end of the narrative. After the creative, chaotic unconscious energy has been woken up for the purpose of disrupting the stale (personal or social) order, it must go back to its dark wellspring. The trickster impulse does not die but is absorbed by the personality structure, and becomes an essential part of the individuating forces which would later closely guard the balance between the personal and the social in the individual’s life. The trickster energy is still alive underneath the structuring forces of the social order.

One of the common narrative sequences in the trickster genre is ‘trickster tamed’. The narrative opens with the release of the trickster from a small and stifling place, and ends with the trickster being under control again. The story of the Jinni, in all its varieties, is a good example of this. Prometheus and Loki are imprisoned by the gods because their actions are potentially lethal for the existing order. Native American tricksters Coyote, Raven, Wakdjunkaga, Veeho and Nixant are often punished by what the tales indicate as ‘powerful people’. The dissolution of the trickster at the end of a tale or cycle of tales is linked to his shapeshifting and boundary-crossing abilities. For instance, in one particular story Coyote plays the role of the psychopomp, visits the land of the dead and attempts to revive all the spirits he finds there. He takes them to the land of the living, but they escape on the way (Erdoes and Ortiz, 1999: 15). Coyote grows sad, but eventually accepts the limitations to his magic abilities (sheds his ‘primary omnipotence’).

The Trickster and Sex

Another prominent feature of the trickster is his obsession with sex. Because he is a shapeshifter and breaker of taboos, he is capable of having sex with virtually any object. For the trickster, sex is a very vague notion and is certainly not subject to control or prohibitions – or even the strictest taboos. Most cultures have a catalogue of ‘indecent’ fairytales containing the sexual adventures of rogues and fools. For instance, both Northern American Coyote and Wakdjunkaga cycles include stories which depict the tricksters as oversexed owners of uncontrollable penises, whereas Russian fairytales of the ‘indecent’ kind often portray cunning peasant males duping unsuspecting females into having sex with them. On the one hand, the sexual motif shows to the audience the difference between the proper, adult behaviour and the behaviour before the onset of shame. The audience laughs at the stupid trickster because they can clearly see the ‘civilizing’ boundary which protects them from the dark contents of the unconscious, thus ensuring the safety and stability of the social structure. On the other hand, many a trickster narrative employ the sexual motif to challenge a social structure whose oppressiveness stretches beyond the essential rules of decency and propriety. In this case the trickster uses the power of sexuality metaphorically. As a fundamental anti- structural force with unlimited destructive potential, the sexual instinct is a constant threat to the structuring forces of society.

Scatological References

Scatology is a regular guest in trickster tales. This kind of basic humour – alongside sexual references – is another fundamental way of deflating the system and dragging it off its high

6 horse. It works because the trickster is unaware of the shameful aspect of all things scatological.

Like the sexual motif, scatological references in trickster tales sometimes have social and political allusions. This is common in canons describing a well-established class system (feudalism and up). The trickster in these tales tends to be conscious of his actions, and his choice to ignore shame is also deliberate and conscious. For this type of trickster, profanity and lewdness are some of the few ways of challenging the immobility of the social system. For instance, in the Tibetan tale ‘Uncle Tompa Drops Sh*t on the Ruler’s Lap’, the trickster restores justice and literally makes his cruel and hypocritical master ‘eat sh*t’ (Dorje, 1997: 41-43).

Bodily functions and excreta are the first ‘victims’ of the civilizing efforts of the system in ontogenetic development. This makes profanity an effective tool of protest because it shakes the founding principles of social existence; it transgresses the basic rules of decent behaviour. Civilization, the trickster discovered, can be challenged and scared to death with something as innocuous as a bare ass.

The Trickster-Artist

It is only natural that creative people become gonzo tricksters because of the anti-systemic and rebellious potential of creativity. Trickster-artists are often prepared sacrifice themselves and to take physical and legal risks to further their art. The task of the gonzo trickster is to uncover what is hidden, to bring the taboo subjects to light, to make people aware of the political aspect of shame. In so doing, they become martyrs because system retaliates and attempts to restore the status quo, either by imprisoning or destroying the trickster.

Interestingly enough, the ranks of trickster-artists comprise a significant number of women. Examples of female gonzo creativity include the artists Carolee Schneemann, Tracey Emin and Marina Abramović whose performances involved the female body, often displayed or damaged, and aimed to shock the audience. For instance, during her act Interior Scroll (1975), the feminist Schneemann gradually extracted a scroll of paper from her vagina, and read her speech from it. Tracey Emin famously displayed her untidy sleeping place in My Bed (1999), and some of Abramović’s visual experiments involved physical damage to her body, including letting the audience violate her with a range of objects in Rhythm 0 (1974), and losing consciousness after running out of oxygen during the performance of Breathing In/Breathing Out (1977) with her partner and fellow artist Ulay.

The controversial performance artist Katarzyna Kozyra is another (albeit lesser known) example of creative trickster. Her performances contain all kinds of transformations, from cross-dressing and gender bending to dressing as animals. Her tools are varied, and her own body is the main canvas for her uncanny experiments. Her art also involves uncomfortable nudity, with bodies shown being less than perfect, or the context in which they are framed being inappropriate. This confronting of the audience with shame, a feeling that is born out of the sense of ‘propriety’, is part of the traditional trickster ploy of boundary-breaking and gender bending. In some of her works she wears a prosthetic penis on an otherwise slim feminine body and openly parades it. Others involve naked elderly people: women wearing prosthetic penises and men prosthetic vaginas, performing dance moves.

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Her performances are full of the trickster’s imperfect, spontaneous creationism, her creative process is messy rather than orderly or beautiful. William Hynes in Mythological Trickster Figures (1993) links the ‘creationist’ motifs in trickster tales with scatological references also prevalent in them:

… all creative intentions are ultimately excreta. Like the mystic who constantly reminds us that no words or doctrinal construct can express adequately the ineffable nature of God, the trickster reminds us that no one creative ordering can capture life. In so far as an ordering continues to express life, it continues to be viable. If not viable, such ordering will drop away, be replaced with new productivities, or this ordering will work to repeal their potential replacements. (Hynes and Doty, 1993: 216).

Some of her projects are collaborations with the German drag queen who calls herself Gloria Viagra - a very tall and colourful performer against whom the tiny Kozyra is almost invisible. Occasionally Kozyra would copy Gloria’s look and the two would appear together as two identical drag queens. Gloria is also present in Kozyra’s famous piece titled Castrato (2006), in which the artist is singing opera on stage wearing a naked body suit with a penis attached to it. The penis is subsequently removed, leaving a gaping hole in the crotch area of the suit. Very much like traditional tricksters - Wakdjunkaga, Loki and the like - Kozyra defies socially delineated vision of a gendered self and keeps playing with the boundaries of the human body. By defying the concept of propriety, she rejects the idea of shame.

There are, however, artists, who push the boundaries so much that they take the idea of shamelessness to the absolute extreme. One most recent – and probably the most extreme – example of gonzo trickster is the Russian performance artist Pyotr Pavlensky who sacrifices his body for the sake of art and political protest. In the best trickster traditions, Pavlensky uses nudity (the major component of most of his performances) to criticise and challenge a sociopolitical structure.

His most scandalous gonzo-installations include sewing up his mouth in support of Pussy Riot; stripping naked and wrapping himself in barbed wire in protest against the repressive actions of the government (Carcass); cutting off his earlobe in protest against the political abuse of psychiatry in (Segregation), and, shockingly, nailing his scrotum to the cobblestones in Red Square (Fixation). The latter installation had a statement attached to it:

The performance can be seen as a metaphor for the apathy, political indifference and fatalism of contemporary Russian society. As the government turns the country into one big prison, stealing from the people and using the money to grow and enrich the police apparatus and other repressive structures, society is allowing this, and forgetting its numerical advantage, is bringing the triumph of the police state closer by its inaction. (Walker, The Guardian, 11 November 2013)

Another of his statements, also referring to Fixation, reads: ‘It’s not the authorities who hold people by their balls. It’s people themselves. The country will turn into a police state if people do nothing’ (Lally, The Washington Post, November 15). Pavlensky’s protests are powerful statements precisely because they involve one of the most effective tools of trickster influence – the body. They confuse both the authorities and the police because the punishment is administered by the artist himself, and not by the representatives of the state. He reclaims the

8 power that had previously belonged to the authorities. The body is no longer owned by them. It becomes the shapeshifting, and regenerated, body of the trickster.

Moreover, he is also now a trapped trickster. Since November 2015 Pavlensky has been in custody following his most recent and most daring performance to date, The Gates of Hell, which involved setting on fire the infamous front door of the KGB Headquarters, the Lubyanka building. Roman Leibov, an Associate Professor in the Department of Russian literature at Tartu University, initiated correspondence with the artist with a view to giving him a voice and providing an opportunity to explain the concepts behind his projects.

It is clear from the letters exchanged between Leibov and Pavlensky that the artist thinks in archetypes and does not try to clarify the complexities of symbolism he is using in his art - although this may be the result of him being careful about what he says in correspondence that is checked by the prison staff. The letters contain large programmatic statements outlining the principal ideas of Pavlensky’s art: the conflict between the individual and the state, the Promethean role of the artist in this conflict, and political apathy of the masses. For instance, in the letter sent around the November 2015 (it is not dated), the artist invokes the symbol of the burning fire (the one that formed the core of his Burning Door artwork) to define his confrontation with the oppressive state. He also reveals that the other target of his shocking art is the ‘obedient citizen’, the main supporter of oppressive state power:

The empire we had in the eighteenth century still persists in the twenty first. The story of everyone who happens to be trapped inside its borders is the never-ending story of the conflict between the individual and the state. I haven’t exactly invented political art; I am not doing anything new. The symbolism I use in my performances has been known for centuries. The only element that really changes is the context. My main aim here is to keep the masses awake, to prevent them from falling into an ideological slumber. My duty is to create so much noise that society starts suffering from chronic insomnia. It’s a very important duty, and it’s particularly satisfying to see all these obedient citizens, offended by the tolling bell and terrified of the blazing flame, rush to perform their civil duty, and summon firefighters and the police. These citizens’ integrity, though, is not my problem, but entirely theirs. I think that it’s futile to wait for the right moment, for the time when the masses are active enough to change the political situation. One has to act now, one has to keep the fire burning – even when all the emergency services in the vicinity are mobilized to suffocate the budding flame. Pyotr Pavlensky (personal communication, November 2015, my translation)

In another letter, dated 24th May, Pavlensky criticises the passivity of Russian painters of the past centuries. These creatives were supposed to be on the forefront of the trickster revolution but instead chose safer forms of self-expression and avoided political content in their art. Meanwhile, writers were the ones who sacrificed themselves for the sake of social change in Russia, they were the ones raising the issues of poverty, political change, and socialism:

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In my view, the entire history of Russian culture is determined by the conflict between the individual and the state. This dynamic is paradoxical as well as irresolvable. Russian literature had waded into this conflict way before all other art forms. Meanwhile, up to the beginning of the twentieth century Russian painters were prepared to be mere court servants whose task was to render the greatness of God, the Tsar and the State. Even the most idiosyncratic of them merely resorted to illustrating the influential texts of the time. ‘The Word’ truly dominated the Russian cultural sphere; an almost religious importance was attached to it by the culture. That’s why the lives of Radishchev, Ryleev, Herzen, Chernyshevsky, Tolstoy, Mayakovsky, and later also Malevich, Filonov, Mandelstam, Kharms, Vvedensky, Oleinikov, Punin, Platonov, Shalamov (and many other writers whose names I cannot immediately recall) have proven that the conflict between the individual and the state is irresolvable. Yet – paradoxically – these enemies of monarchy and bolshevism have formed the core of the school curriculum. That’s how the existing political order undermines itself by planting the seeds of social conflict into the minds of each new generation of individuals. This seedling of a conflict is then either split off and rejected by the fragmented psyche of the obedient citizen or, alternatively, it grows into the next rebellious movement.

To be completely honest, I have no idea why the social order maintains the model of culture based on this continuous dynamics.

Pyotr Pavlensky (personal communication, 24 May 2016, my translation)

This last line is very important because it reflects the strange love-hate relationship that systems often have with tricksters. Why keep a pet trickster when it’s such a dangerous creature? Systems need tricksters; they can’t live without these irritating elements that effectively act as anthroposocial forces to cause a movement within a structure, to highlight its stale elements, and to initiate the renewal process. Any structure without an internal or external irritant crumbles under its own weight, but only the most adaptable ones (capitalism included) manage to turn the trickster into a machine generating constant innovation and change.

IT Security Saboteurs

Ancient Greeks already spotted the connection between communication, speed and danger when they made Hermes the god of communication. This particular trickster god was also responsible for trade, reflecting his connection with the unpredictable world of finance. Trickster is about change and movement, both of which are played against the stability of the system.

The information age is the age of the trickster more than any other era. It’s the time when knowledge becomes so fluid that there is never an absolute guarantee that it will not escape from its enclosure. Information and media become the playground of trickster energies when a ‘single point of failure’ (Edward Snowden’s term) in an otherwise well-organized, solid structure can compromise the system’s credibility by spreading classified information at the

10 touch of a button. It is not surprising that information leaks, which reflect the shapeshifting aspect of the trickster, caused a range of political scandals in the past few years, including the parliamentary expenses scandal (2009) and several high profile ‘geek leak’ incidents such as the exploits of the former NSA employee Edward Snowden, the US Army whistleblower Chelsea Manning and the Australian computer programmer Julian Assange.

All three went against some of the most powerful systems in the world, and paid dearly for their bravery: Manning is serving a thirty-five-year prison sentence for espionage, Assange is hiding in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, and Snowden was granted a temporary asylum in Russia. All can be said to have ended up in a limbo, in captivity, ‘neither dead nor alive’, which is actually a normal state of affairs for certified tricksters. Manning and Assange also possess other traditional trickster attributes: gender fluidity (Manning is openly transgender) and problematic sexual behaviour (Assange faces allegations of rape and sexual assault in Sweden).

The boundaries these three have crossed are so serious that there is little chance they will ever be pardoned or safe. The most eloquent of them, Edward Snowden, defends his decision to leak the top-secret documents in his charge as an NSA employee in numerous interviews. Some of these revelations uncover the monstrosity of the state which would stop at nothing to control its citizens, such as the existence of the PRISM surveillance program which collects internet communications from US internet companies and effectively spies on both politicians and ordinary people all around the world. In one of the several interview he gave to The Guardian, Snowden - very much like any gonzo trickster including Pavlensky and the Soviet dissidents - explains his decision to put his life and social status on the line by the refusal to live ‘unfreely but comfortably’ - the way most of us do. He is also completely aware of the consequences of his actions:

You can't come forward against the world's most powerful intelligence agencies and be completely free from risk because they're such powerful adversaries. No one can meaningfully oppose them. If they want to get you, they'll get you in time. But at the same time you have to make a determination about what it is that's important to you. And if living unfreely but comfortably is something you're willing to accept, and I think it many of us are it's the human nature; you can get up everyday, go to work, you can collect your large paycheck for relatively little work against the public interest, and go to sleep at night after watching your shows.

But if you realize that that's the world you helped create and it's gonna get worse with the next generation and the next generation who extend the capabilities of this sort of architecture of oppression, you realize that you might be willing to accept any risk and it doesn't matter what the outcome is so long as the public gets to make their own decisions about how that's applied.

(Greenwald and Poitras, The Guardian, 9 June 2013)

Snowden describes the dangers of mass surveillance as the biggest threat to freedom and democracy, as the point where the very concept of Western society as opposed to, say,

11 oppressive Russia or Middle Eastern dictatorships, starts to die because of the growing power and omnipresence of the system:

Because even if you're not doing anything wrong you're being watched and recorded. And the storage capability of these systems increases every year consistently by orders of magnitude to where it's getting to the point where you don't have to have done anything wrong. You simply have to eventually fall under suspicion from somebody even by a wrong call. And then they can use this system to go back in time and scrutinize every decision you've ever made, every friend you've ever discussed something with. And attack you on that basis to sort to derive suspicion from an innocent life and paint anyone in the context of a wrongdoer.

(Greenwald and Poitras, The Guardian, 9 June 2013)

What is also extremely curious is the fact that both Assange and Snowden seem to have good relations with Russia - highly the land of free speech, or home to many tricksters. Yet, in the battle between change and oppression, for a trickster to be too principled would mean to be caught and destroyed. Both Snowden and Assange realise that they are much more useful alive than imprisoned or killed.

The Attack of the Female Trickster

The female trickster – particularly in the form of a feminist – is the ultimate kind of gonzo trickster. She is doubly anti-systemic because systems favour patriarchal properties: control, order, hierarchy and structure. As Ricki Tannen writes in The Female Trickster: the Mask that Reveals (2007), today the trickster-woman has come to create ‘a new relationship with the historical adversity and hostility found in western consciousness toward females manifesting autonomy, agency, and authenticity as single, fulfilled, physically strong, and psychologically whole individuals’ (Tannen, 2007: 10). Tannen goes on to discuss a range of real historical figures (female authors and comedians) and ‘fictive female sleuths’ who can be seen as female tricksters challenging the patriarchal discourse using their minds, bodies and texts.

Female gonzo acts are particularly transgressive because the trickster-woman breaks into the forbidden room and uncovers male shame – male weaknesses and fear – which she is not supposed to see because, if she does, the Bluebeard will lose his power. It is not surprising that female gonzo performers prefer ‘physical’ and sexual ways of delivering their messages: the body and its basic functions are the first targets of systemic control when the baby is being integrated into ‘civilization’, and it therefore becomes the trickster’s first line of attack. The female body in particular is the traditional target of patriarchal control and regulation. In shocking the audience with sexuality, nakedness or other transgressions, the trickster merely aims to provide the audience with an alternative view of things. Desacralization thus becomes a political act.

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Femen

FEMEN is an extreme feminist protest group founded in 2008. On their official website they call themselves a ‘sextremist movement’. FEMEN members conduct their protests half-naked, which has nothing to do with traditional sexuality, but is meant to symbolise equality with men and freedom of expression. The official pictures displayed on the website are deliberately violent: a smiling pretty woman is holding a bloodied sickle in one hand and a male scrotum in the other; a woman dressed up as ‘death’ is announcing ‘death for the patriarchy’; another model, wearing heavy make-up, has the word ‘witch’ written in black across her bare chest. All are half-naked.

The founder of the movement is Anna Hutsol, a Russian-born Ukrainian former economist and talent manager. By her own admission, she created the movement, which has since become international, in response to the growing Ukrainian sex industry which was heavily dependent on foreigners coming to the country to enjoy accessible sex services. She says in an interview to the French channel : ‘I set up FEMEN because I realised that there was a lack of women activists in our society; is male-oriented and women take a passive role’ (France 24 website, 28 August 2009, http://observers.france24.com/content/20090828-how- they-protest-prostitution-ukraine--sex-tourism). Interestingly enough, Hutsol emphasizes the sexual aspect of her chosen format: ‘We thought we’d create an organization where young girls could come and help others like them and help society. And the format we picked was this extremely sexy, bright way of presenting ourselves’ (Magnay, CNN website, 21 January 2011).

The jury is still open on the authenticity of this female trickster which is accused of being an entertaining media project and not ‘the real thing’. In other words, it is implied that, despite claiming otherwise, FEMEN and their mastermind are not employing their inner ‘civilized tricksters’ in order to deal with the rigidity of the patriarchal system. They are not rebels fighting for women’s right to have non-systemically-constructed identities. Instead, they are just having fun for the sake of having fun, enjoying the attention and are, in fact, just destructive narcissists. As ever, the main problem with tricksters is that they defy definitions, and it is often difficult to tell the difference between ‘meaningless destruction’ and ‘meaningful destruction’ with absolute certainty.

Pussy Riot The female punk band ‘Pussy Riot’ is another example of female tricksterism publicized and supported by both Russian and international media. In fact, it can be said that it is various forms of media, from newspapers to blogs and social networks, that solidified them as a protest project after they had been arrested for their performance of the song ‘Mother of God, Drive Putin Away’ on the 21st of February 2013. The band is an offspring of another performance art project called Voina (‘War’) which specializes in highly controversial public stunts and uses technology to spread their message. Examples of Voina’s stunts include a sex orgy at the Timiryazev State Biological Museum in Moscow (a metaphorically expressed protest against the Russian presidential elections of 2012) and drawing a gigantic phallus on the Liteiny bridge in St. Petersburg – right in front of the Russia’s headquarters. The latter action was titled D*ck Captured by the FSB.

Both the projects are non-profit which allows them to sustain their purely liminal status. Being thus free of systemic influence, they have the total freedom of (trickster) expression. Notably, most members of the projects are philosophy graduates or students of the Philosophical Faculty

13 of the Moscow State University. Yet, despite its philosophical foundations, the tricksterism generated by the group is genuine in the Rabelaisian sense as it aims to break the best-guarded boundaries (the government, the police, the secret service) and involves the use of basic bodily functions to shock ‘the mass’ out of their slumber. The idea is to challenge the country’s biggest narcissistic structures by doing embarrassing and unpredictable things. Their message is clear: the authorities cannot use shame to control members of the group because Voina disposed of the concept of shame altogether. It is difficult to imagine a more outrageous act of defiance than having group sex in a public place, documenting the whole thing, and then publicising it on the internet. Like the artist Pavlensky, who sees his personal physical body as reflecting the body of the public, the members of Voina have become ‘shameless’ in order to free themselves from any systemic influence. When agency is taken away from the individual, the body is the only remaining area of control the individual still possesses. In performances like this, the violence received by the physical body becomes the metaphor for the state of society.

In February 2012, five members of the Pussy Riot band wearing brightly-coloured clothes and balaclavas, entered the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour of the Russian Orthodox Church in Moscow and performed a song in which they asked Mother of God to get rid of Vladimir Putin. The aim of the action was to sabotage the upcoming presidential elections which were expected to be rigged. By staging the action at the Cathedral, the band attracted the public’s attention to the widespread corruption in the Orthodox Church and to its close links with the Russian government. Three members of the band – Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, Maria Alekhina, and Yekaterina Samutsevich were arrested and put on trial for blasphemy and hooliganism. All three were sentenced to two years in a corrective penal colony on the 12th of August, 2012. The judge defended her verdict saying that the three women ‘crudely undermined social order’ (BBC News website, 17 August 2012, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-19297373). Tolokonnikova, who was sent to the one of the tough penal colonies in Mordovia, continued her trickster activities in prison: in September 2013 she went on hunger strike in protest against the inhuman conditions and slave labour to which the inmates of the colony were subjected. After her eventual release, she became more active than ever, coming up with even more provocative acts, getting arrested and taunting representatives of the state. She also became a celebrity both in the West and in Russia which allowed her work to reach a wider audience.

Interestingly enough, the verdict ‘undermining the social order’ sounds very similar to Socrates’s crime of ‘offending the gods of the state’. Offending state gods in all manners possible, from scatological pranks to philosophical discussions, is a traditional trickster pastime. The mask of the trickster empowers the performers and makes them ‘shameless’ because it transports them to the state before the invention of shame and fear. In this deep, dark corner of the psyche no ideology or any other systemic construction can reach them. Structures have little access to the trickster’s underworld, to its twilight state of mind. One cannot scare and threaten a Coyote or a Wakdjunkaga while an individual with a name and a status can be influenced, controlled and manipulated. Unless, of course, we are dealing with is a trickster individual – the ‘civilized trickster’ who can switch off his sense of shame at times when the system employs it to control the rest of society.

Conclusion

Edward Snowden ended up protected by the state with which the artist Pavlensky is still leading a bloody battle. On the one hand, it is highly paradoxical and ironic. On the other – there is

14 nothing unusual about this. Tricksters do not take sides: they are true anarchists. Deep down, the actions of gonzo tricksters, in line with the unwritten rules of trickster living – are not aimed at any particular system, political or otherwise. They are aimed at the concept of the system as such; at the existence of a framework whose task is to limit individual freedom and to encourage normality and compliance – and any kind of unthinking, uncritical mass behaviour. Pavlensky admits in his letters that he has only ever experienced oppression by the Russian state, and has no idea how things are in other countries. I will not be surprised if he and Snowden eventually swap places and start challenging each other’s enemies.

References: Babcock-Abrahams, B (1975) ‘A Tolerated Margin of the Mess: the Trickster and his Tales Reconsidered’, in Journal of the Folklore Institute, 11, pp. 147-186.

Crossley-Holland, Kevin (1980; 1993) The Penguin Book of Norse Myths: The Gods of the Vikings, London: Penguin.

Dorje, Rinjing (1997) Tales of Uncle Thompa, Barrytown/Station Hill Press, Inc.

Erdoes, Richard and Ortiz, Alfonso (1999) American Indian Trickster Tales, London: Penguin.

Hynes, W.J and Doty, W. (eds.) (1993) Mythical Trickster Figures: Contours, Contexts, Tuscaloosa and London: University of Alabama Press. —— (1993) ‘Inclusive Conclusions: Tricksters – Metaplayers and Revealers’, in W. J. Hynes and W. Doty (eds.) (1993) Mythical Trickster Figures: Contours, Contexts, Tuscaloosa and London: University of Alabama Press, pp. 202-217.

Greenwald, Glenn and Poitras, Laura (2013) ‘NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden: “I don't want to live in a society that does these sort of things” (video interview), The Guardian, 9 November.

Jung C.G. Except where a different publication was used, all references are to the hardback edition of C.G. Jung, The Collected Works (CW), edited by Sir Herbert Read, Dr. Michael Fordham and Dr. Gerhardt Adler, and translated by R.F.C. Hull, London: Routledge.

McCaughrean, Geraldine (1999) One Thousand and One Arabian Nights, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Samuels, Andrew (1993) The Political Psyche, London: Routledge.

Urback, Robyn (2013) ‘FEMEN Puts On a Good Show. That’s All’, The National Post, 2 October 2013.

Radin, Paul (1972; 1956) The Trickster: A Study in American Indian Mythology, New York: Schocken Books.

Tannen, Ricki Staphanie (2007) The Female Trickster: the Mask that Reveals, London: Routledge.

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Unauthored Articles:

‘How They Protest Prostitution in Ukraine’, France 24, 28 August 2009, http://observers.france24.com/content/20090828-how-they-protest-prostitution-ukraine- femen-sex-tourism

‘Pussy Riot Members Jailed for Two Years For Hooliganism’, BBC News website, 17 August 2012, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-19297373

Walker, Shaun (2013) ‘Artist Nails his Scrotum to the Ground in Red Square’, The Guardian, 11 November 2013.

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