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- Convenors:
-
Nikolai Ssorin-Chaikov
Serguei Oushakine (Princeton University)
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- Chair:
-
Xenia Cherkaev
(Independent scholar)
- Format:
- Panel
- Location:
- Peter Froggatt Centre (PFC), 0G/007
- Sessions:
- Thursday 28 July, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
This panel aims at rethinking (post)socialism through the lens of the sociocultural invention, and des-invention, of the Euroamerican category of the 'social' in its Marxist version in former Soviet-type societies and global socialisms.
Long Abstract:
Post-social is often understood as an analysis that admits human beings 'by nature be social animals' but asserts that sociality have been increasingly colonised by 'massive expansion of object-rich environments' (Knorr Cetina 2017). The social is reassembled as 'socius', Latin for 'associate' (Latour 2004) that can take a form of object or thing. But what if 'the social', like 'society', is not analytical but indigenous Euroamerican category (Strathern 1988) and, similarly to 'society', has its own history of invention and des-invention (cf. Rabinow 1989; Joyce 2002)? This panel takes Marxist vernacular (Kruglova 2017; Ssorin-Chaikov 2017) as a case in point of such a reading, and aims at rethinking (post)socialism through its own categories of the social — including ironically its own temporal dynamic of human- and object-centred sociality. Labour time was, for Marx, not not just a way to see through 'relations between things' of market commodity exchange to uncover 'social relations between men' it but also historically change the former into the latter: capitalism into social(ism). Recent historiography and anthropology of state socialism demonstrated that despite its calls 'agains the cult of things' and 'imagine no possessions', it has been a desiring machine of object-rich environments (Oushakine; Kiaer; Goulubev). The panel asks what temporal endpoints this socialist 'social' assumed, and what cultural biographies it had What reformulations of the political, the ethical, the spatial, and the material has it afforded? What kind of work of (un)communing the commons, in academia and elsewhere, does it imply?
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Thursday 28 July, 2022, -Paper short abstract:
The sociality of Soviet collectives was ambivalent in nature, balancing between conflict and comradeship. This paper explores labour conflicts as spaces for such situational play where seemingly coherent sociality of labour collectives depends not on social but on bureaucratic and technical agenda.
Paper long abstract:
Soviet ideology is generally considered effective in terms of introducing communal practices in all areas of life. According to its discursive logic, comradeship was conceived as the main type of personal bonds in socialist society. In contrast, the historiographic tradition insists that Soviet society was atomized. But what were the actual practices of the social? This project is concerned with the study of labor disputes in Soviet industrial enterprises, in particular the ways in which the parties argued and the forms of their interaction in resolving these conflicts. The object of my research is defined by the specific environment of interaction – production and the labor situation, which were thought to be seminal and socially constitutive in the Soviet project. I study workers in various enterprises from a situational perspective, not attributing them in advance to any group, but rather examining to what extent the latter are situationally determined and what operations the participants in the comrade discussion perform with these groups. In labor conflicts they insist on their unity, exclude, support, dismiss, but these operations assume a short-lived character of cooperation set by various forms of interaction – bureaucratic procedures, technological processes, the activity of obschestvennik’s – and constitute temporary associations. Thus, sociality is not an initial premise, but, firstly, the result of the complex interaction of various agents, and, secondly, one of the effective arguments for the substantiation of justice in labor conflict.
Paper short abstract:
This talk takes up the basic question of social theory: how do the denizens of modern industrial states relate to their collectivities? What mediates this relation? I unearth an imaginary in which the relations of modern strangers are not mediated by circulation but by ethical striving.
Paper long abstract:
This talk takes up the basic question of social theory: how do the denizens of modern industrial states relate to their collectivities? What mediates this relation? I unearth an imaginary in which the relations of modern strangers are not mediated by circulation but by ethical striving. Throughout the 2010s, many former Leningrad residents told me about how they had made DIY things – knives, flasks, knitting needles – from industrial scrap at work in “soviet times.” On closer inspection, I often found that these stories of “soviet times” described properly post-soviet actions, events that happened years after the USSR had collapsed. This popular historiography of “soviet” things thus appeared to be factually incorrect: to be nostalgic or sloppy. Turning to Stalin-era juridical documents, I saw that it was neither. In this talk, I show that this apparent chronological error conveys a deeper truth: the stories’ narrative focus on factually illegal but essentially victimless actions express a collectivist ethic that did indeed anchor socialist property relations, in theory and practice, with a formal demand to place ethical obligations to social collectives above a blind obedience to regulations and rules. This collectivist ethic is routinely overlooked by scholars of the Soviet Union, because it makes little sense in such liberal categories as public and private. I suggest that we see it in the terms by which it was legislated: those of a “sacred and inviolable” commons of socialist property, and citizens’ “personal” rights to that common field.
Paper short abstract:
In my paper I will try to show how realizing economic projects people use the notion of ‘local administration’ that replaces an individual counterpart in economic relations. This helps avoid hierarchical personal relations and give place to possibility keeping ‘tendency to equality’ in place.
Paper long abstract:
Having accepted the idea of impossibility to find ‘natural’ social equality (Jolly 1987) anthropologists tend to find the new approach to understand equality (Robbins 1994; Walker 2020). On my field data from the Northern part of European Russia I will showcase how local people avoid relations interpersonal hierarchy using the notions ‘TOS (territorial public self-government) or ‘local administration’ and how this let keeping ‘possibilities of equality’ in interpersonal relations. I perceive ‘TOS’ as encompassing category that replaces hierarchical ‘person-person’ relations by a priori hierarchical ‘homo minor-homo major’ relations (Dumont 1980). This replacement helps not to label interpersonal relations as hierarchical and gives way to possibility to keep ‘the common’ in place. If an unemployed person within the framework of such a project receives money from another person (chair of TOS) labelling him/her as ‘TOS’ allows to return the money in forthcoming projects not this person directly but to other unemployed people. This allows slow down inequality growth and give way to the ‘tendency of equality’ (Walker 2020). At the same time in interpersonal relations the possibility to earn some money in a TOS-project is seen from the point of view of ‘gift economy’: it should be returned through the symmetrical possibility to earn something, not through the return of value of the earned money. This case allows us understand how the ‘tendency to equality’ works while social and economic inequalities are present.
Paper short abstract:
The article interrogates the continuous imposition of liberal-plural ideologies and ontologies on communist (post)modernities that leads to both scholarly and geopolitical wrongs. We suggest approaching the monist specificity of these 'vulgar' modernities through the relational theories of value.
Paper long abstract:
This article takes as a starting point the current popular and scholarly interest in ‘bad’ and deficient forms of modernity, particularly the multiply flawed historicizations of twentieth-century communism. Inspired by the long history of relational anthropology, we argue for recognizing and engaging meaningfully with the specificity and significance of Soviet modernity as a totalizing, even ‘monist’ social order. We see this as an important scholarly imperative, but also argue that to do so helps address the spectre that silently looms over our present historical conjuncture: crises that threaten a transition from democratic pluralism to post-democracy and populist authoritarianism. Both poststructuralist and liberal thinkers cannot get past a flawed perspective on Soviet-type modernity as an ‘inhuman’ ontology. We reappraise that modernity, building on the insights of Keti Chukrov on delibidinized relations under communism with ethnographic examples that help 'humanize' it after all.
Paper short abstract:
The conceptual purchase of ‘post-socialism’ as a category has been recently questioned from point of its descriptive relevance for understanding contemporary Eastern Europe and the former Soviet space. I propose instead to approach it through the lens of ‘temporalisation’ (Koselleck).
Paper long abstract:
In his insightful and provocative essay ‘Good-bye, postsocialism!’, Martin Müller (2019) evokes the movie Good-Bye Lenin to suggests letting go of the temporal analytics of rupture and the vanishing that underpin this concept. Müller adds to a recurrent and important debate in the anthropology of this region. His own preferred lens are spatial: those of the Global East with multiple global interconnections and hierarchies. In this paper I treat the temporal dimension of postsocialism not as a conceptual solution to be argued for or against but an ethnographic problem that I suggest exploring through the lens of the anthropology of time. By looking how temporalisation is implicated in the relations of power, I submit that for understanding divergent historical trajectories in this region from the EU integration to the rise of right-wing populism and statism can be productively explored through their different teleological ends and ways in which they draw distinctions of the ‘new’ and the ‘old’, incorporating different modalities of the ‘old’ into the ‘new’. Furthermore, I argue that this temporalisation has a longer history which is only partially this region’s but has to do with the temporality that is endemic to the categories of ‘society’, ‘the social’ and ‘socialism’. My case in point is the relations of exchange between the temporalities of these categories, and those of the market and empire in a reindeer herding and hunting collective in Sub-Arctic Siberia.