THE
SEMIOTICS OF AUGUST IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY: THE IMPACT OF GLOBAL CATACLYSMS
ON EVERYDAY PRACTICES
TRANSFORMING
THE GENDER ORDER
In her article,
Natalia Puskhareva (Institute
of Ethnology and Anthropology, Russian Academy
of Sciences) describes the gender systems that succeeded one another over the
course of Soviet history. The position of women in Soviet Russia was the
consequence of the etacratic gender order imposed by the
state. The policy of Soviet authorities was aimed at involving women in social
production and poli-tical life, but at the same time it presupposed state
regulation of the family and the imposition of official discourses interpreting
"femininity" and "masculinity."
Based on ethnographic field research, the article
by Svetlana Adonieva (Saint Petersburg State University)
and Laura Olson (University of Colorado) examines the
age-determined social roles of women in a Russian village in various periods of
the twentieth century and shows the "malfunction" that occurred in
the transition from one role to another at the end of the Soviet period.
"’The Luminous Path’: Domestic Service as a
Migration Channel and Social Mobility Mechanism under Stalin," by Alissa
Klots (Perm State University),
analyzes domestic service in Stalin’s Russia as a migration channel and
upward mobility mechanism for peasant women. Paid domestic labor is viewed
through the prism of gender and class relations in Soviet society. The passport
system introduced in the early 1930s
was
both an obstacle and an impetus for female migration from the countryside.
Domestic service, which traditionally provided employment for peasant women in
cities, became an important mechanism of cultural integration for female
newcomers looking for jobs in urban areas. The Soviet state tried to control
the field of paid domestic labor by organizing domestic workers in a
professional union. In the 1930s,
the
union’s main goal was to train domestics for employment in industry and
"promote" them to positions in plants and factories. This policy
corresponded with the desires of domestics, who felt
the stigma of paid domestic work in a country ruled
by the "dictatorship of the proletariat." Moreover, female domestics
were unable to fulfill the Soviet gender contract of working mothers. In the
early 1940s, the state took a
different approach to domestic service and began promoting the idea of
professional domestic workers. However, paid domestic labor remained an
important stepping-stone for kolkhoz women looking for employment in cities.
Research on gender under state socialism has been
predominantly concerned with women in the labor force, including issues such as
the double burden, state and private patriarchy, and welfare. Little research
has so far been published on discursive spaces open for negotiation of gender
or the generation of new meanings or positions. Using samples from official
bureaucratic rhetoric, and journalistic and popular texts (including the novels
"For Reasons Unknown," by Zdena Frybova, and "Memento," by
Radek John), Libora Oats-Indruchova (Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for
European History and Public Spheres) argues, in "The Beauty and the Loser:
Cultural Representations of Gender in Late State Socialism," for the
existence of diverse discourses of gender in late state socialism, from an
unchallenged and unremarked residual patriarchal discourse to proto- feminist
elements and, even, alternatives to both. While the dominant emanci-patory
discourse conserved some traditional preconceptions about the gender order,
traditional attributes of femininity also had a resistant, even subversive,
potential. The emancipatory discourse, fashioned with the fa╖ade of traditional
femininity, opened a textual space for limited proto-feminist imagery.
Traditional models of masculinity, however, did not have the same resistant or
subversive potential, but instead were either co-opted by the authoritative
ideological dis-course for its state-socialist hero or bound up with images of
criminal or semi- criminal behavior. In the absence of acceptable models of
masculinity that would be free of ideological baggage, an alternative discourse
of masculinity that places the male body at its center emerges in the textual
sample examined in the article. Imperfect and incomplete as the state-socialist
emancipation project may have been, it did broaden the range of discursive
positions available to women, although not to men.
SEXUAL
REVOLUTION
In her essay,
"Sexual Revolution and Its Discontents," Dagmar Herzog
(Graduate Center, City University of New York) challenges standard assumptions
about the liberalization of sexual mores and laws in Western European nations
in the post-Second World War era, inquiring into the complex interactions
between the rise of consumer capitalism, the invention of the birth control
pill and the spread of pornography, on the one hand, and the emergence of
radical activism on behalf of sexual freedoms, contraception and abortion
access, and gay and lesbian rights, on the other. The essay documents the rich
variety of ways sexual revolutionaries and opponents of the Vietnam War
theorized the possible con-nections between sexual emancipation and social
justice more generally, but also emphasizes just how many ambivalences the
sexual revolution unleashed already as it was happening, not least among
heterosexual men.
The article by Arthur Clech (EHESS, Paris),
"The Russian Homosexual, 1905-1938:
Paradoxes
of Perception," deals with the history of perceptions of homosexuality in Russia
during periods when these perceptions were changing: after the 1905 revolution, after the 1917 revolution and, finally,
during the emergence of the Stalinist regime. It is precisely during
transitional moments in history that social norms are questioned. Yuri Lotman
proposed the "dual" model for Russian culture, as opposed to the
western cultural model, where a certain transitional space exists. However,
parallels with the western history of culture and sexuality are not limited to
comparisons of cultural models. Clech attempts to understand the extent to
which western queer history influenced perceptions of homosexuality in Russia.
The period 1905-1938 is also
interesting because attempts were made to overcome this "dual"
cultural model. For example, during the period after the 1917 revolution, Bolshevik
legislation reflected the desire to obliterate the distinction between
homosexuality and heterosexuality. However, the paradox in perceptions of
Russian homosexuals is that it is quite difficult to say whether changes in
these perceptions were a "rupture" or a "transition."
TRANSFORMING
RELIGIOUS BELIEFS
In "The
Idea of ‘Humanity’ from Lessing to Thomas Mann," Jan Assmann (University of Konstanz) links the notion of
"humanity" to the cosmopolitan idea of an allgemeine
Menschenreligion, elaborated by such religious thinkers as
Gotthold Ephraim Lessing and Moses Mendelssohn. This idea was a means of
combating the absolutism of differences that gave rise to religious
intolerance, the principal problem of the eighteenth century. In the Twentieth
century, the absolutism of differences was transformed, especially in Nazi
Germany, into a totalitarianism of differences, whose proponents included such
disparate thinkers as Carl Schmitt (with his concept of the "state of
emergency") and Oswald Spengler (who divided humanity into
"civilizations," incapable of ever finding common ground), and whose
opponents included Thomas Mann, who proposed the concept of the "unity of
the human mind."
In "The Twentieth Century: A New Religious
Imaginary," Alexander Panchenko (Institute of
Russian Literature (Pushkin House), Russian Academy of Sciences) surveys the
key changes that religion, as a social concept, practice and form of collective
imaginary, underwent during the Twentieth century. Seculari-zation in modern Europe not only challenged conventional religious
institutions, but also led to the emergence of new religious ideologies and
practices, which were often concealed by wholly "secular" concepts
and representations. One of the stalking horses of the "new religious
imaginary" was science, perceived and advanced by ideologues and
practitioners of secularization as a universal means of "disenchanting the
world." The essential role in restructuring conventional notions of
religion and shaping "science-oriented" forms of religious discourse
was apparently played by the revolution in physics in the late Nineteenth and
early Twentieth centuries: electromagnetic field theory, the invention of the
radio, electron theory, the discovery of X-rays, quantum mechanics, etc. The
concepts of "energy" and "field" soon came to be used by
theorists and practitio-ners of various occult and para-scientific doctrines,
from theosophy to Russian cosmism. In order to show the specific features
religious practices and communi-ties inspired by the ideology and metaphorics
of scientific discourse can possess, Panchenko examines two specific
ethnographic cases — a Party
investigation of Novosibirsk rerikhovtsy (followers of Nicholas
Roerich) in the late 1970s, and the history
of the post-Soviet religious movement known as the Church of the Last
Testament.
ARTISTIC
REFLECTION
In "Franz Kafka’s Real August,"
Kirill Kobrin (Moscow/Prague) investigates the impact of the
beginning of the First World War on Kafka’s work. He closely examines the trace
left by political events of those days in the writer’s prose works and diaries.
Kobrin arques thatthe year the month, even — the war started may well have been the most
important point of Kafka’s writing career. He did not react explicitly to the
war itself but reflected the sensibilities "responsible" for the
unspeakable conflict. "The Trial" and "The Castle" both
stew from these sensibilities, from the phenomena that formed the new,
"total" world.
Mikhail Yampolsky (New York University) examines the work of Alexei
Guerman in his article "A Local Apocalypse: On Alexei Guerman’s Film Khrustalyov,
My Car!" The October Revolution put Russia at the center of a world
historical process focused on achieving a certain telos — communism, whose
advent would be tantamount to the "end of history." But long before
this telos is attained, a "local apocalypse" interrupts the movement
of history in March 1953 in connection with
Stalin’s death. In the article, Yampolsky analyzes Alexei Guerman’s film
Khrustalyov, My Car!, a representation of this event. He argues
that, in the Twentieth century, eschatology enters history and is his-
toricized. The eschaton looming behind teleological history militates against
the model of history as grand narrative, in which meanings are immanent to the
self-development of the historical process. The eschaton is transcendent in
rela-tion to history and introduces meaning into it from the outside.
Intermeshed with eschatology, history as such loses its meaning, while
historical narrative is sub-jected to an incursion of symbols, allegories and analogies
readable only via a vague relationship with the transcendent. The
eschatological model of meaning helps us understand the complex poetics of
Guerman’s film: Guerman rejects coherent narrative and recreates the system of
eschatological incursions into a world gradually losing its internal historical
sense.
Tomas Glanc (Humboldt University, Berlin)
discusses the work of Czech poet Frantisek Hrubin in his article "From ‘A Sunday in
August’ 1958 to Wednesday,
August 21, 1968: Notes on the
Poetics of Getting Stuck." The play "A Sunday in August" (1958), which Hrubin
wrote on a commission from Prague‘s
National Theater, was a turning point: it is regarded as marking the start of a
new era of postwar Czech drama. The poetics of the play and its first staging
were marked by an absence of events, the uneventfulness of a summer interlude
and a multifaceted aesthetic of emptiness and getting stuck, which were
programmatic in the work. The play’s author and producers themselves were aware
that their story — "softened," "anxious" and
"trembling," whose lines were "out of focus," hovering over
the souls of the characters like insects above a pond’s surface — was a mirror on whose banks the action took
place. This rhizomatic movement of thoughts and utterances was the impulse or
expression of a catharsis that lasted and developed until another August day, a
day signifi-cant not only for Czechoslovakian culture: Wednesday, August 21, 1968.
THE
NEW MEDIALITY AND POPULAR CULTURE
The essay by
Helen Petrovsky (Institute
of Philosophy, Russian Academy
of Sciences) is entitled "Matter and Memory in Photography: Boris
Mikhailov’s New Documentality." Drawing on Benjamin’s concept of the
dialectical image, Petrovsky insists on treating visual data, photography in
particular, as a special
form of historical evidence. The truth told by the
photograph does not boil down to a set of visual signs that may easily be
deciphered as so many cultural codes. Instead, there is a hidden dimension in
photography, an implied form of reference that points to a shared affective
experience of the past. It is this expe-rience that makes photographs
meaningful — in other words, plainly visible in the first place. Analyzing
Boris Mikhailov’s remarkable series from the Soviet and post-Soviet periods,
Petrovsky introduces the notion of anonymity, which enables her to account for
the specific documentary nature of Mikhailov’s work.
Gian Piero Piretto (University of Milan),
in his essay "The Spring That Crashed in August: 1968 in Paris, Prague and Moscow," compares the
events of August 1968 in
these three cities. May 1968: students in Paris
invade the streets to fight against power and institutions. Cobblestones are
removed from the ground both to attack brutal policemen and to free the
"beach" existing underneath, hidden by centuries of authority and
control. August 1968: Soviet tanks
invade the streets of Prague
to repress the socialist spring supported by Alexander Dubcek. Young people in Prague invade the streets
to argue with young Soviet soldiers who, from the top of their tanks, cannot
quite understand what the matter is. August 1968: seven people in Moscow "occupy" the Lobnoye Mesto on Red Square
for a few minutes to demonstrate against the Soviet invasion of Prague. In a matter of
minutes, they are arrested and taken away to a police station. The analysis of
these events focuses on some photographs taken during these days (or on the
lack of pictures, as far as the Moscow
demonstration is concerned) and investigates the evolution of gestures, gazes,
expressions, dialogues and attitudes in different cities, different cultures
and different political situations. The com-bination of the gaze and walking,
the consequence of everyday strategies, takes us from May-August 1968 to August 1991 and winter 2012 in Moscow, through
the examination of more pictures, to verify how political, social and cultural
involvement has changed and developed from decade to decade, transforming
obsolete habits of Soviet mass participation into original and spontaneous cul-tural
practices.
"From Nomadism to Sedentarianism: Woodstock vs. MTV," by Andrey Logutov
(Moscow State
University), explores two major events
in the history of popular music that both happened in August: the Woodstock music festival
of 1969 and the launch
of MTV in 1981. Starting with
the conceptual framework advanced by Simon Frith, who distinguished three basic
social functions of mu-sic (transcendent, popular and folk), in combination
with the "nomadic" theory of Deleuze and Guattari, Logutov sees
Woodstock and MTV as embodying two extremes in popular music practices, i.e.,
the nomad-like journey of the listener towards the locus of music, and the
broadcast journey of music into the home. The types of sensibility triggered in
these two settings prove to be quite different as well. The difference may be
articulated in terms of variations in levels of "authenticity" as
they are perceived by the listener. However, both events are related in the way
they have transformed the music market and inscribed musi-cal experience in
everyday life.
Irina Sandomirskaia (Sodertorn
University, Sweden), in her article "From August to August: Documentary
Film as an Archive of Stolen Revolutions," explores the genealogy of a
particular documentary film format from the 1920s to the late 1980s, i.e., throughout the entire span of Soviet history,
in order to describe the origins, development and eventual fall of the Soviet
Union as a phe-nomenon of cinematic reality. With the purpose of representing
the Soviet Union as a totality, Dziga Vertov
invented the method of filming "from border to border." With the
camera "jumping" from one geographical or cultural extre-mity of the
multi-ethnic Union to another, footage was produced so as to be later
incorporated into the complete film (in this case, One Sixth of the
World) using the principle of dialectical montage. Thus, by
splicing genetically unrelated cultures and lifestyles, the film produced a
cinematic reality in which all differences appeared structurally and
ideologically unified. This format later became crucial in the production of
Stalinist propaganda (here analyzed via Mikhail Slutsky’s A Day in the New
World, 1940), and still later,
in the so-called poetic documen-tary cinema of the Thaw, whose purpose was to
challenge the Stalinist represen-tation of total Sovietness and reformulate it
in a new, non-totalitarian way (as in Uldis Brauns’s 235 000 000 000, 1965). Sandomirskaia goes on to
argue that documentary cinema of the glasnost era also employed the same
format, this time not for the demonstration of totality but in a filmic
analysis of its collapse (as in Juris Podnieks’s Soviets,
1991). To understand
this dynamic of transfor-mation and permanence, she draws on Walter Benjamin’s
film theory and Gilles Deleuze’s notion of the time-image. She describes Soviet
documentaries as chronicles and archives of stolen revolutions.
SOCIAL
INSTITUTIONS AND EVERYDAY PRACTICES
In his article
"Trust in Russia:
Meaning, Function and Structure," Lev Gudkov (Levada Center,
Moscow)
provides a theoretical analysis of trust as a social cat-egory. Using empirical
date from studies by the Levada Center, Gudkov demon-strates that there is a strong
lack of trust in social relations in Russia, which has catastrophic
consequences in politics, economics, morality, and so on.
The section continues with an article by
Catriona Kelly (University
of Oxford), "’In
Still Waters Devils Breed’: August as Working Month/Holiday Month in Soviet
Culture." Early Soviet legislation (beginning in 1918) did not make a firm link between the legal
entitlement to holidays and a particular season. Indeed, the implication was
that leave might take place at any time of year and was not necessarily taken
as a block. In the Stalin era, the leader’s own behavior (a spatial
displacement to the Crimean coast did not signify a slackening in productivity)
drove the general attitude to periods of leave at lower levels of Soviet
society, too. Leave was seen as a benefit that might need to be revoked in
extreme situations (cf. the general cancellation of leave during the Second
World War). In the post-Stalin era, however, opportunities for leave expanded,
and there was an increasing assumption that taking leave in the sum-mer
(including August) was the norm, even though there was no official period of
leave for government agencies. By the time of the 1991 coup, therefore, a view
of August as a period when most people were on holiday had become entrenched,
and with this the attitude that events taking place in the month were somehow
abnormal. In this respect, the arrangements for otpusk
(holiday time) in the So-viet era become an example of how the
"etatization of time" (the phrase used by Katherine Verdery) could be
not simply a way of disciplining the population in a punitive sense (making
peasants work to a year-round cycle), but also of providing incentives for the
development of a fundamentally new attitude to the disposal of time and to the
annual cycle.
The article by Julia Sneeringer
(City University of New York), "’Assembly Line of Joys’: Touring Hamburg’s
Red Light District, 1949-1966,"
deals
with the Reeperbahn, Hamburg‘s
notorious red light district (also famous because it was there that the Beatles
launched their career). In the postwar years of the
West German
"economic miracle," the area became a real magnet for all those
craving pleasure and entertainment, both Germans visiting Hamburg and foreign tourists. Originally a
special zone where one could experience a wide variety of sensual pleasures
(moreover, anonymously, without fear of condemnation from society), the
Reeperbahn was the harbinger of trends that would shock West Germany in the
late 1960s, when people’s
sexual behavior became more open, and a greater tolerance of interracial
couples and homosexuality emerged. In this sense, one might say that the
Reeperbahn was at the forefront of social development in the city and the
country. But here more profound trends in the development of West Germany were at work, in
particular, economic trends, for example, the aggressive marketing of consumer
goods linked to sexuality, which was an extreme expression of the postwar
capitalist boom. By analyzing texts on Hamburg and the Reeperbahn written by
various authors prior to 1968,
Sneeringer
attempts to capture the dynamics of changes in people’s attitude to sex, consumption
and leisure, and draw broad conclusions about the history of West German civil
society as seen from the perspective of consumer choice and democracy in its
daily manifestations. Sneeringer approaches these subjects by researching
numerous tourist brochures, travel expenditure accounts and illustrated
publications of the period dealing with Hamburg.
The article by Sven Reichardt
(University of Konstanz), "Is ‘Warmth’ a Mode of
Social Behavior? Considerations on a Cultural History of the Left- Alternative
Milieu from the Late 1960s to the Mid 1980s," deals with the com-prehensive
countercultural milieu from the late 1960s until the early 1980s. Life style
and habitus within this undogmatic and widely peaceful radical leftist milieu
were guided by the principle of "warmth" (friendliness). This
alternative principle of warmth corresponded with developments in West Germany‘s
increasingly individualized consumer society. Countercultural social behavior
was neither a departure into a land of freedom nor into a reign of
normlessness. It was a form of self-guidance and governmentality with its own
contradictions and coercions.
TRANSFORMING
THE URBAN ENVIRONMENT
Nadine
Rossol (University of Essex), in her article "Performing the Nation:
Sports, Spectacles, and Aesthetics in Germany, 1926-1936," challenges the notion that
the Nazis invented the use of aesthetics for staging their mass events. She
argues instead that the time span from the mid 1920s to the mid 1930s can be
considered as a whole in regards to the development of political aesthetics and
festive culture. A stress on rhythm, moving bodies, wholeness and national com-munity
characterized the Weimar Republic and strongly influenced festivities,
parades, sporting events and spectacles organized by the republican state. By
the mid 1930s, the public was well accustomed to the use of aesthetics in mass
events staged by political organizations and the state alike. Grounding what is
often termed the "Nazi aesthetic" in the time of the republic changes
com-monly assumed ideas about state representation in Weimar
and Nazi Germany. The young republic was more keen on and successful at the staging
of political spectacles than has been generally assumed.
Alan Smart (New York City), in his article "The Provo Bicycle
Trick: Radical Form as a Vehicle for Pedestrian Content," analyzes the
left-wing scene in Ams-terdam in the 1960s. Between 1965 and 1967 a radical social
movement known as Provo convulsed Amsterdam and marked the city’s transition from a gritty
port and provincial secondary city to a hub of art, design and bohemian
counterculture and, finally, an urban model of the post-industrial "new
economy." One of the defining practices of Provo
was the staging of events, termed "happenings" in the style of
performance art, designed to disrupt or contest the quotidian functions of
urban life and provoke a response from the authorities. Provo
happenings took up forms and concepts from performance and
"non-object" art, radical political practice, architecture and urban
planning, and forced an engagement between them. The resulting actions provided
not only tactical models for urban practice but also telling illustrations of
the realignments taking place between these terms in the late 1960s and the
changing way that the city, as both a social space and the object of urban
planning and design, was conceived.
In her essay "The Body
of the Media and Medial Incorporeality," Oksana Bulgakova
reflects on the role of contemporary visual media, which generate the total
phantom environment in which the individual dwells.
Oleg Pachenkov (Center for
Independent Social Research, Saint Petersburg), in his article "Urban
Public Space in the Face of Contemporary Challenges: Mobility and the ‘Abuse of
Publicness,’" examines the effect on public life and urban public spaces
of such typical phenomena of late ("high") modernity as an increase
in the pace of life, mobility, the compression of time and space, indi-
vidualization, etc. Pachenkov also outlines possible new approaches to the
study and interpretation of the impact of these processes on urban lifestyle
and public spaces. His overall conclusion is that, given the changes under way
in social reality, social scientists must reconsider the usual categories for
describing the urban public sphere and public spaces and develop new approaches
and new modes of thinking and understanding current processes.
ANEW
MAPPING OF THE HUMANITIES
This section features four surveys dealing with
subdisciplines in the humanities focused on transformations of private life.
Ilya Vinitsky (University of Pennsyl-vania) provides an overview
on works on the history of emotions; Alexei Vasiliev (Russian
Institute for Cultural Research), an overview of literature on memory studies;
Vladislav Tretyakov (New Literary Observer), a survey of books on
the history of sexuality; and Evgeny Dobrenko (University of
Sheffield), a review of recent research on the history of Stalinism.