This book discusses the evolving semiotic landscape across the last few decades of the Soviet system. If you are at all interested in semiotics, linguistics and the iterative cultural reactions a society has in response to its government's various methods of control, you'll find author's journey towards proving his thesis fascinating--actually quite a bit more interesting than the thesis itself.
I also consider this book to be a useful exercise in metadiscourse, helping the reader better perceive and navigate the terrain on which ideological, cultural and even personal discussions can take place, and how our discourse can be externally directed and influenced. Once you understand the types of things that can "grow" on a given informational terrain, you begin to see how governments and regime-compliant media till the ideological soil and "plant" things--in the form of propaganda, opinions we are encouraged to hold or not hold, or even certain words and concepts that we aren't allowed to talk about at all.
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The various performative behaviors and preference cascades that surfaced during the last decades of the Soviet Union have parallels in the West right now, ranging from the disturbing (like COVID-era performative rituals "planted" by our government) to the trivial (see for example "vocal fry" becoming a speaking norm among young people). The COVID era also gave us disturbing examples of how easily our informational landscape can be molested, as our government officials boldly stated things in complete contravention to what they had stated mere months before, with no admission of any change of opinion. And people seemed to just play along, misremembering together with our authorities.
Of course corporate America is likewise filled with examples of formulaic and performative activity imposed from above. I'm chagrined to think of the various performative "rituals" I did during my corporate years, and also I found myself agreeing with the author's view that people "performed" these rituals mostly just to get through them: that way we could more quickly get to--and get done with--our real work.
I mentioned above that the author's journey to his thesis was more interesting than the thesis itself--to the point where I didn't even say what his thesis was. I'll say it briefly here: the author's tour through the late Soviet period is an extended attempt to explain why, despite the abruptness of the Soviet collapse, "it appeared unsurprising when it happened." But there is a much, much simpler reason why the collapse "appeared unsurprising," and it's an idea right out of Nassim Taleb's book The Black Swan: we all narrate things post hoc such that they appear more predictable and expected than they actually were. It's something our minds naturally do.
But don't worry about the author's thesis--or even whether it's correct. Instead, just enjoy the journey! The late Soviet period is a striking moment in time, filled with all kinds of irony, humor--even optimism--as Russians absorbed musical, cultural and social influences from all over the world, appropriating and repurposing these influences in their own distinct way.
[Readers, what follows are my notes and quotes from the text: I include them to help me better remember what I read. They are long this time--really long. Feel free to skip to the "To Read" list at the very bottom of this post, or skip everything altogether.]
Notes:
Chapter 1: Late Socialism: An Eternal State
1ff Comments here on how so many people consider the collapse of the Soviet Union completely unexpected, that they assumed that it would be an "eternal state" but yet the author comments on the paradox that "despite the seeming abruptness of the collapse... it appeared unsurprising when it happened." [Note that this book is an extended (and I mean extended) discussion of linguistic, semiotic and cognitive phenomena, but there could be a much simpler reason why the collapse seemed unsurprising, and it's an idea right out of Taleb's book The Black Swan: after the fact, we all narrate things in a way that seems more predictable and expected than they actually happened. It's something our minds naturally do.] On a "break of Consciousness" or the stunning shock that accompanied perestroika and glasnost; the author offers a couple of examples of people reading things that they were shocked the state authorities would permit being published, like works from Lev Razgon (a journalist who wrote about the Stalinist camps) or Nikolai Gumilev (a poet arrested in 1921 for anti-Bolshevist conspiracy, which was a fabrication of the Cheka). The author describes how publication and subscriptions to new journals and magazines increased exponentially, changing the discourse--and eventually the consciousness--of the society.
3-4 An example here of one woman, proud of being a Soviet, but thanks to reading various works at this time, began to realize that communism could be a form of fascism, something that had never occurred to her before. The author cites this as one of endless examples.
4 A bit of a thesis statement here: "What was the nature of the late Soviet system and way of life that had this paradox at its core? [The paradox he refers to here is how people were unsurprised by the sudden collapse of the Soviet state.] On what kind of internal systemic shifts at the level of discourse, ideology, social relations, and time was this paradox predicated? These questions are not about the causes for the collapse but about the conditions that made the collapse possible without making it anticipated. With these questions in mind, this book sets out to explore late socialism--the period that spanned approximately thirty years, between the mid 1950s and the mid-1980s, before the changes of perestroika began, when the system was still being experienced as eternal."
4ff The author is very careful to remind readers here of "certain problematic assumptions about Soviet socialism"--particularly the idea that Soviet socialism was "bad" or "immoral"; the author cites an extreme example of this sort of discourse: the portrayal of Soviet citizens as having no agency, that they were coerced to believe in communist values and had no means of reflecting upon them critically; the author also criticizes the idea of a binary metaphor portraying the Soviet Union as censored versus uncensored, a world of state-approved media and samizdat literature. [I guess this author, a professor of Anthropology at Berkeley, can't sound too much like he's against socialism... but now that I've read the entire book I think I see his point here, this isn't quite the subtle apology for socialism that it sounds like, instead he is trying to articulate that many of the people who he discusses in this book were believers in socialism, and they did think critically about it. It's just at this point in the book the reader hasn't met these people nor has had a chance to see how they think.]
8 "The Soviet system produced tremendous suffering, repression, fear, and lack of freedom, all of which are well documented. But focusing only on that side of the system will not take us very far if we want to answer the question posed by this book about the internal paradoxes of life under socialism."
8ff On post-Soviet nostalgia: this is "the longing for the very real humane values, ethics, friendships, and creative possibilities that the reality of socialism afforded... A critical examination of such retrospections is essential to an understanding of Soviet socialism." Further discussion here where the author claims that we need a new language "that does not reduce the description of socialist reality to dichotomies... The challenge of such a task is to avoid a priori negative accounts of socialism without falling into the opposite extreme of romanticizing it."
10 Interesting footnote here on page 10 talking about "the contemporary rise of a global neoliberal hegemony--itself a distinctly postcommunist phenomenon." [Hence the very dark joke about modern Western pseudo-democracies: that they spent 75 years fighting communism only to impose an even faker, gayer version of it on their own people.]
10ff On Claude Lefort and "Lefort's Paradox": this is a concept where there's an ideal of freedom, but yet in real-world terms it is only obtained via submitting to a government in some form. In communism the paradox is more stark: the objective of the liberation of society could only happen under full Party control, thus the Soviet citizen had to submit completely to Party leadership and a collectivist ethic and thus was forced to repress any individualism. [Note also the footnote here of the version of Lefort's Paradox that manifests in late capitalism: the double bind between workaholic ethic or the capitulation to immediate satisfaction.]
11ff Comments also on [Henri de] Saint-Simon, an early 19th century theorist who influenced Marx and Lenin, writing about an "aesthetic avant-garde" that would exercise a sort of priestly function for the citizens of the state. On Lenin demanding that the party manage all spheres of cultural life, contrasting to the views of what he called "separatists" who wanted the party to stop interfering in scientific and artistic and cultural spheres.
13ff "It was Stalin who now played the role of LeFort's 'master' who stood outside of ideological discourse, making editorial comments about it from that external position and in this way concealing the paradox through himself." The author discusses how after Stalin's death this "concrete master" disappeared and led to "a major reorganization of the entire discursive regime of state socialism." The author argues that once this figure was no longer there "the incongruence of goals and means that constituted that paradox became unleashed." He argues that this led--eventually--to a change in ideological discourse and in ideological representations and a reinterpretation of the socialist system "creating a set of contradictory conditions that made the system's implosion seem so unexpected when it began, and at the same time so unsurprising and fast once it had occurred."
14ff Discussion here of the forms of ideological representations becoming normalized, ubiquitous and predictable during the late Soviet period: speeches with ritualized texts; slogans, posters and other urban visual propaganda, which collectively formed an "authoritative discourse." The author gives various examples of authoritative discourse here, like the highly formalized May Day and Revolution Day parades that would occur in all Soviet cities. [Note that North Korea still maintains this traditional "form," but see this video of a North Korean military parade played to the soundtrack of "You Dropped a Bomb on Me" for a wonderful example of what the author will later in the book call a "deterritorialization" of the original ideological form.] Other examples: participation in Soviet elections where there is usually just one candidate (and where most people weren't even really sure who they were voting for! There's a quote from one particular person here who talks about forgetting the name of the candidate a few minutes after voting but not actually thinking that the elections were "fake"); also different quasi-ideological unions at schools, factories and colleges which would hold meetings where people would vote for various resolutions without knowing what was even said. See the quote here of a student group meeting where the meeting's convener would suggest frequently, "Maybe we should just write down that we had a discussion and voted in favor of the resolution, without actually having the discussion? I understand that everyone has things to attend to at home."
16 The author asks here how all these acts of mass participation might be interpreted: were they just masquerade, were they practiced under State surveillance? The author argues for a different interpretation: that these acts and gestures don't refer to literal ideological statements or resolutions but they performed a different rule. But he doesn't tell the reader what that role is yet (!) instead writing, "For this analysis, we need first to understand the discursive conditions under which authoritative discourse was produced, circulated, and received in late socialism."
16 The "common explanation" of how ideological rituals function is that the citizens act as if they support them while privately believing something different. See various theories of mimicry and dissimulation, for example Peter Sloterdijk's book Critique of Cynical Reason. Also Slavoj Zizek writes about this idea as well, also Vaclav Havel, in his famous essay "The Power of the Powerless" uses a similar model (per the author Havel found the act of doing something while believing something different in this context to be morally reprehensible). The author argues that "several problematic assumptions about language, knowledge, meaning, and personhood lie at the basis of this [mistaken] understanding."
18ff Discussions here of various theories of language, including John Austin's analysis of performatives and his speech act theory [note Austin's book How to Do Things with Words, which looks like it might be an intriguing read], which says that there are "constative utterances" that state something, but also utterances that do something--like shouting "Guilty!" or "I bet you sixpence it will rain tomorrow," and these things change things in social reality instead of describing that reality. Austin calls these latter examples "performative utterances" or "performatives." "Performative utterances deliver force and cannot be true or false--instead they can be felicitous or infelicitous." "Austin points out that what makes an utterance a performative is not the intention of the speaker, but rather the accepted conventions surrounding the utterance, which involved the appropriate person uttering the appropriate words in the appropriate circumstances in order to obtain conventional results." [Huh, sort of like the liturgy in a church service.] "If the conventions are not in place, the performative will not succeed regardless of the intention of the speaker. Conversely, if the conventions are in place, the performative will succeed regardless of intention." [The substrate drives everything. Interesting!]
20 Comments here on [Jacques] Derrida, who took this idea even further: that the intention of the speaker isn't even that important, it's the convention of the speech act, meaning it needs to be coded in a certain way, "it must function as a citation that is repeatable in an endless number of contexts."
21ff Now on to a discussion of ideological rituals and utterances and the effects they produce: discussion of Judith Butler and her work arguing that subject is enabled through discourse without being completely determined by it; in other words a sort of ritualized production or ritual reiteration; see Amy Hollywood and her work on theories of the ritual in anthropology and in religious studies talking about broadening performative speech to ritualized acts that are repeated in different contexts but the meanings are neither completely known in advance nor determined by the participants' intention. The author wants to present a view that is different from the "mask/as if" model, which assumes a person has their own view and is either "wearing a mask" or "revealing truth" in their performance of an action; here in the "performative theory" the person is seen performatively involved in the repetition of the act, but it doesn't mean they're wearing a mask or that they believe fully in the underlying ideology; there's no necessary rule that stands behind our actions here. [Maybe this I'm undercomplicating the idea, but basically you could say somebody can show up to a May Day parade just because they show up to a May Day parade, not because they have a positive opinion about the ideology of the regime, or because they want to act (falsely) as if they have such a positive opinion.]
22ff More on Austin and his idea of "constative" versus "performative" speech and seeing it on a spectrum: every speech act is a little bit of each--they can be more or less performative or more and less constative. The author here talks about how there's a context-in-emergence over the course of repeated utterances or repeated performatives like slogans, party speeches or ritualized acts like meetings, so they have a coexisting constative and performative dimension; the author gives an example of voting for a one candidate election: it's less important for whom one votes than that one votes, because it involves the reproduction of the institution itself or one's position in it. Thus the person may not pay much attention to the constative dimension of the vote (meaning the literal meaning of the thing he's voting for] but has to pay very close attention to the vote's performative dimension.
24ff The author gives an example of "loyalty oaths" used in the United States; also another example of a sociologist/law professor at a Midwestern university who voiced political opinions against loyalty oaths... but before she could take a job at this university she had to first take their loyaly oath before she could even take up the practice of publicly questioning oath-taking! "Here, the constative dimension of the ritualized act experiences a shift, while the performative dimension remains fixed and important: taking the oath opens a world of possibilities where new constative meanings become possible, including a professorial position with a recognized political voice within the institution. In the sociologists words, 'The oath did not mean much if you took it, but it meant a lot if you didn't.'" The author says this illustrates the general principle of how certain discursive acts can drift to an expanding performative dimension and an irrelevant constative dimension, and he argues that this happened during Soviet late socialism. Another example here: a guy who sat through Komsomol meetings reading a book, but as soon as the phrase "Who's in favor?" was uttered, he raised his hand automatically. The author argues that these ritualized acts and statements had become far more performative and the constative dimension was completely reinterpreted away from its original meaning.
26 Comments here on how during the Stalin era Stalin functioned as an "external canon" or a sort of "external editor" that maintained the "authoritative discourse"; but as he died and the background conditions shifted, "the structures of the discourses became increasingly frozen and were replicated from one context to the next practically intact." The author gives example of texts, posters, films, monuments where constative meanings "became increasingly unimportant." "This book will refer to this process--in which the performative dimension of ritualized and speech acts rises in importance (it is important to participate in the reproduction of these acts at the level of form), while the constative dimension of these acts become open-ended, indeterminate, or simply irrelevant--as performative shift." [This is an absolutely terrible sentence, and it's all the more a problem because it states one of the book's key concepts!] "Performative shift was a central principle through which authoritative discourse in late socialism operated and through which practice was represented and organized." [Note the long footnote on this page and the next citing various examples: stock phrases used in speeches like "the fulfillment of the plan" or "economy of shortage" which meant that "the plan" had to be "fulfilled" at the level of form via numbers, statistics, etc. Thus managers who had to hit the numbers had to do various things (bargaining, barter, padding the numbers) in order to "meet" the plan but that meant that they were violating the literal meanings of the plan in order to meet the plan. Thus "fulfill the plan" is a symbol of a performative shift, and the meaning associated with it became open and somewhat unpredictable.]
27 The author describes how these various unanticipated meanings did not signify "resistance" in any way. [Essentially here the various participants in Soviet Society had to replicate the form of the ritual or they would get in serious trouble, but the actual content and substance were hardly a part of that form itself.]
28ff "The following chapters argue that the performative shift of authoritative discourse that occurred in the 1950s and 1960s allowed Soviet people to develop a complexly [? is this a word?] differentiating relationship to ideological meanings, norms, and values. Depending on the context, they might reject a certain meaning, norm, or value, be apathetic about another, continue actively subscribing to a third, creatively reinterpret a fourth, and so on. These dispositions were emergent, not static." The author argues that the performative reproduction of these rituals and speech acts gave the impression of a system with monolithic immutability but at the same time it really enabled unpredictable meanings and styles of living to spring up everywhere within it. "In a seemingly paradoxical twist, the immutable and predictable aspects of state socialism, and it's creative and unpredictable possibilities, became mutually constitutive."
29ff Discussion of the author's sources: drawing on contemporaneous and retrospective materials, including some 50 interviews with party members, speech writers, propaganda artists, etc. who he found by running ads in several Saint Petersburg weeklies. The author comments about how younger people during Russia's transformation were "particularly struck by the suddenness of the event and yet surprisingly to themselves turned out to be particularly prepared for it. These people most wanted to make sense of this event and their experience of it."
31 Discussion of the post-Stalinist period: the "thaw" (Khrushchev's reforms), then the "stagnation" (Brezhnev's era), also the Soviet intervention in Czechoslovakia in 1968 is considered the symbolic divide between these two periods. These sub-periods also roughly correspond to two generations: "sixtiers" and the "last Soviet generation." The book focuses on this "last" generation, people born between the 50s and early 70s [I guess you could say in our culture these would be Boomers plus some of Gen X]. This generation made up about a third of the Soviet population during the mid 80s, around 90 million people. They are also considered "the children of stagnation" who lacked an inaugural event to coalesce around, unlike the older generations who had the Revolution or the denunciation of Stalin; the last Soviet generation was formed around the collapse of the Soviet Union, but they grew up among the "immutable authoritative discourse of the Brezhnev years" as they all participated in the reproduction of these rituals, texts and performative acts.
33ff Discussion of the book's structure: Chapter 2 is a two-level analysis of Soviet authoritative discourse; Chapter 3 analyzes how members of the last Soviet generation were involved in the reproduction of authoritative discourse, inventing new meanings and relations while they performed them. Chapter 4 looks at networks of friends, conversations, cultural milieus in the 60s and 70s; various groups that had nothing to do with politics and were not in opposition to the Soviet state but then later played a role in reinterpreting the socialist system.
34-5 Chapter 5 discusses the imaginary worlds of late socialist life like the "Imaginary West" and how it came to dominance in the lives of young people in the 70s and 80s. Chapter 6 draws on diaries, memoirs, newspaper articles and personal correspondence between two young men in the late 70s, and focuses on the aesthetics of irony of the humor of the absurd. "I argue that this aesthetic was one of the cultural principles through which the deterritorialized late Soviet culture was produced and reinterpreted." Finally the conclusion revisits the book's questions: "What paradoxes at the core of the late Soviet system made the collapse of that system appear to its citizens as both completely sudden and unexpected and yet completely unsurprising? On what kind of internal displacements at the level of discourse, knowledge, ideology, meaning, space and time were these paradoxes predicated? And how was knowledge produced, coded, circulated, received, and interpreted under those conditions?"
Chapter 2: Hegemony of Form: Stalin's Uncanny Paradigm Shift
36ff Comments here on the Soviet film The Irony of Fate where the protagonist gets drunk with his buddies and ends up on a plane to the wrong city, he gives the taxi driver his Moscow address and is delivered to an identical apartment block, in fact everything is identical--even the door keys. He lets himself into what he thinks is his Moscow home, ultimately to fall in love with the woman who lives in the apartment he thought was his own. "This comedy makes apparent the standardization and predictability of Soviet life in the 1970s... These standardizations of everyday tools, references, and scenes were part of a larger standardization of discourse during the Soviet period, epitomized in the ubiquitous ideological slogans and posters that covered urban space." This formed a sort of familiar backdrop to daily life even in an unfamiliar city.
37 This chapter analyzes how in the early 50s the Soviet discursive regime experienced a major transformation, "becoming highly normalized, fixed and citational and all levels of structural organization" where "the performative dimension of authoritative discourse started to play a much greater role than its constative dimension." This made the system "monolithic" but at the same time "internally vulnerable to a sudden implosion." First, however, the author says "we need to start with its historical development."
38ff Reference here to revolutionary France as well as revolutionary Russia: both were marked by experiments with language: a new "language of acronyms" was created, many invented words were introduced into the language, all of which were used "as a powerful tool for revolutionizing consciousness." Note the Marxist view that in a communist society all spoken languages would finally merge into one communist language. [Heck, post-revolution France tried to redo the entire calendar, changing months, introducing a 10-day week, etc.]
39 The "cacophony" of language experimentation increasingly became a problem for Bolshevik leadership by the 1920s as they were attempting to manage culture and build a state; this led to more control imposed on revolutionary discourse. [As I read this I can't help but think about all of the messaging, political talking points, economic euphemisms ("inflation is transitory"), pandemic talking points ("two weeks to flatten the curve!"), etc., that are autonomically regurgitated by figures in our media in a system of unified messaging, and then watch, astounded, as citizen consumers of that media themselves regurgitate these phrases and talking points in a sort of externally imposed mimesis. You have to avoid consuming mass media--especially regime-compliant media if you want to think for yourself in any genuine way. It's just too contaminatory, the mimetic forces are just too strong.]
41ff On Stalin acting as the "external master," which led to what the author calls a "widely circulating metadiscourse on ideological representations" that evaluated literary texts, artistic products, linguistic formulations and scientific theories as either "correct" or "incorrect" within Marxist-Leninist paradigm. The author gives as a prototypical example a multi-volume History of the Civil War that was to be written by Maxim Gorky, Stalin headed an editorial board that introduced some 700 corrections to the first volume. These corrections were published widely in the Soviet press in order to create "conceptual clarity, theoretical precision, and political vigilance" on the country's historical discourse. [This History of the Civil War turns out to be a gigantic rabbit hole in itself: after one volume was put out, Gorky died under mysterious circumstances, and the whole project fell apart as the Soviet regime had to constantly rewrite history during and after Stalin's various purges. What happened was many former "heroes" had become "traitors" and these people had to be either written out of history or renarrated somehow. Wild.]
42ff Other examples of Stalin as "master": see the metadiscourse on the new Soviet constitution in the 1930s which more or less concreteized the country's ideology. Stalin made specific corrections and responses to letters about the Constitution. Stalin even edited the Soviet national anthem in his role as "the 'master' who stood outside discourse." According to the footnote here on this page Stalin also played this role in agriculture, genetics, physics, chemistry, music and cinema.
44ff Comments here on Stalin's interventions in linguistics and the implications: first Stalin critiqued Marx's "New Theory"; this freed science and aesthetic fields from a strict need to comply with Marxist thinking (this shifted everything around on Lysenkoism and Lysenko's Marxist-compliant "class-based" views on genetics for example). The other major implication was that now there emerged a fixed "canon" of dialogue, language and thought, initially impacted/directed by Stalin himself. Then, after Stalin died and Khrushchev denounced Stalin's cult of personality, this external "master" was fully removed from discourse. "With this shift the epoch of late socialism began."
47ff "Since there was no longer any unambiguous and uniquely explained external canon against which to calibrate one's own texts for ideological precision, what constituted the 'norm' of that language became increasingly unknowable." Party secretaries and communist speechwriters could only look to one another's texts to normalize their own texts, and so "this discourse experienced progressive normalization." The author says that party speeches and documents were subjected to endless editing behind closed doors and "this led to a progressive uniformity, anonymity, and predictability of authoritative language." Since the leadership couldn't risk committing a political mistake by writing something "irregular," you thus had to repeat the form of language that had already been in wide use.
48 The author cites a joke to reflect this shift: Brezhnev is attending a Soviet art exhibition, and everyone gathers around him to hear what he thinks about the artwork. He waits for a minute and then he declares: "Very interesting. But let us hear what they think at the top." [Good one!]
49ff Note that speechwriting became so uniform that Communist party speechwriters used a slang term "block writing" to describe it: they could use relatively fixed blocks of discourse, reproduced from text to text, often entire paragraphs. [This reminds me of things like "indigenous land acknowledgements" made before performances and ceremonies now, it's pure block text, performed and copypasted to various scenarios.] "Soviet authoritative language was becoming increasingly citational and circular at all levels of structure (syntax, morphology, narrative, etc.) and in all contexts." The author calls this type of language "hypernormalized" and says that it contains less and less constative meaning and has become more and more unanchored.
53 "This discourse was experiencing the performative shift I described in Chapter 1: its performative dimension (reproduction of conventionalized and ritualized forms) was becoming more important than the constantive dimension (constative meanings which might be associated with these forms)." The author gives an example of one of the secretaries of ideology who kept a personal collection of thousands of Lenin quotes, and he would choose various quotations to sprinkle into any text to create "ideological continuity" to support any argument. Another example here, both hilarious and disturbing, about a specific slogan text that was to be painted on a building facade. The text contained a mistakenly placed comma which made the sentence nonsensical. The chief artist went to the local party leadership to ask to correct the text, but no one on the committee had the courage to permit such a change even though they all agreed it was a mistake. The problem here was that the text had originated at a higher political level and they were afraid to change it.
55ff Comments here on the normalization of visual propaganda, including even portrayals of Lenin: he became younger, taller, more muscular, he was presented in a fixed, repeatable style and in fewer contexts and poses. Thus "the number of possible visual representations of Lenin diminished." These images became cliches, artists even stocked normalized images of Lenin in their studios, there was even a "block painting" technique--analogous to the "block writing" developed by speechwriters. Also striking comments here on portraits of Brezhnev: as Brezhnev received new medals, every district's artists had to add it to all the public portraits in the district--during the night!--so the change would be practically invisible to most people. Even though people "knew" that president had received a new medal (since this award would be announced in the media), "this fact was symbolically represented in terms of immutability" via a hypernormalization of this authoritative portrait symbol. [Holy shit was a wild thing to think about! Brezhnev has always had 18 medals, he never had 17, certainly not 16...]
58ff Further normalization of the visual form in propaganda photographs and films: see for example how the visual style of newsreels became more formulaic; increasingly the same footage would be reused in different newsreels to represent different events--thus you'd see "blocks" of footage of formulaic scenes (audiences clapping or voting, crowds marching, agricultural work on collective farms, etc). Also the discourse of public rituals became increasingly standardized: you'd see a a unified "orchestrated scheme" with standardized "blocks" of ritualized practice replicated from one context to another: see for example how parades became more and more formalized, or how Party and Komsomol meetings became increasingly formulaic and meticulously planned in advance, including things like the order of speakers, the texts they would read, even the "spontaneous" comments from members of the audience.
59ff Comments here on how if you didn't participate ["perform"] in a ritualized act, it caused problems. Also comments here on how the overall "discourse" was gradually transformed into "mediated knowledge" that was "always already known" rather than new assertions. [Brezhnev has always had 18 medals, look at his portrait!] This made the current authorial voices less present--and therefore also less exposed to potential scrutiny--and there was a growing anonymity and citationality of the authorial voice, along with an ever greater normalization of texts.
61 Discussion here of what the author calls citational temporality: the authoritative language increasingly cited previous texts and structures, all of which were presented as "knowledge commonly known." Because all of this stuff was achored in "prior truth," thus anything said continued to be pre-established knowledge, and therefore the medium was just a voice that acted as a mediator of that pre-established knowledge. [It's fascinating how easily you can sort of insert things into the collective memory and it suddenly "was always true/was never not true." We actually saw some really good examples of this during the COVID era: see for example where figures throughout government and media said that the experimental "vaccines" would make you fully immune... but then shortly thereafter there became a need for boosters, and then more and more boosters. Hardly anybody seemed to remember the informational conflict! We just lined up for boosters.]
61ff The author offers out a sort of repertoire of syntactical and semantic principles here, calling them "generative principles of authoritative language" for this producing "normalized discourse" including block writing or block formation of images, texts, file footage, etc., which could be more or less retransmitted into another utterance. The author comments on this language having a notoriously wooden style and sound, to the point where it was called "oak language" in slang terms. People became very fluent at reciting, writing, using, and combining it in various ways.
63ff The author has the reader compare two texts from different years in different publications, both addressing the same topic--they read like plagiarisms of each other; also a discussion of complex modifiers: certain nouns and verbs would be accompanied by concrete adjectives, like a "high level" of x or the "exceptional completeness" of y; these modifiers made things seem "obvious, taken for granted facts, without necessarily being such." The author repeats here the idea of migration from constative to performative meaning, arguing that people didn't necessarily believe this stuff per se: in fact it actually acquired very different meaning over time sitting in the performative level. "This conclusion has implications not only for the analysis of Soviet political discourse but for broader theories and methods of discourse analysis." [Heck yes as we see these techniques literally being used here in the West!]
67ff On complex nominalizations: the author argues that the editing strategies of authoritative language converted shorter phrases into one long phrase, while omitting verbs and adding commas, "resulting in production of long and unwieldy noun phrases [nominalizations]." [Note that in good English style nominalizations are a no-no]. Just like with complex modifiers this reduces the authorial voice, shifts temporality into the past and makes things seem "always true." The author gives examples here of various "presuppositions" in this style of writing, all piled up one on top of the other and all predicated on each other.
69 Interesting comment here that noun phrases are more assertive than verbal phrases, because the claims appear more natural. The author takes this one more step and says this is not necessarily the case: it's more that this authoritative discourse was designed to communicate something about the nature of that discourse itself [a metadiscourse].
70ff Comments here on other aspects of this authoritative discourse: displaced agency, the author gives an example of "something that is required" but the speaker is removed from imposing the requirement, thus the requirement is sort of presumed. "...the agent of the assertion can be displaced from the author of the text.." Also on rhetorical circularity: here the author quotes Michael Urban and his observations about 1970s and 1980s-era speeches by General Secretaries, saying they were organized around the rhetorical level of the idea of "a lack" and once this "lack" has been named (like food, resources, productivity or whatever), that "lack" was paradoxically supposed to be automatically solved by the means that the discourse had already deemed earlier to be inadequate or inappropriate for the task! There's an example here from General Secretary Chernenko where he would appeal to Soviet citizens to "organize" and "monitor" industrial production while simultaneously arguing that these measures of organizing and monitoring had failed to achieve results in the past. Basically, Soviet citizens should "develop new approaches and methods by using old approaches and methods." The author also calls back to the original Soviet conceit during the Revolution and the establishment of the early Soviet state which was to achieve liberation by means of constraint, again, calling back to the idea of Lefort's Paradox.
73ff Another interesting linguistic idea here, the idea of "master signifiers": units of ideological discourse that serve as "quilting points" where material can be stitched together into a unified ideological field. The author cites both Lacan and Zizek here. An example here would be "money" as the "master signifier of value" in any discourse on value. [Which brings to mind the extreme power of being able to debase the money: it becomes a secret form of control over that underlying master signifier!] Typical Soviet authoritative discourse "quilting points" would be Lenin, the Party, Communism, and each of these words could be replaced with various synonyms (Communism with classless society, Lenin with Marxism-Leninism or "the scientific method," etc. [Yikes, we use "science" as a rhetorical quilting point all over Western media to justify all kinds of insane things.] Note some subtleties here, see for example how Khrushchev detached "Stalin" from the master signifier "Lenin" in his famous speech where he discussed "returning" to the real word of Lenin, and then cities, streets and institutions carrying Stalin's name were renamed, his monuments were taken down, his body was removed from the mausoleum, etc. The author also gives examples of films about the Bolshevik Revolution where scenes where Stalin had been portrayed as Lenin's closest associate were cut or reshot with new characters. Also note this quote: "It was only when Lenin was undermined as a master signifier, in the late 1980s, that the Soviet socialist system quickly collapsed."
74 Also a footnote here musing about the German Nazi system which had so much dependency on the master signifier of "the Fuhrer" that this dependency could be why that system was shorter-lived than the Soviet system. [I suspect the Soviet and Allied invasion of Germany might have had a somewhat larger impact on the lifespan of the Nazi system than the Fuhrer's semiotic role as master signifier. But I could be wrong.]
74-5 Restatement of the thesis so far: "This chapter started by discussing the historical conditions under which the authoritative discourse of late socialism developed. It focused in particular on authoritative language (in party texts, speeches, newspaper articles, etc.) and also mentioned similar developments in other forms of authoritative discourse--in particular, in visuals and rituals. After the 1950s, with the disappearance of the "external" voice that provided metadiscussions and evaluations of that language, the language structures became increasingly normalized, cumbersome, citational, and circular. That language became what I termed hypernormalized. This development was an unintended result of the attempts by great numbers of people who were engaged in producing texts and authoritative language to minimize the presence of their own authorial voice. By doing so, they converted their voices from that of the producer of new knowledge to that of the mediator of pre-existing knowledge."
75ff Further discussion of the performative aspect of this language increasing versus the constantive aspect of it: this belies the view that everyone thought the whole Soviet world was a weird postmodern universe where people had to be delusionally lying to themselves somehow; the author cites Mikhail Epstein's as an exponent of this view. The author disputes this take on things, saying instead that the people did not interpret the authoritative language as constative statements at all, rather, the Soviet people engaged with this authoritative language on a performative dimension. Once again he gives the example of Soviet voting as a standard instance where "participating in the ritual" produced the effect, not the "meaning" of the ritual itself. "Contrary to Epstein's claim that 'reality that differed from the ideology simply cease to exist,' that different reality, in fact, exploded into the Soviet world in powerful, multiple, and unanticipated forms. It is to these unexpected effects of ideological discourse that we turn in the following chapters."
Chapter 3: Ideology Inside Out: Ethics and Poetics
77 Note the chapter epigraph here, a quote from the Slovenian rock group Laibach:
All art is subject to political manipulation,
Except for that which speaks the language of this manipulation.
77ff Comments on the novel Generation P by Victor Pelevin [which sounds like a good read], and an extended quote from it where the protagonist complements his former party boss on his ideological rhetoric: "I realized that I would never learn to manipulate words like this. They have no sense at all, but affect you so much that you instantly understand everything." After this the other character begins speaking extemporaneously using exactly this kind of "oak language." The author describes how this satirical book captures the shift in Soviet authoritative language during late socialism, also on how this language influenced audiences on a level of "poetic function" using the phrase from Roman Jakobson.
79ff The author describes the process this way: first, there was a hypernormalization of authoritative discourse which became increasingly fixed and citational in all contexts (see chapter 2). Next, this discourse then experienced a performative shift, which took place across the ubiquitous hierarchy of state institutions, as it delegated power to every "actor" who correctly reproduced this form of utterance of ideology, and which resulted in a growing importance of the performative dimension of these ideological texts, rituals, and visuals. The author says in this chapter he'll talk about the production of new unanticipated meanings, relations and identities from these texts, describing how the younger/last Soviet generation encountered, reproduced and reinterpreted these normalized forms of authoritative texts and rituals.
81ff Discussion of Komsomol organizations, where membership was more or less tacitly required for many activities in Soviet life; on their role in organizing ideological activities, but also on how it hosted social, musical and sporting events. On its hierarchical and centralized nature; on the training in "techniques of ideological production" that happened at the highest levels of the Communist party in Komsomol organizations, the author describes various people in this organization and their work in some of this performative activity. [Note that the West doesn't really have an institution like the Komsomol to disseminate ideology or authoritative language, but we do have an university system that shapes students' ideology, plus a secondary school system that produces students with certain uniform characteristics, and of course we have media and social media instruments that "shapes" peoples' language, thoughts, etc.]
84ff The author cites one of his subjects's training in the basics of Maxist-Leninist rhetoric, which involved specific keywords that could be used to connect any random theme: pat, cliched phrases that everyone had heard an endless number of times, and they came to mind easily and were easy to reuse. Also on training on the narrative structure of a typical authoritative address in a large Komsomol meeting. "Such explicit discussions on ideology were conducted only inside the Higher Party School and were not visible to most people." [You can't let people see the inside of the sausage factory!] Those in the lower Komsomol organizations were not professionally trained in this stuff, but they would learn it basically by copying the language. The author quotes a person who worked with a more senior and more trained Komsomol member who told him to take his old speech and "use it as a prototype." The author quotes the junior guy: "This was how I wrote all my future texts, and it's how everyone wrote theirs before and after me." Everyone did it, but you couldn't copy the speech verbatim, you just had to use the same formulations while inserting new facts. The author goes over examples here showing the various "generative principles" of inserting, adjusting and rearranging stock phrases and stock words, as well as specific examples of the author's "flavor."
87ff Further examples here in the visual realm: students drawing representations of Lenin, but their teachers were uneasy for various reasons about displaying their artwork, even though they were high quality work. The idea here was that Lenin's image also was part of authoritative discourse, a sort of "master signifier.
90ff Yet another example here: a woman writing speeches while obeying these same generative principles, but not literally understanding the linguistic aspect of it; it's a sort of mimesis she performs, producing verbal phrases changed into nominal ones, using specific types of adjectives and modifiers, long strings of noun phrases, using temporality, etc. Her output looks and sounds just the same as all the other works out there at the time. The author uses Pierre Bordieu's phrase "delegated power of the spokesperson" here to describe this.
93ff The author distinguishes between "pure pro forma" activities versus "work with meaning" activities. the idea here is that the pure pro forma rituals had to be performed in order to enable any work with meaning, although the author cites the nuance that it wasn't always clear where the dividing line was: these two types of work were not easily divided and weren't necessarily in opposition to each other. The author gives an example of one man learning to minimize the pro forma work so he could get to his meaningful work more quickly. "This meant that he reinterpreted for himself much of what the Komsomol stood for in everyday life." And the author is careful to say that this man wasn't some kind of cynical Soviet: he had various awards and honorary diplomas that he proudly kept on the walls of his office and at home.
95ff Another example of one for the author's subjects, Igor, describing his involvement in what the author would call "formalized ritual activity": Igor would bring a book to Komsomol meetings so he could study, he knew that the decisions had been made in advance and the meeting "had to be sat through." [Huh, just like any corporate meeting!] When there was a vote taken he raised his hand automatically. The author is quite clear that none of these people wanted to get rid of socialism, if anything they thought they would just try to get through or minimize the senseless formalities so that socialism could work better. There was no ideological rebellion here at all!
97ff Even in the domain of political joke-telling there is a certain formalism: certain subjects like Lenin were largely off-limits for example; and there is a certain joke structure that is sort of collectively permitted. What's striking about this is these are outside of the official political system in the first place--they are jokes about that system.
99 Another interesting example here of a specific type of speech that Masha, a school Komsomol committee leader, had to give, which tracked students' educational progress. She had to actually state the names of certain "bad" students who received low grades: she would always state the names of "traditionally bad" students who were always named, but she had to rotate in new names that "had not been worn out yet" as well. But she would check with that student first, and tell them she didn't intend any animosity, it was rather the obligations of the speech. Thus she would build around this specific "throne speech" (this was slang for the secretary's annual speech) a separate activity to maintain friendly relations in the school, while still performing this formalized, ritualized activity. See also the "little tricks" that another subject, Andrei, used to distribute formulaic tasks among the rank and file by horse-trading various other tasks and responsibilities. [In my late career I saw nearly identical examples of this. Again, a corporation can be as incompetent, as sclerotic and as ritualized as any government.]
100ff An example here of a sort of "padding the numbers" situation as a group fulfilled a ritual function in a non-standard way: upper-level party organizations had required a large and unrealistic number of lectures in a lecture series, but the lower organizations knew that no one would actually come down and check, so they would participate in the requirement purely at the level of form, where underneath it was "a complex system of agreements and unspoken understandings."
102-3 Preliminary discussion here of the concept of "svoi": the the word literally needs "us" or "ours" or "those who belong to our circle"; it's a word of solidarity.
103ff On "svoi" vs activists vs dissidents: The author takes care to distinguish between svoi-type people and "activists" who were really rabid believers who would be the sort of person who would expose party secretaries who took bribes or who would write letters to the administration about local officials who broke the law. The author says that among the younger generations at this time of late socialism there was so few zealous "activists" that they confused people: were they cynical careerists? Or were they sincere? Note the description here of one activist who saw the performative aspects of a Komsomol organization and claimed that it was not really practicing Leninist principles. "Most students thought he was naive or foolish" and he was eventually expelled from the University.
105 Another example here of an activist-type of guy in a research library who spontaneously spoke in authoritative discourse-style speaking but would always do it, including in regular social environments. People didn't know what to make of him: he had to be mocking, he could not possibly be serious; but others thought he was being extremely careerist. It turns out this guy remained in the Communist party after the collapse of the Soviet state--even when it became a liability to one's professional career to be a member. [So he was sincere all along! e just bottom-ticked the political system.]
106ff Now a discussion of dissidents, who, per the author, "seemed to take authoritative discourse at face value." Most people considered them to be irrelevant at this stage. Interesting discussion here about Andrei Sakharov whose writings were ignored or thought of as irrelevant until the collapse, and then his "moral position suddenly became meaningful and widely respected." Discussion here of the difference between a dissident and "normal people," and then a subtlety here of "dissident-like" people who had critical views of the Soviet system but did not actively practice dissent: they were seen as threatening to the stability of normal life. One comment here is about one dissident-like person that what he was doing was silly and useless and could actually cause problems for others: this person refused to pay his Komsomol dues out of moral principle. People like this were considered abnormal in some way.
108ff Now back to the idea of svoi/normal people: the author gives an example of one of his subjects, Irina, whose responsibility was to collect Komsomol dues among the rank and file members of her cell, and if the dues were not paid in full she would receive a reprimand, and this was not a minor thing. But people paid their dues because they were svoi. She would approach people and say "Please, don't get us into trouble." The author then argues "Paying and collecting the dues under these conditions was not about ideological statements of allegiance" but rather a ritual act and social act of being a normal person, which is why the dissident who refused to pay his dues created more irritation among his colleagues than the actual person who collected the dues herself. She was svoi, he was not.
110 Other examples of svoi-type conduct, including knowing that if someone was svoi you could speak openly without fearing what you said would be used against you.
111 Interesting example of how state power was "deterritorialized" and used to produce discipline in the svoi domain: thus someone who didn't perform the proper rituals and thus created problems for others would be disciplined: literally the punishment would be for the rule/ritual breaking, but in reality the group would do this because of the difficulty it created for the rest of them. So this is a way the group could deal with someone who is excessively lazy, or defiant, but by basically using the state apparatus of reprimands. [It's very very interesting here because they are weaponizing the system as a form of social discipline, but it has nothing to do with politics or ideology at all. Of course, also, if someone wanted to institute a governmental system of control, they'd actually want the disciplinary measures to be pushed down to the level where individuals carry out the discipline themselves. Thus this is just another level of centralized control, just the direct mechanism is decentralized.]
112ff A good example here of this "discipline": at one of the author's subject's Komsomol meetings a question of whether to expel someone came up as he took a job in a religious institution: the group ended up being rough on the guy not because of this per se, but because in general he didn't talk to them as svoi: he was arrogant and disrespectful in general and so the group was harsher on him than it otherwise would be. The author writes "Although the ritual was unavoidable and its topic fixed, what it would mean was not completely predetermined. Indeed, it ended up proceeding in the direction that the conveners wanted to avoid." But it was not for ideological reasons at all, it was because he wasn't svoi. It was sort of a collective social discipline ritual placed inside a "wrapper" of a political ritual.
114ff Here the author gets into the theory underlying the various anecdotal examples he shared earlier in the chapter. First a discussion of the "performative shift" where the authoritative discourse texts and rituals were reproduced--but what they represented [their constative meanings] were unimportant. One voted in favor, one passed examinations, one went to parades, all without paying attention to the constative meaning. But then these rituals could be repurposed and be used to constitute alternative meetings, not in a dissident type of way (in fact it wasn't oppositional at all), but within the system itself. The people still had personal affinity to the various values that were explicit in the overall system. The author calls this a strategy of deterritorialization. The author argues that the entire Soviet system was undergoing an internal deterritarialization although at the representative level everything looked the same so the shift was relatively invisible. This is different from the "dissonance strategy" of overtly opposing the system's dominant mode of signification, doing something blatant and obvious which actually caused trouble among the svoi; per the author's view, people actually reproduced the system's authoritative discourse and built and added new meanings to it.
116 The author actually argues that the svoi concept was an unanticipated result of the process of deterritorializing: being svoi was based on a sort of self-organized set of etiquettes [perhaps you could think of the COVID era an an analogy here, as it self-sorted people with different responses to the event: some people self-separated, some didn't, some were mask-lovers, others weren't, some raced to get as many boosters as they could, others had "vaccine hesitancy" and so on. The two groups self-sorted.] Note here a subtlety of two different kinds of svoi: the literal "we" referred to in ideological terms by a speech at a Komsomol meeting: "Do we support the resolution? Versus the "we" of the performative aspect: as in "are you the kind of person who understands the norms and rules of this current ritual and that they need to be performatively reproduced--as in "we have to get through this meeting"? The author argues that the latter is self-organized but not in explicit opposition of the ideology behind it.
118ff Another example here of a woman who brought a friend onto a committee and then attracted other friends to it, eventually building a fantastic Komsomol committee that was almost exclusively friends, and she has warm memories of that committee, but doesn't talk at all about the ideology component of it. Thus this is a different sort of performative aspect of something that has lost some portion of its constative meaning.
120 Another example here where certain svoi friends would use a coded phrase: "I need to leave for the raikom (district committee meeting)" which they euphemized to leave work to go to a cafe or an art exhibition. But since your reason was something political, it was therefore permitted. The author relates a story here where two women told their library department boss they needed to leave for the raikom, but they were going to try out a new pizzeria nearby. But then their boss later showed up at the same pizzeria with another senior colleague, also using the same "I need to leave for the raikom" reason. This example shows how people use party responsibilities or performative activities, but reshape what they actually mean and reuse them to gain relative freedom. The author calls this deterritorializing the meanings of the socialist system and drawing on the system's principles. [It's very interesting and very ironic.]
121ff Still more examples: parades, where people actually had fun at them, met friends and acquaintances, and it wasn't an ideological event at all. The May Day parade was when the weather started to turn nice, everyone was in good spirits, etc.
122ff A couple other examples here of newspaper workers, a reporter and an editor, who bonded into svoi over a somewhat controversial singer in Russia while working on a formulaic "oak language" article. The author says that svoi bonding happened at every level in the ideological hierarchy.
125 "The system was internally mutating toward unpredictable, creative, multiple forms of normal life that no one anticipated. This deterritorializing move was a move toward greater freedom, but one that was not coded in the emancipatory rhetoric of grand narratives."
Chapter 4: Living "Vinyl": Deterritorialized Milieus
126ff On Russia's "sixtiers" born in the late fifties to mid-60s, 10 to 20 years older than the last Soviet generation [same age as Boomers], disillusioned by Brezhnev and his retreat from reforms. On the author's concept of vnye or "outside": he gives an example of a sixtier generation member, the poet Joseph Brodsky, who was oblivious to who was in the politburo, he simply didn't notice the Soviet regime and actually got in trouble with the state for being this way. The author uses this poet as an extreme example of being vnye, but also arguing that the Last Generation were heavily vnye: outside the system but also inside it at the same time, just remaining somewhat oblivious [in some ways this sounds characteristic of Millennials in our culture today]. The author begins with some extreme examples from the 70s, then more standard/typical examples, then ultimately builds a case that being vnye was widespread enough to create a major "deterritorialization of late Soviet culture."
128ff The author's interview subject Inna and her friends: Inna went from enthusiasm about joining the Komsomol to exposure to Vysotskii and other "rebel" music, and became disaffected. [Maybe this is why regimes "need" to control their arts and culture if they want to control their people.] Inna and her friends at university just ignored and avoided the system's ideological symbols, but they weren't engaging in any anti-system resistance either. They just had zero interest. She saw the system (as well as opponents of the system) as "them" and part of the same thing [Again, this rhymes a bit with the USA today: increasingly people hate both left and right parties and see them as pseudo-oppositional parts of the same corrupt system]. Also not this quote from Inna: "We did not consider Solzhenitsyn svoi. This was important. No, no, we were not anti-system like him."
132 The author distinguishes between Havel and Solzhenitsyn's appeals "to live not by lies" whereas these younger people spoke of "living lightly" or "leading a very fun life." The author is not talking about this being a form of non-seriousness, but more in terms of sitting outside the structural system in a mental sense. The author goes still further describing a concept of "internal emigration" which is not complete withdrawal from Soviet reality but rather being inside and outside at the same time, or what he describes as an "inherent ambivalence."
134ff a bit of a tangent here on the clubs and "circles" that were formed at the Leningrad Palace of Pioneers, which selected university-educated people who had demonstrated particular skills and abilities, and in this group more freedom of thought was permitted, including aggressive discussion about the Soviet system. The author then returns to the the interviewee Inna who was involved in the Archaeological Circle; in their activities they often read poetry of the Soviet silver age, works that had been unpublished/throttled by the Soviet state for ideological reasons for a long time. They also sang the songs of "problematic" singer-songwriters like Vysotskii. The author describes the circle of friends as another example of svoi, contrasting it from "regular people": they considered themselves neither anti-Soviet nor pro-Soviet but more non-Soviet.
139ff Other instances where the a group's discourse was simultaneously internal and external to the system's discourse, see for example groups that occupied privileged positions in the state: engineers, scientists, students, filmmakers. Even these groups contained people who were living vnye. The author gives what he calls a paradigmatic example among theoretical physicists who developed a culture of vnye. There's a quote here from a physicist who described how they had a level of freedom far greater than in the US: they didn't have to teach, they could decide what they wanted to work, on whereas in the US you had to spend all your time writing applications for grants that you wouldn't get.
141ff On the coffee houses that opened in many cities in the 1960s during the Khrushchev era, which "enabled new spatial and temporal contexts for interactions among large groups of young people." The author likens it to the previously-discussed clubs and circles but more freeform. These coffee shops usually just said "Cafe" on the outside but they acquired slang nicknames, often based on Western locations; the author talks about one cafe known as "Saigon" which was a celebrated cafe that opened in 1964 in Leningrad. The author hints at the name itself being a sort of deterritorialized use of a word that had certain symbolic meanings--nickname contained also a bit of defiance. The patrons liked the intellectual unpredictability of it, rather than, say, having a private dinner at their house; comments here on the various groups that would show up there, groups that would actually not mix; for example a group of black marketers, a group of poets, a group of artists, etc. Also the word "Saigon" became a metaphor that could mean literally "meeting at the cafe" but could also mean meeting within the milieu of its regulars. Note also: because occasionally dissidents would go there, the KGB kept the place under surveillance--as a result it became "useful" to both the patrons and the state to keep it open (it was never closed down) because the KGB could use it to keep an eye on things. [Once again this really rhymes with the USA today as it uses "glowies" to infiltrate online groups, or arranges "honeypots" to draw out and entrap people.] This also added an a "feeling of romanticism and adventure" to going there, but at the same time these groups were uninterested in politics and so they didn't feel that they were at any risk.
144ff Comments in some of the literature read by the author's interviewees: authors that maybe weren't "fully illegal" so you could find these works say in a research library; the woman Inna actually worked in such a library and thus had access to these works, authors like Gumilev, Bulgakov, Platinov. The author talks about how they were "not particularly worried about the KGB." Her comment here is interesting "...as far as arresting us for this--who would do that?" She didn't have any interest in dissident works, didn't believe in it, and didn't have the kind of fear that the generations before her had of the secret police. [This is interesting in a sense that people are rebelling on some level, but doing it within permitted parameters: you could think of it as a pseudo-protest that the people themselves deny is a protest, or you could think of it as a sort of safety valve the state sets out in a subtle way: this keeps people more or less fully under control, but gives them just enough pseudo-rebellion so they stay under control.]
146ff Comments on Leningrad amateur rock musicians, who likewise insisted they were uninterested in politics and didn't consider the Soviet state's campaigns against rock music to be dangerous to them. "Political themes were not only considered uninteresting and banal, but any hint of raising such topics was met with explicit sarcasm." Note that one of the band names here was "Popular Mechanics" (Populiarnaia Mekhanika).
148 On the concept of obshchenie: socializing, deep conversation, hanging out, exchanging ideas, togetherness, but in more intense conversation than just small talk; there's no direct equivalent of this word in English, although interestingly the author describes "the concept of privacy" as a close antonym for this word in the English language; not also he says the concept of privacy doesn't exactly have a Russian word equivalent either. [!!] The author likens it to close quality time with someone. Note another footnote on this page where the author says as the post-Soviet period progresses there's less and less time space for this sort of relationship, a sort of mourning for the loss of this form of social togetherness. [I guess modernity is socially atomizing Russia as well, just like the rest of the world].
149 The author shares a quote here: "a person who was always ready to have a chat and to drink a bottle with friends was never regarded as a criminal or evil, whatever society thought of him." And a person who avoided obshchenie "looked suspicious and evil, almost like Judas." Comments here on how it was important to read certain books, discuss certain ideas, and be involved in obshchenie as a major portion of your free time. [This sounds genuinely great!] The people doing this were not siloed like modern academics or modern intellectuals. These could be theoretical physicists who enjoyed French poetry and were interested in Western rock music, aesthetics, and Buddhist philosophy, and they relentlessly avoided political issues. [Once again, it sounds amazing.] The author describes this obshchenie as a form of kinship, a form of family, of svoi.
151ff On the idea of members of the intelligentsia taking working-class jobs, giving up their professional careers in order to have more free time; the author writes about the stereotype of the "boiler room technician" who might work a few night shifts a week but then have plenty of time for obshchenie and other interests. The author describes this as yet another form of the performative shift of authority of discourse. The state required mandatory employment, but "employment" was reproduced purely performatively at the level of form, while doing this enabled new meanings because the person had time to express himself more as a result. Thus the Soviet state actually "enabled it without quite being able to control or account for it." There's a concept also of "boiler room rockers" who didn't have professional status as musicians and thus could not make a living playing music, but they sought out employment that would provide a little money plus meet the mandatory employment law, and this would then leave them as much free time for music as possible. "By the early 1980s, it became difficult to find a vacancy in such jobs." The author describes it as "their boiler room wages functioned as academic research grants."
154 The author quotes one boiler room rocker: "Before the advent of glasnost and perestroika he could live on three rubles per week [this was US$1.80]." [!!!]
155ff The author cites other examples of what he calls "deterritorializing temporality," where normally the state would occupy a certain amount of a person's time, like for example unpaid weekend days to go help with the harvest in the countryside, but the people would compensate by having their shops "closed for technical reasons" or they would be "out of the office." The author cites a Soviet-era joke of an epitaph on a bureaucrat's tombstone: "I'm not in, and I won't be back." This is how people responded sort of amorphously to the state's various requirements. Thus the author in this chapter has given out different ways that state rituals for work, time or even space can be deterritorialized and reused by people in ways the state can't really control. "These milieus and practices demonstrate that the supposed spatial and temporal linearity and totality of late socialism became everywhere injected with new forms of diversity, plurality, and indeterminacy. The temporal, spatial, and semantic regimes of late socialism became deterritorialized from within as the very logic of the system's existence."
Chapter 5: Imaginary West: The Elsewhere of Late Socialism
158ff On the concept of zagranitsa, ("that which is abroad") which reflects "the peculiar combination of insularity and worldliness in Soviet culture." On the idea that zagranitsa was an imaginary elsewhere; on the sort of archetypal manifestation of the West that was envisoned locally since the "real" West could not be encountered because Russians were forbidden to travel. The author calls this the Imaginary West.
159-160 Thesis statement here: "This chapter continues the discussion of the internal deterritorialization of Soviet culture during late socialism. It builds on the previous two chapters: chapter 3 analyzed the publics of svoi that emerged as a deterritorialized sociality of late socialism; chapter 4 focused on tight milieus that were living in the temporal and spatial vnye (inside-outside) of the Soviet system. The current chapter ventures into the larger realm of the imaginary, arguing that among the great number of imaginary worlds that were both internal and external to late Soviet culture, the Imaginary West was perhaps the most significant."
160f Discussion of various examples of imaginary worlds, including the late Soviet era boom in interest in foreign languages, in Asian philosophy, in Hemingway's novels, science fiction, hiking, mountaineering; also on the emergence of a metadiscussion of this cultural phenomenon in the literature and films of the the 1970s. The author refers here to Andrei Tarkovsky's 1979 film Stalker which involved a mysterious world called "the Zone," which was once sort of a "picnic stop" for an alien spaceship, and the aliens left debris behind; this area is both dangerous and off limits, but it's a site of mysterious powers as well. This film was widely seen as a metaphor for late Soviet reality. The irony of the film is that this allegedly special place is actually nothing special at all, but the people who bring you to the Zone insist that you have to keep this non-specialness a secret, in order to not destroy the hope of others, because "the Zone was constitutive of their reality."
162ff Some of the paradoxes that emerge surrounding this idea of the Imaginary West, including that "Western cultural influences were both criticized for bourgeois values and celebrated for internationalism." Also on the mix of "good" and "bad" forms of international culture: the author refers again here to Stalin criticizing Marx's theories of language (which saw language as a product of social class), this and other domains led ultimately to a "Marxist-Leninist 'canon' that was external to discourse and against which all things could be evaluated as politically correct or incorrect." [What's interesting about the Western idea of political correctness or incorrectness is that there's no canon, it's iterated by a strange back-and-forth between unseen forces in the media and people's willingness to kowtow to those forces.] On the concept of "cosmopolitanism" which was "a product of Western imperialism" and therefore bad, versus "internationalism" which was good and enriching: see for example the (good) internationalism of foreign music that successfully inspired the working people of Soviet society, versus the (bad) cosmopolitanism of music that introduced bourgeois aesthetics into Soviet life. See for example comments from minister of culture Andrei Zhdanov in 1948 deeming Prokofiev and Shostakovich unharmonious and inspired by or rootless cosmopolitanism; thus foreign musical influences could represent "bad cosmopolitanism" or "good internationalism." "...the former was a bourgeois product of imperialism, the latter was a product of progressive people's culture."
164ff The problem was because there was no objective canon against which to compare things, it wasn't clear whether a specific foreign influence was good or bad, leaving everything open to interpretation; some could be good in some contexts but bad in others. [Note here the author's footnote where he talks about this being a paradox that has deep roots in Russian culture, in part due to the split between Slavic and Western culture. These types of issues came up during Peter the Great's reign as well.] The author gives an example of Nikita Khrushchev publicly ridiculing Picasso's abstract art in a Moscow exhibition for its "bourgeois lack of realism" but then one year later Picasso was awarded the Lenin Peace Prize for his "progressive internationalism" as a communist artist. Likewise with American jazz: it was praised for the genius of the slaves and the working people, but also condemned as bourgeois pseudo-art. The author recalls Lefort's Paradox once again: the idea that to liberate a culture you have to subject that culture to total control by the Party. [Also on some level this sounds like dueling interpretations of scripture: if you twist the words enough you can make them say almost anything.] Continued examples and comments about between how from the 1950s to the 80s many cultural forms were both simultaneously critiqued and supported, and this ambiguous dynamic led to (during the 1970s and 80s) a concept of the Imaginary West that itself became deterritorialized.
166ff Comments here on American jazz seen as a symbol of the United States as an ally with Russia against the Nazis, thus the Red Army orchestra would play American tunes after liberating cities in Europe; but then later this music came under criticism for its "trashy philistine motifs." Thus jazz, depending on the context, was criticized but also tolerated. Also even during periods when it was under its greatest criticism it was still performed, but in the style of Soviet "light music" where the songs' names were changed, traditional (and thus more politically palatable) Soviet compositions were inserted between numbers at concerts, etc. [I can't help but imagine a Russian version of Arthur Fiedler and the Boston Pops doing "jazz" with a classical orchestra.]
168 More ambiguity here with film: "At first foreign films were widely shown, then criticized, then banned, then shown again." The author talks about specific historical events provoking these waves of banning/rehabilitation, noting the deeper underlying paradox of the socialist system "that made these waves of cultural policy possible."
168ff Other interesting examples: during the Stalin years a Soviet person was encouraged to enjoy consumption of bourgeois pleasures like dresses or lipstick... as long as they were due rewards for hard work. Likewise certain luxuries of Western life could be admired for their aesthetic beauty and "the genius of the working people who created them." Also foreign language learning was mostly seen as an example of "good internationalism" because many scientific or technical fields required some English, German and French; likewise languages expanded one's cultural horizons, as long as it was looked at critically and with an eye towards benefits to the working people or benefits to the creativity of the working people--rather than the materialism of the bourgeois classes.
170ff Examples here of "stilyagi" people, dressing like actors from American films in the 1940s and 50s, imitating the pompadour/Elvis Presley-type hair of the 1950s, dancing the twist. Note that the Soviet press criticized these young people for being "loafers" and "deviationists." [See photo below.] But yet you would have many young people interested in Western fashion and music but in the sense of "approved" high culture, like literature and classical music; these young people likewise disapproved of the stilyagi and had nothing to do with them. The author describes these young people as excited about creative experiments with literature, poetry, western music, etc., and creating a mix of Soviet and Western art forms.
"Monkeys"
175 Because the Soviet media more or less divided these groups into "extreme" (like the stilyagi) and "normal," this normalized some level of Western influence among educated Soviet youth. Note here in a footnote on this page the author talks about how in a very similar way the British media in the 1970s treated punk as extreme, as opposed to other forms of youth culture. [You could likely argue the USA media did the same with rap music in the 1980s until later when it became more normalized.]
175ff Comments here on shortwave radio: with the invention of the transistor, Soviet industry started mass production of portable shortwave radio sets, allowing listeners all over the vast Soviet Union to tune in to various Soviet stations, but this also enabled listening to stations internationally as well--in fact the tuning dials of many Soviet sets listed the names of foreign cities. Comments also on the Soviet state's ambivalent relationship to shortwave radio, limiting certain bands, making it easier for the state to jam unwanted foreign broadcasts, thus these things were not banned exactly but restricted partially. The state wanted to continue endorsing international cultural knowledge while trying to contain its unwanted effects." "...this ambivalent goal had mixed results." It made shortwave radio listening acceptable, and radio shops opened all over the country, and radio engineers also offered techniques to get around the limited specifications introduced by the state.
178ff Comments on some of the Soviet radio jamming policies: there were periods during which Voice of America, the BBC and certain German stations were jammed during certain years, and the CIA-funded Radio Liberty was always jammed. but foreign language broadcasters like BBC World or Radio France International or Voice of America in English were not jammed if the broadcasts were in languages other than Russian. This was to encourage the cultured person to speak multiple foreign languages and it gave Soviet listeners a chance to learn about rock, jazz, etc.; Thus shortwave radio became a common pasttime around the country. See also the comments here on Willis Conover and his famous show "Time for Jazz" on VOA radio in the mid-50s: because he spoke slowly and clearly and used relatively simple language many people in Russia (and many other countries) learned their first English words and phrases from him. Even Yurii Andropov was a frequent listener of Conover's programs. Finally, the author discusses the shortwave radio as yet another example of deterritorialization, because it was an important tool for cultural production in the late Soviet system, and was enabled by the state, "but its meaning was not determined by the state in any predictable way," thus it enabled a huge explosion in the popularity of Western jazz, rock and roll, foreign languages, and general knowledge about the world.
181ff Interesting discussion here of homemade gramophone copies made on plastic x-ray plates, thus they had the nickname "rock on bones": these were actually used X-ray plates (with images of broken bones, chest cavities, etc.) with a small hole in the center and grooves that were barely visible; this was a cheap and readily available source of plastic, and students at the Leningrad Shipbuilding Institute rigged up a technique to link two turntables and produce these record copies [!] which were then sold clandestinely in city markets and and record stores. Comments on the obvious metaphor here of the rock on bones recordings: that it was Western music copied onto clearly visible Soviet innards. [This is really wild on a few levels.]
185ff Quickly however the rock on bones recording technique was replaced with the production of consumer reel-to-reel tape recorders in the 1960s. Although the state tried to spread "good" music, Western music also spread exponentially too with the rollout of these devices. There's a propaganda quote here from a composer, P. Kantor, talking about avoiding bourgeois music that "wakes up in human beings excessive frivolity and gloomy indifference." [Honestly, a lot of media does impose gloom and nihilism, and thus are bad nutriments. And so one can see why a state might actually try to impose some degree of taste-making with the benefit of its people in mind. Of course when one thinks about the West--where many governments show active disdain toward their citizens--one can see why those nation states actively promote alarmist, nihilistic media because it's an indirect instrument of control: such a nation state will have its subjects that much more depressed, medicated, distracted, alarmed and stressed out... such a nation state does not want its subjects' spirits lifted up by great art.]
187ff On the tape-recorderfication of the last Soviet generation, which enabled the appropriation of Western jazz and rock "as its own cultural forms." This created a whole generational identity according to the author. Note the example of a letter from one 17 year old Russian to his friend indicating his love for Alice Cooper, Deep Purple, Creedence Clearwater Revival, but also J.S. Bach: the author concludes these young people would hardly recognize themselves by the state's concurrent portrayal of Western Rock fans as people with no education uninterested in high culture.
191ff Also on various repurposings and deterritorializations of music here: Beatles songs which were renamed as "British folk tunes" and "songs of protest"; see also the song "Sixteen Tons" by Merle Travis from the 1940s that came under criticism in the McCarthy era, but since the American government saw this song and artist as pro-communist it became therefore "acceptable" Western music that could be played in the Soviet system. But from the standpoint of listeners, the people who enjoyed this music, it was the dancing rhythm, the American English, the non-soviet sound that people loved; the literal meaning of the song was irrelevant. The author ties this in with his Imaginary West concept, saying that it allowed Soviet fans to imagine worlds that were not linked to any real place or circumstance, but yet seemed "Western."
192ff On the 1981 Leningrad Rock Club, an association of amateur bands run under the auspices of the Komsomol (and under unspoken supervision by the KGB) which was thought of as a advantageous for both because the state could monitor the growing amateur rock community while amateur rock musicians could be given relative freedom. Ultimately the semi-legalization of these groups caused a vibrant local rock subculture to grow in Leningrad in the 1980s, much like the milieu of the Cafe Saigon from chapter 4: the "freedom" was also an opportunity for the KGB to observe certain things. [This is another analogy that probably can be translated perfectly to Western pseudo-democracies today, instances where the censors and the censored--or the controllers and the controlled--develop a sort of symbiotic relationship together like this. Worth thinking about this a little more.]
193ff Comments on naming conventions that came from the Imaginary West: young people would give themselves Americanized nicknames like "Mike" instead of Mikhail or "Bob" for Boris. Also examples of invented, misspelled or unknown English words which would convey "Westernness" irrespective of the words' literal meanings.
195ff On "authentication": there were Russian-made knockoffs of Western jeans like Lee or Wrangler brand jeans [heh, just like the phony Fendi bags on sale in Chinatown!], and so "sophisticated techniques of authentication emerged" as people would examine every seam, button, label etc., to verify the true Western origin. This is a part of the author's semiotic discussion of "Westernness" and what actually feels Western, as there was a mix of known and unknown brands, images, uninterpretable lyrics and words in English, etc. that were all part of what made up the Imaginary West.
201 See the image below, which was a piece of government propaganda to show the image of a "loafer" loaded down with Western bourgeois brands and products. Note that Soviet youth who did want to work and study and were the exact opposite of "loafers" simply did not recognize themselves in these images, in fact they these Western things as normalized because they didn't identify with the type of person being criticized in the image. Thus the propaganda--as well as the products--lived in a sort of ambivalence.
A "loafer" and his mother
201ff And there were layers of ambivalence here: "It was not uncommon to buy these products but also to dislike the types of people who supplied them." Basically black marketers were never seen as svoi, people would go out of their way to avoid or minimize encounters with black marketers, or they would buy things from a friend who bought it from a black marketer, etc. [Honestly this looks to me more like hypocrisy than anything else, you want to own these products but you refuse to "lower" yourself to interact with the people who sell them to you?]
204ff The author foreshadows the next chapter here, describing how it "became perfectly appropriate to reproduce the form of authoritative discourse (write speeches, vote "in favor," participate in Komsomol meetings, etc.) while wearing Western jeans, playing Western music, and having a Westernized nickname." But then when perestroika happened and people actually could travel to the West it became obvious that the Imaginary West was quite different from the "real" West, and the mental construction Russian had of what they thought was the West went through its own form of sudden collapse. Thus it was a stunning surprise to the last Soviet generation when many of them first traveled to Western Europe, as they found it quite "ordinary." The author gives several examples here: initially there was a euphoria of consumption of Western beer, but then beer consumption quickly reverted back to Russian beers; likewise with a lot of Western foods. The author comments and how the original Imaginary West was sort of like a parallel universe, later to be romanticized or felt with a feeling of loss: it was like they had an imaginary, even idealized world in their minds when the real West turned out to be much more banal than they imagined it would be. The author quotes Victor Pelevin in his book Generation P as the book's protagonist realizes "a great deal of what he had liked and had been moved by [in what he imagined was "the West"] had come from that parallel universe... but it had been overtaken by the same fate as the Soviet eternity."
Chapter 6: True Colors of Communism: King Crimson, Deep Purple, Pink Floyd
207ff On the tremendous impact of Western rock and roll on Soviet youth in the 1970s; how the Party studied its effects on ideological convictions, organizing debates on with young Soviet audiences around the country to explore western mass culture's influence on Soviet youth; sociologists in these debates tried to show examples of how rock and roll was an ideological tool, but the students' response was essentially "Why should we worry about any connection between music and politics?" The author refers back to chapters 3, 4 and 5, showing the lack of interest in explicit political issues, considering them uninteresting or irrelevant; here the young rock and roll aficionados weren't even interested in the literal meaning of the songs' lyrics. In response, the sociologists participating in these debates "concluded that Soviet youth had become precariously naive." [They probably were naive. Media functions more subtly than people think: it does have an ideological effect, but it doesn't happen on the word/lyric interpretation level. The young people didn't see, couldn't see, that they were being "lubed up" for something, some sort of radical change to the political and ideological structures they grew up in.]
209 The author argues in this chapter that the official critical campaigns of Western rock and other Western values were self-destructing--they actually boosted the change the state was trying to arrest. Also the chapter examines specific Komsomol secretaries enjoying this music and these cultural influences who still considered themselves to be dedicated Soviet citizens invested in communist ideals. The second part of the chapter discusses a young man called Alexandr who is an exemplar of this set of paradoxes in the Soviet system: well-educated and independent thinker interested in diverse cultural interests but also devoted to the values of communism, all of which made--to him--his interest in Western black market rock "perfectly logical." "The result of the activities of people such as Alexandr was he had another kind of profound deterritorialization of the Soviet system--a deterritorialization that was performed paradoxically in the name of Communism."
210ff Examples of how the state propaganda machine in the Soviet Union misread and misunderstood what was happening, how it failed to recognized the much wider spread of tape-recorded music throughout the country; the problem here, per the author, was that the state interpreted it at the constative level of discourse: they saw it as a literal manifestation of bourgeois values, not as the reinterpreted appropriated thing that it actually was. Also the Soviet state sent internal documents to intensify control over what music was played in discotheques in various regions of the country, naming 38 problematic Western bands and pop artists whose music was circulating among Soviet youth. Interesting to see here that the author notes that this particular effort by the Komsomol remained unknown until the 1990s.
215 See photo below for the author's translation of this document. [It is hilarious on some level to see bands like the B-52's being accused of "encouraging violence," or the Talking Heads being criticized for "the myth of the Soviet military threat" (what song could they possibly refer to here, "Life During Wartime"?), or the Village People being criticized for violence (??? Macho Man? In the Navy?). I can see why they tried to hide this document! This is what happens when you have old people criticize young people's music. They can't understand it, they're not supposed to understand it, it's definitional that they do not understand it.]
"Music groups with ideologically harmful compositions"
216 The author explains here how these efforts actually achieved the opposite of what it wanted: "The very fact that there was a limited list of foreign names implied that only some Western bands were problematic, while others, including dozens of bands that were not listed but whose music circulated in tape-recorded copies, were not. Furthermore, the fact that the harmful ideas associated with Western music were described in very narrow and precise terms simultaneously suggested to Komsomol activists that the Western music that did not seem to represent these ideas was ideologically acceptable." [Again, the mechanism is much more subtle than this, it's not happening on a level of words or explicit ideology, and the various cultural changes that it eventually imposes isn't obvious either.]
217 [Another thought strikes me here about all the misunderstandings on almost every level of meaning between generations in a sort of Fathers and Sons-style chasm of miscommunication: The state censoring apparatus (older generation) reads the songs literally and interprets the threat that thinks it sees: the younger generation doesn't even understand the words at all as they listen to the songs (heck, I could never understand a lot of these lyrics and it was in my own language). The kids think that they're being so original as the "first" to discover Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple, etc. (see one of the letters the author quotes where one young man exults, "Luckily we were there for the real musical beginnings!") but yet they misunderstand too: by definition they were discovering this music long after it was released in the West, and they weren't really understanding it in the same way that it was understood in the West, because their understanding happened insight a type of reappropriation of this music into Russian culture. And the state misunderstood the cause and effect relationship ideologically, as these kids didn't even see it ideologically in the first place. Once again, it's just misunderstandings built on misunderstandings, all the way down.]
218ff The author discusses his interviewee, Andrei, who was very much into Western rock but also a professional geologist working at the Leningrad Institute as well as a Komsomol member who was elected secretary; the author quotes an extract from one of his speeches talking about ideological education: it uses some of the ready-made "block writing" the author explored in chapter 3. [This is a nice little epistemic callback for the reader by the way, thank you!] But the author points out the use of a similar phrase used in a newspaper to attack Western bourgeois music, while also pointing out that Andrei was clearly familiar with this rhetoric and this very phrase: the idea of an "uncompromising attitude toward bourgeois ideology and morality"... and yet he literally used it in a speech to young people who attended rock and roll events, and he also had a widely known reputation as a rock music connoisseur! At these concerts he would actually personally announce the bands and songs into the microphone, he'd provide detailed information about the groups, etc. The author's point here is this guy is actually an instrument of the influence of Western rock but yet at the same time he's also an instrument of ideological control too. The author gives an example of a long article that Andrei translated and typed up painstakingly on the Komsomol committee typewriter about the band The Scorpions, even though the band was blacklisted. In other words the state ideological apparatus was seen as "pure formality" and this young man was self-evidently not naive or apolitical given all his work on the Komsomol meetings. He always thought of himself as a good communist, and when perestroika happened this particular guy was unable to reconcile himself with criticism of Lenin and other communist ideals.
221 The author uses the word "heteroglossia" (borrowed from Bakhtin and his 1994 book The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship) to describe the idea that there can be many layers or levels of meaning, with competing worldviews, competing interpretations, etc., and all of this decentralizes meaning. [An interesting word and concept.]
221ff Returning to the idea of performative rituals of authoritative discourse, the author describes Andrei using these various ideological phrase "text blocks" (like "bourgeois morality" and others), but then somehow reinterpreting them to allow Andrei and his audiences to accept critiques of bourgeois culture (like that capitalism commodified art) while viewing other State-originated critical claims (like that the aesthetics of Western rock and roll were evil or anti-Soviet) as "pure formalism." [Somehow this guy held these paradoxes and opposing statements together and considered himself a good communist.] See another paradoxical example here about Andrei's fascination with the drug addictions of Western rock stars, while at the same time he launched vigorous campaigns against heavy drinking.
223ff Discussion here of an exchange of letters between two young men, Alexandr and his friend Nikolai, during their teenage years on a broad variety of topics ranging from communism to philosophy to Western Rock to science to poetry. Both kids grew strongly supportive of communist ideals and reflected on them frequently in their letters, but at the same time they frequently disagreed with party opinions or articles in the Soviet press. During these years they were also active fans of Western music and bought and sold records through black market channels. The author shares extracts from these letters to illustrate a wide range of examples of the various informational phenomena he's talked about all throughout this book. Alexandr is deeply involved in Komsomol work, he and Nikolai have debates on whether it's tedious and pointless or not (Alexandr considered it to be important work that he did sincerely). [The reader can also see this kid as an absolute ass-kicker: he's a math whiz, he writes poetry and as a young man had his poems published in a literary journal--this kid is an absolute beast compared to typical American high school students.]
226 The two of them discuss a routine for studying for University entrance exams, and it's a monstrous study schedule; also this young man already recognizes aspects of the formulaic "authoritative rituals" that one was expected to perform.
227ff Alexandr also had a poetic and artistic aesthetic and saw that Western rock and roll music fit into it: he was "interested in how it worked on aesthetic and psychological levels." The author gives examples where state authoritative discourse-type comments made about rock and roll on its psychological effects, on the "infrasonic character of the sound," etc., gave him a "vocabulary" to discuss these things on an aesthetic level, thus the author argues that this is a sort of deterritorialization of its own. [It's also pretty cute to hear these two young men write back and forth about their favorite rock groups, why they like them, what it does to them psychologically, their thoughts and opinions about the aesthetics of the music... they're extraordinarily intellectual guys for their age. That said, this is one of the weaker chapters of the book, the author is generalizing from the specific, he's taking a conversation between two individuals and really extrapolating the heck out of it.]
231ff Finally an odd section here, rhetorically speaking, as the author describes the young man's work to organize a festival of international rock music with delegates of socialist and communist representatives from various countries, quoting the young man describing his enthusiasm about music festival. But then the author directly quotes him asking his friend to find him a pair of jeans, giving him his size. [This doesn't actually sound like an example of the author's various concepts (e.g.: deterritorialization, or of finding new meanings/new compatibilities between authoritative discourse and the individual's own appropriation of that discourse). Instead it actually sounds like plain old hypocrisy.]
234ff Aesthetic debates about the Beatles versus classical music in their, as these two young students discuss how their older teachers are incorrect in their anti-Western rock and roll views. [A Western, non-Boomer-age reader might find this discussion, as earnest as it was, to be both amusing and weirdly familiar at the same as these young men call the Beatles "an unprecedented phenomenon" comparable to space flights and nuclear physics. The one kid puts Paul McCartney alongside to Tchaikovsky, Bach, Rachmaninoff. As anyone from Gen X down knows, the Beatles are not Beethoven: only Boomers think this, and they can't wait to tell you why you're wrong to not agree! That said, it's clear what the author is trying to say: he's saying that this young man, a dedicated communist and a dedicated believer in international communism, thought it was totally fine to articulate these rather non-vanilla thoughts across the Soviet mail and argue, as the author puts it, "for a need to reinterpret communism in a non-dogmatic, aesthetically innovative, future-oriented terms."
235ff The author argues that Alexandr did not see himself is outside the system at all, he was not vnye, he was a believer, he was political, but yet he still found ways to make his own reinterpretations of his state's authoritative discourse and repurpose them in his own way, although his "way" is quite different from the vnye/outside examples given in prior chapters. The author claims that this young man saw an opposition not "between bourgeois culture and communist culture but between two strands that coexisted within Soviet culture, between dogmatic circular aesthetic forms and future-oriented experimentations and innovations."
Chapter 7: Dead Irony: Necroaesthetics, "Stiob," and the Anekdot
238ff On the artist group Mit'ki, based on a guy who didn't know anything about the Soviet world, didn't read the newspaper or watch television, only knew two local shops: a wine shop in a bread shop; this was sort of performing role of "loafers" who were oblivious to common concerns for career. success. money, he works in a boiler room at the lowest wage, etc. This group represented a sort of ironic detachment but also an acceptance of the way things were in Russia at the time. The author describes it as a Soviet-era version of the "Ivan the Fool" fairy tales, or sort of a modern version of Gogol or Bulgakov. These stories were ritually recounted in front of audiences, often who had heard them many times before.
242-3 The author describes this group as one of a number of examples of "an aesthetic of irony that became particularly widespread during late socialism." [Interesting to see in the Soviet world a similar hipster-type artistic behavior that we see today in the USA during our late stage capitalism era.] The author talks about how during late socialism, with all the displacements and deterritorializations that happened, there was an emergence of a peculiar humor of the absurd, "reacting to the paradoxes of the everyday." "This chapter will focus on several of these humorous genres and lifestyles, some marginal and some widespread, arguing that they all engaged with the same paradoxes and discontinuities of the system, exposing them, reproducing them, changing their meanings, and pushing them further."
243ff On the Necrorealists and their "provocations": these artists became famous during perestroika and in the post-Soviet period, performing and filming collective pranks and scandalous activities beginning in the mid-70s, staging fake brawls; also on their zombie films, portraying humans in a way that blurred the lines between alive or dead, psychotic or normal, personhood or "bare life" (in the Soviet context of a non-political life); the author discusses how this wasn't dissident activity at all, in fact it rejected the concept or dynamic of activist versus dissident.
249ff On the concept of "stiob" a slang word for the ironic aesthetic practices of these groups. Differs from sarcasm, cynicism or more familiar absurd humor; instead it required overidentification with the object or idea that the stiob was directed at, and thus it was difficult to tell whether it was sincere support, subtle ridicule or a mixture, and there was no indication of how it should be interpreted. It also avoided any kind of political or social concerns, unlike for example the socialist art practiced by the older generation of artists critical of the Soviet system.
251 There's a striking one-paragraph quote here where the author quotes and answer from one of the necrorealist artists asking how his artistic work engaged in politics. The artist gives a long and very strange answer, talking about an airplane crash which may affect various political figures and then describing how injuries make it difficult in identify who was who, then he comments on what happens when bodies decompose, and then he finally answers the question with "well, I don't really know." The author describes this as an answer that even lacked any metacommentary about how to interpret what he was saying, and further describes it as not just overidentification with the symbol of authoritative discourse but also the decontextualization of that symbol of authoritative discourse. The overidentification would be something like a "precise slightly grotesque reproduction" of the authoritative form, whereas decontextualization takes that form and puts it in a context completely unexpected or unintended, thus the meaning is unclear or even irrelevant or absurd.
253ff On various examples of stiob, including the Slovenian rock group Laibach and the Russian rock group AVIA; the author talks about how he was a manager of AVIA and tells an anecdote of how some older Communists went backstage after a concert to thank the performers for "a real communist celebration" because "it had become so rare to encounter young people genuinely devoted to communist ideals." In other words they took the stiob completely straight. And then he gives another example where an elderly couple thanked the group for their satire of totalitarianism, this couple had spent years in Stalinist labor camps.
254ff On how the aesthetics of stiob spread throughout late Soviet society to ordinary Soviet citizens and more ordinary contexts: see for example "scary little poems" that were sort of gruesome examples of extreme violence [these remind me of all the "dead baby" jokes people would tell in the 1980s].
A little girl found a grenade in the field.
"What is this, Uncle?" with trust she appealed.
"Pull on the ring" he said, "you will find out."
For a while her bow will be flying about.
255ff The author describes all these various forms of stiob as producing a feeling of the uncanny, a mix of something familiar but also a feeling of disgust or horror that's not quite what you think it is. These scary little poems usually took place in everyday mundane contexts, thus the author argues they also imitate the performative shift of everyday symbols, showing that everyday people themselves were likewise enmeshed with paradoxes and incongruities in their daily lives.
256 Some sort of funny/odd comments about the Soviet gerontocracy in the late 70s and early 80s: they all felt the same, they all seemed like the same faces, the leaders' themselves (beyond a few leading figures) all seemed the same: people were uncertain who was who. Also late in his life Brezhnev's speech became increasingly slurred and thus it didn't even matter really what he said or whether it was even understood [!], in fact the politburo itself became sort of its own form of dead irony: "...while these figures were on the verge of dying as biological beings, they functioned as immortal authoritative forms."
257 Comments here on the shock of Brezhnev's death in 1982, people talked about him as a "biblical figure who would live eight hundred years"; but then at the same time Party leadership grew so old that there were deaths every six months, so even this became part of ritualized authoritative discourse: the obituaries were identical, the phrases and idioms were identical, the announcements on television were identical, the mourning symbols, portraits on the streets and somber music on the radio became identical--to the point where it became a cliche. The author quotes a joke from this period where a man approaching Red square to attend a funeral is stopped by a policeman. "Do you have a pass?" The man replies, "I have a season ticket."
258 Now a discussion on the necrorealists in the context of Foucault's idea of "heterotopia" [spatial discontinuity] and "heterochronia" [temporal discontinuity]: The necrorealists' pranks and staged provocations "defied social taboos and rational understandings, leaving the witnesses wondering whether they had observed a group of lunatics and drunkards, or were themselves going insane, or if perhaps there was something 'bigger' going on... They operated as models of the performative shift par excellence." The form may be recognizable but there was no clear interpretation, or the interpretation could be various things. All of this functioned as a sort of ironic displacement of the immutable and fixed Soviet reality.
259ff Interesting example here of the Komsomol committees themselves performing a type of stiob, making up their own imitation documents in the authoritative style: the author gives an example of a young man's 30th birthday celebration where his committe presented him with an official congratulatory document typed on official letterhead using the exact same "method of ideological production" of all the high-ranking death announcements during that same: it drew on the style of those obituaries, and then mixed the styles of a birthday announcement with an official obituary announcement. [The document is pretty funny actually!] Thus this is another example of the author's performative shift concept, using authoritative forms, giving them unanticipated meanings in creative ways, etc.
264ff Another examples of satire using an important authoritative Russian document using the human resources form, which is a five-page document with all sorts of biographical information about a person for when they start a new job; this satirical version of this done for Andrei, the guy we met in the last chapter: in this satirical HR form he was listed as "from landed gentry"; also he was a "member" of the party (a pun on a word for "penis"), one of his scientific works was listed as growing facial hair in extreme conditions. These national HR forms themselves were a type of frozen authoritative discourse for decades--it would include questions about whether the person fought for partisan units during World War II for example--and these guys are really playing with the form in this example as they describe for example Andrei's participation in the 1812 Battle of Borodino.
266ff On the poet Prigov who did strikingly similar things in the 1980s, but Andrei and his friends had never heard of him as his work was suppressed. Prigov wrote a series of short vignettes called "obituaries" in the authoritative style of Soviet obituaries, but Prigov's obituaries announced the deaths of 19th century classic authors of Russian literature, thus completely decontextualizing the authoritative obituary form.
269ff Other examples here of letters and postcards where regular people practice stiob by fooling around with authoritative discourse forms. The author notes that these things were practiced fairly openly, citing even examples where people would write these ironic quotes on the outside of regular mail envelopes.
273ff On anekdoty: these are short formulaic jokes that can be repeated by different people in different contexts. The author argues during the late socialist period it acquired certain characteristics that it didn't have before or after, as the practice of reeling out endless rounds of anekdoty became part of daily life among friends and even strangers in the 60s and 70s. It was still inappropriate at formal interactions and functions however. The author gives an example of an anekdoty metajoke: Since everybody knew all the jokes, they would just read out the numbers and everyone would laugh. One guy called out "Number 15!" while another said "Number 74!" and everyone laughed. But then a third guy called out "Number 108!" and "there was a long silent pause, and then one man said in embarrassment: 'How could you tell that one in front of the ladies?'" Note also here the author describes how during perestroika this ritual of reeling out anekdoty virtually disappeared--to the extent that it was widely discussed in the media that there are no anekdoty any more. Also striking thoughts here from the author that when the post-Soviet era began in the 1990s there were no jokes about Yeltsin and nothing about the new post-Soviet phenomena.
277ff The author goes into his theories about the explosion of anekdoty during late socialism and its near disappearance during and after perestroika: it was a form of resistance to the system, an ironic subversion, but then the role of anekdoty in late socialism disappeared in the late 80s and early 90s as authoritative discourse collapsed. The author cites examples here of anecdoty about dissidents, including this joke: A big crowd of people is quietly standing in a lake of sewage that comes up to their chins. Suddenly a dissident falls in it too, and starts shouting and waving his hands around in disgust. "I can't stand this! How can you people accept these horrible conditions? The people reply, "Shut up! You are making waves." [That joke really is genuinely funny, and it's absurd in a way that makes it even funnier.] The author comments on how the dissident is portrayed as making a banal, obvious and moralistic observation, but also disregarding everyone around him--but at the same time the joke makes fun of the people too--for tolerating the things the dissident criticizes them for.
279ff The author shares several examples of anekdoty that use authoritative discourse itself as a setup or a punchline: the author puts in the authoritative discourse phrases in quotes:
What is the difference between capitalism and socialism? "In capitalism man exploits man," but in socialism it's the other way around.
What is the phrase "capitalism is at the edge of an abyss" mean? It means the capitalism is standing at the edge looking down, trying to see what we are doing there.
And then other versions of anekdoty, including this example:
What would happen if they started building communism in the Sahara desert? There would soon be shortages of sand.
[Also, if you've seen the miniseries Chernobyl, note the coal miners' scene where the crew chief tells an anti-Soviet joke after their work day and everyone laughs: it's a textbook example of anekdoty.]
281 "[Anekdoty] enabled one to have a meaningful, creative, ethical life in the spaces and zones that traversed the boundaries between support and opposition, and therefore they became yet another technique in the ongoing deterritorialization of Soviet reality."
Conclusion
282-3 "This book began with a paradox: the spectacular collapse of the Soviet Union was completely unexpected by most Soviet people and yet, as soon as people realized that something unexpected was taking place, most of them also immediately realized that they had actually been prepared for that unexpected change... This book set out to explore this paradox of the Soviet system by closely examining the internal shifts, at the level of everyday life, in the discourse, language, ideology, ethics, social relations, time, and space on which this paradox was predicated." The author talks about false dichotomies like oppression and resistance, truth and lies, official and unofficial culture, etc., that didn't fully explain the complex meanings that constitute the late Soviet environment; he argues that people engaged in "performative reproduction" of these official rituals and their "authoritative discourse." By unanimously participating in the system's rituals and discourses everyone was involved literally in the system's continuous displacement: "the system's hegemony of form made it appear monolithic and immortal."
283 Then the author asks: "What exactly was that moment of rupture that occurred in the Soviet discursive regime during the early perestroika? How was the unexpected and yet unsurprising revelation introduced into the system, and how did it lead to the spectacular unraveling of late socialism?"
283ff [Now we get a multi-page review of the entire book's thesis] "Before we answer these questions, let us revisit some of the central points in the book." The author reviews Claude Lefort's paradox: that total liberation comes by total control, thus there was a total control and censorship apparatus to begin shaping authoritative discourse, normalized into a canon by an external "editor," which was Stalin; when Stalin died this external canon survived, but there was no metadiscourse on ideology that continued: thus people would simply cite, quote and reuse ideas, notions and texts from the "safe" canon. This led to a hypernormalization of this "language" of words, narratives, rituals, speeches, visual structures, etc., which presented all this knowledge as "things that were already established" and "that had always been true"; the people reading these types of speeches and creating these types of representational artwork (like in propaganda posters or images of Lenin or whatever) would simply quote what it already been done both literally, artistically and visually; thus they became mediators of pre-existing discourse rather than creators of new discourse; this is how the authoritative discourse came into being. Then late socialism produced a different representation of this authoritative discourse where it became separated from its constative meaning and took on performative aspects, and thus could be rearranged and reused, which would produce unpredictable and new creative interpretations; this is what the author calls the "performative shift" of authoritative discourse. Further, this was not a form of resistance against norms or against communism, it was actually separate from the party/dissident oppositional dynamic that we all sort of think of when we think of the Communist system; in fact it was often sincere Komsomol members and organization leaders who would perform these performative and creative acts.
287ff Next, on the emergence of different "publics": where the author talks about svoi or normal people, who were distinguished from activists or dissidents; again this wasn't the duality of for/against the system, but rather operating inside the system; also the concept of being vnye: outside but also at the same time inside this field of discourse, where people could be actively non-political or even being ignorant of politics in their entirety, yet still participate in these performative acts of authoritative discourse.
288ff Comments on Soviet attempts to promote "good cultural internationalism" and restrict "bad bourgeois cosmopolitanism" in the 1950s and 60s; and then on the creation of the Imaginary West concept where Soviet people kind of manufactured their own idea of what the West was about, while appropriating aspects of Western culture into the Soviet world. The author argues that normal Soviet youth who enjoyed rock music and other western things tended to be educated, hard-working and were actually good Soviet citizens--they didn't identify at all with the state's critique of people who listened to rock and roll or enjoyed Western products as "loafers." Also on the spread of shortwave radio and reel-to-reel tape recorders helped spread Western culture in the form of rock music and jazz and thus normalized these things, thus making it so enjoying this music was not associated with an anti-system identity.
289ff Next on the system of stiob irony: the author argues that the aesthetic of this type of absurd irony emerged by drawing on the shift from the performative to the constative in all spheres of authoritative discourse; it was a form of folkloric creativity practice by almost everyone to observe the reality of late socialism through a lens of absurd irony based on the internal paradoxes of the system. The author argues that the system's authoritative representations of itself "were reinterpreted and displaced from within."
291ff On the sudden rupture of the standard normalized discursive regime, which began in 1985 as Gorbachev "broke with the circular structure of authoritative discourse": his speeches lacked the familiar structure; he talked about having decisions made outside of party leadership, and thus according to the author, Gorbachev reintroduced an "external narrator" or "editor" of ideology; this is the first time this had been done since Stalin. Thus there suddenly could be a public discussion about authoritative discourse, a metadiscourse, even questioning the entire discursive structure of socialism; the author argues that this "ruptured the discursive regime and undermined the very basis of late socialist discursive formation and of the party's leading role."
292ff The author share a very interesting example here where an article in magazine of visual arts wrote about how the propaganda images had become "invisible" in the sense that people couldn't really differentiate them: they all contained the same images, the same types of "mannequins" and people couldn't even recall the last few propaganda posters they've been exposed to because they all looked the same [!]; so what followed was a sort of refresh--ordered by the Party itself--of all these images, linguistic constructions, speeches; and so the various performative things that had been so stable for decades were swapped out for "fresh" things. The author argues that there became a new metadiscourse on ideology that was quickly introduced at all levels, and that this didn't undermine so much the Soviet state or its institutions of power but more it was a "discursive deconstruction" of the Soviet semiotic system, "and in that process lay the beauty, excitement, and initial hope of perestroika... Authoritative discourse was imploding and with it the system itself, and the process was irreversible. For many people this experience was both exhilarating and traumatic." The author says that within just a couple of years, the party had lost its prestige, millions began leaving it--an act that would be unthinkable just a year or two previously; and then Lenin himself came under fire in a whole array of publications and documentary films. "Soviet late socialism provides a stunning example of how a dynamic and powerful social system can abruptly and unexpectedly unravel when the discursive conditions of its existence are changed."
Vocab:
obshchenie: togetherness, intense conversation
svoi: one of us
tusovka: a gathering, a hangout
vnye: outside, separate from
zagranitsa: beyond the border, that which is abroad
Media:
Music by Vladimir Vysotskii
Music by Laibach
Stalker [1979 film by Andrei Tarkovsky]
To read:
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari: A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia
Lev Razgon: True Stories
Vasily Grossman: Life and Fate
Arkady and Boris Strugatsy: Roadside Picnic [sci-fi novel describing the reality that Alexei Yurchak later called "hypernormalization" in this book]
Peter Sloterdijk: Critique of Cynical Reason
John Austin: How to Do Things with Words
***Judith Butler: Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative
Martha Lampland: The Object of Labor Commodification in Socialist Hungary [the author cites her "brilliant description of the 'fetish of plan'"]
***Ronald Bergan: Eisenstein: A Life in Conflict
Jean Baudrillard: Selected Writings
***Victor Pelevin: Generation P [called Homo Zapiens in the English translation]
Pierre Bordieu: Outline of a Theory of Practice
***Pierre Bordieu: Language and Symbolic Power
Andrei Sakharov: My Country and the World
Andrei Sakharov: Memoirs
Andrei Sakharov: Moscow and Beyond
William F. Hanks: Intertexts: Writings on Language, Utterance, and Context [the author cites in particular Hanks' discussion of letters from Mayan elites to the Spanish crown, which helped shape the meaning of the conquest]
Sergei Dovlatov: The Zone A Prison Camp Guard's Story
Sergei Dovlatov: The Suitcase
Sergei Dovlatov: The Compromise
Nancy Ries: Russian Talk
***Nikolai Berdyaev: Dostoevsky
Hedrick Smith: The Russians
Alena Ledeneva: Blat: Russian Economy of Favours
***Greil Marcus: Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century ["fascinating history that traces some of the avant-garde roots of rock"]