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Definitions Intimacy: “Who is communicating and how does communication establish an intimate relationship?” This is the most general question the project will pose. Intimacy is defined as a discursive, communicative strategy that transcends its narrow definition of an erotic relationship (Berlant, 2000, Rössler, 2001, Streisand, 2001). We want to find out how intimate relationships in different textual genres and cultural spaces are produced in Russia varying in accordance to the historical contexts. Using George Bataille’s definitions of religion - the “search for lost intimacy” (Bataille 1997, 50) and of the paradox situation of man in the middle of an “intimate order”, a continuous, undifferentiated being-in-the-world (Bergfleth 1997, 213), and of the order of things (Bataille 1997, 46) - as a starting definition, the project will analyze:
Intimacy is understood as a play between proximity and distance: the more intimate a relationship, the more distance is reduced. This may imply either a relationship of freedom and equality or, on the contrary, one of power and subjection. Intimate relationships: The genesis of intimate relationships is – so we contend – the mystical relationship between I and God (see, for example, Scheler 1923, Bataille 1997). In Russia the hesychasts were the first to participate in God’s energy, practising a communication of silence and prayer. The mystic couple is the prototype for the intimate relationship between two (couple), three (triangle) or more (collective) persons. Within this context, different forms of intimate relationships will be examined: the mystical unity, couples, (love-) triangles, friendships, and reader response relationships, which are all examples of intimate structures. Familial and social bonds (e.g., conflicts between the family and the law, familial bonds and family as a social decision, love and power, and desire and reason) will also be taken into consideration (among others: Lévi-Strauss, Butler 2001, Engels, Weston 1991). The History of Intimacy in the Russian Culture: Mysticism in the 15th and later in the 18th and 19th centuries is the first step for the beginning of intimacy in Russia. In the Romantic period intimacy acquires a worldly impact; the Romantic philosophers write intimate letters and they write about intimacy. In the course of the 19th century intimacy acquires a revolutionary impact: the Decembrists and the revolutionaries of the 1860s and 1870s operate on the basis of intimate organizational underground structures. Another aspect of intimacy in the 19th century is a forced intimacy, a forced proximity, as we find it in Dostoevsky’s and Yadrincev’s description of the prisoner camp. In the 20th century forced intimacy reappears in different forms of communal living; in the dom-kommuna of the 1920s as well as in the communal apartments until the 1960s. Romanticism, Symbolism and Stalinism are diachronic milestones for the project: in the Romantic period between lovers as well as between friends, intimacy was highly cultivated. In Symbolism the religious philosophers projected intimate world views (Solovyev, Karsavin, Florensky) and in Stalinist culture intimacy became part of state policy. Intimacy is transformed into a public duty; the state replaces the family and the members of this family have to be transparent. Intimate Genres and Intimate Spaces: The intimate field is established in texts and in cultural spaces, in epistolary genres as well as in the successors to the Platonic dialogue, in the literary salon as well as in communal living spaces.
Brief Summary of Project Objectives The Construction of the Intimate Sphere in Russian Culture - Intimacy as a Culturally Specific henomenon – Interdisciplinary and Intercultural Approach
subproject 1
Radical Proximity –
Radical Distance. Cultural-Political Anthropology of the
Mid-1920s to 40s in Russia and Western Concepts of Man The Post-Revolutionary Search for the New Man – Collective Oneness vs. the Transgressive Personality – Radical Concepts of ManThe post-revolutionary search for the new man: Revolution released a surge of avant-garde projects on constructing the New Man, which was investigated for the first time by Erik Naiman in his book Sex in Public: The Incarnation of Early Soviet Ideology (Naiman 1997). However, the second phase of the Bolshevik revolution took place and while the Soviet Union was shifting towards Stalinism, the utopian plans were not diminished, but rather assumed new contents and a new form: Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of carnival and the conception of a polyphonic consciousness are the most important ideas concerning a different New Man. Eurasian philosophers and historians were occupied with similar problems in emigration, among them Lev Karsavin, who conceptualised the New Man as a symphonic (hybrid) personality. Even an opponent of the Eurasian movement such as Georgij Fedotov became engaged in anthropological studies. Since Stalin's doctrine restricted free philosophical thought in the USSR, the realisation of radical anthropological dimension took place in other media. This is especially true in literature, cinematography and in some architectural utopias: in the play Fear by Afinogenov, in the film The Strict Young Man by Yuri Olesha and Abraham Room, in Andrey Platonov's novels and stories, and in the projects of House Communes and agro-industrial towns. Collective one-ness vs. the transgressive personality: In this period views of man oscillate between two points: the idea of people’s unity in the collective “oneness” (Plotinus) and the concept of man as a transgressing personality, who was alienated from human standards (transhumanisation). Situated in the Russian culture of the 1920s to the 40s the dialectical split between super-intimacy and super-alienation is expected to be the key theme of the work. Radical concepts of man: Both in Western Europe and in Russia this period is characterised by an intensive development of the radical conceptions of man, which are elaborated in terms of proximity/distance resp. intimacy/alienation. For Georges Bataille (Théorie de la religion, 1948) man working with the earth is referred to as one who has intimate relations to nature. Roger Caillois (L' homme et le sacré, 1939) takes all living creatures into consideration, including man, to suggest that they exist in close relationship with the background where they can be dissolved (mimicry). Ernst Jünger (Der Arbeiter: Herrschaft und Gestalt, 1932) tends to focus on the new intimacy between people who were completely involved in total labour processes. Throughout Carl Schmitt’s texts (Staat, Bewegung, Volk – Die Dreigliederung der politischen Einheit, 1933), national jurisdiction dominates the international rights. On the other hand, the contradictory phenomenon of estrangement is supposed to be the major issue in Helmut Plessner’s reply to Ferdinand Tönnies (Tönnies, Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft, 1887, Plessner, Die Grenzen der Gemeinschaft, 1924). Central to Plessner’s discussion of man is a personality, who is in search of his role in society while constantly alienating himself. Yet in Arnold Gehlen’s account (Der Mensch, 1940) the entity of man postpones his desires into infinite future. The project will be structured around the following research questions: - How do the notions of “proximity” and “distance” reflect and influence the anthropological views of the mid-1920s to 40s? - Is it possible to compare Russian and Western concepts of man on the basis of the notions of intimacy/alienation? - What is the role of the media and new technologies of that time in the shaping of “proximity/distance” between new human beings?
subproject 2 The
Peculiar Residential Public Square called „Kommunalka“ Individual Experience in Soviet Russia – Rules of Everyday Conduct – Ambivalence of Space – Total Intimacy or a Total Public? – Methodological and Theoretical FrameworkIndividual experience in Soviet Russia: The Soviet state regarded society as a mere social machine and accordingly, social engineering was callously implemented, affecting important changes in the culture of the everyday in Soviet society. In order to better understand the complex and multi-dimensional phenomenon of Soviet civilisation, cultural theories and methods have been developed and applied within Soviet studies, creating new research areas like the culture of the everyday (see Boym 1996, Utekhin 1998, 1999 esp. on the Kommunalka), the subjectivity of the individual (Hellbeck 1996, Halfin 2000), as well as the role of memoirs in contemporary Russia (see Paperno 2002, Walker 2000) and placing them into the political constellation of the Soviet Union. All of these research areas have one aspect in common: they all centre around the individual experience in Soviet Russia. Rules of Everyday Conduct: Factors that influenced and shaped everyday conduct were on the one hand the attempt by the state to eradicate the old way of life by formulating “official” rules that were to function as a mechanism for transmitting the new socialist, modern way of life. On the other hand, inhabitants of the kommunalka needed to make “unofficial” practical and pragmatic decisions with regard to the material and socio-cultural realities of space provided. The official and unofficial rules of conduct that developed due to this discrepancy were codified into a complicated organizational structure and system of social interaction. Under extreme conditions of crowding, families had to resort to a great amount of creativity within their “private” space in order to respect each other's privacy, ranging from symbolic and actual barriers to ad-hoc arrangements and fixed schedules. A similar practice was also applied in the common spaces outside of the rooms, which had effectively turned into public, municipalized spaces for random and fluid meetings with quasi-strangers. Ambivalence of Space:Due to the inadequate and ambivalent social realities and the forced communality and collectivism, an autonomously (inter)acting individual effectively learned how to navigate between official and unofficial spheres of conduct − public space in each of the communal apartments was determined by inhabitants who intermittently used the official political line in order to further their own interests. Suspended in uncertainty and tension, residents of the kommunalka intersubjectively − in their interactions with each other − developed their own structures and system of meaning, i.e. they created a Soviet normalcy under extraordinary circumstances. Within this context the dynamic and ambivalent character of (public and private) space becomes obvious in that conformity is expected and social practice is thus repeated while at the same time provoking innovative and creative deviance. Total Intimacy or a Total Public?: The kommunalka is an object of study for the process of the destruction and simultaneous reconstruction of intimacy and privacy. The Soviet state demanded an intimate relationship with each individual person, whereby a close connection and fluidity between intimacy and power becomes apparent, calling not only for a closer look at the intimacy of power but also at the power of intimacy. Further scrutiny of this space reveals that the public and corresponding private spheres within this specific living arrangement are polymorphous and hybrid, all combined interactively and intersubjectively to (re)construct intimacy at each interchange, pointing at the relational and dynamic nature of these two dichotomous concepts and of social practice in general. Methodological and Theoretical Framework: In order to reveal the relational and dynamic nature of social interaction under authoritarian conditions, a combination of analytical tools from the disciplines of anthropology, cultural studies, history, literary theory and sociology will be utilized. One of the main paradigms of analysis will be the theory of social practice drawn from the field of cultural studies: what are the procedures of action in social routines and conventions, how is collective knowledge gained and codified and how do individuals develop competence of action. Rather than a pattern of products and activities, culture within this context should be understood as a dynamic process that (re)constitutes itself constantly based on old and new as well as universal life knowledge which is not static nor bound to a specific region and/or traditions. By way of social practice and interaction in the everyday, residents of the communal apartment developed practical knowledge and associated skills with which they (re)constituted and (re)produced the Soviet everyday. The assumption here is the notion that knowledge gained in life and in life forms in turn determines the consistency of life and its life forms. Questions centered around New Historicism will provide guidance in determining the (inter)relationship between texts and culture: how do texts represent society's behavioral patterns and how do they preserve, shape or change dominant cultural codes? How do texts represent culturally or socially constructed forms of knowledge and authority? And how do they implement and reproduce in the readers the very practices and codes they embody? To what degree can a literary text function as a critique of authority? Historically Russian literature has performed a social function by providing a forum for intellectual and political debate. Essentially it continued to perform a social function during Soviet times, only this took on different extraliterary dimensions which will be analyzed here. Within the Soviet context, the public and private distinction can help to clarify, analyze and interpret official and unofficial rules in social interaction and practice. While in the 20th century the power of the state in being able to interfere in “private” life was of concern, the 21st century is marked by the opposite phenomenon: the increasing role of the private or intimate sphere at the expense of the public. The traditionally public realm is being restructured and according to Berlant (1997) and Bauman (2000), a politics of confessional intimacy dominates the public sphere of political debate and collective interests – a so-called public intimacy. Increasingly it is becoming difficult to distinguish between private and public matter since the boundaries between the two are, or always have been, porous and polymorphous. The public/private distinction remains a relevant category of analysis, especially in today's global societies that are becoming increasingly dependent on new media like the Internet and mobile telephones. The relationship between public and private spheres seems to become more complex and fluid and individuals need to develop the capacity to navigate the new material and virtual (and mobile) spheres that are neither solely public nor private. Despite its historical, political, sociocultural and ideological peculiarity, I would like to argue that the conditions created within the Soviet communal apartment can provide relevant guidance in helping to understand sociocultural issues with regard to the relationship between the public and private sphere and the role of intimacy in a chaotic and uncertain environment. |
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Last modified by Sandra Evans on 30.03.06. |
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