[logo]


project






aktuelles

projekt
personalia
institutionalisierung
texte
seminare
konferenz
bibliografie
kooperation
netzwerk
links


kontakt

home




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:

    • how distance is minimized in the communicative act and

    • how the subject is dissolved in the world, in God, in the couple.

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.

  • Poets have been writing love letters (Vasily Zhukovskij and Masha Protasova), letters to friends who were also poets (the epistolary heritage of Arzamas), letters to their mothers (Aleksandr Blok’s letters to his mother) and letters to the center of state power (Michail Bulgakov’s letters to Stalin) – how do they construct an intimate relationship in their texts?

  • The Platonic dialogue has been cultivated in Russian culture from Vladimir Solovyov’s Tri razgovory / Three dialogues via Perepiska iz dvuch uglov / Letters from two corners by Viacheslav Ivanov and Mikhail Gershenzon to the conversations of the avant-garde group Chinari as well as the “Moscow kitchen talks” (as they continue in the dialogues between the artist Ilya Kabakov and the philosopher Boris Groys,) and to the E-mail exchange between academics (e.g., the E-mail correspondence between Boris Groys and Igor Smirnov, Groys / Smirnov 2001). The dialogue as a media twin of the epistolary genre has not only changed the media, but also the participants of the exchange – no longer are the participants of the dialogues friends or lovers, but academics, artists, philosophers.

  • The literary salon in the early 19th century is a room that is based on a familiar atmosphere, often created by a woman. This leads to the creation of special genres, for example the stikhi na slučaj / verses for the moment, bout rimeés, characterised by a pre-literary form and necessitating a familiar communication. Also, the literary salon is highly eroticized. Especially in the 18th century eroticism played an important role for self-fashioning in the salon. Memoirs (e.g., Viazemskii), literary texts generated in the context of the salon (Karolina Pavlova, Miatlev, Prutkov) as well as prose about the salon (e.g., Pushkin’s fragments of prose) will be part of the analysis – the (intimate) talk within the salon will be examined with the help of biographic and literary talk about it. An official-inofficial pendant to the salon is the ballroom; in many novels and short stories of the 18th and 19th centuries the ballroom is the public space where intimate things are done and said.

  • The analysis of communal spaces will concentrate on artist’s communes and apartments (e.g., the kvartira LEFa / the apartment of the Left Front of the Arts) and on experiments in communal living (e.g., heretic mystic communities like the Khlysts, the communes of the 1860s and architectural utopian projects of the postrevolutionary era). How are these communal spaces related to the literary salons? Real communal projects as well as imaginary spaces (Nikolay Chernyshevsky’s novel Čto delat’ / What is to be done from 1863, Nikolay Leskov’s Nekuda / There is nowhere, 1864) will be examined. (The communal apartment from the 1920s to the 1960s will be analysed in project No. 3).



Brief Summary of Project Objectives

The Construction of the Intimate Sphere in Russian Culture - Intimacy as a Culturally Specific henomenon – Interdisciplinary and Intercultural Approach

  • The construction of the intimate sphere in Russian culture: The construction of the intimate sphere in Russian culture is determined by historical circumstances. The project will follow historical threads from three angles: by investigating intimate genres and intimate cultural spaces throughout history (Project 1), by examining the anthropological dimension of intimacy in the period from the 1920s to the 1940s (Project 2) and by concentrating on an intimate architecture of the Soviet era as an organisational structure of everyday practices where intimacy is acted out by the individual (Project 3).

  • Intimacy as a culturally specific phenomenon: The intimate sphere will be defined in its relationship to the public and the private. Especially in Russian culture, where intimate structures are often tied to governmental power (poets as teachers of the tsar’s children, Nikolaj I as Pushkin’s personal censor, Stalin as the father for the state), we find a dynamic relationship between intimate and public power. Intimacy claimed by the state implies lies and violence, while the subjects who are forced to be pseudo-intimate with the state invent alternate social spaces in order to establish a more private form of intimacy. In the Stalinist period, the specifically Russian form of intimacy, encompassing a perverted form of usurped intimacy, reaches its climax.

  • Interdisciplinary and intercultural approach: In order to reach a culturally specific understanding of intimacy, its definition will be specified in a sociological, historical, anthropological, ethnographical and philosophical context and it will be contrasted with Western concepts of intimacy.



subproject 1

Radical Proximity – Radical Distance. Cultural-Political Anthropology of the Mid-1920s to 40s in Russia and Western Concepts of Man
Nadezhda Grigoryeva, Moscow / Konstanz, Germany


The Post-Revolutionary Search for the New Man – Collective Oneness vs. the Transgressive Personality – Radical Concepts of Man

The 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“
Sandra Evans, University of Tübingen


Individual Experience in Soviet Russia – Rules of Everyday Conduct Ambivalence of SpaceTotal Intimacy or a Total Public? Methodological and Theoretical Framework

Individual 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.







    Last modified by Sandra Evans on 30.03.06.