Katerina
Gerasimova, “Public Privacy in the Soviet Communal Apartment,” in David Crowley
and Susan Reid, eds., Socialist Spaces: Sites of Everyday Life in the Eastern
Bloc (Oxford and New York, 2002). 207–230.
A critical
approach to the dichotomy of private and public as applied to Soviet culture
(Kharkhordin); explores their applicability taking kommunalka as a case. Takes Jeff Weintraub’s classic definition as
this dichotomy as ‘hidden and individual’ vs. ‘open and collective’. Takes the
Great Retreat as the time when the new elite wanted a comfortable life and made
domestic space a frontier between the public and the private. Resulted in
“public privacy” (Stalin as the Father, portraits of leaders at home – see
Boym). Communal apartment as a way of life embodying this negotiation and
concept. The Thaw – another re-configuration of the public-private dichotomy,
with family as the private space (not exactly true – Komsomol weddings for
example). – p. 210. Mentions ‘second economy’ as a way to use for private needs
public facilities and public goods – a kind of ‘private publicity’.
The space is
passive in her account, a site of application of people’s will.
Makes an
interesting discussion of the (general) use of space for the negotiation of
one’s personality/identity and scarce possibilities for such negotiation in the
‘public privacy’ of communal apartments. Hence an increased attention to
public-private boundaries, depersonalization of neighbours (to decrease the
‘stranger’s gaze’), symbolic assumption of an attitude of indifference,
establishment of pseudo-family relations.
Christina
Kaier and Eric Naiman, "Introduction" to Everyday Life in Early Soviet Russia. Taking the Revolution Inside.
“Throughout
the early Soviet period, private experiences of everyday life were understood
to be in potential conflict with the ideally collective and public nature of
Soviet experience.” (1) How people lived to internalize soviet ideology and how
it changed their ways of lives, selves, etc.
Refer to Henre
Lefebvre: “lived experience becomes a critical concept for analyzing the
foundation of the subject in modernity.” (2)
Early
Bolshevik policies: to make their population intentionally ideological; to
achieve that proletarian ideology was intentionally embraced by the population.
“Bourgeois class ideology was exposed and criticized, including its
construction of gender and race, but ideology in the sense of the many
unexpected assumptions through which subjects organize the world was not fully
interrogated. This resulted in the paradoxical situation that despite the
development of a new, conscious proletarian ideology, the dominant ideological
constructs underpinning a naturalized reality, which were indebted to both
Enlightenment ideals and Russian history, continued to function.” (7) Patriarchy
is one obvious example: fought on the surface level, it survived in miniscule
acts of everyday behaviour.
Refer to
Habermas to define the border between the public and the private lives: a
separation of both spheres becomes foundational for the Western modernity; both
were required to define a new modern order of things. Svetlana Boym – an
alternative view, that for Soviet modernity, this differentiation is less
relevant. (But this is valid only if a point of view of Soviet intelligentsia
is taken into account).
P. 10: speak
of the Bolshevik mobilization of private life, which was fundamentally
different from Western in two respects. (1) mobilization was explicit, as an
aspect of public Bolshevik ideology, rather than unconsciously functioning
ideology, and (2) what was known in the West as private life was expressed in a
broader Russian/Soviet concept of byt.
The concept of byt comprised ideas of
material existence and was opposed to the concept of bytie, that of spiritual (and hence of a higher status) existence. Kaier
and Naiman, however, develop their argument on a strange factual basis: “For
Bolsheviks…” (all Bolsheviks?), “Bolsheviks did not acknowledge” (all
Bolsheviks?). They essentialize these concepts, which were negotiated and
transformed almost on a daily basis, not to say of the fact that there’s a huge
difference between 1920s and 1930s.
Speak of
ideological colonization of private life – p. 13ff
And this is wrong: “A central
characteristic of Soviet subjectivity was the desire to be a Soviet subject – a
desire that inevitably fell short of its goal and which, in the subject’s
knowledge of his or her own inadequacy, was a defining feature of this
ideological age.” (18) – There were too many Soviet subjects who master Soviet
subjectivity better than officially
sanctioned.
Jeff
Weintraub, "Public/Private: the Limitations of a Grand Dichotomy," The
Responsive Community, Volume 7, Issue 2, Spring 1997, pp. 13-24
Starts by
arguing that it is necessary to define the conceptual limits of the concepts “private”
and “public.” “The public/private distinction, in short, is not unitary, but
protean. It comprises not a single paired opposition, but a complex family of
them, neither mutually reducible nor wholly unrelated. And these multiple (but also
overlapping) discourses of public and private do not simply point to different
phenomena; often they rest on different underlying images of the social world,
are driven by different concerns, and raise very different issues.” (p. 14) He
then suggests that these concepts exist only in antagonism, as a binary
opposition, and suggests to interpret them along to criteria, which he calls “visibility”
and “collectivity”:
(1) “What
is hidden or withdrawn vs. what is open, revealed, or accessible”
(2) “What
is individual, or pertains only to an individual, vs. what is collective, or
affects the interests of a collectivity of individuals.” (p. 15)
He then moves
to discuss in which intellectual traditions these dichotomies are important and
focuses on three of them. The first of them is the liberal-economistic model,
where the terms like “public sector” and “private sector” generate much of
debate. He interprets their use as an ideology (in Althusserian sense), that
is, as an imagined attitude of individuals to the surrounding reality. The
second is discourse on citizenship. It also implies “public” as “political,”
because it originates “from the conceptual framework of liberal social theory
is that the practice of citizenship is inseparable from active participation in
a certain type of decision making community maintained by solidarity and by the
exercise of what used to be called republican virtue (or public spirit).” (19) Originating
in ancient political thought, these ideas were temporarily out of agenda during
the Middle Ages, and their rehabilitation (and reinvention) became one of
foundations of modernity as we know it. “the liberal conception of the public/private
distinction turns fundamentally on the separation between the administrative
state and civil society—one dichotomy being mapped onto the other.” (20)
Weintraub then
moves to analyze the third way of applying this dichotomy – which he traces to
Philippe Aries and which is a research concept in critical theory: “Ariès makes
this remark in the context of a sweeping interpretation of the transformations
in the texture of Western society from the old regime to the modern era. At the
heart of this picture—supported, in its essentials, by a wide range of other
scholarship—is the decay of the older public realm of polymorphous sociability
and, with it, the sharpening polarization of social life between an
increasingly impersonal and severely instrumental “public” realm (of the
market, the modern state, and bureaucratic organization) and a “private” realm increasingly
devoted to creating islands of intense intimacy and emotionality (including the
modern child-centered family; the modern ideals of romantic marriage and
anti-instrumental friendship; and so on).” (22) In the meaning the “private” sphere
is the realm of personal life, above all of domesticity.
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