Monday 17 December 2012

Kozhevnikov, Alexei. Stalin's Great Science



Kozhevnikov, Alexei. Stalin's Great Science: The Times and Adventures of Soviet Physicists. London: Imperial College Press, 2004.

Agenda: to answer the question of how impressive scientific and technological progress could exist under a regime which supressed the Western-type democracy. A Lycenko case as a rhetorical example in Western Cold War studies of Soviet science. Kojevnikov aims “to develop a less impaired view of the history of Soviet science in its social, political, and ideological contexts.” (xii)
“freedom of scientific discourse could maintained precisely by keeping it separate from the much more dangerous discourse on political, religious, and moral issues” (xiii)
!!! “Many of the Cold War ideological stereotypes were not laid to rest with the end of the Cold War itself – in fact, they have survived particularly well in the field of Soviet history and continue to underlie the bulk of popular and professional literature in the field.” (xiii)
xvi: “a society that started with a pact between a revolutionary ruling party and scientific experts ended up in their mutual – and mutually self-destructive – alienation.”

Chapter 1: the role of applied research in the envisioned and projected re-organization of Russian science; therefore the revolution – a great opportunity for this. Russian academic loses contact with Western schools—emergence of national forms of scholarly dialogue (new journals, e.g.). Development of a new organization (‘mobilizational’ type) of research. Another context: a desire of Russian scholars for academic autonomy and research institutions as a type of research organization disassociated from universities and, hence, teaching obligations. German model of research institute. Centralized effort in scientific research. Soviet science born from these developments and debates of the immediate pre-WWI and WWI time.

Chapter 2: an alliance between science and revolution. “As the war and the attendant isolation of Russian science ended in 1921, the foundation of a novel government-sponsored system of research and development was already in place.” (23) Independence of universities, accent on research, centralization (even monopolization) of a certain field, large interdisciplinary projects with applied flavour. Bolsheviks have support from scholars, but not from universities – part of the tendency. Optical industry as an example of transformations that this alliance between pre-1917 scholars and the revolution brought. Establishment of a new Soviet-style model of industrialization and modernization which was driven by science and not market (cf. the brothers Strugatsky). Scientists cooperate with the regime, because their effort has now a much greater social impact than before or abroad.

Loren Graham has described the birth of the characteristically Soviet system of research institutes as “the combination of revolutionary innovation and international borrowing” (Graham 1975). The present study shows that that formula needs to be modified. The new R&D system was, true, a revolutionary innovation, but one that had started already before the revolution itself and did not originate from a particular political or ideological agenda of a revolutionary party. (44)

In chapter 3, Kojevnikov links revolutionary transformations in Russia and the development of the theory of the expanding universe (Aleksandr Friedmann). (FROM Wikipedia: Friedmann's work supports both theories equally, so it was not until the detection of the cosmic microwave background radiation that the steady state theory was abandoned in favor of the current favorite Big Bang paradigm.) This chapter presents a case in which a similar question can be answered with sufficient confidence. The case is that of some revolutionary ideas applied to the description of the behavior of atoms and electrons. (48) Kojevnikov argues that the idea of electrons’ freedom in dense bodies came from leftist political language and social theory – the case of Yakov Frenkel. (49)

Chapter 4 (mentions his own position as a scholar:
Back home, their advanced expertise was no longer needed, or so at least sounded the message from political authorities in the new post-communist Russia, who were busy devaluing science along with everything else that their predecessors, the communist authorities, had seemed to value. (74) )
An experience of Western travel funds (Rockfeller funding and other sources) as very timely for Soviet theoretical physics.

Chapter 5 explores the biography of Piotr Kapitza before his split with Beria. Chapter 6 looks at the Soviet atomic project: “The socialist economy, with its centralized military-style management and an existing tradition of big-science institutions, was perfectly suited for replicating the Manhattan Project.” (127)

Chapter 7 discusses the fox-like character of Sergey Vavilov, President of the Soviet Academy since 1945. “Vavilov’s case, though unique, is also revealing, as it helps to understand Stalinism not simply as a totalitarian dictatorship but as a society and a culture with specific rituals, mores, and styles.” (184) Chapter 8 discusses in more detail this discursive aspect of Soviet science. Five debates – biology, physiology, philosophy, economics and linguistics. Anthropological approach to the study of rituals and languages of the Soviet scholarship. Kritika i samokritika. In chapter 9 Kojevnikov discusses why a similar ordeal never happened to Soviet physics. He argues that it was due to bureaucratic intrigue of Vavilov. Chapter 10 deals with the alternative of how to develop Soviet science: through international collaboration (physicists) or in a relative autonomy (Lysenko). Kozhevnikov takes the case of ‘collective excitations’, a state of atomic interaction, a theory developed by Soviet physicists, to see how ideas trespassed national border during the Cold War.

Chapter 11 Dialogues about Knowledge and Power in Totalitarian Political Culture discusses how scientists’ enter to power position in the Soviet society was negotiated through Soviet political language. “This relationship was not stable, but rather subject to negotiation and compromise, with terms that shifted over time. Politicians and scientists were two privileged and mutually dependent elite groups in Soviet society. The partners in this relationship, though of course not equal, exerted influence upon each other. Politicians had a share in deciding on matters related to science. At the same time, scientists had de facto access to political decision making, although the nature of this access was not easy to formulate in acceptable Soviet political language.” (276) Kozhevnikov makes an excellent discourse analysis (or even conceptual analysis in a form a-la Koselleck) of concepts of power and knowledge in the Soviet society. Discusses the imagined Party as the bearer of Power (not impossible to be described vis-à-vis real party); then: “Even in the world of communist dreams, however, the ideal Party was not expected to command the third kind of higher knowledge, knowledge of the natural world. For this, Bolsheviks imagined a separate ideal agency, which they called Science.” (281)

“Science as an ideal agency enjoyed a very high status in the Bolshevik world, compared to that of Party, People, or Proletariat. Bolsheviks knew that Party could not rule without relying on Science— in other words, that Power depended on Knowledge. On the other hand, they insisted that Science could not be separated from politics and ideology— in other words, that Knowledge could not be independent of Power. These two symmetrical epistemological theses were represented in the Bolsheviks’ language as the two formulaic phrases about Science and Party quoted above.” (281) Mentions that Purges led to the homogenizing of the social group of technical professionals.

Between 1917 and mid-1930s – a search for a model of relationship between the party and the science. “The restoration of order, hierarchy, and boundaries between science and politics meant a return to a compromise between scientists and politicians— a compromise that can be called the Stalinist pact. This restored relationship has often been characterized in implicitly gendered terms. Soviet publications and statements pictured it as a romantic (but traditional) partnership between Party and Science. The former provided support and leadership, while the latter responded with devotion and assistance, with the two inseparably tied together by true and mutual love.” (290) Traces this relationship through the work on the Bomb to Sakharov with his political activism. He uses the example of Sakharov to, actually, discuss the end of this tacit and cordial alliance between science and party and to chart the beginning of their dissociation.


Gronow, Jukka. Caviar with Champagne



Gronow, Jukka. Caviar with Champagne: Common Luxury and the Ideals of the Good Life in Stalin’s Russia. Oxford: Berg, 2003.

Agenda: to examine how the Stalinist consumption culture was formed and why, while commodities for everyday use were in shortage, there was a centralized encouragement of ‘luxurious’ consumption. Starts in 1934, when “the Party leadership condemned all kinds of asceticism… and libertarianism…” (9)
Strange arguments from time to time: “It was as if the history of literature, music and art had stopped sometime in the mid-eighteenth century” – really? What about works by ‘fellow travellers’ who were translated and published in millions of copies, like Theodore Dreiser?
Curiously, there’s a form of argumentation – another thing borrowed from Sovietology – which haunts contemporary Soviet studies, including this book. Gronow builds his argument as if all cultural production and official enunciations emanated from one source, from one group (hence the temptation to use Stalin to symbolize it) – although he himself mentions of certain ‘dissent voices’ (10), but it is not reflected in his overall argument. As if there were no groups that fought for different versions of cultural production.

“In Sheila Fitzpatrick’s opinion, this new Soviet middle class or intelligentsia [of which Vera Dunham says, the Big Deal], ideally of proletarian origin and schooled in Soviet educational institutions, became the new reference group of Stalin’s politics by 1939, replacing the working class.” (11) – reference to Fitzpatrick, The Cultural Front, 179.

Makes references to the way society was reshaped on the basis of its ‘loyalty’ and ‘contribution’ to the socialist project through material stimulation: “[Stalin] vigorously demanded that individual skills and efforts be rewarded with higher wages and other material rewards.” (12) Кстати – отличный пример (целый абзац), как все изменения в официальном отношении к материальной культуре «останавливаются» на Сталине:

“In the middle of the food crisis in the summer of 1931, Stalin publicly announced his new six-point programme. In addition to some administrative measures, he vigorously demanded that individual skills and efforts be rewarded with higher wages and other material rewards. In his opinion, it had now become necessary to encourage workers to get personally interested in the results of their own work. With the help of and after many experiments the system started to reward industriousness, talent and skills that were deemed especially useful in building the socialist society. The wage system was amended in 1931. Previously, pay had been based on time alone, but the new system allowed for piece rate pay. As a result, income differences started to grow. This policy culminated in the official condemnation of the ‘equal wages policy’ in 1934.” (12)

Also speaks of ‘the New Soviet Middle Class’. His book is a development of arguments that Dunham and Fitzpatrick put forward.

By the way – it is curious that all other social groups were awarded material rewards only for their loyalty to the regime, and only party officials were awarded per se, even without any service or even when they sabotaged the socialist progress (as long as nobody knew about it). In their case, rewards came in a default manner, in all other cases – only for self-sacrificing work or for ass-licking (writers, artists, etc.).

Speaking of cheap Soviet imitations of luxurious Western goods: “Now, thanks to the Communist Party and its great leader, Comrade Stalin, every worker could live like an aristocrat.” (14)

Uses the idea of carnival to contextualize ‘kitsch’ products—cheap imitations of Western luxurious commodities. P. 33-34 – Gronow describes the rise of privileges for Soviet bureaucracy in the early 1930s. “From the mid-1930s some of the genuine luxury goods and services gradually became accessible not only of the rather narrow political elite, but also to a rapidly growing group of privileged people.” (34)

Mentions an important thing – a redistribution of luxurious goods (like watches or jewelry) from disenfranchised groups “into the hands of the new Sovie elite or well-to-do ‘non-party Bolsheviks’.” (65) – this can be regarded as a first step ‘from below’, on behalf of Communist bureaucracy, to legitimate ‘luxury’ through the figure of Stalin.

79 – 86: Soviet advertising as a means to educate consumers’ tastes.
Gronow, curiously, writes about the ‘political struggle’ over new Soviet restaurants

And the book is structured in a very strange way: he writes in the end of the historical background to events that occurred in the beginning of his book – which doesn’t let him use the narrative possibilities that this context could give to interpretation of his material. He discusses, drawing on Osokina, of ‘special provisioning’ that existed in the early 1930s for nomenclatura (126ff).

!!!!! “An examination of the development of the Soviet culture of consumption in the 1930s largely supports the totalitarian thesis. The government and the Party directed and initiated everything from above. Virtually nothing could be done independently or without the knowledge of state authorities except on the periphery or on the outskirts of the system.” (142)

Wednesday 12 December 2012

Suny, Ronald Grigor, and Terry Martin (eds.). A State of Nations: Empire and Nation-Making in the Age of Lenin and Stalin



Suny, Ronald Grigor, and Terry Martin (eds.). A State of Nations: Empire and Nation-Making in the Age of Lenin and Stalin. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.

“How an anti-imperial enterprise aimed at the emancipation of nations metamorphosed into an empire of national states is the central theme of this book.” (vii)

Introduction
“After decades of Russocentric exclusion, historians in significant numbers have ventured into the non-Russian peripheries or examined metropolitan policies toward nationalities.” – this phrase betrays that they work in a hermetic environment, as in the Soviet context there were tons of publications on ‘Bolshevization’ of national peripheries. They are not going to take seriously Soviet research of this field.

Enter a dialogue with “Sovietologists”: “With few exceptions, non-Russians were either left out of the mainstream narrative or treated as objects of political manipulation and central direction, sometimes as victims of Russification, other times as pathetic, archaic resisters to the modernizing program of the central authorities.” (4) Suny and Martin claim that in Sovietologist works, “the Soviet state was presented as a fundamentally imperial arrangement, a colonial connection between Russia and its borderlands.” (4) Then they explain that “The essays in this book—while they do not
all conform to a single idea of empire or even agree that the USSR should be
labeled an empire—all engage with the problem of imperial rule…” – which means that they accept acting on the field demarcated by Sovietologists and, as titles of most articles show, including the book itself, they are not going to challenge this Sovietologist assumption. Richard Pipes's The Formation of the Soviet Union as the main reference point and ‘the other’ of this intellectual dialogue for Suny and Martin.

They argue that their novelty in the application of modern research on nations and nation building (Ernest Gellner, Benedict Anderson, etc.) to Soviet materials. The “new paradigm shift” of the 1990s: “The political scientists Philip Roeder and Rogers Brubaker each produced institutionalist analyses that emphasized the role of Bolshevik-created national institutions and elites in preserving national consciousness and in providing institutions that allowed for rapid nationalist mobilization. The historians Ronald Suny and Yuri Slezkine, drawing on the research from their previous monographs, provided overarching accounts of the ways in which the Bolsheviks had encouraged national consciousness and a sense of inherent primordial ethnicity.” (7)

Curiously, language at certain points betrays the Eurocentric position of the book’s editors: “given Russia's historic backwardness” (8) “Unlike in Britain, Yugoslavia, India, or America, "Soviet" was never considered an ethnic or a national identity.” (9) – contradicts to SO MUCH empirical evidence.

“these deportations were perceived by their victims as national repression by an imperial Russian power.” – show me at least one Soviet Finn who would characterize it in this way. “by the time of Stalin's death, almost the entire Soviet exile population was being confined due to national identity alone.” (15) ??? really???

“The turn in the mid-1930 toward Russian nationalist propaganda and a practice of selective nation-destroying had a crucial long-term role in undermining the viability of the multiethnic Soviet state. As Mark Beissinger has convincingly argued, in the age of nationalism, to be labeled an empire by one's citizens and one's neighbors is frequently fatal, for it is assumed that empires are antiquated, artificial constructs that will eventually fragment into their natural nation-state components.” (15) Here, their narrative turns into absolutely artificial construction informed by their conceptual framework and teleological argument. No ‘futures pasts’. The mid-1930s as the beginning of the end of the Soviet Union. “Stalin's nationally targeted repression, in fact, affected only a small percentage of non-Russians, but it nevertheless conveyed an image to all non-Russians of imperial behavior.” (15) what did they smoke when they were writing it? The most teleological text on Soviet history I’ve ever seen.

“There are many ironies to Soviet history. Certainly a principal one must be that a radical socialist elite that proclaimed an internationalist agenda that was to transcend the bourgeois nationalist stage of history in fact ended up by institutionalizing nations within its own political body.” – contestable. It was much about nationalities, not nations (a different way of conceptualizing things)

Бранденбергер выделяется из этой группы, когда эксплицитно говорит, что «...растущий руссоцентризм необходимо рассматривать скорее как тенденцию первых лет войны, чем как отчетливо сформулированную центральную линию» (279). Да и вообще у него вполне себе взвешенная аргументация, он много оперирует на «местном» уровне, в частности, обсуждая историю дискуссий вокруг «Истории Казахской ССР» -- рассуждает ровно о том, что функционеры пытаются «возвратить контроль над официальной линией» (283). По большому счету, Сталин в его аргументации появляется тогда, когда споры военного времени стихают и он готов сформулировать позицию победившего большинства (287). И он что делает хорошо, так это пишет историю именно дискурсивную (National Bolshevism: Stalinist Mass Culture and the Formation of Modern Russian National Identity, 1931-1956 (Harvard, 2002))

Saturday 8 December 2012

Derrida, Jacques. Margins of Philosophy



Derrida, Jacques. Margins of Philosophy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982.
Tympan
Examines the idea of limits/borders/margins of philosophy, behind which, as philosophy believes, there is the constitutive Other, all other forms of knowledge, that it tries to appropriate by alienating and by appropriating to define its own subject and, hence, itself. Therefore, its outside is never its outside; the discourse of philosophy aspires itself to organize the economy of its representation. What are, then, the limits of philosophy without which it is impossible to define its subject?
Derrida promises to play with the question in the book, not to answer it ‘properly’. The metaphor of ‘tympanum’ (барабанная перепонка) as that limit of philosophy that establishes a difference between a question and an answer and by establishing it destroys it.
“If Being is in effect a process of reappropriation, the ‘question of Being’ of a new type can never be percussed without being measured against the absolutely coextensive question of the proper.” (xix) Argues that most discourses (e.g., on sexuality, economy, semantics) organize their limits (and therefore themselves) “in sonorous representations.” (xix) “A quasi-organizing role is granted, therefore, to the motif of sonic vibration…” (Hegel, Heidegger). “Timber, style, and signature are the same obliterating division of the proper. They make every event possible, necessary, and unfindable.” (xix)
Derrida engages multiple physical metaphors to identify the place of “the unthought, the suppressed, the repressed of philosophy.” (xxviii)
Differance
“we must let ourselves refer to an order that resists the opposition, one of the founding oppositions of philosophy, between the sensible and the intelligible. The order which resists this opposition, and resists it because it transports it, is announced in a movement of differance (with an a) between two differences or two letters, a differance which belongs neither to the voice nor to writing in the usual sense, and which is located, as the strange space that will keep us together here for an hour, between speech and writing, and beyond the tranquil familiarity which links us to one and the other, occasionally reassuring us in our illusion that they are two.” (5)
“differance is not only irreducible to any ontological or theological—ontotheological—reappropriation, but as the very opening of the space in which ontotheology—philosophy—produces its system and its history…” (6)
“It is only on the basis of differance and its ‘history’ that we can allegedly know who and where ‘we’ are, and what the limits of an ‘era’ might be.” (7)
Starts where Saussure stops. “Every concept is inscribed in a chain or in a system within which it refers to other, to other concepts, by means of the systematic play of differences. Such a play, differance, is thus no longer simply a concept, but rather the possibility of conceptuality, of a conceptual process and system in general. For the same reason, differance, which is not a concept, is not simply a word, that is, what is generally represented as the calm, present and self-referential unity of concept and phonic material.” (11) “differance is the non-full, non-simple, structured and differentiating origin of differences.” (11)
Language constitutes itself historically through the play of differences in speech (differance). Differance links any given element of language not only with its semantic synchronic environment, but also—through that notorious play of differences—with past and future meanings. Temporization as ‘becoming-space of time’ and ‘becoming-time of space’, as two-concepts-in-one that try to fix this interplay of time and space in the making of any meaning through differences. The present can manifest itself only through temporization and the presence—through spacing. But in order to get meaning as the present, any meaning (word) should defer (отсрочить) its differance, to temporize delay, what Derrida calls “the economic signification of the detour.” (13)
“Differences are, thus, ‘produced’—deferred—by differance. But what defers or who defers? In other words, what is difference? With this question we reach another level and another resource of our problematic. Draws on Heidegger, Freud and Nietzsche to argue that the very human presence in the world is subordinate to the same rules as linguistic presence: it doesn’t exist per se, but identifies itself through the play of differences (differance) and through permanently referring itself into the future. Refers directly to Freud when he explains that
differance as the economic detour which, in the element of the same, always aims at coming back to the pleasure or the presence that have been deferred by (conscious or unconscious) calculation, and, on the other hand, differance is as the relation to an impossible presence, an expenditure without reserve, as the irreparable loss of presence, the irreversible usage of energy, that is, as the death instinct, and as the entirely other relationship that apparently interrupts every economy?” (19)