Ahmed, Sarah. The Cultural Politics of Emotion.

Ahmed, Sarah. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. New York: Routledge, 2004.

Agenda: to explore “how emotions work to shape the ‘surfaces’ of individual and collective bodies.” (1) Starts by examining the discourse of Britain as too emotional, to soft a nation which works as a mobilization instrument for nationalist groups. “Soft national body is a feminised body, which is ‘penetrated’ or ‘invaded’ by others.” (2) Emotions perform multiple social roles, including securing social hierarchies. (4)

Theoretical discussion of what emotions are: “Emotions are both about objects, which they hence shape, and are also shaped by contact with objects.” (7) These makes emotions (a) social and (b) affective, where “feelings do not reside in subjects or objects, but are produced as effects of circulation.” (8) “Emotions should not be regarded as psychological states, but as social and cultural practices.” (9)

“Affective economies” – an excellent metaphor describing how the circulation of emotions in any given society involves its own logic independent of the primary referents of emotions; affective economies provide symbolic resources to organize social reality (thus becoming, in Zizek’s terms, parts of the ideology) – Ahmed is drawing on different examples of hate in the British society to demonstrate how certain political groups use the discourse of hate to mobilize the society against immigration or to reinforce the institute of private property. Hate becomes an important social phenomenon, as different forms of hate form alliances. In “economies of hate,” the very existence of certain selves and communities depends on hate, as “hate is involved in the very negotiation of boundaries between selves and others, and between communities, where ‘others’ are brought into the sphere of my or our existence as a threat.” (51) This relationship is somewhat more complex, actually, as “an ‘I’ that declares itself as hating an other... comes into existence by also declaring its love for that which is threatened by this imagined other (the nation, the community and so on).” (51)

A perfect quotation explaining the Soviet affection to imported commodities or affection of former prisoners of Finnish camps to their traumatic experience: “It is through affective encounters that objects and others are perceived as having attributes, which ‘gives’ the subject an identity that is apart from others (for example, as the real victim or as the threatened nation).” (52-53)

Affective politics of fear: “fear works to secure the relationship between... bodies.” (63) Like other forms of discourse, fear works as by referring to past “histories of association” (cf. Western construction of the Soviet Union as oriental and associated with disease during the Cold War).

Sheffer, Edith. Burned Bridge: How East and West Germans Made the Iron Curtain

Sheffer, Edith. Burned Bridge: How East and West Germans Made the Iron Curtain. Oxford University Press, 2011.

Sheffer uses a geographic metaphor and object, Burned Bridge between Sonneberg and Neustadt, two towns in East and West Germany, respectively, to study how the Cold War border between two blocks, which divided Germany, became embodied in the German culture in general and local communities in particular, not simply like a dividing line, but as a kind of crooked mirror, a place of contrast, but also contact, a site which objectified relationships, alliances, sympathies and antipathies on both sides of the border. As Sheffer argues, “Burned Bridge offers a critical vantage point on the Cold War and Germany’s division,” (7) which allows to see how the East-West border became negotiated in social structures, political decisions and on the level of identities and how the East-West divide was created not just by decision makers in Moscow, New York, Bonn and Berlin, but also by ordinary people living on both sides of the border and internalizing the border in themselves.

The first chapter starts with an account of how two border towns of Sonneberg and Neustadt were occupied by Soviet and American forces, respectively, leading to the criminalization (including wide-spread rape) in both towns, but also to the use of occupying forces as suppliers of resources by the local populations (implying a certain accommodation and compromise) and consequent enforcement of measures to somehow supress this situation on behalf of military authorities on both sides, which included a stricter control over the border between American and Soviet sectors. Different measures (say, different ‘level’ of de-Nazification) also contributed to growing differences between the neighbouring towns.

The second chapter starts with an examination of large-scale population movement between Soviet and Western sectors (1.6 million people between October 1945 and June 1946), which led to official measures aimed to curb this flight from East Germany. A numerical increase of border guard, however, only increased problems, as American and German border guards either were arrogant or integrated very fast into local communities, so smuggling and people movement continued. The Soviet army regarded the border as transparent and violated it on numerous occasions; in general, without political decisions as to what to do with the border, keeping it and border communities safe was beyond control. Absence of legal regulations just increased illegality in the region. Local populations had to adapt to this situation, which changed the patterns of life & communication and reshaped the landscape in both communities. New ways of imagining and constructing the border also appeared, which marginalized and othered everything behind it.

Chapter three addresses the economic inequality between the two neighbouring regions, resulting from differing access to resources in Sonneberg and Neustadt. Local communities became actively engaged in these activities, which furthered the East-West division by stigmatizing Sonnebergers, who made up 90 to 95% of smugglers, as well as introducing new social tensions inside the communities (use of the language of moral economy to stigmatize border-crossers). This created a popular demand on both sides to introduce stricter measures of border control, especially in the East (Neustadters generally benefitted from the illegal trade, as well as from influx of qualified labor). The problem of illegal immigration was, however, pressing for both sides. Western media and public opinion marginalized and victimized them, fearing their burden for the economic and social system of West Germany. This contributed to the strengthening of the divide.

Chapter four starts with an examination of a football game in which the border became the midfield line. This triggered a chain of events (or, rather, objectified a trend), as American forces and Neustadters proved suspicious of this cross-border cooperation as staged and orchestrated by East German secret policy and threatening to their established order of things. Eastern inhabitants throughout the course of the 1949 summer organized several mass crossings of the border, undermining its status of a frontier and defying the efforts of both American and Soviet border guard to control their flow. At the same time, starting with 1949, the border became a site of increasing propaganda warfare, as Western and Soviet zones consolidated into states.

Chapter 5 looks at how East German regime attempted to seal the border between Neustadt and Sonneberg as early as 1952. It starts with the general political context, which led to the 1952 fortification of the border. She then discusses the forced deportations from border areas, especially focusing on how the lists of deportees changed to reflect local authorities’ and population’s views of whom to consider ‘unreliable’ elements. News or fears of deportation leading to suicides, flights to the West, open rebellions, but most commonly with scared submission. This also had an impact on those who stayed, by returning or petitioning or through them and their deportations being remembered in local communities. West German press reacted by describing these events as barbarity, furthering the divide by arguing that East Germans now live in an authoritarian state. During 1952 and 1953, almost 90 Sonnebergers defected a week, more than 2,000 in total.

Chapter 6 starts with the burning of Burned Bridge by neo-Nazies, assisted by East German border guards; Sheffer argues that the harsh reaction of authorities to this attempt at breaking the border marked their accommodation and decisiveness to enforce the East-West demand, not constitutive for their own statehood. It when explores changes following Stalin’s death, including a relative lack of any events during the uprising of 17 June 1953 in East Germany, as well as the introduction of a new form of cross-border communication, meetings across the barbed wire on Sundays. On the other side of the border, the growth of welfare contributed to the reinforcement of the border in people’s attitudes and discourse. New state regulations, especially on the Western side, hamper local initiatives to promote cross-border cooperation.

Chapter 7 explores East German techniques of surveillance and control over its citizens, as between 1952 and 1961 the country lost 2.5 million citizens (every seventh), usually young, educated and skilled. To prevent a demographic collapse, East German authorities started to address people’s needs, which opened the doors for manipulating the regime, pouring resources into people. Re-defining of fleeing compatriots as ‘problem’ one. Restriction of travel permits for West Germany (customizing travel), which allowed citizens for bargaining, as well as strained local administrative resources. Winning populations back (Rueckkehrers)-ca. 1 out of 1 refugees. Introduction of Stasi and techniques of self-surveillance, building of a panoptic society.

Chapter 8 addresses life in the Prohibited Zone, a rather privileged according to East German standards (a 15% bonus to salaries). Border’s permeation into nearby citizens life as a factor of its stability. Increased daily participation in border-defence practices. A certain militarization of East German borderland population. Cynical conformity. Increased Stasi activities. In sum, a new normalcy emerged out of this situation, to which people were perfectly adapted and which adapted people to itself.

Chapter 9 approaches the 1980s and argues that despite all this, the border remained a dynamic, uncertain space. She focuses on the ways people were crossing the border, arguing that often it was an impulsive act, a sign of a new subculture emerging here. Soldiers as another dynamic component of the borderland. The border itself as a volatile object, with moving mines, waste flowing across the border, etc.

Chapter 10 explores different ways in which the border was imagined; Sheffer here argues that the ways of imagining the border led to a further estrangement. Bourder tourism as a way to almost orientalise and certainly exoticise East Germany as a land behind the barbed wire. Stasi infiltration in the West. Relaxation of Eastern travel to the West as another source of tensions in East Germany. In the end, Sheffer argues that the border regime held stronger than elsewhere in East Germany and fell not as a result of cross-border contacts, but due to strains in other areas.

Conclusion: opening of the border in 1989 lead not only to the reunification of two Germanies, but to realization of decades-old prejudices, esp. those of West Germans about their Eastern compatriots.

Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality. Vol.1: An Introduction.

Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality. Vol.1: An Introduction. New York: Vintage Books, 1990.

The topic sentence(s) of the entire volume appear on p. 105, when Foucault concisely states what his agenda for the entire project on the history of sexuality is. Speaking of how knowledge about sexuality formed in Europe throughout the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries, he says that, rather than a process which aimed at obtaining knowledge about sexuality,

“what was involved, rather, was the very production of sexuality. Sexuality must not be thought of as a kind of natural given which power tries to hold in check, or as an obscure domain which knowledge tries gradually to uncover. It is the name that can be given to a historical construct: not a furtive reality that is difficult to grasp, but a great surface network in which the stimulation of bodies, the intensification of pleasures, the incitement to discourse, the formation of special knowledges, the strengthening of controls and resistances, are linked to one another, in accordance with a few major strategies of knowledge and power.” (105-6)

Foucault’s project is informed by his fears that power relations and meanings so deeply penetrated into the structures of sexuality that even what might seem as emancipation can actually reinforce patterns of domination. Ideology abducts language, and in the course of three centuries, sexual desire was transformed into discourse (21). What we might take for Victorian “repression” of sexuality was in fact time when discourse on sexuality (and, hence, sexuality) greatly enlarged: “there was installed rather an apparatus for producing an ever greater quantity of discourse about sex, capable of functioning and taking effect in its very economy.” (23) He also argues that a historical account of discourse on sexuality should address not only what was said, but silences as well, for silences can be just as meaningful as explicitly discussed things: “Silence itself... is less the absolute limit of discourse, the other side from which it is separated by a strict boundary, than an element that functions alongside the things said.” (27) Equally important are underlying assumptions which form the contextual field within which discourse is produced, negotiated and consumed.

The mechanism by which the subjugation of sex by power occurs is historical: it was established through enforcement and self-enforcement of practices of constant surveillance, including writing of diaries, visits to doctors, search for ‘perverts’ and their isolation, etc. For example, medicine: “Medicine made a forceful entry into the pleasures of the couple: it created an entire organic, functional, or mental pathology arising out of ‘incomplete’ sexual practices; it carefully classified all forms of related pleasures; it incorporated them into the notions of ‘development’ and instinctual ‘disturbances’; and it undertook to manage them.” (41) As the result of all these practices which surrounded people in their coming to sexuality, they got trapped in this discourse about sexuality and “power advanced, multiplied its relays and effects.” (42) Power became sensualized, power became all about pleasure and in pleasure (44-5). Peripheral sexualities were particularly important in this respect, hence why authorities were always obsessed with perversions, incest, etc.—“it is through the isolation, intensification, and consolidation of peripheral sexualities that the relations of power to sex and pleasure branched out and multiplied, measured the body, and penetrated modes of conduct.” (48)

Foucault examines “scientific” discourse about sexualities; his focus is on the idea of how people became preoccupied with producing “truths” about sex. He argues that this preoccupation with truth was an indication of the desire of intellectuals to assume and embody power, to ensure the cleanness and morality of the social body, to secure the proper evolution of mankind (in social, but also in the biological sense) (54). That’s why it was bourgeoisie and, to a lesser extent, aristocracy (who supplied most intellectuals) which were preoccupied with sex, hence so much attention to everything related to it (women’s neuroses, children’s onanism, perversions, etc.), because through institutions and practices which addressed these areas, privileged classes structured and discipline their social bodies and, in a way, ‘hoped’ that this attention to biological means of reproduction would help them reproduce their group socially (“it staked its life and death on sex by making it responsible for its future welfare; it placed its hopes for the future in sex by imagining it to have ineluctable effects on generations to come; it subordinated its soul to sex by conceiving of it as what constituted the soul’s most secret and determinant part” – 124). Their preoccupation leads to the emergence of cultural space permeated with sexual practices (built often through negation, othering, criticism, stigmatization, etc.), which people cannot escape. Result of these new technologies of sexuality: “What was formed was a political ordering of life, not through an enslavement of others, but through an affirmation of self” (123) To achieve all this, European intellectuals “constructed around and apropos of sex an immense apparatus for producing truth, even if this truth had to be masked at the last moment.” (56) That’s why Foucault calls his own intellectual project “the ‘political economy’ of a will to knowledge.” (73) Intellectuals create discourse about sexuality in four major directions: (a) a hysterization of women’s bodies, (b) a pedagogization of children’s sex, (c) a socialization of procreative behavior, and (d)  psychiatrization of perverse pleasure (104-5).

Foucault develops in the fourth part of his book a theory of desire which is about: “where there is desire, the power relation is already present.” (81) Power needs to colonize desire, because power is all about subjugation, domination, repression and obedience, so “power is tolerable only on condition that it mask a substantial part of itself.” (86) That’s why power can be so nice and good: it is because its masks itself in desire (among other things). Foucault argues that this can happen only because power doesn’t exist (just) as some centralized form, but is rather because it colonized various forms of social life and is now reproduced through them. “The omnipresence of power: not because it has the privilege of consolidating everything under its invincible unity, but because it is produced from one moment to next, at every point, or rather in every relation from one point to another. Power is everywhere; not because it embraces everything, but because it comes from everywhere.” (93) “Power comes from below.” (94) Power is indispensable for the self: “what was formed [as the result of discourse on sex] was a political ordering of life, not through an enslavement of others, but through an affirmation of self.” (123)

Power imposes and enforces itself by a number of subtle, almost invisible relays, the main one of which is the body – “the body that produces and consumes.” (107) Reasons behind the deployment of sexuality are not primarily human reproduction, but “proliferating, innovating, annexing, creating, and penetrating bodies in an increasingly detailed way, and in controlling populations in an increasingly comprehensive ways.” (107) That’s why sexuality in Europe expanded greatly since the seventeenth century: it is so closely related to power, that with the expansion and elaboration of power, human sexuality – a site where power materializes itself – could not but to expand as well.

Foster, Hal. The Return of the Real

Foster, Hal. The Return of the Real: Art and Theory at the End of the Century. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1994.

While Hal Foster identifies his research goal as an exploration of neo-avant-garde of the second half of the twentieth century, his research and political agenda is much wider. Its broader scope is rehabilitation of the postmodernist project; but he is also concerned with multiple issues that drove modernist (and post-modernist) project, both in arts and academia, such as questions of subjectivity. In this way, he explores his research object – neo-avant-garde – in its diachronic dynamics (how it positions itself in relation to the past and the future) and synchronic dynamic (how it treats the social reality around itself).

In the beginning of chapter 6, Foster starts by differentiating between two early Soviet cultural phenomena, the one of formalist/constructivist agenda (productivism) – that the artist on the left should ‘side with the proletariat’ in the way that s/he should take possession of the means of (artistic) production in order to make her/his production genuinely revolutionary; here lies a deep distinction with prolekult which, while also aspiring for a revolutionary and anti-bourgeois agenda, occupies a different position, the one of a movement that ‘surpasses’ bourgeois art and culture in their role of educating masses – this is a difference that Boris Groys did not grasp in his analysis of Russian avant-garde as the symbolic predecessor of Stalinism, for avant-garde did not have on its political agenda a desire to ‘enlighten’ and ‘educate’ the working class.

Developing this opposition, Foster argues that neo-avant-garde of the 1960s had a similar agenda, but its object shifted from proletariat to colonial nations. Instead of constructivist/formalist/Benjaminian ‘artist as producer’, artists of the 1960s were ‘artists as ethnographers’.

Chapter 7 works as an umbrella for the preceding analysis (both in terms of epistemology and politics). Foster draws on Freudian theory of ‘deferred action’ in which “subjectivity, never set once and for all, is structured as a relay of anticipations and reconstructions of events that may become traumatic through this very relay. I believe modernism and postmodernism are constituted in an analogous way, in deferred action as a continual process of anticipated futures and reconstructed pasts.” (207) As a result, he argues that for modernism, the ‘quintessential questions were: Where do we come from? Who are we? Where are we going? They were solved through the appeal to otherness, either subconscious as the other or in form of the cultural other. Therefore, any identification is always alienation – Lacan’s mirror stage (210). Fascism draws its strength from here, from the ever-present possibility that one’s subjectivity is just a play of reflections; ‘fascist subject’ armors him/herself against the chaotic world, “against all others (both within and without) who seem to represent this chaos” (210).

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.