....Everything Was Forever provides fresh paradigms that pack a hefty
explanatory punch both with regard to its immediate subject matter and
beyond. Its publication means that discussions of Soviet life, culture, and
literature that rely on the old, rigid binarisms are going to seem instantly
dated. For anyone interested in Soviet culture broadly defined, including
literature, language, discourse, music, and art, as well as those interested
in the interface between the study of anthropology, ideology, subjectivity,
and governmentality both in the former Soviet Union and elsewhere, this
study is a must-read.
CURRENT ANTHROPOLOGY Volume 47, Number 5, October 2006
BOOKS
How Things Were Done in the U.S.S.R.
Harriet Murav
Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign, 3080 Foreign Language Building, MC-170, 707 S. Mathews,
Urbana, IL 61801, U.S.A. ([log in to unmask]). 4 V 06
Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation. By
Alexei Yurchak. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006.
Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More is an important book, and
not only for scholars whose research concerns the former Soviet Union or its
republics. Yurchak offers a new paradigm for the analysis of Soviet culture
from the death of Stalin to the collapse in 1991. His work goes beyond
political and economic interpretation to focus on language, discourse, and
forms of knowledge integral to the lives people actually lead in the Soviet
Union. Furthermore, and more impressively, it goes beyond the binarisms that
have long dominated scholarly and journalistic writing on this question,
including, for example, freedom and oppression, public and private, the
state and the people. Using a sophisticated theoretical framework, it
explains both how the Soviet system kept on reproducing itself and,
paradoxically, how it kept on producing new opportunities for its own
destruction. This is a model that could well be applied beyond the
boundaries of the former Soviet Union.
Yurchak's theoretical framework has several key points of departure,
including Claude Lefort, John Austin, and Mikhail Bakhtin. Lefort showed
that in order to function successfully, ideology must claim the status of
truth, and that in order to do so it requires a "master" outside the system
who allegedly possesses the objective knowledge of that truth. As Yurchak
argues, in the Soviet context, the figure who played the role of "master,"
to whom all ideological questions could be referred, was Stalin, and it was
Stalin's death that made possible both the continuation of the system and
its undermining. To show how this dual process worked, Yurchak relies on an
expanded notion of John Austin's two functions of language. In the
constative function, statements say something about reality, but in the
performative, statements do something (e.g., "I now pronounce you husband
and wife"). The performative function is of particular interest to Yurchak
because of its open-ended and unpredictable capacity to produce new meanings
and new relations between people. When Stalin died there was no one to turn
to provide so-called objective knowledge of reality, and "authoritative
language" (Bakhtin's term) became increasingly rigidified to the point where
individual words lost their meaning and prefabricated "blocks" of language
became the norm in every official communication. This shift toward what
Yurchak calls "hypernormalization" meant that the constative function of
authoritative language decreased (that is, its perceived capacity to relate
to reality declined) but its performative function increased, giving rise to
new formations of group identity, new modes of knowledge, new relations, and
new interactions.
Yurchak traces these other forms of community, knowledge, discourse,
and artistic production in specific contexts, beginning with those most
closely associated with the Soviet system and concluding with those least
associated with it. Chapter 3 focuses on the Soviet youth organization, or
Komsomol. After showing how Komsomol leaders learned the "block language" of
authoritative discourse, he explores the means by which they made their work
actually meaningful and, in so doing, used language to perform new roles and
forms of social relatedness amongst themselves and with their clients,
Soviet young people. A key term found in this community was svoi, which
means "our type of people, normal people." In contrast to other scholars who
define svoi in terms of the opposition between the state and the people,
Yurchak convincingly argues that svoi meant the kind of people who shared
the same tolerant attitude toward the government without aspiring to join
the Central Committee and who saw the Komsomol as a potentially meaningful
site for social, cultural, and other activities. These Komsomol leaders
carried out a "deterritorialized" (i.e., transformed) version of Soviet life
not controlled by the top tier of the system but one which nonetheless was
made possible by the system itself.
Yurchak's combination of indigenous language and current critical terms
is one of the most successful aspects of his study, since it precludes the
complaint voiced by some scholars that Western critical theory does not
apply to Russia. The critical apparatus in Everything Was Forever is in key
instances "native" to the informants. Chapter 4, "Living `Vnye':
Deterritorialized Milieus," discusses the concept of being "within and
without" (vnye) or "beside," a state of "extra-locatedness." This term
appears in Bakhtin's early work as vnyenakhodimost, somewhat inaccurately
translated as "outside." While he is right to criticize this translation,
Yurchak does not take full advantage of the excellent commentary in the 1990
translation of Bakhtin's essay "Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity,"
which offers the alternatives I have given above. This demarcation of a
space "beside" was used by Yurchak's informants to describe literary clubs,
archeological circles, cafes such as the well-known Saigon in St.
Petersburg, and other forms of sociality-including conversation itself-which
enabled their participants to find themselves "elsewhere," not oriented to
Soviet life as such. For example, people who lived vnye eagerly sought jobs
in boiler rooms to have time to pursue interests in such fields as medieval
history, law, and rock music. These other milieus, both real and imaginary,
were, according to Yurchak, not oppositional or resistant to the Soviet
regime but rather prime instantiations of the flourishing of the Soviet
system.
Chapters 5, 6, and 7 address forms of cultural production oriented
"elsewhere," encompassing fashion and rock music, as well as more extreme
versions of what can be called performance art (the Mit'ki). The ambiguity
of official Soviet judgments about "bad" cosmopolitanism versus "good"
internationalism opened up considerable space for what Yurchak calls the
"imaginary West" in late Soviet culture. This was a version of the West
created on Soviet soil, including, for example, Western jeans, shortwave
radio, and homemade phonograph records from old X-rays on which rock music
could be enjoyed-required extensive networks of knowledge, distribution, and
the creation of new technology. Yurchak's discussion of a 1985 list of
banned Western rock groups, including, for example, Black Sabbath, which was
blacklisted for "violence" and "religious obscurantism," typifies his
approach (pp. 214-15). The government's attempt to restrict rock music by
circulating this list among Komsomol leaders also created the possibility of
expanding the list of what was acceptable and created a space for debate and
discussion that Yurchak traces concretely in the correspondence between two
Komsomol activists. The performance art activities of the Mit'ki, the
fascination with dead bodies (the "necrorealists") and the corrosive irony
of their aesthetic, with its parodies of socialist realism, were, of course,
at a far greater degree of extralocality (living vnye) from the Soviet
system than the Komsomol activists who debated the meaning of various rock
groups, but both, according to Yurchak, were located on the same spectrum
and both were actively deterritorializing Soviet life into new forms of
expression.
One can see the influence of Bakhtin on the work as a whole: quotation,
as in the citation of the "block" form of authoritative discourse on the
part of the Komsomol leaders, which he discusses in chapter 2, and parody,
which Yurchak discusses in chapter 7, are both forms of what Bakhtin calls
"double-voiced discourse," speech that is oriented towards and relies on
another's words. The late Soviet system, in Yurchak's view, looks less like
the Kremlinocentric stereotype of a single dictatorial voice or a closed
circle of voices endlessly repeating the same words (about the triumph of
communism) against an apocalyptic backdrop of the ultimate confrontation
with the real, not the imaginary West. Instead, it looks more like a novel,
with multiple, shifting centers and voices (authors and heroes at one and
the same time) that expand and reinvent each other's words in a framework
that could last forever, as the title suggests. The work is much more about
the production, productivity, and creativity of late Soviet culture than it
is about its collapse. The discussion of the events and shifts precipitating
the collapse and the nature of post-Soviet entrepreneurship comes at the
very end of the study and is far less well developed than the work as a
whole. The post-Soviet cultural phenomenon that carries on some of the
features of what Yurchak describes may very well be found on the current
Russian Internet and not among post-Soviet entrepreneurs as he suggests.
Scholars interested in the geopolitical, economic, and ethno-national causes
for the decline of the Soviet Union should look elsewhere.
Everything Was Forever provides fresh paradigms that pack a hefty
explanatory punch both with regard to its immediate subject matter and
beyond. Its publication means that discussions of Soviet life, culture, and
literature that rely on the old, rigid binarisms are going to seem instantly
dated. For anyone interested in Soviet culture broadly defined, including
literature, language, discourse, music, and art, as well as those interested
in the interface between the study of anthropology, ideology, subjectivity,
and governmentality both in the former Soviet Union and elsewhere, this
study is a must-read.
Reference Cited
* Bakhtin, M. M. 1990. Author and hero in aesthetic activity. In Art and
answerability: Early philosophical essays. Ed. Michael Holquist and Vadim
Liaponov; trans. Vadim Liaponov. Austin: University of Texas Press.
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