The essays presented in this book cover that age of European rationality during which, by fits and starts, between intermittent wars and armistices, the gradual move took place from the epoch of the Baroque to Classicism and then to the age of Romaticism. During the period, one of the empires evolves into a European superpower, reaches its apogee and slowly declines; in the meantime, its counterpart on the other shore closely watches and emulates its neighbour/enemy/big brother and gradually masters the art of being an empire. We leave the scene of the narrative delineated in this volume at the turning point when the impoverished Sweden sets out on the path towards European nation statehood, leaving the newly magnificent Russia to shine on land and sea in its stubborn pursuit on unrestricted dominion. The stage of this historical drama is not only populated by armies and navies, but also enlivened by an incessant flow of travelers traversing the expanses of the other, in both directions and beyond each other's confines, in search of each other's secrets, the keys to the other's (and consequently one's own) symbolic constitution.
Under det senaste decenniet har begreppet ”kulturarv” tagit en allt större plats i den offentliga debatten. Samtidigt är kulturarv ett märkligt begrepp, som antyder att kultur kan ärvas som om det vore ett ting och att det därmed finns en sorts arvs-kultur.
Den här boken handlar om kulturarv, men den handlar inte om kulturarvets eventuella fördelar inom minnes- och identitetspolitik. Inte heller är boken tänkt som en kritik mot hur kulturarv kommer till användning i praktiken.
Vad som orienterar föreliggande reflektioner är snarare frågan vad ett arv är, vad en kultur är och vad en arvs-kultur kan tänkas vara samt vilka värden och värderingar ett sådant arv förutsätter?
Boken tar sin utgångspunkt i dessa frågor samt i ett pågående samtal mellan Marcia Sá Cavalcante Schuback, professor i filosofi och Johan Hegardt, som är docent i arkeologi.
Ett särskilt förord har skrivits av Irina Sandomirskaja, professor i Cultural Studies.
Bokens bilder är tagna av Esther Shalev-Gerz och Jochen Gerz och föreställer deras konstverk Monument against fascism.
This article attempts to interpret Kira Muratova's Asthenic Syndrome (1989) from the point of view of the director's work with sound. I suggest that in composing the sound for the film, Muratova seeks to dissect the filmic convention that treats sound merely as an additional element, which is supposed to support the illusionism of the realistic visual image by complementing it with the illusion of an accompanying realistic audio image. In order to subvert this false motivation of sound by visuality, to highlight sound as an independent agent in the construction of meaning, and to emphasize the explosive critical potential of film sound, Muratova employs techniques of sound performance art and sound installation. She uses the medium of sound to make visible those politics of speaking and hearing that constitute the USSR in crisis, a society that imagines itself through audio metaphors: glasnost, related to the Russian word golos (voice), and perestroika, related to the Russian term nastroika, tuning (of a musical instrument or an acoustic device). As a result, heteroglossy receives a literal implementation in the spoken word, which is acutely and irreparably out of tune, alienated from itself and polytonal in a freakish, morbid and perversely pleasurable way. These effects are achieved through the use of non-professional actors, the use of voices with substandard articulation, the emphasis on hybrid or dialectal prosody and phonation, amateur declamations and recitals and other manipulations of the Soviet norms of high diction. I also explore the genealogy of Muratova's technology in terms of the principles of manipulating the viewer's sensitivity and perception as invented by the Soviet film avant-garde (Eisenstein and Vertov) and contemporary critical theory (Benjamin and Adorno). I thus understand Asthenic Syndrome not only as political critique, but also as a meta-filmic analysis, an allegory of mourning and a diagnosis of asthenia in both film as technology and in the (collective perception of the) USSR as the symbolic product of film technologies
Aesopian language (or Aesopian speech) is an important component of Soviet language culture, a cultureof expression under surveillance and censorhip that invented various modes of the circumlocution and euphemization of politically sensitive topics. In this chapter, I am illustrating some of the innumerable ways of organizing communcation under the sign of (sometimes imagined) prosecution. I am describing various practices of Aesopian circumlocution and summarizing theoretical work in Soviet literary history that addressed this peculiar phenomenon in Russian and Soviet literary tradition. I am also discussing the aesthetics and politics of Aesopian language and its role as a means of expressing political dissent as this was seen by its practitioners inside the USSR and by the theorists who worked with the matters of language and power in the West.
This essay is an attempt to interpret Mikhail Bakhtin’s working notes in a new way, by reading them as instances of fragmented writing produced in exile during the war. To capture the specific way Bakhtin’s thinking reveals itself in a difficult relationship with writing, I read these pieces through the prism of critical categories suggested by Maurice Blanchot in his book The Writing of the Disaster (1980). By means of comparative reading of these two quite disparate authors, I hope to demonstrate that the very fragmentariness of Bakhtin’s writing, a well as its unfinished and ”un-worked” character, opens it up for critical reflection. The fragments in question should be read as exilic theory rather than merely biographic data or preliminary materials that suffer, not surprisingly, from intellectual and writerly incompleteness. This essay also discusses ambiguities in Bakhtin the asyndetic writer (a stylistic trait especially difficult to solve in translation) as methodologically central for an understanding of his philosophy of history and language.
When discussing Bolshevik cultural politics, both scholars and the public today emphasize what the Bolsheviks destroyed. In this essay, however, the focus is on what they “preserved,” and especially how they preserved it, to what purpose, and with what consequences. The article reconstructs the ideology and practices of cultural heritage in Soviet Russia from the vantage point of Bolshevik policies in reuses of the past. As an example, in reading the writing of the authority in Soviet cultural heritage industry, Igor Grabar, the author reconstructs the process of aestheticization, commodification, and internationalization of the Russian Orthodox icon.
Early work by the Soviet psychologist Lev Vygostky was connected with the special education of the so-called "defective" children. Vygotsky constructed blindness, deafness, and other functional disorders in children as "defects" in the social system that alienates them from the so-called normal people. In the chapter, I am analysing Vygotsky's representation of the blind child as a subject of proletarian revolution, and his method of psychological and pedagogical "correction" as an allegory of cultural revolution in general.
A comparative reading of Walter Benjamin's linguistic theology and Sören Kirkegaard's theory of the revolutionary age.
An important part of Viktor Shklovsky’s legacy remains neglected by scholars of formalism and questio-ned for political reasons: his controversial critical and political interventions, as well as his work in propaganda onbehalf of the Stalinist regime. Personal memories of Shkovsky and whatever is available in his publications fromthat period all convey a sense of compromising uncertainty. I am suggesting that his work during that period hasspecial value, even though it arises from the shadow of a doubt that surrounds his private and public images asa Stalinist opportunist. Based on his earlier theoretical findings and his practical and critical competence in lite-rature and film, Shklovsky found original analytical tools to reflect temporality, historical experience, and (Soviet)subjectivity under political violence. His profound critical revision of his early theoretical postulates in the light ofhistorical experience gained during this controversial period is relevant nowadays.