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Program - Summer Session 2009 Print

Alternative Culture Beyond Borders
Summer Session 2009
Cultural Studies in Post-Soviet Spaces

WEEK ONE: 12-15 August

Wednesday, 12 August

9:15-9:30 • Opening Remarks / Olga Zaslavskaya, Mikhail Uvarov

9:30-11:00 • Opening Discussion / “How are We Enacting Alternative Culture?” / Petra Rethmann, Jessie Labov

11:00-11:15 • Coffee break

11:15-13:00 • Mapping Alternatives: Stalin as an Alternative Cultural Practice: Debating Media Convergence and Alternative Cultures / Vlad Strukov

This lecture will provide an overview of recent cultural developments in Russia, including an online project The Name of Russia, the work of a St Petersburg-based art group Protez, performances at the Moscow Praktika theatre, as well as the music by a Russian band Padla Bear. The purpose of the lecture is to analyse the relationship between the established cultural tradition and what we may call alternative practices in connection with the convergence of media and the increasing use of the Internet for articulation of new identities and worldviews. The works chosen for the discussion provide a critique of dominant practices and cultural stereotypes, including de-politization and ‘glamourization’ of Russian cultural production. These works are brought together because of their common interest in the figure of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin and because of the use of his statue and statute as a form of cultural expression.

Readings:

13:00-14:30 • Lunch

14:30-16:00 • Current Issues in Cultural Studies: Ghosts of Theory: Walter Benjamin / Petra Rethmann

In the last decade or so Walter Benjamin has emerged as one of the most debated modern intellectuals and thinkers. More than a cultural critic, though, he is also known for an idiosyncratic approach to methodology, notably flânerie and the excavation of dialectical images. In keeping in step with the purpose of the project, this talk will introduce Walter Benjamin’s methodology and thinking. I will pay particular attention to the registers of a) flânerie, b) dream-reality, and c) ruins. In keeping in step with the philosophy of Walter Benjamin, this talk will not introduce his thought in a systematic way (an impossibility to begin with), but refract it through images and theoretical fragments.

Readings:
  • 1999 The Return of the Flâneur. In Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings. Volume 2. 1927-1934. Ed. by Jennings, Michael W., Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith. Cambridge, Mass. The Belknapp Press of Harvard University Press. Pp. 262-272 [E-Library]
  • 1999 Excavation and Memory. In Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings. Volume 2. 1927-1934. Ed. by Jennings, Michael W., Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith. Cambridge, Mass. The Belknapp Press of Harvard University Press. P. 576. [E-Library]
  • 2002 Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century. In Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings. Volume 3. 1935-1938. Ed. by Jennings, Michael W., Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith. Cambridge, Mass. The Belknapp Press of Harvard University Press. Pp. 32-49 [E-Library]

16:00-16:15 • Break

16:15-18:00 • Focus Group Meeting I:

  • Virtual Spaces / Jessie Labov
  • The Underground / Olga Zaslavskaya

20:00 • Opening Reception at Wine Piccadilly
Pühavaimu 15, Pärnu 80011

Thursday, 13 August

9:30-11:00 • Teaching Session I: Offline to Online Collective Authorship in the Classroom / Jessie Labov

In this session I will spend about 30-35 minutes demonstrating how I acclimate my students to the use of a wiki – both in class and in an online environment outside of class. This is a process I’ve designed for a group of students who are not consistently “web-savvy.” They have usually been forced to use the university blackboard system for various tasks (including online discussions), and they usually hate it. It is rare that they are asked to use any multimedia platform outside of the university system, and this can evoke some understandable anxiety.

Therefore, we develop the practice of collective authorship first in the classroom, with paper and pens and chalk. Then, once the students are familiar with the document we are working with, I put it online as a Word Doc (which we collectively author in class). Once they become familiar with that, I simply transfer it to a wiki format and demonstrate how they can add information themselves.

Beyond the simple goal of demonstrating the benefits of collective authorship in offline and online environments, this process demands that students critically evaluate the authority of online resources, and take responsibility for the reliability of their entries into our mutual resource. Content-wise, the wiki also addresses the problem of introducing a large amount of contextual information overwhelming students with no background in the area.

11:00-11:15 • Coffee break

11:15-13:00 • Mapping Alternatives: Feminism as a Critical Social Theory: Emergence and Travel (Part I) / Anna Temkina

This lecture will explore the conditions of emergence of feminism as a critical social theory and a new form of epistemology in the 1960s in “the West”, as well as transformations in and discourses of feminism in post-socialist countries in 1990s. One of the key peculiarities of feminism is its inclination to change relationships between the Subject and Object of research from a hierarchical to an egalitarian schema. I will also discuss the development of standpoint theory and epistemology which elevates the importance of experience of subjugated and socially marginalized groups. The lecture as well as the discussion which will follow will address a number of interrelated issues:

  1. Is feminism viable as an alternative epistemological?
  2. Why are negative attitudes towards feminism constantly reproduced in post-communist countries?
  3. Are gender studies a purely “western” product, imported from the West?

Since feminist methodology integrates personal experience and everyday life into the analysis of social relations and social change, and brings forward non-mainstream issues of private life and sexuality, gender roles balance, deprivation, violence, discrimination, resistance and “otherness”, it seems productive to discuss the personal experience of course participants in this light. In other words, we will turn to self-ethnography in order to make sense of personal experience will discuss how this analysis can be used for researching structures of gender segregation.

Readings:
  • Walter L. (1995) “Feminist Anthropology?” Gender and Society 9.3: 272-288 [E-Library]
  • Stratern M. (1987) “An Awkward Relationship: The Case of Feminism and Anthropology” in Signs. Vol 12.2, p. 276-292 [E-Library]
  • Smith D. (1989) “Sociological Theory: Methods of Writing Patriarchy” in Feminism and Sociological Theory, ed. by Wallace, Sage Publication, p. 34-64 [E-Library]

13:00-14:30 • Lunch

14:30-16:00 • Current Issues in Cultural Studies: New Cultural Studies: From the Study of Objects to the Study of Interfaces / Vlad Strukov

This seminar will focus on the intersection of New Media and Cultural Studies, using Lev Manovich's 2001 text The Language of New Media as a starting point for the discussion. Manovich himself is a product of critical theories of both East and West: his first degree was at Moscow State, and his 1993 PhD thesis The Engineering of Vision from Constructivism to Computers traces a genealogy of the digital aesthetic back to the Russian avant-garde. The Language of New Media was one of the first texts to place new media studies in a broader framework of visual and cultural studies, and served as a jumping-off point both for a more historical and more phenomenological approach to the subject. In this session we will consider the relevance of fundamental concepts in Manovich, such as

  • technological determinism;
  • social constructivism.

As an outcome of this session we will produce 'a map of cultural studies knowledge', trying to pin this text down, specifically looking at the study of the object and concept of subject.

Readings:

16:00-16:15 • Break

16:15-18:00 • Focus Group Meeting I:

Poetics, Politics, Ghosts / Petra Rethmann

Between 1873 and 1876 Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche published a series of four essays under the collective title Untimely Meditations. In the second essay, entitled “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life,” he writes, “We need history, certainly, but we need it for reasons different from those for which the idler in the garden of knowledge needs it, even though he may look nobly down on our rough and charmless needs and requirements. We need it, that is to say, for the sake of life and action, not so as to turn comfortably away from life and action, let alone for the purpose of extenuating the self-seeking life and the based and cowardly action.” In the workshop History’s Disquiet we take this sentence as one of our premises. In particular we shall consider what kinds of narratives and stories about history and time can form untimely meditations today. We will do so through the registers of Poetics, Politics, and Ghosts.

The workshop will run in three parts, with each part focusing on one major 20th century thinker: 1) Walter Benjamin; 2) Hannah Arendt; 3) Siegfried Kracauer. Several of you have suggested this as a useful format, and we will take Kracauer’s, Arendt’s, and Benjamin’s thinking as our analytical lens. Each workshop will begin with a short, introductory lecture on these thinkers, with each lecture being connected to ethnographic and visual materials, to be followed up by discussions. For each session there will be one or two selected readings (please see below), and we will take these readings as our point of departure. Please keep in mind that these sessions are analytically and methodologically interrelated.

Session I: Poetics(Walter Benjamin)

Readings:
  • Benjamin, Walter (1999), Dream Kitsch: Gloss on Surrealism. Transl. by Howard Eiland. In Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings. Volume 2: 1927-1934. Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith eds. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999.
  • Buck-Morss, Susan (1983), Benjamin’s Passagen-Werk: Redeeming Mass Culture for the Revolution. New German Critique 29: 211-240.
  • Visual and ethnographic materials here include the dream kitsch of commodities, a glimpse in the “new” arcades of Berlin (with a view on Benjamin’s own work on the Paris arcades), and socialist everyday objects and kitsch (with a particular view towards their musealization in Berlin).
Alternative Music / Mikhail Uvarov

20:00 • Film Screening I: Rocking the Nation (director Borbala Kriza, 2007)

Friday, August 14

9:30-11:00 • Intersession Reports / Aleksandra Kleschina, Anna Piotrowska, Mikhail Uvarov

11:00-11:15 • Coffee break

11:15-13:00 • Mapping Alternatives: Feminism as a Critical Social Theory: Emergence and Travel (Part II) / Anna Temkina, Olga Zubkovskaya

Issues for discussion
  1. Changes in gender relations in post-socialism; new gender contracts and the of balance roles; new conventions, possibilities and restrictions. Which norms and practices are conventional? How are new norms being formed?
  2. Alternative gender identities: definitions and criteria for descriptions. What are the mechanisms by which alternative gender identities are created? What are the consequences of the marginalization and othering of gender identities?
  3. Can feminist knowledge be seen as an alternative for the post-soviet condition?
  4. Soviet feminism as an alternative. Dissident woman’s journal “Maria”; “prohibited” issues and topics: abortions, childbirth, etc.
Readings:
  • Rotkirch, A., Temkina, A. (1997) “Soviet Gender Contracts and Their Shifts in Contemporary Russia //” Idantutkimus. N 4, p. 6-24 [E-Library]
  • Funk N. (1993) “Introduction Women and Post-communism, in: Gender Politics and Post-communism.” Ed. by N. Funk and M Mueller MY, London Routledge. Pp. 1-14 [E-Library]
  • “Women’s Birth and the Family” (1984), in: Mamonova T. (ed) Women and Russia. Basil Blackwell. Pp. 89-117 [E-Library]
The discussion will be based on three types of materials: 1) reflections on personal experience (preferably described in writing and circulated before the seminar); 2) comments on depictions of gender in recent films, e.g., Three mothers and a choir, Who will sing a lullaby?; 3) research articles.

13:00-14:30 • Lunch

14:30-16:00 • Mapping Alternatives: Rock'n'roll Carnival: Rock Music, Nationalism, Counter/sub-culture and Humor (Part I) / Mark Yoffe

This brief survey will focus on several concepts and social and cultural phenomena, such as:
  • concepts of counterculture and subculture, with their definitions, behavioral patterns, cultural markers and creative cultural outcomes. Several examples of well- known counter and subcultures will be discussed in comparative ethnographic perspective (beatniks, hippies, punks, hipsters);
  • rock music will be discussed as a major creative output of counter/sub-cultures. Rock music would be viewed as an art form and its historical development will be discussed in detail;
  • process of adaptation/nationalization of Western Anglo-American art form of rock music within non-Anglo-American and non-Western musical, cultural, social and political traditions will be discussed in specific detail. Interrelationships between rock culture and notions of nationalism will be discussed;
  • the Bakhtinian concept of carnival will be discussed in the way it pertains to rock music, and countercultural/subcultural behavioral patterns and creative output. Mechanics and formal methodology of applying carnivalesque practice to counterculture/subculture creative output will be discussed in specific detail. Interrelationship between rock, counter/sub cultures and folk-humorous traditions will be explored. Concept of carnivalesque method of STEB-international (STEB being a crucial Russian term for specific folk-humorous counter/sub cultural mode of self-expression) in its international perspective will be established.
Readings:
  • Bakhtin, Mikhail M. Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics. Translated by Caryl Emerson. University of Minnesota Press, 1984. http://site.ebrary.com/lib/gwu/Doc?id=10151133 Chapter 4: Characteristics of genre and plot composition in Dostoevsky's works; Chapter 5: Discourse in Dostoevsky
  • Rock n Roll and Nationalism: a Multinational Perspective. Mark Yoffe and Andrea Collins, editors. Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2005. Chapter 7: Conceptual carnival (by Mark Yoffe) [E-Library]
Recommended:
  • Hebridge, Dick. Subculture: the Meaning of Style. London, Methuen & Co Ltd., 1979. [E-Library]

16:00-16:15 • Break

16:15-18:00 • Individual consultations; project groups meetings

20:00 • Current Issues in Cultural Studies: Cultural Studies since 1989 / Imre Szeman

How has cultural theory and cultural studies changed since the end of the Cold War? This session will provide an overview of developments in cultural theory over the past twenty years, with a special focus on the impact of shifts in politics, economics and communications. In what ways was cultural studies connected to the politics of the Cold War? And what kinds of developments can we anticipate in the next two decades?

Saturday, August 15

9:30-11:00 • Teaching Session II: Everyday Life Culture of Consumerism: Between Neoliberalism, Postindustrial Capitalism and Postmodernism / Hajrudin Hromadzic

Consumerism is a comprehensive phenomenon of nowadays, a fact manifested in all the various aspects of our lives. As such, it represents contemporary everyday life’s ideological substance. The aim of the lecture is to offer an overview of how and why consumerism has become so powerful force in our everyday lives. My aim is to assess the ways in which neoliberalism, postindustrial capitalism, and postmodernism are interwoven within the field of contemporary culture of consumerism. I will focus on the characteristics and manifestations of developing consumer culture in post-socialist or so-called “transitional” countries.

Readings:

11:00-11:15 • Coffee break

11:15-13:00 • Mapping Alternatives: Alternative Orthodoxy: Contemporary Jurisdictions / Irina Papkova

After the collapse of the USSR, a number of prominent Orthodox activists split off from the Moscow Patriarchate to form their own jurisdictions, which have become known among Russia’s religious believers as “Alternative Orthodoxy.” At least half a dozen such parallel structures have sprung up over the territory of the Russian Federation, most notably, in the Suzdal region. Their differences with the Patriarchate are not so much ecclesiological as political and, to an important extent, cultural; whereas the current mainstream Orthodox leadership has been relatively uncritical of the Yeltsin and Putin/Medvedev regimes, the “alternative” jurisdictions have ranged in their politics from strongly monarchist to staunchly democratic. Some look backwards, culturally, to the Orthodox Empire as their ideal; others look to the West; in all cases, the “Alternative Orthodoxies” in Russia provide competing visions for Russia’s present. The lecture examines these issues in depth.

Readings:
  • Turunen, Maija (2007) “Orthodox monarchism in Russia: is religion important in the present-day construction of national identity?”, Religion, State and Society, 35:4, 319 – 334 [e-Library]
  • Papkova, Irina. The Post-Soviet Russian Orthodox Church and Secular Politics: Ideological Frames (Chapter 2 from the forthcoming book "Symphonic Smoke and Mirrors") [e-Library]
  • Papkova, Irina. Informal Orthodoxy and Radical Politics (Chapter 4) [e-Library]
Recommended:
  • Николай Митрохин. Русская православная церковь: современное состояние и актуальные проблемы. Москва: Новое литературное обозрение. 2004. С. 460-472; optional: 43-64; 106-121 [e-Library]
  • Диакон Андрей Кураев. Искушение, которое приходит «справа». Издательский Совет Русской Православной Церкви, 2005; с. 8-111, 50-52, 55-58, 72-73 [e-Library]
  • Житие, пророчества, акафисты и каноны святым царственным мученикам. Издательство «Русь самодержавная», 2005; с. 69, 84, 141-143 [e-Library]

13:00-14:30 • Lunch

14:30-16:00 • Current Issues in Cultural Studies: Rock'n'roll Carnival: Rock Music, Nationalism, Counter/Sub-culture and Humor (Part II) / Mark Yoffe

In the second half of this two-part session (see longer description above under Part I), we will incorporate participant responses into a seminar style discussion in a more comparative context, focusing again on these points:

  • concepts of counterculture and subculture;
  • rock music will be discussed as a major creative output of counter/sub-cultures;
  • process of adaptation/nationalization of Western Anglo-American art form of rock music;
  • the Bakhtinian concept of carnival will be discussed in the way it pertains to rock music, and countercultural/subcultural behavioral patterns and creative output
Readings:
  • Bakhtin, Mikhail M. Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics. Translated by Caryl Emerson. University of Minnesota Press, 1984. http://site.ebrary.com/lib/gwu/Doc?id=10151133 Chapter 4: Characteristics of genre and plot composition in Dostoevsky's works; Chaper 5: Discourse in Dostoevsky
  • Rock n Roll and Nationalism: a Multinational Perspective. Mark Yoffe and Andrea Collins, editors. Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2005. Chapter 7: Conceptual carnival (by Mark Yoffe) [e-Library]
Recommended:
  • Hebridge, Dick. Subculture: the Meaning of Style. London, Methuen & Co Ltd., 1979 [e-Library]

16:00-16:15 • Break

16:15-18:00 • Focus Group Meetings II:

  • Virtual Spaces / Jessie Labov
  • The Underground / Olga Zaslavskaya

Sunday, August 16

FREE DAY

 

WEEK TWO: 17-21 August

Monday, August 17

9:30-11:00 • Focus Group Meetings II:

Poetics, Politics, Ghostst / Petra Rethmann

Session II: Politics (Hannah Arendt)

Readings:
  • Arendt, Hannah (2006), The Revolutionary Tradition and its Lost Treasure. In On Revolution. New York: Penguin. Pp. 207-273.
Here visual and ethnographic materials are related – among other things - to the Leon Trotzky Museum in Mexico City.
Alternative Music / Mikhail Uvarov

11:00-11:15 • Coffee break

11:15-13:00 • Mapping Alternatives: The Visual Turn in the Context of Critical Theory / Andrey Gornykh

The critical understanding of the “visual turn” of (post)modernist culture can contribute to a radical questioning of the alternative within the modern society. The analysis of commodity fetishism as deep social logic of capitalism opens up wide perspective for such understanding that can be outlined by the following questions. How do things become “true” appearances of money? What are the effects of the modern aesthitcs of commodity? To what extent the image is a form of alienation? In what sense the spectacle is a mature form of commodity fetishism? How to consume “visually”?

Readings:
  • Benjamin W. Illuminations. London: Pimlico, 1999. P.211-245 [e-Library]
  • Debord G. Society of the Spectacle. Black & Red, 1977 [e-Library]
  • Friedberg A. Window shopping: cinema and the postmodern. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press,1994. P. 47-111 [e-Library]
  • Gornykh A., Ousmanova A. “Aesthetics of Internet and visual consumption. On the RuNet’s essence and specificity” in Control + Shift. Public and private usages of the Russian Internet. (Norderstedt, 2006) P. 198-214 [e-Library]

13:00-14:00 • Lunch

14:00-15:30 • Urban Spaces Roundtable: Creativity and Urban Space

16:15-17:30 • Urban Spaces Roundtable: Creativity and Urban Space

20:00 • Film screening II: War Photographer (director Christian Frei, 2001)

See: http://aspen.conncoll.edu/politicsandculture/page.cfm?key=620
And: http://aspen.conncoll.edu/politicsandculture/page.cfm?key=621

Tuesday, August 18

9:30-11:00 • TBA

11:00-11:15 • Coffee break

11:15-13:00 • Mapping Alternatives: Contemporary Theory and Contemporary Art (Anti-Aesthetics) / Helen Petrovsky 

Respondent: Dragan Kujundzic

The lecture will focus on some of the recent experiments in contemporary art. Sophie Calle and Cindy Sherman will be taken as the two most striking examples. What will be discussed is the probing of contemporary art into theoretical issues with the means proper to it. In the case of Sophie Calle it is the problem of experience and its possible transmission through storytelling, her preferred device. With Cindy Sherman it is an intense questioning of the medium of art, painting in particular. What seems to be common to the two artists is a way of redefining the aesthetic in favor of an audience-related and ultimately unspecialized approach. What is at stake is a new concept of art, as well as the possibilities that this redefined concept opens up for laymen.

Readings:
  • Walter Benjamin, “A Short History of Photography,” in: Classic Essays on Photography. Ed. Alan Trachtenberg (New Haven, Conn.: Leete’s Island Books, 1980), pp. 199–216 [e-Library]
  • Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller. Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov,” in: Idem. Illuminations. Essays and Reflections. Ed. and with an Intro. by Hannah Arendt. Trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), pp. 83–109 [e-Library]
  • Arthur Danto, “Past Masters and Post Moderns: Cindy Sherman’s History Portraits,” in: Cindy Sherman. History Portraits. With a Text by Arthur C. Danto (New York: Rizzoli, 1991), pp. 5–13 [e-Library]
  • Christine Macel, “Biographical interview with Sophie Calle,” in: Sophie Calle. M’as-tu vue (Munich – Berlin – London – New York: Prestel, 2003), pp. 73–84 [e-Library]

13:00-14:30 • Lunch

14:30-16:00 • Current Issues in Cultural Studies: Media and (Post) Public Sphere: New Forms of Counter-cultural Politics and Cyber protest in Eastern Europe / Almira Ousmanova

The lecture will focus on the transformations of public sphere and the appearance of new forms of civil protest and political resistance which involve various forms of media activism and media-based cultural practices (including Public Art) in some post-Soviet countries (the cases of Belarus and Lithuania – flashmobs, ”Pro-Test Lab and “Belzhaba”).

The formation of the modern public sphere(s), as shown by J.Habermas, had been closely related to the evolution of printed media which played a crucial role in the transition from absolutist to liberal-democratic regimes in western societies. However, during last decades we have been witnessing structural changes in the public sphere due to the arrival of new media, new social technologies and new forms of interaction between different “publics”. The new types of publicness that have been proliferating over the past two decades, especially within electronic media, not only force us to redefine the spatial, territorial and geopolitical parameters of the public sphere, but also prompt us to rethink, once again, the function, scope and mode of intellectual activity in the public sphere. Visual media irrevocably put into question claims to cultural centrality of the written or spoken word, challenging their normative function for the constitution of the public sphere, but also seriously challenged the ‘classical’ concept of the “public sphere” which paid little attention to ‘the power of images”. Reformulating P. Bourdieu’s thesis, one can say that nowadays the functioning of public sphere is almost entirely dominated by the logic of visual media (TV, Internet and cinema).

Readings:
  • Donald, James and Donald Hemelryk, “The publicness of cinema”, in Christine Gledhill and Linda Williams, eds. Reinventing Film Studies (London: Arnold, 2003), pp.114 – 129.
  • Teubener Katy, Schmidt Henrike “(Counter)Public Sphere(s) on the Russian Internet”, in Schmidt Henrike, Teubener Katy, Konradova Natalia, eds. Control + Shift. Public and Private Usages of the Russian Internet (Norderstedt: Books on Demand, 2006) http://www.ruhr-uni-bochum.de/russcyb/library/texts/en/control_shift/control_shift.htm
  • Wodiczko Krzysztof .“Strategies of Public Address: Which Media, Which Publics?”, in Foster Hal, ed. Discussions in Contemporary Culture. Number one. New York: The New Press, 1987, pp.41 – 45 [e-Library]
  • Bourdieu, Pierre, On Television (any edition) [e-Library]
  • Усманова А. «Белорусский détournement, или искусство обходного маневра как политика» // Топос, # 13 (2/2006), сс.91 – 127 [e-Library]
Recommended:
  • Habermas, Jurgen, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (Polity Press, 2006)
  • Calhoun, Craig, ed. Habermas and the Public Sphere (The MIT Press, 1992)
  • Dahlgren, Peter “The Public Sphere: Linking the Media and Civic Cultures”, in Rothenbuhler, Eric W., Coman Mihal, eds. Media Anthropology (SAGE Publications, 2005), pp.318-328 [e-Library]
  • Eco, Umberto, Turning Back the Clock. Hot Wars and Media Populism (Orlando: Harcourt Inc., 2007)
  • Lewis, Justin, Inthorn Sanna, Wahl-Jorgensen, Citizens or Consumers? What the Media Tells Us about Political Participation (Open University Press, 2005)
  • Robbins Bruce, ed. The Phantom Public Sphere (University of Minnesota Press, 1993)
  •  

16:00-16:15 • Break

16:15-18:00 • Focus Group Meetings III:

  • The Underground / Olga Zaslavskaya
  • Virtual Spaces / Jessie Labov

Wednesday, August 19

9:30-11:00 • Teaching Session III: On the Ethics of Photojournalism and Documentary? / Svetlana Poleschuk

This class is part of the course “Theory and Practice of Photography” that I teach at the European Humanities University for journalists, cultural studies students and art historians. The ethics of photojournalism and documentary is one of the most controversial topics in the theory of photography as there are a lot of pros and contras. How to present this topic to students within one class? How to combine positive and critical knowledge? How to use visuals in the most effective way? – these are the main methodological questions that I have in mind presenting this teaching sample for alternative cultures seminar.

Readings:
  • Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, Penguin Books Ltd; new edition, 2004
  • Film: War Photographer (2001), directed by Christian Frei

11:00-11:15 • Coffee Break

11:15-13:00 • Mapping Alternatives: «Two Cultures»: the Representations of Love and Sexuality in Soviet and Post-Soviet Cinema / Almira Ousmanova

The lecture focuses on the ‘close reading’ of two films: the first one is well-known ‘Thaw” film ‘Once again about Love’ (G.Natanson, 1968) and the second film is “Sky. Airplane. Girl” its ‘remake’, which was released in 2002 (V.Storozheva). Both ‘love stories’ deal with the question of “the Soviet” and its ‘structures of feeling’. One of the crucial issues to be discussed is how films can be used for studying the history of emotions, and, more specifically, how cinematic love stories represent and articulate socially and historically grounded love discourses. In this sense Soviet cinema of the 1960s and Post-Soviet cinema of the 1990s-2000s are indeed, two different cultures in both cinematic and social aspects. Another important question to be addressed concerns the phenomenon of ‘remake’: is there a cultural need for remaking old films and what needs to be ‘rewritten’ in terms of gender relations, sexualities, visual representations, cultural and sociopolitical realities. Since the ‘remake’ has been produced by women-filmmakers, the problem of women’s cinema and female gaze is to be given a special attention.

Readings:
  • Illouz, Eva. 1997. Consuming the Romantic Utopia. Love and the Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism. University of California Press, 1997, pp.1 – 21, 43 – 78 [e-Library]
  • Zizek, Slavoj. “From Courtly Love to the Crying Game”, in New Left review, Nov.-Dec. 1993 [e-Library]
Recommended:
  • Giddens, Anthony. 1992. The Transformation of Intimacy: Sexuality, Love and Eroticism in Modern Society. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press [e-Library]
  • Коллонтай Александра «Дорогу крылатому Эросу! (Москва: Молодая гвардия, 1923). (Or: Kollontai Alexandra Love of Workers Bees (Academy Chicago Publishers, 1992)
  • Усманова А. «Повторение и различие: или «еще раз про любовь» в советском и пост-советском кинематографе», Новое литературное обозрение, # 69 (2004), СС.179 – 213. [e-Library]

13:00-14:30 • Lunch

14:30-16:00 • Current Issues in Cultural Studies: Critical Theory in Russia & the West / Jessie Labov & Dragan Kujundzic

Critical Theory in Russia and the West: An advance peek at an upcoming volume…

This session will continue with a conversation begun last year about “The Paths of Critical Theory,” in which we were attempting to trace the intersecting lines of different literary and critical theories as their proponents and influence spread around the globe. This was not an attempt to delineate national canons (i.e., which theories/theorists “belong” to Russia, England, Slovenia, etc.), rather to understand better how theory travels. If we look at the path of many of the Russian formalists, for example, through Central Europe and Scandinavia before settling the U.S. after the way, we can see better the trajectory of the theories themselves: 1) how they were influenced by the environments through which they traveled; 2) why these theories have had different patterns of influence at different moments.

In this session we look at a forthcoming volume of essays edited by Alaistair Renfrew and Galin Tihanov, entitled Critical Theory in Russia and the West. We will read a few of the chapters (generously offered in advance by Routledge), and try to evaluate the success of the project

Readings:
  • “The Resurrection of a Poetics,” Alastair Renfrew [E-Library]
  • “From Post- to Proto-: Bakhtin and the Future of the Humanities,” Mikhail Epstein [E-Library]
Recommended:
  • “The Poetics and Politics of Estrangement: Viktor Shklovsky and Hannah Arendt,” Svetlana Boym [E-Library]

16:00-16:15 • Break

16:15-18:00 • Focus Group Meetings III:

Poetics, Politics, Ghosts / Petra Rethman

Section 3: Ghosts (Siegfried Kracauer)

Readings:
  • Kracauer, Siegfried (2005), Photography. In The Mass Ornament. Transl. by Thomas Y. Levin. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Pp. 47-63.
  • Feldman, Allan (1997), Violence and Vision: The Prosthetitics and Aesthetics of Terror in Northern Ireland. Public Culture 10 (1): 25-60.

Visual materials are related to the works of Hans-Peter Feldman, The Dead, and Gerhard Richter.

Thursday, August 20

9:30-11:00 • POSTS Symposium: Cultural Traps of Peripheral Capitalism / Boris Kagarlitsky

Contemporary society has turned cultural process into an industry of sorts, which, like any other industry, gets its bearings by the exigencies of the market. The problem, however, arises from the fact that unlike material production that occupies a clear cut location within the global normative framework of capitalism, the “cultural” production of peripheral capitalism does not have a fixed place within this framework. At a first glance, the cultural sphere seems to be inherently much freer than the sphere of economic production. While economic “breakthroughs” are invariably curbed by the international division of labor, the cultural domain would appear to have no such constrains, either formal or material. Yet upon a closer look one discovers that the cultural sphere, too, is shaped by the so-called “western standard” (i.e. western cultural/economic paradigm?). Peripheral societies either seek to adapt their cultural production to western norms and standards (for example, the Russian cinema industry that sets out to produce “Hollywood blockbusters”, that invariably come out worse) or they obsess with their own “authenticity” and “difference”, turning it into a western-style commodity all the same.

11:00-11:15 • Coffee break

11:15-13:00 • POSTS Symposium: Back in Ex-USSR: Paradoxes of Postcolonial Condition / Aleksei Penzin, Boris Kagarlitskii

Two decades have passed since the process of disintegration of the USSR began. This process has political, economic, social, and cultural repercussions that remain important for Post-Soviet countries as well as for the rest of the world. It is easy to identify the basic traits of this transition period: the establishment of new national States, the decomposition of planned economy, and the (supposed) transition of the region to “free markets” and "democracy." But there are other, less positive features as well: poverty, precarization, rapid class differentiation, multiple conflicts among "newly independent States,” and the growth of nationalisms within countries which have had an impact on intra- as well as in international relations.

Thought theory has not advanced far in explaining and accounting for the post-Soviet condition, there has recently emerged some new approaching it. For example, with respect to post-Soviet economies “post-development” theory argues that in spite of that neo-liberal mainstream there has never been an “ideal” transition from a socialist economy to a market economy. Recent case studies have shown that a considerable share of Russian households are still not deeply involved in the market and monetary exchange, but have economic practices shaped by informal non-market relations and practices.

A similar logic can be assumed in sphere of the international relations. Despite their formal independence, the new post-Soviet States are tightly bound by the traumatic past history of “sovietization” and their status as national republics in USSR. Their mutual nationalisms and other dangerous social and political symptoms can be understood through the concepts and thematics of the field of postcolonial studies. Postcolonial studies as systematic area of research emerged in the 1980s and has now developed into an ambitious set of critical devices and accumulated knowledge, especially in the Anglo-American academic world. There have been some recent attempts to correlate Post-Soviet experience with the postcolonial condition. (See for example David Chioni Moore’s “Is the Post- in Postcolonial the Post- in Post-Soviet? Toward a Global Postcolonial Critique” originally published in PMLA 116.1 (2001), Special Topic: Globalizing Literary Studies.)

But in the space of former Soviet republics, the postcolonial has certain anomalies. For example, the “subaltern” position of Russian-speaking minorities in some post-Soviet countries does not correspond to the familiar logic of decolonization; the retreat of former “colonizers” usually does not produce new subalterns in quite this manner. At the same time, inhabitants of contemporary Russia—the supposed “colonial” or “imperial” center—exhibit the cultural and behavioral traits described in postcolonial studies. A typical postcolonial symptom for those who lived under colonial control was so-called “compensatory behavior,” expressed though the search for authentic roots, myths, heroic legends, and the like. Such compensatory images and figures are widely present in official Russian media and TV-series recalling the new country’s “glorious” past. Another well known compensatory strategy is so-called "mimicry" (Homi Bhabha), in which the formerly colonized diligently simulate dominate cultural forms. If the first tendency describes nationalistic conservatives in Russia, the lateral names that of liberal "Westernizers" in the country.

Following the disintegration of the USSR and during 1990s, Russian culture and politics was undoubtedly characterized by such postcolonial traits and strategies. This was not the result of direct “colonization” but the traumatic effect of forced implementation of "Western" models of daily life, political forms, and global mass culture against the background of the catastrophic disintegration of the previous social order and all of its utopian imaginary. Formation of collective traumatic feelings of "backwardness" and "subalterity" can be traced to this sudden invasion of ideas and pratices, which in last decade has been exhibiting itself in a multitude of symptoms.

A postcolonial condition without colonial past? Is this a theoretical paradox? We should keep in mind that the postcolonial is a discursive, cultural and ideological formation as much as the name for a lived reality. These problematizations might open a path to more attentive and critical usage of postcolonial criticism and a productive interdisciplinary dialogue. We invite to our symposium all those who are interested in discussion of themes described above and welcome all possible contributions.

13:00-14:30 • Lunch

14:30-16:00 • POSTS Symposium (Part II)

16:00-16:15 • Coffee break

16:15-18:00 • POSTS Symposium (Part III)

Friday, August 21

9:30-11:00 • Groups presentation of outcome(s) and plans for 2009-2010

11:00-11:15 • Coffee break

11:15-13:30 • Planning Session: "The Cooptation of Creativity" conference

13:00-14:30 • Lunch

14:30-16:00 • Closing Wrap-up

Note: Programs for Urban Spaces Roundtable, POSTS symposium and Focus Research Groups will be posted additionally.