Abstract
The article presents an overview of A. S. Akhiezer’s reconstruction of Russia’s socio-cultural history as a cultural hermeneutic. The underlying idea is that the way humans make sense of their existence is driven by an algorithm of meaning production informing the organization of their ‘world’, in particular the selection of the means involved in that production. Thus the central axis of Akhiezer’s hermeneutic, methodogically, is symbolization: ‘worlds’, that is, socio-cultural matrices, are made according to and reflect specific modes of symbolization. Akhiezer’s account of the Russian socio-cultural experience is centred on the particular algorithm that he names raskol (schism). His purpose was twofold: to examine the ‘logic’ of raskol, on the one hand, and to investigate, on the other hand, in the manner of a historian, its impact and consequences for Russian society at large, including its effects on institution-building. In this way, the study of raskol goes hand in hand with an investigation of and commentary concerning the uncertain state in Russia of what Akhiezer named the bol’šoe obščestvo (roughly, the modern differentiated, dynamic institutional order). In effect, his theory is a social ontology with culture at the centre.
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Notes
There is nothing new about this in the context of Russian society throughout the twentieth century: it is fair to say that a veritable obsession with culture since before the Revolution and then in the Soviet period (the label ‘kul’turnost’’, ‘kul’turnyj čelovek’) has been a hallmark of the society and its intellectuals.
Cf. the ‘special issue’ of this journal “Gender and Culture Theory in Russia Today” (2003).
I am abstracting from Western Slavists, cultural historians, art critics and the like. There are exceptions. Most evident among them is the attention given to the statements about all things Russian by such personalities as Boris Groys, Mikhail Epstein, Mikhail Ryklin, and Boris Gasparov, to name only the most prominent. One reason for their success in relation to their far less illustrious co-nationals is that they are either established in the Western academic circuit (Groys, Epstein, Gasparov) or are frequent visitors (Ryklin). Their texts are widely translated. As a general rule, little if anything at all ties them to the sort of mainstream kul’turologija under discussion here.
A close empirical study of this project for a new national idea is by Bettina Sieber (1998). To be sure, Russian human and social sciences throughout the Soviet period had thrown up examples of fruitful ‘culturological’ research that did acquire recognition outside Russia. I am thinking in the first place of the Tartu-Moscow structural semiotics school (Lotman, Uspenskij, Ivanov), the Annales-inspired historical culture theory practiced by A. Gurevič, as well as the work of cultural historians such as Meletinskij, Knabe, and Averincev. More recently Aleksandr Dobrokhotov has added his voice to this discussion; he is presently working up a systematic ‘metaphysics’ of culture based to a large extent on these sources. Nor can the name of Bakhtin be omitted from any such short list of prominent Russian ‘cultural’ theorists. On the whole, with few exceptions so far as I can ascertain, these ‘Russian’ resources were largely missing from the texts of the first post-soviet generation of culturological discourse.
I often employ single quotes to pick out expressions which are common currency in ‘cultural’ discourse in Russia today and which are, moreover, polysemic (depending on the context of usage). In their case, the line between ordinary and scholarly (theoretical) usage is largely indistinct and absent with the result that fixing definitions is often difficult. This is one reason why cultural theory in Russia is, to reiterate, a tricky business fraught with extra-theoretical connotations.
Akhiezer, for instance, has written that philosophy in Russia has been and remains turned in on itself, that is to say, the object of philosophy in Russia is Russia itself, a frame of mind he seeks to explain with reference to ideologized religious motives—Russia as a vessel for the Sacred. “Rossija—predmet social’noj filosofii i nauki” (n.d. unpublished manuscript).
It should not be concluded from this that kul’turologija was unanimously acclaimed. On the contrary, besides being for many a laughing stock, a mock discipline and not a science, it was attacked on institutional grounds (for instance by the former director of the Institute of Philosophy in Moscow, Vjačeslav Stëpin; in a discussion the present author held with him he railed against a system in which ‘kul’turologii’ were taking up posts in philosophy departments to the detriment of specialists in the domain). The ‘kul’turologija’ at issue here has to be distinguished from the kind of work that is associated with, for instance, the Moscow-Tartu semiological school (Lotman, Uspenskij), and the various ‘philological’ (literary) conceptions that were well-established in Russian academia. This kind of ‘cultural theory’ was taught by Dobrokhotov, at the MGU, head of the Chair for the History and Theory of World Culture (formerly directed by V.V. Ivanov, who had resettled in the USA).
Another culturologist, working roughly with the same intentions as Akhiezer, is Igor’ Kondakov. He uses the expression ‘algorithm’ or ‘configurator’ and distinguishes, with regard to Russian historical course, five such coefficients in a successive ordering: accumulation, divergence, cultural synthesis, selection, convergence. One is reminded here of Luhmann’s thesis of ‘Ausdifferenzierung’ (Kondakov 2000).
I have come across one synthetic treatment in Russian of Akhiezer’s work and the conditions under which it arose (by one of his former collaborators), S. Ja. Matveeva (1997–1998) Raskolotoe obščestvo: Put’ i sud’ba Rossii v sociokul’turnoj teorii A. Akhiezera, the introduction to the second edition of Rossija …1997–98.
Let me remark parenthetically: there has been little research into the interaction among different ‘categories’ of scholars in Russia. Sociologically, the situation is, I believe, rather unique: Russian ‘science’ and ‘scholarship’ are divided among the universities, the various institutes in the Academy of sciences (many of which have converted since the demise of the SU into university-like faculties dispensing teaching services to paying clients and/or living off grants from private, frequently non-Russian, foundations), and so-called ‘independent seminars/institutes’, a context originating possibly in the coping techniques developed by (quasi-)dissident scholars during Soviet times. Just what these latter do today, how they publicize their activity, disseminate their ‘scientific results’, to what effect, and whether the individuals associated with these centres acquire symbolic capital qua ‘independent scholars’ whose works count as contributions to scholarship—these are questions worthy of more intensive research than they have received. I took a hand in some of this research. (Batygin et al. (2005)).
I have found the following online bibliographies of Akhiezer’s works; none is complete.
http://demoscope.ru/center/biblio/bib_akhi.html
http://demoscope.ru/weekly/2008/0355/biblio/bib_akhi.php
http://publ.lib.ru/ARCHIVES/A/AHIEZER_Aleksandr_Samoylovich/_Ahiezer_A._S..html
The persons who appear to have collaborated with Akhiezer on a regular basis, starting in 1991 include: V.V.Il’in, I.V. Kondakov, I.G. Jakovenko, I. Kljamkin, A.P. Davydov, E.N. Jarkova, B.G. Fedotova, S.Ja. Matveeva, M.A. Šurovskij, A.I. Utkin. It would be too much to claim that these writers were all of one mind or that Akhiezer was an undisputed authority for them.
It is not clear to this writer just what kind of influence Akhiezer wielded; his name was generally familiar, though with the exception of Rossija: kritika istoričeskogo opyta his texts were not the object of critical analysis and commentary. In certain circles in Moscow he was referred to rather unkindly as a ‘grafoman’.
He was more impressed by the efforts of Dr Axel Kaehne (Cardiff) who went to the trouble of addressing Akhiezer’s views of the nature of the political process in an exchange first published in Neprikosnovennyi zapas and later in the web journal Eurozine. http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2003-03-05-kaehne-en.html.
I will add in this connection that Akhiezer was clearly linguistically hampered as regards access to and knowledge of primary sources and research outside the Russian language, a circumstance that put him squarely within ‘Soviet culture’.
To discover whether this is so or not, the scholar needs to take in hand Akhiezer et al. (2008). The study applies the basic categories of Akhiezer’s cultural hermeneutic of the Russian historical experience. Available online at: http://publ.lib.ru/ARCHIVES/A/AHIEZER_Aleksandr_Samoylovich/_Ahiezer_A._S..html
An English translation appeared in Russian Studies in Philosophy, 1997, 36, 3, pp. 27–53. A second instalment of the same essay appeared in Voprosy filosofii 1998, 2. Over the years since then, Akhiezer published several more pieces in Voprosy filosofii. The last appeared posthumously.
Akhiezer is thus fairly described as being neither a Slavophile nor a Westernizer.
Interestingly, Akhiezer did not contribute an analysis and criticism of Marxist (and Marxist-Leninist) historiosophy and socio-cultural ontology. However, he did examine the socio-cultural phenomenon of Bolshevism in the light of his hermeneutic of the Russian historical experience (more about this in the last section of this essay).
Charles Taylor refined a distinction which is central to his own cultural hermeneutic, that between acultural and cultural modernity (Taylor 1993). The former has been the salient paradigm of modernistic theories of social development, typically that of Marxism with its emphasis on the ‘materialist’ explanation of the socio-cultural matrix. Taylor insists that ‘modernity’ so conceived is but an imaginary that remains blind to itself, that is, it in fact conveys, however implicitly, the values (meanings) of an Atlantic civilization grown to universal prominence—‘local’ values of the true, the good, and the beautiful. Akhiezer would have most certainly adopted Taylor’s stance in favour of ‘cultural modernity’).
Cf. Trudy, chapter 5, “Filosofskie osnovy sociokul’turnoj teorii i metodologii”.
Compare this with Max Weber: „Kultur ist ein vom Standpunkt des Menschen aus mit Sinn und Bedeutung bedachter endlicher Ausschnitt aus der sinnlosen Unendlichkeit des Weltgeschehens. (…) Eine Kulturerscheinung ist die Prostitution so gut wie die Religion oder das Geld, alle drei deshalb und nur deshalb und nur soweit, als ihre Existenz und die Form die sie historisch annehmen, unsere Kulturinteressen direkt oder indirekt berühren, als sie unseren Erkenntnistrieb unter Gesichtspunkten erregen, die hergeleitet sind aus den Wertideen, welche das Stück Wirklichkeit, welches in jenen Begriffen gedacht wird, für uns bedeutsam machen. (…) Kulturmenschen sind die, die (…) mit der Fähigkeit und dem Willen begabt sind, bewusst zur Welt Stellung zu nehmen und ihr einen Sinn zu verleihen.“
Quotation taken from Daniel 2001, p. 449.
Trudy contains an extensive part devoted to ‘Katastrofy v prirode i obščestve kak nravstvennaja problema (na istoričeskom opyte Rossii)’, pp. 157-332.
There are references to Bakhtin and Vladimir Bibler in Akhiezer’s texts: meaning is constituted ‘between meanings’, in a dia-logic. (Akhiezer, Šurovskij 2005).
Cf. chapter 3 “Civilizacionnaja specifika rossijskogo obščestva” of part I of Trudy: “Specifika rossijskoj istorii”, pp. 41–47.
On ‘mera’ and the ‘meždu’ cf. Trudy, chapter 4, “Sfera Meždu, ee osmyslenie”, 425–446.
In a discussion with Akhiezer about the difficulties ‘bolšoe obščestvo’ has run up against in Russia, Igor Jakovenko sums up their view as follows: “… a rather unique situation arises when in the framework of a single society two typologies of human consciousness exist. On the one hand, the administrative, bureaucratic mentality of a political elite, which has arisen in the same land that is shot through with currents of archaic consciousness, and which has grown to understand why a state and therefore the big society are required. On the other hand, the mass consciousness of the lower echelons deprived of any understanding of the need for big society; indeed not only do they not understand this, they also refuse to recognize the authentic nature of the state. A man from the lower echelons conceives the world as a kind of ‘matrëška’ in which the patriarchal family, or the state itself, resemble each other structurally. This man treats the big society as if it were his native village, and he imputes to the state [normative] ideals drawn from archaic nativist existence. […] … the specificity of Russian history and civilization lies in this paradoxical duality within the culture.”
In my conversations with Akhiezer, he was surprised by my ‘naiveté’ with regard to the ‘real’ Russia. Moscow, he insisted, is hardly Russia—I need to go ‘v glubinke’ where ‘arkhaika’ reigns supreme.
Akhiezer writes (1997, 32): “What are abstract forms of communication? A man who issues an order may be unseen and the order itself appears in an abstract form—a text, a slip of paper, a law created by the state having a binding force. The law is unseen, unfelt, but it is binding. Whatever be the emotive state of any man it [the law] remains an objective requirement (zadannost’), as real as this axe or animal. Money is among the most important abstractions. (I am not talking about money under socialism. All the controversy about the functions of money under socialism had little sense since they overlooked the fact that money is first of all a cultural category.) Money is first of all an abstract universal medium completely beyond the understanding of an archaic man. A man from the local community understands what a fish is, what a hare is. But what is money as such? To understand this, the materiality of things has to be transcended.”
I am reminded here of the ‘social ontology’ discussion around the work of John Searle (The Construction of Social Reality, New York, London: Free Press, 1995) and its application to economic theory (viz. Hernando de Soto’s ‘mysteries of capital’). Searle writes about “the huge invisible ontology” of social reality, which in the present context could well be parsed as the ontology of bol’šoe obščestvo. No doubt some part of Akhiezer’s musings on such themes was due to the raskolotoe character of Soviet society, in particular the economy: the centralized, all-Union economic process (the semblance, the simulacrum in light of the ideological rhetoric, of a ‘big society’) was set off by the ‘shadow economy’ of local exchange and services (blat).
Cf. The piece is a typical Akhiezer ‘application’ of the general cultural hermeneutical model, this time to the requirements of political science and its theories.
Groys (2006).
References
1. Works by A. S. Akhiezer
Akhiezer, A. S. (1991). (1997, 2008). Rossija: kritika istoričeskogo opyta. Ot prošlogo k buduščemu. Novosibirsk: Sibirskij Khronotop.
Akhiezer A. S. (1993). Rossija kak bol’šoe obščestvo, Voprosy filosofii, 5.
Akhiezer A. S. (1997). (with I.G. Jakovenko). Čto takoe obščestvo? Obščestvennye nauki i sovremennost, 3.
Akhiezer A. S. (1995). Ob osobennostjakh sovremennogo filosofstvovanija (Vzgljad iz Rossii), Part 1 Voprosy filosofii 12, 3–20; 1998. Part 2, Voprosy filosofii 1998, 2.
Akhiezer A. S. (2000). Problema perekhodov v sociokul’turnykh processakh i fenomena osmyslenija—pereosmyslenija situacii. Mir psikhologii, 21(1).
Akhiezer A. S. (2001/2002) (with I. Jakovenko). “Bol’ševizm kak sociokul’turnyj fenomen: opyt issledovanija,” Voprosy filosofii 2001, 12, Voprosy filosofii 2002, 5.
Akhiezer A. S. (2002a) (with Šurovskij M. Davydov. A.). Sociokul’turnye osnovanija i smysl bol’ševizma, Novosibirsk: Sibirskij khronotop.
Akhiezer A. S. (2002b) Specifika rossijskoj političeskoj kul’tury i predmeta politologii (Istoriko-kul’turnye issledovanie). http://www.carnegie.ru/ru/pubs/procontra/66526.htm.
Akhiezer A. S. (2005) (with M. A. Šurovskij). Ot dialoga k dialogizacii (v svete koncepcii B. Biblera), Voprosy filosofii 8.
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Akhiezer A. S. (no date). Rossija—predmet social’noj filosofii i nauki, unpublished manuscript.
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Swiderski, E.M. The cultural hermeneutic of Russia’s historical experience: the case of Aleksandr Samojlovič Akhiezer. Stud East Eur Thought 62, 279–298 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11212-010-9117-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11212-010-9117-8