Fighting a New Cult: On Thing-Power of Late Socialism

It has become a cliché to think of the late Soviet period in terms of shortages, deficits, and other forms of deprivation. For decades, lack was the key organizing meta-metaphor around which the Cold-war vision of the Soviet Union was structured. The Soviet was typically equated with a lack of freedom, a lack of housing, or a lack of basic food items. This talk follows a very different line of thought. It argues that by emphasizing lack and absence, we tend to overlook a profound fascination with things, objects, and material culture in general, that became so typical for the late Soviet society. Starting with the second half of the 1950s, we could easily trace the emergence of a distinct set of ideas, images, and arguments together with a network of social actors that actively generated a viable alternative to the dominant ideological model of the formation of the new Soviet person. The direct ideological pressure, which was so typical for earlier periods, was giving way to a rather indirect and soft influence of what the Soviets called “technical aesthetics” or what we now call “design.” If the traditional Soviet approach towards daily behavior and tastes was shaped by a clear cut understanding of what was good and what was bad, then the new cultural logic prioritized the notions and experience of beauty, comfort, or, at least, usefulness.

Throughout the 1960s-1970s, the normative didactics of Soviet aesthetic thought was gradually transforming itself into a more dialogical process that took individual feelings and emotions seriously. This aesthetic turn demonstrates an interesting epistemological diversion in understanding the role and the importance of material things in the life of late Soviet people. On the one hand, there were active attempts to determine rational limits of material consumption by establishing a hierarchy of tastes and aesthetic norms that could be taught and appropriated. Excessive interest in consumption – the “cult of things” – was castigated and ridiculed. Yet this moral critique of “crude materialism” was accompanied by similarly strong attempts of architects, designers, sociologists, and social thinkers to focus on a purposefully and effectively organized material environment. It was this environment (not prescriptive norms and rules) that was supposed to nudge and direct the individual towards more effective styles of consumption. Crucially, in both cases the material thing occupied the center of these discussions – either as an object of contemplation or as an active matter and agentive substance. It is precisely this formative power of the late soviet thing that this talk explores by examining heated debates about the benefits and pitfalls of the mass produced housing and the mass produced furniture.

Serguei Oushakine is a Professor of Anthropology and Slavic Languages and Literatures at Princeton University. As an anthropologist who works in the humanities, Professor Oushakine focuses primarily on practices of cultural production and consumption. In particular, he is interested in exploring cultural recycling and retrofitting. He has published extensively on aphasia, nostalgia, pastiches, reconstructions and imitations in contemporary Russian culture. He has authored three monographs and several dozens of articles. He also edited or co-edited volumes on masculinity, family, and trauma and curated special clusters of essays on jokes and satire; cinematic emotions; objects of affection; eastern European intelligentsia; and postsocialist urbanism.