Open AccessThe Flexible and the Pliant: Disturbed Organisms of Soviet Modernity
Author(s) -
Oushakine Serguei Alex.
Publication year - 2004
Publication title -
cultural anthropology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.669
H-Index - 75
eISSN - 1548-1360
pISSN - 0886-7356
DOI - 10.1525/can.2004.19.3.392
Subject(s) - maxim , modernity , subjectivity , rhetoric , phrase , subject (documents) , order (exchange) , sociology , structuring , social order , aesthetics , epistemology , literature , linguistics , philosophy , politics , computer science , political science , law , art , finance , library science , economics
In the texts of prominent Soviet figures such as writer Maxim Gorky, the agrobiologist Trofim Lysenko, and the educator Anton Makarenko, the uncertainty of social norms in early Soviet society became equated with an instability of environment in general and nature in particular. A powerful and vivid rhetoric of a “second nature,” to use Gorky's phrase, overcame the absence of clearly articulated models for subjectivity. A series of disciplining routines and activities capable of producing the new Soviet subject compensated in the 1930s for the dissolution of the daily order of things and all the structuring effects, social networks, and reciprocal obligations that were associated with it.