From a Shining Void: The Dialectic of Bespredel in Postcommunist Social Praxis

Abstract

The paradigm of late-Soviet social praxis that we have termed the para-Soviet ethics of disengagement consists in the cultivation of autonomous forms of life beside the formal public sphere that evade the subjection of one’s existence to the historical tasks posited by the governmental rationality of the existing political order. As Akvarium’s songs of the early 1980s demonstrate, these practices of disengagement open an experience of time that is freed from the prescriptive rhythm of the authoritative chronos. In this manner, the unfolding of historical progress in the Soviet Union was subverted by the establishment of autonomous spaces, in which history was arrested and time was appropriated for free use. Yet, what happens to these extra-historical zones, when the official public sphere of historical politics, against whose background they were formed, itself implodes into the condition of ‘timelessness’? How can one maintain disengagement from the system whose historical motion has been rendered inoperative?