Village as a discursive space

The political study of a non-political community

Ivan Gololobov

University of Warwick
Discourse analysis in both its theory and practice is traditionally concerned with
politics. The sphere of the non-political rarely attracts attention of the researchers.
It appears to be invisible to discourse theorists and unprivileged in empirical
studies of discourse. This article aims at filling this gap. With the example of a
Russian village it dwells on the discursive organisation of rural communities
whose radically personalised world resists traditional approaches to political
logic and suggests different modes of relations, agency, and power.
Keywords: village; rural communities; Russia; discourse analysis; and
non-political

1. Introduction
Discourse analysis in its post-structuralist and post-Marxist tradition and in both
its theory and practice is concerned with the study of politics. It is focused on
social change, political movements, actions, practices and the construction of
political identities (Norval & Stavrakakis 2000; Howarth & Torfing 2005). Identities which for various reasons are not considered to be political, for instance,
associations based on the territorial or interpersonal connections rarely attract
attention of discourse analysts. This raises a problem as discourse analysis claims
to explain the construction of all identities, social formations and every social
configuration (Laclau & Mouffe 1987:84); and not only those belonging to the
realm of imagined communities (Anderson 1991), such as nation, class or political movement. Appealing to the centrality of politics discourse analysis, nevertheless, assumes that the political is a moment rather than a state or institution
(Howarth 2000:104110). This implies that it occurs in the context of other, presumably non-political configurations of discourse. Laclau and Mouffe indicate
this context when they write about the impossibility of hegemony and hence politics in the situation of closed meaningful structure (Laclau & Mouffe 1985:136).

Journal of Language and Politics 13:3 (2014), . doi 10.1075/jlp.15.3.05gol

issn 15692159 / e-issn 15699862 John Benjamins Publishing Company

Village as a discursive space

owever, questions of what these tendentiously closed structures are, how are they
H
organised and how are they related to the moment of politics remain largely unattended in discourse theory.
The present article aims at filling this gap. It intends to bring the methods of
discourse analysis to the study of, paraphrasing Benedict Anderson, observed
community whose organisation is traditionally described through the eventless
practices of daily routine, inarticulate aural tradition, and non-political action.
Ibelieve that such research does not only show the ways discourse theory can be
applied to the study of this uncomfortable material but also poses interesting
questions to the discursive understanding of the political.
Politics in discourse theory are seen first of all as a logic which: (a) operates
in what Laclau calls undecidable terrain (1996:5960); (b) leads to the construction of subjects; and (c) involves the linking together of different identities and
political forces into a common project, and creation of new social orders from a
variety of dispersed elements (Howarth 2000:109). The last aspect of this logic
is coined in the concept of hegemony while the first one is associated with the
moment of dislocation. The concept of dislocation is understood in discourse
theory as a disruption of the symbolic organisation invoked by real events which
cannot or can be hardly symbolised within a given discursive order (Howarth&
Stavrakakis 2000:1314). It is this disruption which opens the discourse, generates indeterminacy, and makes possible for the political logic to operate.
The following study tests this analytic framework against the material of a
particular observed community and highlights specific responses given by it to
the challenges of incomplete meaningfulness, undecidability and dislocations.
2. Politics and the studies in rural worlds
This paper explores discursive organisation of a village community, in particular
the rural world of a Russian village. It is primarily based on retrospective reflections and long-term observations of rural life conducted during several ethnographic expeditions to various rural locations in Southern Russia between 1993
and 2004.
Rural communities have already been the focus of some discourse studies.
Laclau and Mouffe (1985:125) use Eric Wolf s study of peasants wars (Wolf 1971).
The authors of Hegemony and Socialist Strategy refer to Wolf s work to show how
the penetration of capitalist relations into traditional peasant community triggered dislocations and created the situation where, literally, peasants could no longer be peasants. This example is used to illustrate the idea of dislocation, discursive
failure and the construction of social antagonism, central to the political theory of

 Ivan Gololobov

discourse (Howarth 2000:101110). However, what Wolf, and Laclau and Mouffe,
do not show is how this discourse which appears to be threatened by the penetration of capitalist relations is constructed, and how these pre-capitalist identities,
blocked by the expansion of capitalism, are fixed.
Socio-economic studies on rural worlds and on the Russian village in particular, show that outside of these moments of rebellion the village is the community of the weak or the great unknown (Scott 1985; Shanin & Danilov
1992), situated at the bottom of the power hierarchies (Scott 1985; Shanin
1992:820): it is little (Redfield 1973), silent, disempowered and somehow
excluded from the field of political relations. Iarov (1999) indicates that the attitudes of Russian peasants towards political process in general are strange. He
considers peasants protests to be a reaction of traditional culture and suggests
that it should not be considered political at all (Iarov 1999:77).
Instead, most of the authors agree that what defined life in the Russian village
and its responses to various social challenges was the commune, or in Russian
obshchina. Obshchina, a word derived from the word obshchii, which means common or shared, was a collective voice of the village which regulated economic
activities of the peasants, took responsibility for the most important decisions in
the life of the village, and performed the function of a judge in accordance with its
own rules. What is interesting here is that in the times when the village commune
was assembled was called Mir, which in Russian stands for World. Moreover,
as some authors notice, for centuries the world Mir was also applied to connote
the village community as a whole: the 1814 edition of the Russian Academys
dictionary defined Mir as a community [obshchestvo] and as the assembly of
inhabitants of any village (Grant 1976:641). This inward-looking organisation
of life, where the World was associated with a concrete village community, was
also grounded by essentially aural and direct character of communication in the
Russian village.
For the majority of peasants rumours were a significant source of information on
domestic affairs and international politics, change of monarchs, plots, uprisings
etc. In the process of complex aural transmission of information these events
were not only supplied with imaginary details, but often radically changed their
character, depending on the attitudes, sympathies and loyalties of the context,
where these rumours where spread.
(Gromyko 1991:129)

Interestingly enough, the value of aural communication and the power of communal voice are also mentioned by ethnographers with regards to the Soviet village
(Kushner 1958). Rural worlds observed by the author in the context of this research
are of course different to those explored by Wolf, Redfield, Grant, Kushner or even
Shanin. In the end of the 20th beginning of the 21st century R
ussian village

Village as a discursive space

is literate, it has an undoubtedly better connection to the town, and, although

with some significant limitations, it is connected to the global network of mass
communication, such as newspapers, radio and TV. Nevertheless, this research
argues that, in spite of these transformations, contemporary Russian village still
demonstrates specific attitudes with regards to its interaction with the outside
world. I argue that they remain largely non-political, and that these non-political
responses are a complex phenomenon which does not reveal itself as a simple sign
of tradition. The present study shows that the Russian village, as a concrete and
observed rather than imagined community, remains a specifically organised
discourse, and it is this organisation which explains its specific attitudes, practices
and forms of social action.
3. Discourse and organisation of the social
In the most general terms discourse in the frame of this study is seen as a sphere
of practices and meanings where particular communities and actors are formed
(Howard 2000:5). These actors fill the social space with a certain structure and
a system of interrelations. Institutionally, a social system depends on the agencies dominating this space: for instance, the idea of class implies division between
workers, peasants or bourgeoisie. Such a system would be different from, for
instance, national societies where nations but not classes are seen as the subjects
of historical progress. Theoretically this approach is based on the ideas of Michael
Foucault (1994, 1984) and the so-called New Theories of Discourse (Torfing
1999) or Discourse Theoretical Analysis (Carpentier & De Cleen 2007). In spite
of obvious differences, the authors belonging to this theoretical tradition agree in
their understanding of discourse as a sphere where reality is objectified (Laclau &
Mouffe 1985:108). It is seen as the field of meaningfulness constitutive to social
agency and social organisation as such. Only in discourse do we form ideas of
whom society consists and only here do relations between these units receive their
systematic organisation.
Applying this theoretical perspective to the study of a rural collective we have
to ask a question: if we look at the village as a discursive space, who then are the
main figures in the social space there? Of what does the village consist discursively? As an example, let us compare how people in towns normally refer to each
other. In the shop, when addressing a shopkeeper it is likely to be Ms, or Mrs
[or in Russian devushka or more formal zhenshchina], in a taxi it is boss [or in
Russia, shef], and in a conversation with the police it is sir [which corresponds to
what people say in Russia nachalnik or komandir]. One calls a passer-by mate
[muzhik, zhenshina, grazhdanin in Russia], or gentleman [molodoi chelovek].

 Ivan Gololobov

But what happens in the village? Let me describe a typical situation, repeatedly
observed during a series of field studies in various rural locations. A village of
approximately 5,000 inhabitants. The central street. A group of locals are chatting.
After some time they are joined by a gentleman, also local. In the beginning he
is silent, just listening. Then he asks: Whose Vanka [diminutive of Ivan]? Then
affirms, for instance: Ah, Petrenko! and after that he is actively engaging in the
conversation. This seemingly ordinary situation illustrates profound differences in
the discursive organisation of rural and urban space. Initially, the object of the discussion, a certain Vanka, was not personalised and was referred to with a generic
name. This prevented the man who joined the conversation from recognising an
actual person and consequently from actively joining the dialogue. The question
Whose? here is not only the key to the entering the conversation itself, but also
to the understanding of the way the discourse of a rural community is organised.
In towns, people live in the world that consists of relatively abstract or imagined categories and city dwellers organise their lives according to them. They
rarely know all individuals that belong to the group of devushka, shef, or nachalnik.
They are not interested in whose Vanka? is driving the bus, or whose Zinka
[diminutive from Zinaida]? works in a restaurant. They do not know and do
not want to know. Agencies here are defined by abstract categories. In the village
things are different. Visiting a doctor a village dweller does not go to a doctor, but
to a certain person whom he or she usually refers to in a proper noun Alexander
Gennadievich [patronymic, used to demonstrate a polite and semi-official attitude], for instance. Calling a plumber, he or she is not calling a plumber but a
certain Pavel Petrovich, etc. Concrete persons, names, and proper nouns define
the structure of agency in rural community.
This attribute of social organisation in a rural community has been already
noticed. Kozlova, for instance, writing about village society in Soviet Russia in her
book Horizons of Post-Soviet Everyday Life says:
We have to stress it again that the lives of these communities are based on personal
connections. People here communicate with people and not with abstract systems
(represented by money, science, law, systems of legitimation etc.) Personal
connections are a complex network based on personal trust and nowadays
functional relations can be rethought in their terms.
(Kozlova 1996:114)

In the village each social object is personalised and recognised as unique. Only
through this is it included in the social world of the village.
It is obvious that concrete and abstract perceptions of social space do not
fully correspond to respectively urban and rural Weltanschauung. City dwellers
also live in the world of persons: family, friends, neighbours, everyone included in
close social circles. They are concrete Vasia [diminutive from Vassilii], Liuda
[diminutive from Liudmila], Mikhail Ivanovich, etc. The principal difference here,

Village as a discursive space

however, is that a city dweller lives in various situationally-activated worlds simultaneously. One is the family, the other may be colleagues at work, the third might
be friends, etc. They may overlap but also may not. Moreover, their intersection
essentially depends upon categorisation of the proper nouns. Only in so far as Vasia
is a friend he is positioned as Vasia to the wife at home, only in so far as Sidor
Petrovich is the boss is he called Sidor Petrovich in a conversation with friends.
In the village a person lives in a single and indivisible world of proper nouns.
There is no specialisation there. Relations of friendship are not divided from the
family, neighbourhood or professional relationships. This world is total and it is
impossible to simply leave it after work and re-enter it in the process of socialising with friends. Moreover, the name precedes possible categorisation. A certain
Kolia the technician [Kolya-tekhnik] is first of all Kolia and only then a technician, Zhora the drunkard [Zhora-alkash] is first of all Zhora and then the
drunkard. Unlike in the city, here one cannot say I am going to see my friends
or I have stayed late with my colleagues without referring to the meaningful
predicate of who these friends are and who these colleagues are exactly. Empty
categories simply will not work in the rural community.
Nevertheless, one can raise a fair observation: abstract categories of agency
exist in the village as well. For instance, police from the rayon centre checking the
alcohol level of local drivers are cops [menty] to those locals; seasonal workers
from other areas are known as khokhly if they are from the Ukraine, Krasnoiartsy
if from Krasnoiarsk, or severiane [literally, the Northerners] if they are from the
North; townspeople from renting village houses for the summer time are known
as dachniki [people who have dachas]. However, in the total world of the village
these categories receive a different discursive value. In the world organised around
unique individuals, or proper names, categories come to signify the external,
something alien. It is this value of the abstract identities that defines the specific
attitude of the rural world to political organisation.

4. Discursive structure in the world of proper nouns

In a situation where social organisation is fixed around proper names the very idea
of the political is seen differently. According to the argument of Althusser, the transformation of a private individual into a political one happens by means of interpellation which recruits them to a common unity of class, nation, culture, etc.
Ideology acts or functions in such a way that it recruits among the individuals (it
recruits them all) by that very precise operation which I have called interpellation
or hailing, and which can be imagined along the lines of the most commonplace
everyday police (or other) hailing: Hey, you there!

 Ivan Gololobov

Assuming that the theoretical scene I have imagined takes place in the street,
the hailed individual will turn around. By this one-hundred-and-eighty-degree
physical conversion, he becomes a subject. Why? Because he has recognised that
the hail was really addressed to him (and not to someone else). 
(Althusser 1971:174)

This hailing brings an individual into imagined communities of women, the

French, workers or other unities fixed in the sphere of public communication.
They offer a certain position which the individual is literally invited to occupy or
identify him- or herself with. In discourse studies this choice among the available
subject positions is understood as an act of political self-definition or the practice
of political subjectivity (Laclau & Zac 1984).
In this approach, institutional arrangements of the political are placed entirely
in the sphere of public communication. It is organised differently to private talk. In
their article Myth Name Culture, Russian semiologists Yuri Lotman and Boris
Uspenskii introduce this problem with a preamble World is a matter/World is a
horse (Lotman & Uspenskii 2001:525). Dividing these two modes of signification
the authors agree that in the first case we deal with the description of the world
through some kind of meta-language while in the second we see a description of
the world through itself . In the development of this idea Lotman and Uspenskii
say: [] at the end of the day, the whole situation can be reduced to the opposition of principally monolingual consciousness and that which requires at least
two languages organised differently (Lotman & Uspenskii 2001:526). The authors
suggest calling the former mythological and the latter non-mythological.

The world imagined in the frames of mythological [or monolingual I.G.]

consciousness must be comprised of the objects which are:
Located at one level (the notion of logical hierarchy is in principal located
outside of this type of consciousness);
Indivisible into properties and characteristics (each thing is seen as an integral
whole);
Singular (the idea of multiplicity of things imply that they can be included
in certain multitudes which brings them to the level of meta-description).
(Ibid. 526)
A simple inversion of these points reveals the world seen by the non-mythological
or polylingual consciousness. It then consists of the objects that are:
Placed in some sort of logical hierarchy with each other;
Divided into properties and characteristics (each thing is seen not as a combination of parts rather than an integral whole), and;
Multiple (i.e. included into various multitudes).

Village as a discursive space

Leaving aside a rather compromised attribution of these two modes as mythological and non-mythological, which is not really relevant to this research, it is
still possible to relate description of the world through itself to the monolingual
view and description through proper nouns. Likewise, reference to meta-language
relates to categorical description. Such extrapolation is identified by Lotman himself in a number of his other works. Thus, in a later article he writes: One of the
basic semiotic mechanisms given to the human being starts with the possibility of
being just oneself , to be a thing (a proper noun) and simultaneously to be a representative of a group, one out of many (nominal noun) (Lotman 2001:38). Following these ideas and in contrast with the proper or personal, the second type
of semiosis can be called nominal. It distinguishes concepts and objects so that a
multitude of concrete individuals can find themselves in relations of equivalence
towards them. Here, not unique individuals but social groups become the agents
in the social space, unlike in proper or personal semiosis where the units of social
space are reduced to unique and unrepeatable individuals. Such division between
the worlds of proper and of nominal nouns opens an interesting perspective for
sociological application of the ideas elaborated in the works of the key theorists of
the Moscow-Tartu semiotic school.
Nominal semiosis requires the presence of some kind of meta-language where
concepts are formed and unique entities are united in an imagined community.
According to Lotman meta-language functions as a secondary modelling system
which is built upon natural language but has a more complex structure. Secondary
modeling systems include rituals, arts, and all kinds of ideological sign communication (Lotman 1977). This concept expands on the ideas of Mikhail Bakhtin and
in particular on his theory of the speech genres (Bakhtin 1986:60102). Bakhtin
writes that secondary or complex speech genres include literature, scientific works,
journalism, artistic and socio-political communication. Interestingly enough,
Bakhtin also calls the secondary speech genres ideological (Bahktin 1986:60).
They not only consist of artistic texts, which traditionally fall into the scope of
semiotic investigations, but include all texts and messages of high cultural importance, including those of an ideological character (Eagleton 1991:194).
The concept of culturally important speech genres or secondary modelling systems implies the existence of social divisions dividing important cultural communication from, consequently, the unimportant. In frames of such division it is
the cultural and political elite writers, scientists, lawmakers, state officials who
produce these important messages. If such division is absent no meta-language is
possible. Hierarchical structure of the nominal semiosis, therefore, does not only
refer to that which such consciousness is directed towards, but also defines the
organisation of its very subjects. It specifies who has the right to produce ideological texts and who is deprived of it. In general terms, the institutionalisation

 Ivan Gololobov

of such inequality by professional and other divisions fixes the structure of social
organisation that dominates the world of nominal categories. It depends upon the
institutions of power as the supreme arbiter of ideological messages and as a guarantor of discursive dispersion which brings other authorities such as scientists,
artists, doctors, church, and teachers, etc., into the cultural and social elite.
The world of proper nouns is organised differently. It does not need a metalanguage and is therefore indifferent to the social conditions of its formation.
Logically, this indifference results in a situation where social divisions lose their
value. Both objects and subjects of monolingual consciousness are on the same
level because a system with one language can only exist in conditions of discursive
equality. And this semiotic equality is a key feature of the rural life-world.
The absence of status divisions results in practical difficulties in identifying
the so-called key persons, local elite or authoritative people in a local community. It is extremely interesting to cite a remark of Nikolai Kondratenko, a
symptomatic figure of post-Soviet Russian politics, who was born and grew up
in stanitsa Plastunovskaia in Krasnodar krai. In his memoirs he writes: In each
farm you can find a local Karl Marx with his own view on the matter and dialectics. (Kondratenko 2000:78) By this Kondratenko shows the total indifference
of the rural community to the opinion of the so-called elite which discursive
power dissolved, forming a situation where anyone could have his or her own
authoritative opinion on any question. In development of this discussion the
author gives an example of such dissolution. While he himself was a Chairman
of the Krasnodar krai soviet and at the presidential elections 1991 he supported
a pro-party candidate, his brother refused to listen to the authoritative advice
and supported Yeltsin (Kondratenko 2000:78). Another example can be found
in the work of Aitech Khagurov and his research on the Russian farm located in
the Apsheronskii district of the same Krasnodar krai. He describes a situation
where one of the locals born in 1926 who lived all his life on the farm, working
as a stableman and then as a minesweeper, once brought to him his own project of stabilising life in Russia. This project was comprised of various points of
what is needed for the normal life of the people. These points included: the law
on assigning the land to those willing to work on it; the law on providing fuel
and oils for agriculture; the law on maximal prices; the law on crime and other
remarkable proposals (Khagurov 2002:256). This is a clear example of another
local Karl Marx. Especially interesting, however, is that despite the ambitions to
importance of the project its author was not regarded by the farm dwellers as a
member of the elite. Moreover, as it turned out, they did not have any respect for
him. In their eyes he was seen as someone who spent all his life at a warm place
next to the horses, barely breaking a sweat. They complained that in the 1960s he
procured a disability note; although according to Khagurov, when the author of

Village as a discursive space

the project became 60 and retired he was never sick and worked like a horse,
despite his disability (Khagurov 2002:49). In spite of the obvious presence of
rich and poor, strong and weak, influential and silent, success and failure, village
intelligentsia and otherwise, no one hegemonises discourse of a rural collective,
whether chairman of local administration, police, state servant, doctor or teacher,
etc. Life can depend heavily on the rich and powerful. However, their words and
messages are not always treated in the village as a guideline to action and their
actions are not unequivocally seen as examples to follow. The rural community
does not delegate authority to the key persons and does not clearly legitimise
their importance as such.
5. Power in the world of proper nouns and the weapon of the weak
The question one can ask now is this: do rural communities resist any idea of
power-based and social inequality? Does it mean that these communities are
excluded from power relations? Paradoxically enough, yes and no. On the one
hand village communities are obviously included in the power relations of the
wider society as its lower levels. Theodor Shanin mentions this lower position
of the village in the hierarchies of modern societies as one of the key organising moments in the life of the village dwellers (Shanin 1972; Shanin 1992:1620).
And yet, being a hierarchically lower level of social place in the world of nominal
nouns, the village seems to resist any hierarchies within its own language of proper
names. In other words, any institutions of social inequality and ambition of social
authority coming from the outside will be external to the rural community, inorganic to the structural organisation of its discursive space. Therefore, the question
of whether the village is excluded from the relations of power can be answered
both positively and negatively. Relations of power are possible in the village as
external while within itself it lives without them.
In this regard, a rural community can be seen as a certain antidote or antiagent of abstract power which comes from the outside of its concrete world of
proper nouns, and it is this quality that makes it interesting for a discourse analyst.
In this regard the village should not be treated as a sphere at the periphery of the
social space where politics simply loses its coverage. The village here represents a
certain discursive counter-pole to the universalising impulse of the political. In this
area of counter-polarity other relations, other modes of behaviour and other strategies of social action come instead of the political organisation of a discursive space.
One of the most evocative examples of such counter-political response is a
choice of informal economic strategies and in particular, different forms of theft,
something usually seen as the weapon of the weak (Scott 1986). Interestingly

 Ivan Gololobov

enough, though having replaced Scotts weapon with the weaker term tool,
in his essay Valerii Vinogradskii omits theft, the sharpest form of everyday rural
resistance, from his overview of peasants informal economies (Vinogradskii
1999:3648). Otherwise, sociological records of village theft are impressive. Many
scholars notice a certain inadequacy of the biblical commandment not to steal
in the economic organisation of the Russian village. Olga Fadeeva for instance
gives an example of the story told to her by people in a village where before was
praised and now was rued, because now, people have to be careful not to steal
and not to be caught:
Before we had an opportunity to steal, but now police are patrolling the fields and
at night the warehouses are checked. We are still trying to take things here and
there and not to get caught. Before we could take two or three sacks of forage, but
now any tiny bit would do the job. We tell the brigade leader: Give us some, weve
got nothing to feed the pigs with! And he replies: You can take it, but if you get
caught you will be fired with legal consequence. So it is getting worse and worse
with the forage. [] Really bad with the forage, you cant steal it anymore []
The collective farm doesnt have cash to pay us, and it is not profitable to us, those
kopeks. I, therefore, would be better off stealing as much as I need. And maybe
even a bit more. Many are doing this in our stanitsa.
(Fadeeva 2002:171)

In her research Fadeeva draws a convincing picture of the normality and at the
same time elaborate sophistication of rural theft. In everyday speech it is even
coined with a special term: business atmosphere (Fadeeva 2002:172). Such a picture of legitimate theft is by no means a unique example or a particular situation.
As a matter of fact, many people from the town, regardless of how much empathy
they have for the rural communities, estimate the situation there in a Karamzin
style, who when asked about how things are in Russia replied: They steal.
Village theft is a straightforward example of non-political strategy. This practice is institutionalised in the world of proper nouns. It is here that the weapon
of the weak takes its discursive objectivity, yet in spite of the fact that the scale of
everyday rural theft in Russia is impressive it has its limits and restrictions. The
main one is the silent restriction on stealing the property of members of ones
own community. Koznova writes about it: We all steal, what else can I say!
You cannot not steal in a collective farm. Otherwise you will not survive This
was considered natural and morally right. However, from ones own people, from
neighbours, you could not steal, this was a moral imperative (Koznova 2000:133).
Describing their informal economic strategies, peasants indeed speak with no
hesitation of taking crops from the farms storage, oil from the local garage, or
vegetables from the farms warehouse. However, usually no one mentions a personified theft from their neighbour, relative, friend, or any other concrete person. As such, only impersonal theft which does not bring any direct harm to a

Village as a discursive space

articular individual is normal. Personal theft, stealing from a concrete person

p
is not accepted and is even punished in a rural community. Khagurov gives an
example of the reaction provoked by repeated cases of cattle stealing from individual households:
After his return [from prison I.G.] Edik Shamba has an undisputed authority
in the Mezmai enclave. This made my dacha safe. In the last couple of months
thieves robbed many dachas, and even the houses of the locals. [] Yesterday
Edik came to me with a local policeman [], he complained about the lack of
rule: Yura, they even started stealing from me. A calf got stolen. They can even
break into your house.
(Khagurov 2002:9293)

To follow the argument I can quote my own observation. My parents have a dacha
in one of the stanitsas in Krasnodar krai and heard quite a few stories like that.
One of them is especially interesting and took place at the beginning of the 1990s.
The locals actually caught the thieves and called for an informal assembly of the
people in order to decide what to do with them. Two solutions where put forward. One was to give the thieves to the police with all the necessary complaints
so that they could be taken in with a criminal charge. The other was to punish
them with a whip right there on the stanitsas main square in front of the public. To
great surprise the convicted chose the unpleasant but short public punishment,
after which they left the square with appreciation to the locals for understanding.
Would the passion for justice be the same if those thieves had stolen not private
but public cattle? Personally I am not aware of any such instance and will risk suggesting that such cases do not exist and that it is clear why. In the world of proper
nouns, where only unique and unrepeatable individuals exist discursively, such
actors as collective farm, warehouse, garage as well as community or the
state as a whole do not exist. Kozlova describes the rural attitude towards the
big society in the following way:
Anonymity of social relations in the big society, its character of being componentbased [] is translated into individual connections as the very essence of
human relationships. Social relations lose their transparency, clarity, mutual
trust. Institutional fabric, social and political life are anonymous, they are
incomprehensible and anomic for the mass of [rural] population. 
(Kozlova 1996:203)

They are not recognised as objects deserving special treatment. If, for example, a farms property does not belong to a particular person it is seen as, literally, not belonging to anyone. Sometimes I heard that if the land belongs to the
state, it belongs to no one, cites a popular opinion revealed by research on the
socio-psychological attitudes of Soviet collective farmers published in the 1970s
(Levykin 1970:5259 quoted through Koznova 2000:88). It is exactly this verb to

 Ivan Gololobov

steal in relation to public property which in the conversation of village dwellers

is often substituted with a neutral to take or to bring out. And this is not a mistake or a colloquialism. Bringing out two sacks of grain from the farms storage,
or taking three dozen nails from the local garage are not really seen as anything
criminal. For the majority of the rural community it is normal. With a certain
degree of exaggeration, it can be said that stealing from the state for a peasant has
the same moral significance as the normative aspects of stealing berries from the
wood, or flowers from the meadow. You may take them, you may step over them,
you may give them water or you may simply ignore them. No one would be interested and no one would offer any comments whether it is good or bad.
6. Instead of conclusion: Non-political decision in the undecidable terrain
In 2003 a film directed by Gennadii Sidorov came out in Russia. It was called
Grannies [Starukhi] and told a story of the everyday life of the generic Russian
village of Klokovo, in the Susaninskii district, Kostromskaia oblast. The cast was
mostly comprised of unprofessional actors who were actual village dwellers. The
intent of the film was nicely summed up by the critic Anton Kostylev:
[..] this film gives the answer to a very important question: why here in the village
you never know for sure if a stranger is going to hit you with an axe or is going to
give you his last possessions, pull his pockets inside out and in the end apologise.
It is because it has nothing to do with you, neither the former nor the latter. He
is bored, the stranger, he is sinking in his eternity. He wants to kill somebody, or
to save him. In the morning they set fire to the houses of Uzbeks, in the evening
they took them into their own homes, the day passed. Illogical? Which logic we
are talking about when the samogon [self-distilled spirit] is ready!

(Kostylev 2004)

You never know for sure here is the key phrase illustrating the logic of interaction of the rural community with its outside. This interaction is often illogical
and this absence of logic is explained by the fact that abstract categories of the big
society open tendentially closed and singular world of a rural collective. Without
having an event dislocating a discourse, a villager regularly finds him or herself in
a situation where his or her actions with regards to the world outside of his or her
collective receive no normative regulation and no stable meaningful guidelines.
Particular type of Russian suburbanisation also known as slobodisation caused
by the massive displacement and resettlement of Russian peasants in the course
of industrialisation is a good example of this situation. Glazychev, for example,
writes:

Village as a discursive space

Sloboda always means temporary, each moment ready to be removed, destroyed

and displaced, therefore [] alien and even aggressive to the very idea of stability,
[], and rootedness. We cannot say that the very notion of property is not known
in sloboda, it does exist but it only covers a small range of movable assets which
could be easily squeezed in a couple of suit-cases [] while everything which lays
beyond the ramshackle fence is a considered to be a wild steppe. 
(Glazychev 1995:87)

Taken out of their Mir peasants did not integrate into the urban world of categorical nouns but remained in this state of undecidability each moment ready to be
displaced and moved around this wild steppe where even the rules regulating
relations within the perimeter of a ramshackle fence do not apply.
Discourse theory assumes that undecidability gives birth to political logic.
However, as this research demonstrates in the case of Russian village this gap is not
filled with the political logic but is lived through in such inarticulate, unsymbolic
and illogical practices as stealing, beating up those Uzbeks, or forgetting oneself in
samogon, that self-distilled spirit Kostylev was talking about. Discursive rupture,
opened by the conflict of tendentially singular rural world of proper nouns and
hierarchical organisation of big society is not symbolised and fixed in the logic
of political articulation, but, as the present study shows, lived through by a community which adapts to it in a range of silent non-political responses. These
responses clearly lack subjects. This challenges assumptions that the moment of
the decision [taken in the undecidable terrain] is then, simultaneously, that of the
subject (Norval 2005:93). They are resistant to the very idea of hegemony and
have little to do with the articulation of new social order. However, the rupture of
discursive formation resulting in the incompleteness of meaning, central in contemporary discourse analysis, is also crucial in understanding illogical behaviour
of the observed community, raising a question of the place this particular gap and
specific responses given to it occupy in the meaningful totality of the social.

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Authors address
Ivan Gololobov
Department of Sociology
University of Warwick
Coventry CV4 7AL, UK
i.gololobov@warwick.ac.uk

 Ivan Gololobov

About the author

Ivan Gololobov studied at Kuban State University (Krasnodar, Russia), Moscow School of
Social and Economic Sciences, and got his Ph.D. from the Ideology and Discourse Analysis
Programme at the Department of Government, University of Essex. He has previously worked
as a research fellow at the Norwegian Institute of Foreign Affairs (1998), the Institute of International Law of Peace and Armed Conflicts, University of Bochum, Germany (20042006), and
taught at the University of the West of England in Bristol (2007). He has been participating in
a number of academic projects, such as Far from the Cities: Social Transformation of the PostSoviet Village, German Research Council 20022005, and The Role of Regions in Transforming
Post-Communist Societies, INTAS 19992002. He is currently an Associate Research Fellow at
the Department of Sociology, University of Warwick.