Introduction: Communities of Science and Culture in Russian Science Studies

This thematic issue of Configurations is devoted to studies of science and culture in Russia. It features neither the entire range of contemporary Russian studies in the history of science, nor any well-established trend in such scholarship. It is, rather, an attempt to start something new, and to bring together different scholars in hopes of opening a dialogue among themselves and between them and their readers. The aim of this collection of articles is to create new meanings and interpretations of these works by bringing them together under one cover, into one cultural space in which they can be heard as distinct voices discussing similar questions from different viewpoints. Of course, for these voices really to be engaged in a dialogue the reader must animate them in his or her mind: reading, comparing, agreeing, objecting. Without the active reader this issue would remain a mere collection of curiosities brought from over the ocean.

With this rather Bakhtinian idea in mind, the framework for this issue was designed and its authors approached. Beginning with the idea of an interview with Anatolii Akhutin and Vladimir Bibler, the key concept for the issue was that of “the community of science” or “the community of culture” (see p. 340; page references in this Introduction are to the articles in this issue). In modern studies of science in society, there is still a largely unbridged gap between the microsociology of laboratory life and studies of science and culture. Literary studies of science on a new sophisticated level have brought us back to the history of ideas. From a Bakhtinian vantage point, this problem can be approached through his idea of the chronotope.1 Science is usually presented in two different chronotopes: one of an everyday-life-space and one of the rather asocial time-space of culture. The concept of a community of science and culture proposed by Akhutin and Bibler can add force to the construction of a new chronotype and show the common ground between literary studies and the micro-social history of sci ence.

One of the possible ways to illustrate the concept of a community of science is to apply it to this issue. Besides their own local social interaction in their own scientific or scholarly communities, scientists and scholars become actual and potential interlocutors in the dialogue about the studies presented here. In doing so they form a virtual community together with Mikhail Bakhtin, Ludwig Wittgenstein (on forms of life), Lev Vygotsky (on speech and culture), Vladimir Vernadsky (on noosphere community), and other scholars whose voices are embodied in the fabric of this collective work. At the same time, the authors’ voices reflected by their articles also come out of their own communities and forms of life.

In the interview published in this issue, Anatolii Akhutin stresses the social nature of these seemingly ideational interactions in the following way: “Informal communities, small unstable groups, even complete solitude—all of these are...specific social forms... of the community of culture....The community of culture has its own laws, its own determinative forces, its own needs, which are different from the laws, forces, and needs of that society in which we happen to be living” (p. 384). He continues by saying that “ (i)t is precisely the membership in this community...that produces the appearance of ‘asociality’ of a serious thinker or artist. It is not a matter of romanticism, but a matter of one’s instinctive obedience to the laws of the cultural community which may be at sharp variance with the laws of the society wherein one occupies a certain social position” (pp. 384–85).

The sociology of the scientific and intellectual community is rather a Bakhtinian sociology—a sociology of people communicating. However, through the publication of the interview with Anatolii Akhutin and Vladimir Bibler, we intend to discuss neither Mikhail Bakhtin himself nor Akhutin and Bibler’s interpretation of him. As the reader will see, Akhutin and Bibler do not aim to interpret Bakhtin; rather, they respond to his challenge in their own way. Anton Struchkov...