In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

CHAPTER 8 Social Afterlives and the Creation of Temporal Margins Ruination and the Social Afterlives of Socialism I n his Specters of Marx (2006), Jacques Derrida coined the term “hauntology,” a play on “ontology” (best understood when pronounced in French). Hauntology, for Derrida, was meant to supplant ontology by replacing the priority of being and presence with a focus on what is neither completely present nor completely absent: the ghostly. As Frederic Jameson has pointed out, in Derrida’s writings such “spectrality” is not a matter of whether one believes in ghosts or whether ghosts exist. Instead, it tries to convey that “the living present is scarcely as self-sufficient as it claims to be” (Jameson 1995: 39). For Derrida, the specter—or ghost—was a deconstructive figure hovering between absence and presence, making established certainties vacillate (Davis 2005: 376). We should, Derrida argued, pay more attention to what “disjoins” the present, to the ghosts of those who are not yet born and who are already dead (Derrida 2006: xviii). One of the broad themes of this book is the notion of haunting, for several reasons. One is that haunting—in a metaphorical sense—has been characterized by numerous scholars as a key side effect of processes of ruination (Armstrong 2010; Edensor 2005; Ivy 1995; Stoler 2006, 2008). Another, related, reason is that haunting and ghosts as social figures animate social life, particularly in situations where everyday life is marked by uncertainty and social change (Gordon 2008; Stewart 1996). I consider here what notions of ruination and haunting can tell us, both about the “post-Soviet” situation and the situation of youth in the post-Soviet region. The fall of the Soviet Union marked the end of a system that, it had been thought, would last forever (Yurchak 2006). As the empire fell, uncertainty , and in some places outright chaos, became inherent to daily life (Nazpary 2001). The situation faced by a large number of people in the 168 • CHApTER 8 years following was stark, and, indeed, as David Kideckel writes, “postsocialist studies is not a happy genre” (2008: 7). Many anthropological studies have shown that “the end” was not just the end, that a new and better future did not merely wait accessibly around the corner even as the future articulated by the Soviet Union was circumvented (e.g., Verdery 1999). Despite large-scale political reforms that were to ensure a swift transition from state socialism to a market economy, this transition was anything but swift in many of the newly emerging nations. As previously mentioned, this resulted in an anthropological critique of the notion of “transition,” which, it was claimed, overlooked the fact that the “to and from” in this process was anything but clear for the people who experienced it. There were many reasons for this. As Elizabeth Dunn has shown in her study of the baby food business in poland, the introduction of new regulatory technologies imported from the United States and Western Europe brought about new concepts of personhood and new power relations that fostered new forms of inequality and at the same time—ironically—increased the kinds of corruption and informal relations that had existed during state socialism (Dunn 2004: 162). Similarly, Alena Ledeneva (2006), regarding the continuous prevalence of informal practices in Russia, has shown that legislation designed to improve political and economic order continued hand in hand with Soviet legacies. Bruce Grant has noted that, despite overall political changes, thousands of political leaders did little other than change their office letterhead (Grant 2001: 333). When it comes to anthropological studies of how future-oriented endeavors—whether political or personal—were affected and challenged by past practices, and how ambiguities arose even in the most intimate aspects of daily life, the list is long: the studies range from questions of property and value (Verdery 2003), consumption (Barker 2005; Creed 2002), and markets and trade (Mandel and Humphrey 2002), to the sphere of civil society and NGOs (Sampson 1996)—to name just a few. The uncertainty surrounding daily life in the years following the breakdown of the Soviet Union was twosided . As people sought to “unmake” Soviet life and make sense of the emerging world around them, new activities and new rationales came about (Humphrey 2002: xvii). Nevertheless, although some things took on new forms, many still rested on—or were influenced by—what had once been. Kevin platt recently pointed out that the Georgian–Russian conflict in 2008 in itself showed that the...

Share