From the Editors: Politics of Comparison: Inescapable Centrality and Elusive Clarity of Matching Things Up

13 Ab Imperio, 2/2007 From the EDITORS Comparison is a fundamental analytical operation, which allows singling out an object and legitimizing and grounding its specificity. Hence, an act of comparison is political by default: whoever compares has a right to do so, and, while comparing, creates hierarchies of objects and of their characteristics . This is why this issue of Ab Imperio, which develops our annual focus on the “Imperium of Knowledge and the Power of Silences,” concentrates on the problem of the politics of comparison, be it practical politics of historical actors and regimes or politics of production of knowledge. This problem is particularly acute in the context of the heterogeneous imperial space, and in an imperial situation in which one particular framework of comparison is superimposed upon another, and one logic of comparison that works perfectly well on one level of imperial space appears irrelevant on the other. For instance, the politics of comparison is, no doubt, present in the definition of western and eastern borderlands of the Russia Empire. In this case, the choice of a region on the West-East continuum results in a different image of the imperial experience. Comparison is written into the very act of choosing taxonomy in the descriptions of the imperial order: confession, region, or nationality. On the other hand, beyond the borders POLITICS OF COMPARISON: INESCAPABLE CENTRALITY AND ELUSIVE CLARITY OF MATCHING THINGS UP 14 From the Editors of specific empires, the politics of comparison can be found in juxtaposition with continental and colonial overseas empires, or in the languages of catching up development and of asserting uniqueness (the latter is particularly characteristic of the languages of self-description of the region of Eastern Europe, which generated a historiographic axiom of mimicking development). However, the epistemological specifics of “comparison” (which also means its political significance) cannot be reduced to the question of who compares and what gets compared. The very object of comparison, which is perceived by many comparativists as given, is conditioned by the fundamental situation of comparison: “autocracy” appears as an unambiguous definition of a political regime only when it is explicitly or implicitly opposed to “republic,” and “empire” acquires much of its meaning in an opposition to “national state.” In fact, as we noted on several occasions, this very instance conditions a very specific understanding of the “imperial” in the framework of the new imperial history, when “empire” is viewed as an ideal type in opposition to an ideal type of “nation.” In the space defined by these two poles, in comparison to them (closer to one or another) one can find real historical sketch of a polity. In this sense, an object cannot exist outside of a permanent comparison and juxtaposition to other objects, which creates additional tensions since the recurrent comparison with changing referents undermines a stable self-same identification of the object. It is this aspect of the comparative approach that becomes a leitmotif of the articles published below: they focus on contestation of, or on the initial fluidity of the frameworks of comparison, on the struggle for the “right” choice of an object, and for the list of candidates for comparison with clearly “appropriate ” parameters. This mechanism of the object’s definition through the position of the researcher and through the selection of comparable objects is discussed in the texts by Kristine Vitalich on the making of Vladimir Dal’’s Dictionary and by Steven Seegel on the politics of comparison in East-European cartography. The construction of the “body” of the Russian language in Dal’’s Dictionary, and the making of the space of a homogeneous nation with the help of ethnographic maps is made through the double operation of “comparative constructivism.” This operation provides for the external boundaries of the created object through a comparison with objects possessing a legitimate status (commonly recognized European language or territory of a national state). On the other hand, the internal homogeneity of the created entity is recast in categories of a vertical hierarchy: language versus dialect, minority versus titular nation. 15 Ab Imperio, 2/2007 The politics of selection, dismemberment, or silencing, and the politics of manipulating the language and organization of knowledge are the...