I would like to take this opportunity to share with the readers of Ab Imperio my preliminary reflections on the place of research on the former Soviet realm and Eastern Europe – in short, “second world” studies – on the map of contemporary social and cultural theory. I address these reflections not only to historians of the Russian empire but to all students of the second world, whether English-speakers or not, whether their background is in history, literary theory, anthropology, or sociology (the “us” of what follows).
I use the term “second world” to acknowledge the distinctiveness of our field of study with respect to the developed and developing world, the global North and the global South, or what was formerly known as the first and third worlds. The most immediate sources of this distinctiveness are the legacies of the continental empires and, in the recent past, Soviet socialism. As these sources indicate, the second world is not a region with clear and distinct geographical, cultural, and political boundaries (is the whole former Ottoman realm a part of it?). What matters for me at the moment is that the second world constitutes in many ways a blind spot on the map of the world as imagined in the centers of global academic and cultural power and influence. Most important for me, it is a blind spot on the map of contemporary social and cultural theory. I am not saying that Russia and the rest of the second world are neglected and understudied by scholars writing in English or a few other internationally respected languages of academia. I am not even saying that the scholars from corresponding regions have a particularly hard time being acknowledged within Western academia in any status other than as Russia or Eastern Europe specialists (although currently this is certainly true – in contrast to the more “favorable” Cold War years – but this is hard to prove). What I am talking about is that second world studies, the second world as an object of study, has historically played and continues to play a particularly marginal role in generating the internationally circulated models of how human society and culture is structured and works. The second world may be studied, sometimes intensively, but it is rarely expected to be a source of important theoretical ideas and idioms. The insights from studying societies and cultures of the second world are not expected to be able to “travel” beyond the fields of Russian and Slavic studies. Whatever we do – whether our empirical research or what we consider “theory” – rarely reaches the minds and often even the ears of our colleagues in other fields and especially professional theoreticians. Our region may be seen as politically, economically, or – less frequently nowadays – culturally important but conceptually it is deemed by default to be uninteresting.^[1]
In practice, this means that second world studies – all reservations being made – consistently occupy the receiving end of the tidal waves of theoretical and methodological innovations in social and cultural sciences. In what follows, I would like to reflect on the possible reasons for this marginality and on the conditions of the possibility that the one-way road will turn one day into a genuine dialogue across area specializations and disciplines, and our field of study – former Soviet and socialist realms – will start to occupy a more central and honorable position within the universe of global social sciences and humanities.
A few possible reasons for the marginality of second world studies immediately come to mind. Comparative intellectual and institutional isolation of not only the former socialist academic community but also Western Slavic studies from the concerns of the wider academic community is definitely one such reason. Among its implications are our colleagues’ defensive hostility to contemporary trends in theory, their militant empiricism and/or stubborn loyalty to the theoretical currents of the 1960s, from modernization and totalitarianism theories to structuralism. Another implication is the insistence on our object’s unique historical destiny (e.g., Russia’s Sonderweg), which is usually “conceptualized” in terms of broad historiosophic clichés that go back to the nineteenth century or the Cold War. The antidote that is frequently suggested for this parochialism is openness to the outside winds, joining in the most vibrant global conversations and trying to see how influential theoretical frameworks operate on our terrain.
I certainly support this call for “openness.” In fact, I am about to reflect specifically on the impact that postcolonial theory and contemporary historical sociology may have on second world studies. Yet, this openness by itself does not solve the problem of marginality. The extension of novel conceptual tools to our field and learning from exemplary research on, let’s say, Western colonial empires may be very fruitful as far as the advancement of Russian (imperial) studies is concerned. Yet, it will not, in and of itself, change the image and the status of second world studies in the larger academic field. After all, the hunger for outside wisdom, just as intellectual xenophobia, is itself a sign of provincialism.
In trying to figure out the reasons for our marginality, we can take a different path and blame wider Western academia for its inherent Eurocentric bias that arguably prevents it from paying more attention to what the history and the present day of the second world can teach all of us about the human condition and the character of Europe/West itself. This bias is definitely still very strong on all levels of the academic enterprise, from funding policies to choosing and framing research questions, and to making theoretical generalizations. This is hardly surprising considering that the centers of academic prestige and influence are still clustered on the campuses of the United States and Western Europe, and that concerns and loyalties of most academics continue to center on these regions. Yet, as contemporary social and cultural theories teach us, intellectual hegemony is never total or monolithic, it is full of cracks which – favorable conditions and hard work provided – can be expanded into huge gaps. Without accepting this last premise, it is hard to understand how, over the past forty years, the scholars of, and even from, Latin America and the former British colonies (Africa, India) could manage to enter the limelight of Western theory in order to stay there as founders and key representatives of influential contemporary currents such as development and globalization theory/studies as well as cultural and postcolonial theory/studies.
So far, the second world cannot claim any comparable breakthroughs on its record.^[2] This seems to be evidence of the fact that the roots of our marginality lie not only in the unfriendliness of the environment in which we have to operate. The Eurocentric bias of our interlocutors is of course a factor, but this bias is just as widespread among us, second world scholars. Even more widely shared throughout academia is an essentialist bias that proceeds from the assumption that the distinctions between West and East, modernity and tradition, as well as between various cultures, nations, and “civilizations” are differences of an inherent (social, cultural, or even biological) “nature.” Traditional critics of Eurocentrism, cultural relativists, share this essentialist bias, too.
Yet, my hunch is that the source of the second world’s status as a blind spot is not in these biases per se but in the peculiar way they have traditionally framed our field of interest. Since the very establishment of such dichotomies as West vs. East, and modernity vs. tradition as facts of the public and academic imagination, Russia and Eastern Europe have always occupied an ambiguous, intermediate, liminal position in this imagination (ни то, ни сё, as Russian language suggestively captures it). “We are the West for the East and the East for the West,” wrote Sławomir Mrożek about Poland but he effectively expressed the sentiment shared by many Russian and East European intellectuals, artists, and politicians, by students of the region and by many common people. Every student of the second world is familiar with this perception and can come up with an unlimited number of quotations and examples to illustrate it.^[3] Many would admit that this image of the region has a lot to do with its historical reality: amorphous borderlines and expansive borderlands, polyethnicity and cultural diffusion, repeated modernization attempts and the interpenetration between imperial centers and peripheries.^[4]
The problem with this image of our region is that, within the framework of the Eurocentric binary dichotomies, this ambiguity implies impurity, mixture, creolization, and hybridity. Within this framework, hybridity means being derivative and secondary to “West” and “East” as pure types. Moreover, hybridity is considered illegitimate if not outright nonexistent, at least in the realm of theory that, according to the modern canon, has to purify, to separate essences no matter how intermingled they may be in the messy empirical reality.^[5] Within this canon, a hybrid object has nothing fundamentally new to add to what can be captured within the joint matrix composed of such pure-type dichotomies as modernity vs. tradition and West vs. East. I suggest that this marginality of hybrids is a key to understanding the marginality of the second world, as imagined within classical and (much of the) twentieth-century social and cultural theory.
Although it was never fully realized, this problem has certainly been felt since long ago. Therefore, there was never any lack of attempts to (conceptually or politically) “purify” the second world or its parts – that is, to reduce it to one side of the binaries that were taken for granted: Russian political culture was often treated either as an example of “oriental despotism” or as an overly “normal” European nation-state-in-the-making. Yet, the very persistent opposition between these efforts attested continuously to the enduring power of the motive of hybridity in the (self-) descriptions of the second world societies and cultures.
Another way of looking at this hybridity motif is to point out that it contains potential for a powerful critique of the Eurocentric and essentialist bias. Why not look at the second world as a model and a resource for nonessentialist and non-Eurocentric theorizing? Indeed, this is my proposition in a nutshell: to look at the hybridity of the second world’s cultural constructs and social formations as a model and resource for nonessentialist thinking! Yet, before I elaborate on this idea, we should not forget that the second world as a region and a field of research has so far generated nothing as radical and profound in terms of the critique of the modern canon in comparison with such trends as poststructuralism, cultural studies, postcolonial theory, and – I add, perhaps, somewhat untraditionally – contemporary neo-Marxist and neo-Weberian historical sociology. As long as we continue to expect to find “pure” “Europe” and “Asia” beyond the boundaries of “our” hybrid and messy region, the revolutionary potential of the second world’s hybridity can easily be neutralized. It can be treated as a kind of anomaly, or ”pathology,” with respect to the essentialized European norm. The “unmixing” of the population within the borders of the state by means of assimilation, ethnic cleansing, and genocide has, since the twentieth century, been an increasingly popular state-level “treatment” for this “pathology.” Another strategy for neutralizing hybridity is to proclaim it an “essence” of, for instance, Russian or Eurasian culture or civilization. This perspective may be self-consciously opposed to the teleology of progress and the Eurocentric bias but, by treating culture as a primordial totality, it subscribes to the essentialist idiom and reproduces the modern teleology on the level of “culture” or “civilization.”
The strategies just outlined not only accommodate the phenomenon of hybridity to the dominant biases behind Western theory but also reproduce the theoretical marginality of the field of second world studies. As long as these biases are maintained, no genuine, two-way dialogue with Western theory is possible. Thus, the possibility of such dialogue depends on the presence of the wide-ranging, theoretically profound, and empirically consequential critique of Eurocentric and essentialist assumptions. Within the framework of this critique, the second world’s motive of hybridity may acquire a completely different meaning. The remaining part of this essay is an attempt to elaborate on this new meaning and its implications for research.
Conducted most consistently and productively since the 1960s, the anti-essentialist critique has been primarily a product of the Western self-critique, greatly aided by a number of “third world” intellectuals who were able to make themselves heard due to decolonization.^[6] Although some of the names and works of the representatives of this critical movement were known to the students of the second world and to Russian (Polish, etc.) intellectuals since as early as the 1970s (Michel Foucault, in particular), only in the new millennium – I would even say, right now, as we speak! – the wave of this critique is reaching the shores of second world studies. I ask readers to accept at face value and without justification this statement about our late arrival. To justify this point would mean to explore the actual process of this reception and thus even further exceed the limits of this essay. I should only say that the social and intellectual obstacles to not only accepting but even seriously processing this critique are immense: from disciplinary and national academic/intellectual conservatism to the (re)emergent ethnic and state nationalism and to the superb ability of established essentialist discourses to appropriate the legacies and language of critical Western trends.^[7]
Nevertheless, despite the immensity of challenges, I feel as if we are gradually arriving at an understanding of the full extent of the implications of the anti-essentialist critique for second world studies. What seems to be emerging from some of my readings in, particularly, Slavic Review, Kritika, Russian Review, Ab Imperio, and Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, and related collected volumes, is the sense that the engagement with such trends as cultural and postcolonial studies does not have to be a traditional one-way game – that is, joining in the dominant conversations and remolding our field according to “international standards.” I am convinced that the standards of much theorizing and empirical research within specifically postcolonial studies are very high and well worth emulating, especially since we have many themes in common. Yet, we, the second world scholars, can do better. We can start doing better by recognizing that many of the “discoveries” that contemporary cultural and postcolonial studies have made in the course of analyzing the European and colonial experiences of nation- and empire-building have, all along, been common knowledge about the second world among, for instance, Russian intellectuals and Russia specialists.
The motif of pervasive and irreducible ambiguity and hybridity, as discussed above, is the main case in point. What the anti-essentialist critique allows us to do at present is to liberate this motif from any association with being a handicap, a liability, a source of intellectual torment and schizophrenia – or, from its celebration as a distinctive national or regional trait, a foundation of the Russian or Eurasian Sonderweg. Liberated from these traditional frames, the second world’s motive of hybridity at last acquires its universal meaning, the meaning of a resource and a model for nonessentialist thinking. Once we come to grips with these implications of the anti-essentialist critique, second world studies should be able to move from the deep provinces of the contemporary intellectual universe to a position as one of the key “labs” for producing nonessentialist knowledge about (not only second world) culture and society. This may sound like a dream but it is in fact a theoretical possibility – the possibility of deprovincializing the second world.
Let me illustrate this idea by exploring how the postcolonial perspective can contribute to it. First, I briefly list some of the postcolonial ideas that I find particularly useful for any student of Russia or Eastern Europe. Then I overview, very briefly, the differences between merely joining in the postcolonial conversations and engendering the genuine dialogue between postcolonial studies and Russian imperial studies.
In my opinion, one of the most valuable lessons of postcolonial theory is its overall quite successful attempt to think outside of the essentialized categories such as “West” and “East.”^[8] Specifically, this implies challenging the received image of European colonial empires: the empirically observable geographical, institutional, and cultural distances between the metropole and the colonies have been traditionally interpreted in such a way that, for instance, the British nation and a colonized nation preexist the empire and enter a number of external relationships such as “subjugation,” “civilization,” and eventually “liberation.” Furthermore, nation- and empire-building have been treated as essentially two separate processes. In a striking departure from this received wisdom, postcolonial theory has demonstrated the relativity of the boundaries between the metropole and the colony, and explored the processes of “mutual constitution” in which their social and cultural identities and institutions historically emerged. Furthermore, postcolonial theorists have relativized the very distinction between nation and empire in a number of interesting ways. By treating nation-building in both Europe and the colonies as an “imperial process,” they have explored how, for instance, Britishness was emerging in the course of confronting, dominating, and producing knowledge about the colonized Other. They have also demonstrated that a nation-state can be seen as effectively a former empire that has more or less successfully “nationalized” itself (through such processes as “peasants into Frenchmen” and “internal colonization”). These advances imply the “provincialization of Europe” and a decentering of the concept of modernity: “Europe” is considered in relation to its non-European sources, while modernity appears to be constituted not only by liberal democracy and the unprecedented rate of social and economic development but also by racialized exclusion, violence, and such “primordial” and “traditional” social formations as the “Hindu caste system” according to the British colonial census of 1901.^[9] This decentering of modernity helps to make the concept of modernity more analytical and less ideological by lightening the positive value load usually associated with it.
Some of the best passages in the texts of the theorists of postcoloniality are dedicated to “hybridity” that is both repressed and often generated by nationalistic and colonial discourses and policies. The “discovery” of this pervasive hybridity behind the screen of colonial and nationalistic dichotomies problematizes what seems to be the basic assumption of colonial domination – the impenetrable difference between the colonizer and the colonized, whether understood as the difference between the civilizer and the savage, the master and the subject, or the oppressor and the resistance fighter. The identities of all actors involved in the colonial/imperial encounter appear to be, in postcolonial analysis, notoriously fragile, unstable, contested, and negotiated, marred by doubts, repressions, sublimations, and fears of contamination. Despite the visible racial difference between the British and the African or Indian, the burden of empire was only seemingly light and easy for Britons: many of them – proletarians, women, the Irish, in particular – used to find themselves in the situation of being effectively “subalterns” no less often than in the situation of masters and citizens of the metropole nation-state. As for the elites, they never fully achieved monolithic agreement on the “how?” “what for?” and “is this worth it?” of imperial expansion. Simultaneously – postcolonial theorists argue – despite the regime of racial exclusion and the status of imperial subjects, local colonial elites and Europeanized middle classes exercised many of the civilizer and even colonizer functions with respect to “their own” populations. Thus, the answer to the question “whose empire?” appears to be rather more complicated than previously perceived.
On the empirical plane, these perspectives imply the shift of scholarly attention from privileging clearly bounded political bodies, national myths of origin, and the othering “gaze” from the imperial center to the preoccupation with peripheries, margins, and borderlands of all sorts, whether they are indeed located at the outskirts of empires or occupy the fringes and “cracks” in the body of imperial and national identities and institutions. In other words, postcolonial analysis deprovincializes all sorts of “meeting points” or “contact zones” – that is, the sites where the hybridity of the social world is thrown into open relief – and thus we have direct access to ways in which supposedly monolithic and primordial identities and dichotomies come into being.
What are some of the theoretical lessons that, for instance, a student of Russian empire can draw from these perspectives? First of all, the sharp distinction between colonial and contiguous empires as properly modern and not-quite-modern empires needs to be reconsidered. The new postcolonial image of “classical” empires implies that we should talk instead about the continuum of differences and commonalities. When plotted on this continuum, real-life empires may appear to be considerably closer to one another than the traditional ideal types suggest. Moreover, they can slide along the continuum over time.
Yet, this continuum can be read in at least two different ways. One way is to conclude that the Russian Empire was “more like” the French or British empires, as reconceptualizied by postcolonial theory. As recent research – including that published in Ab Imperio – demonstrates, this heuristic assumption opens the door for a whole range of previously unthinkable analogies, comparisons, and innovative ways of looking at Russia. For instance, Russia may be cast as a much more dynamic and modern empire than has previously been admitted, as constituted not only by old-fashioned dynastic discourses and policies but also by colonial-style racialized discourses, Orientalism, and modern politics – the production of the individualized subjects of empire.
However innovative in its specific implications and conclusions, this direction of inquiry nevertheless follows the established pattern of emulating the best in Western scholarship and applying it to our own field of study. Yet, the continuum mentioned above can also be read slightly differently: Western empires are “more like” Russia. This heuristic turn challenges not only us, the students of the second world, but also specialists of the “West” and “East” to revise our ways. Indeed, if postcolonial theorists have a point in arguing that nation-building is an imperial process, that the center and the periphery of the empire emerge in the course of “mutual constitution” and that “masters” and “subalterns” do not constitute two mutually exclusive categories of population, then the Russian empire and the Soviet Union should become their most obvious sources for comparative cases, models of analysis, and theoretical insights. In other words, while postcolonial theorists have (re)discovered the irreducible ambiguity of the colonial situation and the hybridity of identities produced in the course of empire-building, this ambiguity and hybridity has all along been an irreducible fact of Russian social and cultural history. Once both sides make these kinds of conclusions, a dialogue between postcolonial studies of Western empires and second world studies will become possible.
In this dialogue, the second world would no longer have to be consigned to the status of an unremarkable case under the general rule or an exception to the rule. The deprovincialization of hybridity in postcolonial analysis is a step toward the deprovincialization of the second world. Our object of study would itself become a legitimate source of the “rules,” that is, of theoretical propositions and models. At the same time, once postcolonial scholars realize that the second world is absolutely material for them as a source of comparative perspectives and theoretical propositions, they will have to seriously rethink their own conceptual identity and framework and perhaps change the name of their field to something like “post-imperial studies.” Or, rather, a new trend under this or another name would have to emerge.
Of course the reader is anxious to know what kinds of specific new theoretical insights this kind of decentering of second world studies may bring. Well, so far, I have tried to explore the theoretical possibility of such deprovincialization, that is, the conditions of the possibility that, once proposed, theoretical contributions based on studies of the second world would have a chance to be seen as legitimate contributions to the global conversation on matters of theory. This is as much as I have originally planned to do in this essay. After all, to predict an innovation is to make it. Yet, after some doubts and deliberations, I have decided to venture a proposition that may count as a kind of possible theoretical implication of my speculations. I ask the reader to bear with me for a few more pages.
One of the “oddities” of the second world that long puzzled but did not excite the Western theoretical imagination was something called “reverse-cultural colonization.”^[10] To put it in essentialist terms, this is when less European nations (Russians) or outright Orientals (Turks) establish their imperial sovereignty over more European nations (e.g., Greeks and Poles). To put it more analytically, this is a case when centers of political power and cultural prestige do not coincide or – in even more radical cases – they are located on the opposite poles of imperial interaction axes. In a word, political authority comes from St. Petersburg while cultural influence spreads from or via Warsaw.
Although a matter of much political and empirical-historical debate, this situation has left hardly any imprint on either traditional or contemporary theorizing about empire. It was treated as an unusual peculiarity of such “nonclassical” – and thus theoretically inconsequential – empires as Russia, as a sign/proof of these empires’ abnormal and illegitimate status in comparison with “civilized” and “modern” Western colonial empires. Indeed, the notion of reverse-cultural colonization puts a strain on the basics of the Eurocentric and Orientalist faith that global political, economic, and cultural authority and prestige can be located only in the West.^[11]
Yet, if we make an effort to place this second world’s “peculiarity” in the framework of the anti-essentialist critique and specifically the postcolonial idiom, we cannot fail to notice that the situation of reverse-cultural colonization is a revealing case of the kinds of ambiguities and tensions that the theorists of postcoloniality detect in their studies of the encounter between the (European) colonizer and the colonized.
For instance, let us briefly look at Ryszard Kapuściński’s Imperium.^[12] In this travelogue, the object of the classically Orientalist and thus imperial discourse is empire itself, the Soviet Union, while the author of this discourse is technically a subject of this empire, although he is also a uniquely well-traveled Polish journalist, a favorite of both “comprador” Polish authorities and dissidents. Of course, much here can be understood within the context of the history of Polish–Russian/Soviet relations, as well as in the context of the peculiar tensions between the state and cultural/intellectual elites in Soviet-style socialist societies. In a word, the conditions of Kapuściński’s narrative stance toward the Soviet Union obviously differ from the position in which a Western traveler, some contemporary Marquise de Custine, finds himself with respect to Russia. Yet, considered within the postcolonial framework outlined above, these differences can no longer be easily plotted along the binary distinction between the classical (“Western”) case of Orientalism and its “odd,” totally exceptional and “local” (second world) version. Rather, Kapuściński’s case now looks more like an example of the general ambiguity and hybridity of the imperial encounter, as pictured by postcolonial scholars. This may be a slightly extreme case: the Western colonial experience rarely presents us with cases of such radically reversed vectors of political domination and cultural authority. Yet, an extreme case, following Max Weber’s definition of ideal types, may also count for an ideal type, a model of certain aspects of any imperial situation.
The point, which the case of Kapuściński and similar cases illustrate and model, is that the coincidence of the sources and centers of political power and ideological hegemony is by no means a self-evident norm. Although to an extent exemplified by the British Empire and contemporary American “empire” – more at some points of their history than at others, – this coincidence is neither stable nor mandatory. Seen from the perspective of the long durée, it is a rare and temporary historical achievement. Even Romans found themselves culturally dependent on the “colonized” Greeks, while the imperial Chinese culture dominated Japanese culture for centuries without any trace of political or economic domination of China over Japan. Finally, the cultural prestige that French “high” culture enjoyed at various points in the twentieth century by no means corresponded to the high points of France’s political influence.
All this is not to claim any particular originality of my latest statements or to describe them as theoretical insights that I expect to follow from the dialogue-to-be between postcolonial studies and second world studies. Yet, I am convinced that, by defining the Russian–Polish imperial encounter as a model – obviously not the model – of the imperial encounter, rather than an exception or a pathology, we may achieve at least two goals: to challenge postcolonial theorists to clarify their conceptual tools and to make a strong point for the need of dialogue between cultural and social sciences.
Considering the first goal, the issue is as follows: I can see why many – but not all! – postcolonial scholars might take issue with my proposal to consider reverse-cultural colonialism a model for certain central aspects of the imperial situation. The de-provincialization of Kapuściński’s case does not sit easily with some central political, and even theoretical, trends within postcolonial studies. What seems to contradict my proposition is Foucault’s power/knowledge thesis, according to which “truth” and power mutually produce and sustain one another in a circular relation. In Edward Said’s interpretation, knowledge about and power over colonized lands are interrelated enterprises.^[13] That is, the authority to produce knowledge about others is indistinguishable from the material ability to dominate and exclude them. Although insightful and even valid as far as it goes, this model is open to interpretation, according to which power and knowledge are “possessed” by some imperial center and “imposed” on the colonized by this center. Here, the binary dichotomies of West vs. East are once more reproduced and essentialized.^[14]
Of course, this interpretation contradicts the one that follows from Foucault’s other well-known theory of power as a decentered, dispersed network of relations.^[15] According to this Foucauldian perspective, power cannot be localized in any place outside of the network (state, West, etc.); it is nobody’s property and cannot be “possessed.” Nobody “can direct the entire network of power,” although within the network certain actors/nodes may enjoy a more or less “central” (political and/or epistemic) position.^[16] This approach implies the conceptualization of power as a hybrid relationship, rather than a binary one between West and East, the colonizer and the colonized. Within this framework, it is quite conceivable that imperial imaginings can take place without any access to and even in defiance of imperial authority.^[17]
Unfortunately, as is the case with many philosophical perspectives, they are as illuminating as they are vague and confusing. Foucault is “rich” enough to provide legitimacy for both interpretations of his ideas, as the debate between Said and Bhabha in the 1980s indicated. This tension persists within postcolonial scholarship throughout the past three decades. Although the theoretical evolution seems to be in the direction of the second interpretation (the extended version of which I outlined earlier), the first one is still deeply embedded in the anticolonialist and leftist roots of the whole intellectual movement. The central role of the racial divide in the history of the colonial encounter between Europeans and non-Europeans adds experiential and empirical validity to the first interpretation of the power/knowledge thesis.
These considerations help in understanding why, despite pursuing the anti-essentialist and anti-Eurocentric critique into the realm of empire, postcolonial studies were traditionally quite blind to the realities of the second world. The considerably smaller significance of the visible racial difference and greater visibility of the confusion between imperial centers and peripheries in the second world made it look politically and, to some theorists, theoretically irrelevant. Yet, as argued earlier, in the postcolonial theory of the colonial encounter, the shift of the emphasis from domination and control to contact and hybridity opens the doors for the insights that the second world harbors. Apart from its significant consequences for second world studies, this dialogue promises a serious reconfiguration of the international field of studies on colonization, empire, and nationalism.
In particular, I expect that the dialogue with Russian imperial studies will strengthen the “revisionist” camp among the theorists of postcoloniality and help bring the postcolonial interpretation of Foucault’s social theory into accord with current advances in postcolonial and imperial studies. The emphasis on hybridity and the serious reception of the second world experience might also challenge the theorists of postcoloniality to reconsider the politics of their research, and to conclude that the studies of colonial and imperial experience should tear themselves from the affiliation not only with imperial perspectives (traditional anthropology and Oriental studies were arguably guilty of this affiliation) but also with the anticolonial/imperial movements. In other words, the dialogue with second world studies might, ironically, drive home one of Foucault’s key points: the goal of scholarship is not to propose the new “truth” instead of the dislodged one (e.g., liberationist truth instead of imperialist ideology) but to “ascertain the possibility of constituting a new politics of truth,” that is expected to elucidate, relativize, and thus contribute to changing the existing mechanisms of truth production.^[18]
One of the key conclusions I expect historians and literary scholars of empire to arrive at in the course of the reconfigurations discussed above is the need to renew the dialogue with social sciences. In particular, I see considerable potential in the turn to contemporary sociological theory and especially historical sociology. By contemporary historical sociology, I mean here a very specific intellectual idiom that, in its best incarnations, exemplifies a model of nonessentializing thinking within the discipline of sociology.^[19] While quite independent of the influence of poststructuralism and related trends, the historical sociology movement has done a great job of deconstructing essentialist assumptions within its native discipline.^[20]
Specifically, with respect to the case of reverse-cultural colonization, Michael Mann’s magisterial The Sources of Social Power provides a rather straightforward framework. He specifically refuses to treat “society” on the model of the idealized nation-state: as a totality that encompasses within its clear and distinct boundaries “its own” state, economy, and culture. He breaks down “society” into “multiple overlapping and intersecting networks of power.”^[21] Most important in the context of the above discussions, these networks – ideological, economic, military, and political – and corresponding institutions never coincide completely, and all instances of such partial coincidences (as exemplified by the nation-state or colonial empires) are historical achievements, the accomplishment and maintenance of which is by no means predetermined by either the “logic” of national development or the teleology of modernization. To my mind, this line of reasoning, which Mann pursues for the next two volumes and in his other important work, is indeed quite exciting. In particular, it provides a theoretical sociological foundation for my interpretation of reverse-cultural colonization as a general case rather than an exception: if the coincidence of political and ideological networks is a contingent historical achievement, one should hardly be surprised by the fact that the centers of one network are located elsewhere than in the centers of another. Furthermore, by pursuing in detail the idea that “[o]verlapping interaction networks are the historical norm,” Mann provides a sociological analogue and a generalized expression for the postcolonial proposition to consider ambiguity and hybridity as defining characteristics of the imperial encounter.^[22]
I do not want to suggest Mann, Tilly, or Collins as alternatives to Foucault and other humanities-based theorists. I do not claim that historical sociologists necessarily provide a “better” or “more scientific” theoretical framework. I do not dispute the virtues of preserving a certain autonomy between social sciences and the humanities, and correspondingly, inspired theorizing. Yet, the current situation in which sociological and humanistic perspectives on, very often, the very same social/historical phenomena relate to one another as two incommensurable “language games” is quite intolerable. What I belief my speculations about deprovincializing the second world bring into relief is both the need for and the potential of the dialogue between sociological theory and historical sociology, on the one hand, and cultural and postcolonial theory, on the other.
At the moment, a few comments on where this dialogue may proceed will suffice. First of all, contemporary historical sociology may serve to complement culture-oriented postcolonial studies with an expected focus on social, economic, and political institutions and practices, as well as with a sophisticated methodology of comparative analysis. As some voices from the camp of British imperial historians indicate, there is a considerable hunger for such social science input.^[23]
Furthermore, the concept of “network” seems to have great potential for converging efforts on both sides. For both Foucault and Mann, this is a central category. While Foucault proceeded from linguistics – networks of significations – into the realm of material, corporeal practices, Tilly in his recent research has moved into the realm of linguistics from the field of state theory and the sociology of social movements. In either case, the category of network suggests a nonessentialist image of society and culture: people do not inhabit hermetically sealed groups or share monolithic identities; their actual practices weave together different identities, crosscut various group boundaries, and create new but always irreducibly hybrid, or networked, affiliations – a process by no means always peaceful and “dialogical,” but often violent and oppressive. Thus, every binary or “essential” boundary between friends and foes, oppressors and subalterns, whites and blacks, Russians and Chechens is a hybrid construct and a network effect.
These are some of the basic tenets of, in Michael Mann’s words, a “confederal,” as opposed to unitary, image of social life, an image that seems to be shared by some of the most promising scholarship across the social science/humanities divide.^[24] The same image, I claim, is the one that used to be in part responsible for the marginality of second world studies within the framework of Eurocentric and essentialist social and cultural theorizing. Yet, in the contemporary intellectual situation, there is a well-grounded possibility that the same imagery will transport our field into the center of contemporary theorizing and debates, will make it an obvious source of analogies, comparative cases and – most important to me! – theoretical insights that are useful for understanding not only Russia and/or Poland but other regions as well, and, ultimately, human society and culture per se.
Of course, this outcome is not set in stone. I have already mentioned an enormous number of obstacles on its path. Without active efforts on our part to overcome these obstacles, nothing will happen. In particular, to have a chance to be taken seriously, we – the students of the second world – should triple our efforts to produce a solid body of work that not only illuminates the aspects of our region’s history and present day but also engages seriously – beyond the level of name-dropping – with the key ideas and idioms, exemplary texts and objects of analysis, social and political concerns of such intellectual trends and fields as postcolonial theory and contemporary historical sociology. Only then can we expect that our ideas and idioms, texts and concerns will be able to occupy the kind of place we know some of them deserve to occupy in the global marketplace of knowledge.
The two preceding paragraphs are, in fact, my formal conclusion. Yet, before I actually stop writing, I would like to briefly address one possible criticism that my reflections may meet: by claiming to deprovicialize the second world and by proposing to elevate it into a model of the imperial situation per se, I seem to suggest that there are no significant differences between, for instance, the British and Russian empires. This interpretation is, of course, mistaken. On the contrary, my proposal attempts to make explicit the conditions under which the comparison of these empires is possible – that is, to illuminate the assumptions shared by what may be considered successful research in this domain.
In my opinion, the key assumption here is and should be as follows: such categories as “Western” and “Eastern,” “European” and “Russian” should not be the starting and ending points of analysis. The differences between “Russian” and “European” history may be “obvious” but we cannot simply take for granted one of the popular and politicized interpretations of this “obvious” knowledge and let it determine our research, no matter how overly sophisticated and well-documented it is going to be. We should keep ourselves ready for surprises, on the level of both our personal attitudes and our methodological/theoretical stances. We should not assume that because something is called “Russian” it will always, under all circumstances and in all times, be different from what we call “British,” “German,” or “European.” All differences do not cluster around a single dividing line and especially not along national/imperial borders. The assumption of the Sonderweg of a nation or civilization is a sure recipe for blocking any meaningful comparison.
Even if, at some level of research, we have settled on labeling the difference between the British and the Russian empires as the difference between colonial and continental empires, or between liberal and authoritarian political systems, it does not mean that we will be able to sustain these dichotomies through all levels of analysis and empirical domains. This is in part because our categories and distinctions are not reflections of reality but ideal types – that is, tools, “ladders,” and “scaffolding” that guide us only so far (e.g., they work only on the macro level or for specifically defined purposes) and then have to be thrown out, as Wittgenstein advised. Yet, this is also because of such things as fractal distinctions and nested hierarchies, which, it appears, are characteristic not only of geometric figures but also social phenomena. According to the sociologist Andrew Abbott, the fractal is “a distinction [that] repeats a pattern within itself, as geometric fractals do.”^[25] That is, the opposition between liberal and authoritarian empires repeats itself within each term of this opposition so that any liberal empire contains in itself important practices and institutions that correspond to the ideal type of authoritarian empire (e.g., colonial state, internal colonization), and the other way around. Moreover, the same pattern may repeat itself even further down the “nested hierarchy” of categorical distinctions to make the totalizing/essentializing use of binary dichotomies even more impossible.
Of course, some of these suggestions are platitudes and can be found in the well-known literature as well as in textbooks.^[26] Yet, I am sure it is worth reiterating them, since the temptation to employ historiosophic and essentialist clichés is still very strong in contemporary human sciences, especially among the students of Russia and Eastern Europe (at least those who do not regularly read Ab Imperio). This is definitely one of the key hurdles for second world studies on their path out of marginality. Thus, I would like to finish this essay by issuing a call to my colleagues to publicly acknowledge this “temptation” as a problem and make it a topic of open debate between and among the representatives of different disciplinary and theoretical perspectives.