Abstracts
Russia on Edge: Reclaiming the Periphery in Contemporary Russian Culture
Interdisciplinary Workshop, 11-12 December 2009 (CRASSH, University of Cambridge)
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University of Edinburgh
Playing with Meaning on the Periphery of Russian Counter-Discourse
The paper will examine the role of the ideological periphery in the discursive struggle over naming. The analysis of the discursive behaviour of the key ideological term of the Putin era, the noun вертикаль in the dominant and the counter-discourses will demonstrate the particular strategies that the periphery employs as it is vying for the naturalization and legitimization of meaning. Through the embodiment of the word, the competing discourses strive to establish their own schemas of ideological knowledge, or, using the term elaborated by Pierre Bourdieu, the doxa. The counter-discourse illustrated by the satirical text of the radio programme Plavlennyi Syrok written by Viktor Shenderovich, presents a paradigm of satirical semantic manipulations of the dominant meanings of the word вертикаль. By playing with and distorting the meaning attributed to the word by the centre, the author achieves the destabilization and delegitimization of the ideologically grounded norm and the dominant transparent currency. As a result, the periphery creates the hybrid meaning of вертикаль where the central meaning still exists but is dislocated to the periphery as an aberrant other.