Mateusz Laszczkowski
Current Project


Mateusz Laszczkowski

Curriculum Vitae

Current Project

City of the Future:

The politics, pragmatics and aesthetics of the future in Astana, Kazakhstan

I was astounded watching images of the new buildings recently built, currently being built or soon to be built in Kazakhstan.s new capital, Astana, which used to be a dusty town in the middle of the steppe up to as recently as 1997. I realized that this futuristic, science-fiction-movie-like project corresponded to the future-orientation of the official Kazakhstani state-discourse, but I also sensed that it must be a peculiar experience to live in such a .Disneyesque. city (Baudrillard 1996). Hence, this PhD project explores the .social life. of multiple, politically non-indifferent visions of the future among diverse actors, and what bearing this has on the practices of living in Astana. It recognizes that future can be also .denied. to some actors and milieus, as it has been explicitly formulated in some recent ethnographies of urban Kazakhstan. Acknowledging that despite the enormous scale of recent construction work, Astana also includes quarters of Soviet-built apartment blocks slowly falling into decay and oblivion (Buchli 2007), it explores this .fractured geography. of the future within the city (cf. Mills, M. 2005). Importantly, it tackles the future not so much in abstract representations per se, but rather as embedded in actions taken up by multiple actors in relations that involve the state, different organizations, and crucially, individual persons with their dynamic networks. The future as the subject matter of this project is understood, on the one hand, as the expected conditions of agency which may be seen to leave more or less free space to different actors, and on the other, as an idea whose concrete applications affect people.s lived environment of the here-and-now.

What makes the future especially relevant as a project topic regarding today's Kazakhstan, and the former Soviet area more generally, is the fact that while a strong nostalgia for the 'Soviet era' is one of the phenomena most commonly described in the regional ethnographies, the Soviet order was very much about a political utopian teleology (see Stites 1991, Buck-Morss 2002). Moreover, the 'arch-label' for the on-goings in the 'post-socialist bloc' ever since perestroika has been 'transition' (Beyer 2006) and anthropology has known since Van Gennep (2001 [1909]) that any 'transition' is a 'future-oriented' process.

Speaking of 'politics of the future', I refer on the one hand to the ways the idea of the future is used to maintain, legitimize and indeed exercise power, primarily by the state and large business (the boundary being not always clear in Kazakhstan - Cummings 2005, Dave 2007). It is one of my hypotheses at the starting point of this project, that by incorporating the future prominently into its discourse and, crucially, by bringing its vision of the future into life in so imposing forms as it is the case in Astana, the regime claims monopoly on projecting the future, thus preemptively disempowering alternative creativities. On the other hand, those strategies can be challenged, subverted or accommodated by individuals who exercise their agency by relating to what is offered to or imposed upon them, as well as by imagining futures for themselves. This does not necessarily imply resistance, for one's agency can also be exercised by letting oneself be enchanted or simply taking the advantages of accommodation. With my emphasis rather on the 'bottom' end, the politics blends into the 'pragmatics of the future'. My use of 'pragmatics' derives from De Certeau's idiom (2002 [1984]), although I believe a Certeaunian approach needs to be complemented by acknowledging that practices do not necessarily oppose hegemonic discourses or strategies, but rather seek comfort and sense of agency (Yurchak 2006).

A third key-term along with politics and pragmatics must be aesthetics, for if Astana's architecture acts politically, then it does so by making powerful aesthetic impressions. Following Susan Buck-Morss (1992, 2002) I take 'aesthetics' as referring to sensual, bodily experience of the world which guides human action and judgment. Buck-Morss has analyzed how aesthetics in general and utopian aesthetics of Soviet socialism and Western capitalism in particular shaped political landscapes for actors to act in, while Svetlana Boym (1994) in an explicitly De Certeau-driven work on everyday life in Soviet and post-Soviet Russia showed that the processes of carving out heterogeneous, autonomous spaces through practice consist in a dynamics of taste - in aesthetics, perhaps in a more commonsensical usage this time. As noted by Victor Buchli, today in Astana anxiety over the cityscape's work of legitimating 'the forms of social life' is epitomized in a preoccupation with aesthetic impressions: 'Does it look right?' Buchli's informant asks (2007: 40). Essentially, thus, this project explores a nexus of politics, pragmatics and aesthetics of the future, embodied in a city.


References:

Baudrillard, Jean
1996 ‘Disneyworld Company’, Liberation, March 4, 1996, English translation available at http://www.egs.edu/faculty/baudrillard/baudrillard-disneyworld-company.html.

Beyer, Judith
2006 'Rhetoric of "Transformation": The Case of the Kyrgyz Constitutional Reform', in: Andrea Berg and Anna Kreikemeyer (eds.), Realities of Transformtion. Democratization Policies in Central Asia Revisited, Baden-Baden: Nomos, pp. 43-62.

Boym, Svetlana
1994 Common Places: Mythologies of Everyday Life in Russia, Cambridge MA: Harvard Univ. Press

Buchli, Victor
2007 'Astana: Materiality and the city', in: Catherine Alexander, Victor Buchli and Caroline Humphrey (eds.), Urban Life in Post-Soviet Asia, London: University College London Press, pp. 40-69.

Buck-Morss, Susan
1992 'Aesthetics and Anaesthetics: Walter Benjamin's Artwork Essay Reconsidered', October, Vol. 62. (Autumn, 1992), pp. 3-41.
2002 Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

Cummings, Sally N.
2005 Kazakhstan: Power and the Elite, London and New York: I. B. Tauris.

Dave, Bhavna
2007 Kazakhstan: Ethnicity, language and power, London and New York: Routledge.

De Certeau, Michel
2002 (1984) The Practice of Everyday Life: Berkeley: University of California Press.

Mills, Martin A.
2005 'Living in Time's Shadow: Pollution, Purification and Fractured Temporalities in Buddhist Ladakh', in: Wendy James and David Mills (eds.) The Qualities of Time: Anthropological Approaches, Oxford, New York: Berg, pp. 349-366.

Stites, Richard
1991 Revolutionary Dreams: Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the Russian Revolution, New York, Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press.

Van Gennep, Arnold
2001 (1909) The Rites of Passage, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Yurchak, Alexei
2006 Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation, Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press.