Suchergebnisse

Cover Totalitarian Communication -- CONTENTS -- Acknowledgments -- Prolegomena to the Study of Totalitarian Communication -- HIERACHIES -- Stalinist Rule and its Communication Practices. An Overview -- Public Communication in Totalitarian, Authoritarian and Statist Regimes A Comparative Glance -- Performance and Management of Political Leadership in Totalitarian and Democratic Societies. The Soviet Union, Germany and the United States in 1936 -- CODES -- The Duce in the Street. Illumination in Fascism -- Audio Media in the Service of the Totalitarian State? -- The Birth of Socialist Realism out of the Spirit of Radiophonia. Maxim Gorky's Project "Literaturnaja ucheba" -- MESSAGES -- Totalitarian Propaganda as Discourse. A Comparative Look at Austria and France in the Fascist Era -- Violence, Communication and Imagination. Pre-Modern, Totalitarian and Liberal-Democratic Torture -- The Lure of Fascism?. Extremist Ideology in the Newspaper Reality Before WWII -- POST-TOTALITARIAN COMMUNICATION? -- Uneasy Communication in the Authoritarian State. The Case of Hizb ut-Tahrir in Kyrgyzstan -- Afterthoughts on "Totalitarian" Communication -- Authors.

Totalitarianism has been an object of extensive communicative research since its heyday: already in the late 1930s, such major cultural figures as George Orwell or Hannah Arendt were busy describing the visual and verbal languages of Stalinism and Nazism. After the war, many fashionable trends in social sciences and humanities (ranging from Begriffsgeschichte and Ego-Documentology to Critical Linguistics and Critical Discourse Analysis) were called upon to continue this media-centered trend in the face of increasing political determination of the burgeoing field. Nevertheless, the integration of historical, sociological and linguistic knowledge about totalitarian society on a firm factual ground remains the thing of the future. This book is the first step in this direction. By using history and theory of communication as an integrative methodological device, it reaches out to those properties of totalitarian society which appear to be beyond the grasp of specific disciplines. Furthermore, this functional approach allows to extend the analysis of communicative practices commonly associated with fascist Italy, Nazi Germany and Soviet Union, to other locations (France, United States of America and Great Britain in the 1930s) or historical contexts (post-Soviet developments in Russia or Kyrgyzstan). This, in turn, leads to the revaluation of the very term "totalitarian": no longer an ideological label or a stock attribute of historical narration, it gets a life of its own, defining a specific constellation of hierarchies, codes and networks within a given society.

Abstract
Building upon the extended notion of conceptual history as a diachronic study of conceptual interactions, the article begins with deconstructing the paradoxical semantic core of incomparability statements that, it is claimed, endows them with a capacity of stabilizing social semantics. By declaring certain foundational values—positive (Shoah) or negative (God)—"incomparable" and thus immune to the challenges of cross-evaluation, the users of discourse uphold the boundaries of civilized society. On a smaller scale, this exclusion of competitive valuation is undergirded by the ascription of "incomparability" to the small pool of political and cultural figures, literary artifacts, social events, and representative allegories. The conclusion outlines the social contingency of conventions regulating the ascriptions of "incomparability" against the backdrop of their discursive stability across genres, epochs, and languages.

The aim of this article is to explore to what extent the rule of economics commonly known as Gresham's law ("bad money drives out good money") can be extrapolated to verbal language ("bad concepts drive out good concepts"). Consequently, the goal of this article is twofold. First, for Gresham's law to be applied simultaneously to money and language, its unfortunate ("good"/"bad") and obscure ("drives out") wording should be clarified. Second, one should identify the contexts in which the validity of the law could be assessed best, and run a very preliminary test. For this purpose, the circulation of the adjective ("hard", "strong", or "stable" in Russian) in the word combination ("hard currency") in use in the Soviet Union in the 1920s and 1930s was scrutinized.

Starting with Rene Descartes and Albrecht Dürer, Europeans obsessively contemplated, registered and expressed their being-in-the-worldandassigned those self-expressions a universal cognitive value. Such generalized personal accounts as Cartesiancogito ergo sumor John Locke's memory- based theory of personal identity formed the basis of sweeping statements about nations and epochs. For instance, the turn-of-the-century decadent deconstruction of subjectivity brought to life the myth of a smooth transition from the 19th century individuated ('I'-based) Self to the 20th century shared ('We'-based) Self. To correct this uninformative and factually inaccurate social description of personal identity, I suggest searching for social identities beyond the realm of self-reflection. In this light, a cursory survey of first-person statements found in books, journals and newspapers published in major European languages between the First and the Second World Wars, is subjected to various kinds of discursive analysis in the light of the chosen topic. As a result, a few politically and aesthetically privileged self-identifications of Europeans give way to a diverse social hierarchy, providing a possible strategy for linguistic description of social identity beyond the European terrain.

At the first glance, the comparison of Jews and Russians in the Russian economical mythology suggests that in the early period (11th through 16th centuries), religion set a framework for their antinomy, whereas later (17th through 19th centuries), the role of religion was gradually reduced to mere form, filled up with economical substance. However, the picture gets more complicated if we take into account that even at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, Russia was still governed (and for the most part populated) by superstitious people, largely uninterested in economy. Although the form of the Russian nationalism (including anti-Semitism) was progressively adjusted to the Western patterns of economical mythology, its substance retained that symbiotic totality of religious and economical imagination, which was compatible with both Russian monarchy and Soviet socialism.

Symbolic patterns and interactional dynamics in ruler personality cults : state of the art and open questions / Kirill Postoutenko and Darin Stephanov -- "Personality cults" : the career of the contested notion / Dmitri Zakharine -- The mechanisms of cult production : an overview / Xavier Marquez -- Making the cult of personality from bottom up : the case of seventeenth-century Mughal India / Ali Anooshahr -- A personality cult against one's will? Traits and trajectories of popular veneration of Emperor Alexander I (r. 1801-1825) / Darin Stepanov -- Of death and dominion : Queen Victoria and the cult of colonial loyalty / John Plunkett -- The magic mirror : supplicant letters and the role of false equivalences in shaping ruler dominance / Eva Giloi -- Father of the people, face of the nation : continuities and splits in premodern foundations of modern ruler personality cults / Alexey Tikhomirov -- The image of Josip Broz Tito in post-Yugoslavia : between national and local memory / Tamara Trošt -- Deification, canonization and random signaling : upholding and sustaining personality cults / Kirill Postoutenko -- 'We thank you, our beloved leader!' the origins and evolution of Nicolae Ceaușescu's cult of personality / Manuela Marin -- Embodied practices of leadership : the case of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan / Charlotte Joppien -- Symbolic patterns and interactional dynamics in ruler personality cults : responding to questions and formulating ideas for future research / Kirill Postoutenko and Darin Stephanov.

AbstractAcross the natural and social world, some fairly advanced and apparently robust systems destroy themselves without discernible reason, function, or purpose. Whereas such and similar cases have been discussed within specific branches of scholarships, the attempts to propose and test a general theory of self‐destruction in complex systems remain, to our knowledge, a thing of the future. To move in this direction, we suggest that the conflicts between explicit stratification, thorough functional differentiation and tacit segmentation within complex systems, are likely to provoke their unintended self‐annihilation. Furthermore, we hypothesize that whenever such systems collapse, it is the circular co‐dependency of noisy signaling, redundancy, and semantic inflation that sets self‐destructive mechanisms in motion. We illustrate our preliminary findings with examples from social, natural, and artificial life; reexamine autoimmunity as a popular model of systemic self‐destruction; and indicate potential avenues of empirical research aimed at supporting, qualifying or disproving the underlying hypothesis.

Intro -- Preface -- Contents -- Notes on Contributors -- Abbreviations -- List of Figures -- List of Tables -- Chapter 1: Soviet Communication and Soviet Society (1917-1953): Alignments and Tensions -- Overview -- Soviet Society in Communication: Political Conditions and Interactional Consequences -- Communication in Soviet Society: Adaptations, Changes and Repercussions -- References -- Part I: Channels -- Chapter 2: Visual Channels (1): Posters and Fine Art -- Posters -- Fine Art -- References -- Chapter 3: Visual Channels (2): Cityscapes -- Talking to the Uninitiated -- A More Planned Approach -- Conclusion -- References -- Chapter 4: Visual Channels (3): Cartography -- Introduction -- The Development of Soviet Cartography -- Mapping the Revolution: The Cartographic Communication of Spatial Ideology -- Cartographic Secrecy in Post-revolutionary Russia -- References -- Published Sources -- Archival Sources -- Chapter 5: Auditory Channels: Crowing Roosters and Wailing Sirens -- Human Vocal Organs, Musical Instruments, and Records -- Soundscapes: A General View -- Russia Between Rural and Industrial Soundscapes: A Comparative Glance -- Sound Design and the Recording Rituals: Constructing Soviet Soundscape -- Noise with a Soul: Soundscapes of Soviet Cinema -- Conclusion -- References -- Filmography -- Chapter 6: Tactile Channels: Brotherly Kisses, Handshakes, and Flogging in a Bathhouse -- Proximity as a Social Identifier -- Touch and Proxemics -- The Politics of Brotherly Kissing in Russia and the Soviet Union -- Rubbing the Back in a Bathhouse from Old to Stalinist Russia -- Conclusion -- References -- Part II: Media -- Chapter 7: Public Body (1): Popular Assemblies -- Popular Assembly as a Special Interactional Setting -- Birth of Popular Assembly from the Spirit of Revolution -- Modifications of Popular Assembly in Mature Stalinism.

This book provides a systematic account of media and communication development in Soviet society from the October Revolution to the death of Stalin. Summarizing earlier research and drawing upon previously unpublished archival materials, it covers the main aspects of public and private interaction in the Soviet Union, from public broadcast to kitchen gossip. The first part of the volume covers visual, auditory and tactile channels, such as posters, maps and monuments. The second deals with media, featuring public gatherings, personal letters, telegraph, telephone, film and radio. The concluding part surveys major boundaries and flows structuring the Soviet communicate environment. The broad scope of contributions to this volume will be of great interest to students and researchers working on the Soviet Union, and twentieth-century media and communication more broadly.

Michael Freeden, Ideology Studies: New Advances and Interpretations (London: Routledge, 2022) 208 pp.
Thomas Fröhlich and Axel Schneider, eds., Chinese Visions of Progress, 1895 to 1949 (Leiden: Brill, 2020), 323 pp.
Manfred Hettling and Wolfgang Schieder, eds., Reinhart Koselleck als Historiker: Zu den Bedingungen möglicher Geschichten [Reinhart Koselleck as a historian: On the conditions of possible histories] (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht Press, 2021), 461 pp.
Jesper Vestermark Køber, Niklas Olsen, and Heidi Vad Jønsson, eds., Citizen Categories in the Danish Welfare State: From the Founding Epoch to the Neoliberal Era (Odense: University Press of Southern Denmark, 2021), 208 pages.