Abstract

This dissertation is an investigation of the intercultural transferability of the style of inquiry practiced by Michel Foucault. Stated most crudely, it attempts to apply Foucault's methodology to the study of Russia and compare the resulting findings with those that Foucault obtained in the French case. Following an interpretation first supplied by Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, Foucault is treated as a student of background practices that constitute conditions of possibility for objective and subjective knowledge in a given culture. ;The dissertation studies the most obvious and mundane phenomena of Russian culture, that of the individual and the collective and identifies the background practices that constituted the conditions of possibility of thinking about, constructing and transforming these phenomena. Practices of denunciation and admonition are examined in particular detail, since they provided a shared pragmatic background for the Orthodox Church and the Communist Party, and thus were of key importance to both pre- and post-revolutionary Russian culture. Following Dreyfus and Rabinow, background practices are then classified as being of a subjectifying or objectifying kind. ;Two broad comparative hypotheses are formulated and explored. The first hypothesis states that discipline in Russia primarily relied on practices of mutual horizontal surveillance among equals, rather than on the hierarchical surveillance of subordinates by superiors which characterized the West. Consequently, objectification of the human individual adopted a form different from that in the West. The second hypothesis holds that Russian subjectifying practices were formed out of practices of self-knowledge characteristic of Eastern Christianity; that is, on penitential rather than on confessional practices, which constitute the background for self-knowledge in Western Christianity. To state the second hypothesis differently, if the Western individual was produced by submitting him- or herself to confessing matters of sex or to some parallel version of the hermeneutic analysis of desire, by contrast the Soviet individual was produced by submitting his or her deeds to review by the relevant community during the purge, a specific procedure rooted in the practices of undergoing penance in the public gaze