How Does Politics Take Closeness into Account? Returns from Russia

Abstract

When taking part in a community and communicating disagreement or difference, one has to rely on common forms to be understood by others. And being understood by others is essential to composing the good of the community—the central task of politics. Given this, we should pay close attention to how intimate experiences and personal concerns are transformed into an accepted common format that makes sense to others during disputes. Rules govern these practices of communicating issues in a common format, disputing them and compromising to compose the good of the community. These rules are grouped together in different “grammars of commonality and difference,” which structure different ways of maintaining a composite and conflicting community: which kinds of disagreement are integrated, which kinds of difference are legitimate, even at the cost of sacrificing others? Identifying these grammars is all the more difficult because the categories of the social and political sciences themselves depend on these grammars. This results in bias when these categories are used in comparisons or even descriptions. Therefore, a detour abroad might be profitable not only to compare but also to correct biases of the research tools we use. The collaborative French-Russian program that I named “From close ties to public places” enabled the comparative study of learning politics in practice. The political and moral ethnography I conducted for this research focused on communal residences (in Russia, the USA, France, Brazil) where students live together and learn politics in practice from the most basic level of dwelling in a common habitat, having to transform personal familiarity into commonality and difference. The article also benefitted from studies by other researchers working in the same program as well as subsequent research using the same framework, which influenced both the so-called French “pragmatic sociology” and socioeconomic “convention theory.” The analytical framework I used evolved throughout this fieldwork as I identified commonality grounded on personal affinities to common places. In the context of “apolitics” and the rise of authoritarian populist politics which, in the East as in the West, tap into personal attachments, this article takes advantage of the detour via Russia to examine how close attachments are taken into account in various constructions of commonality and difference. It clarifies the tensions and possible combinations between them, as well as the democratic requirement of a public sphere.