The “Collective Irresponsible”: On Attempts at Building a “Society” in a St. Petersburg Commune

Abstract

The article presents research of one of about two dozen (known to the author) St. Petersburg communes based on living together in large apartments. The commune is considered by the concepts of scale by Marilyn Strathern and the concept of nonscalability by Anna Tsing. Scaling refers to the homogenization of practices and actors by integrating them into a broader system of practices. Most communards avoid scaling practices, representing themselves not as a commune as a whole, but as individuals, abandoning the system of those on charge of in favor of an individual choice of one occupation or another and creating the interior decor of the commune as fundamentally stylistically heterogeneous. At the same time, communards who strive to scale establish common rules and “unifying” rituals. Their attempts are ignored or ironically deconstructed, but no objections are raised against them, so they become only the practices of individual communards. In the described commune, the reverse scaling process takes place – the de-scaling of scaling practices. Scaling practices not only fail, but, if they persist, they themselves become nonscalable. Some informants describe this situation with the emic term “collective irresponsible”.