Abstract
Framing “immobility” as already containing mobility, this research asks why people stay in conditions of economic disadvantages and social abandonment even when they have tangible opportunities to leave. Based on ethnography conducted in Eastern Siberia, this research investigates how people throughout the region maintain connections to one place: the village of Anosovo. I argue that the notion of “affective infrastructure” can encapsulate a multiplicity of ties connecting people to places. Affective infrastructure refers to the capacity of “hard” infrastructural agglomerations—such as pipes, wires, and buildings—to evoke feeling, and to the “social” infrastructure such as kinship ties, memories, attachments, and human–nonhuman relationships. Seeing people as always already included in the agglomerations of affective infrastructures opens the space to see them pinned down to the place even as their neighbors leave while the hopes for improvements of conditions are bleak.
As Valentina rearranged mason jars with pickled cucumbers, she asked, “When are we moving?” “I don’t know when you, guys, are moving,” Konstantin replied. He was referring to Valentina and their two kids. “Why do I raise puppies? For whom do I breed the bee, horses?” “The bee-horses (pchelokoni)?” She responded. “I do not know why you breed your bee-horses.” The tree in the window in fall foliage did not obscure the steel glint of the Angara River.
They spent their time together in playful bickering. For some, it would be too much—for them, it worked. Both in their thirties, the Smirnovs family—Konstantin, a hunter and a lumberjack, and Valentina, a teacher of English in the Anosovo school—has been building a house near Irkutsk since the 1990s. Almost daily, the Smirnovs rehearsed the familiar argument: Valentina insisted that the family moved as soon as possible, and Konstantin refused. She suspected he delayed the completion of their Irkutsk house on purpose.
The Smirnovs’ housing alternative gave an option for them to move while making it possible to stay where they were, in the village of Anosovo—a location powered by diesel generators and with a once-paved road that deteriorated into a zimnik (winter road).
Why do people choose to stay in conditions far less comfortable than locations they have access to? Broader, what forces keep people attached to, grounded in, or emplaced in the sites of economic abandonment or sometimes even technological disasters, after catastrophes, during the war, or, as in the case of Anosovo, a place of infrastructural and economic decline? What ways of belonging connect to a shrinking place?
“[P]lace and self are thoroughly enmeshed,” and the nature of this enmeshment is messy, “as highly ramified as it is intimate” (Casey 2001, 684). “Affective infrastructures” are called to tease out such enmeshments. Affect is an embodied, underlying state on the surface of which feelings, sensations, and emotions occur. Affect is an “intensity” beyond feeling (Massumi 1995, 99, 2002, 27). An example of affect can be “cruel optimism”—a longing for an object evading possession but difficult to lose (Berlant 2011). Because such longing is no doubt complex, at any given moment, it could “feel like anything, including nothing: dread, anxiety, hunger, curiosity” (Berlant 2011, 2). Thus “feelings” (of “anything”) are clouding on the surface of affect. Berlant describes a particular affect of “cruel optimism,” but it can be a different affect still evident and “knowable” in the feelings on the surface of it. The relationships of Anosovians with Anosovo are “cruelly optimistic”: even though realistic hope for the improvement of conditions is not forthcoming, people continue to build attachments to the place. I am looking at the stories that seem to display potentially nameable feelings; I am doing it in hopes to portray the affect of the place that generates attachment.
I wish to make the argument concerning mobility similar to what Thrift made of urban space and Stoler of colonial practices. Stoler argued that “the ‘political rationalities’ of Dutch colonial authority. . .were grounded in the management of. . .affective states, in assessing appropriate sentiments and in fashioning techniques of affective control” (Stoler 2004, 5). Thrift argued that “the neglect of affect in the current urban literature, even in the case of issues like identity and belonging which quiver with affective energy” is explained in part by the Cartesian assumption that “affect is a kind of frivolous or distracting background to the real work of deciding our way through the city” (Thrift 2007, 172). Both Thrift and Stoler argued that the affective register is not peripheral but instrumental and at the heart of the matter in the colonial practices or the construction of the urban space. I argue that the affective register is central to and constitutive of (im)mobility. The answer to the question “Why do people stay?” that I offer is, because they are included in the affective infrastructures of the place.
“Infrastructure” is read voraciously here, as a “movement or patterning of social form” “made from within relation,” and even as a “kind of form of life” (Berlant 2016, 393–94). Infrastructure is “a platform providing for and reproducing life in the city” (Simone 2004, 408)—and, I add, the rural space. “Infrastructures are matter that enable the movement of other matter” (Larkin 2013, 327), “enduring systems that. . .enable the movement of people, ideas and information from place to place” (Urry 2007, 12, original emphasis). This article is written to point out that infrastructures not only enable movement but shape it by precluding some forms of movement, too; infrastructures and lack thereof enables immobility. Given this host of definitions of infrastructure, I would define affective infrastructures as a matter that facilitates the circulation of feelings. Affective are the infrastructures that beget feelings. For instance, Anosovian infrastructures, in their very inefficiency, work powerfully when it comes to the generation of affect.
The post-Soviet spaces continue to represent the fruitful ground for studying how infrastructures can be affective and how feelings can take infrastructural, systemic forms. It is because the Socialist infrastructure was built specifically to evoke deep feelings of belonging and participation in the messianic project of the construction of Communism. Other feelings (on the surface of affect) include affinity to the Soviet internationalism and a patriotic attachment to a particular place of one’s birth, “small motherland” (malaia rodina). The Soviet infrastructure was constructed to be a space for the Soviet subjectivities. It was an explicit goal formulated by the Soviet architects (I expand on this below), and anthropologists analyzed it as such (Collier 2011; Humphrey 2005). Linguistic ideologies reaffirming belonging to a place manifest in many Russian sayings. For example, “where you were born there is your use” (gde rodilsia tam i prigodilsia). Or popular Soviet songs, such as “Where does the motherland begin? [It begins] from a picture in your ABC book” (“S chego nachinaetsia rodina? S kartinki v tvoem bukvare”). 1
Anosovo is the main site of my research for two reasons: first, because of its typicalness for the region of Priangarie, Eastern Siberia: removed from Bratsk and Irkutsk in almost equal measure, it is the biggest village on the right shore of the Angara River. Additionally, or perhaps even more importantly, I have a family connection to the place: my grandmother lived there, and my grandfather died young there. So, for me, the exploration of the connection to the place in general and this place, in particular, is personal and, truly, affective.
Throughout this article, I unpack the notion of “affective infrastructure” as related to one particular post-Socialist Siberian postindustrial rural place with the aim to show, on ethnographic examples, how “affective infrastructure” plays a role in the decision-making that results in an “(im)mobility,” or staying.
Structure, Stakes, Methods
First, I speak to the importance of asking the question why people stay in places of economic disadvantages even when they have the opportunity to leave and their neighbors have left. Then, I look at how the term “affective infrastructures” has been used so far in the literature. Then, I talk about the methods. Then, I outline why the case of the Soviet infrastructures is so important and how it can illuminate other cases. I divide the ethnographic examples into two sections: “Immobility Outcomes” and “Mobility Outcomes.”
The first section shows that “immobility” can be a moment nested in the process of mobility. Affective infrastructures in this case can include the engagement with the “hard” infrastructures of the place, such as the electricity system and connections of kinship-like structures. The second section contains the ethnographic encounters with the cases of mobilities mediated by affective infrastructures of connections and memory. It shows that mobility also contains a grain of immobility. I have created the composite characters from the ethnographic encounters in order to present the responses to the place that appeared to be typical: an older man returning to a place of his birth, a woman who escaped the village and is happy about it, a young man who left but had to return because he could not find his place in the city, a woman who did not want to leave but eventually was pushed out of the village by her family’s search of a better life, and so on. The post-factum rationalizations are a process where the understandings of self and place as co-constructed adjusts over time to suit the needs of making sense out of the world. Feelings can be volatile, and in the next moment, a person may feel differently about the constants and variables of their life. I illustrate that mobility decisions are not easy to make (and make sense of) since people are situated in the ties of affective infrastructures while actively constructing, maintaining, or foregoing such ties.
Many of my interlocutors were exceedingly suspicious of the presence of the recorder and uneasy when I asked them direct questions. To get the kind of stories that I got, I simply stuck around long enough inviting people to tea or waiting for an invitation from them. They were aware that I collect the information for my work. They were reluctant to embrace the mode of the “interview,” but once the conditions were favorable for the monologue, all I had to do was ask short questions, nod, listen, and maintain eye contact. The best “data” appeared when the modus of the interview switched to the modus of conversation. I deciphered the conversations from my handwritten notes I often took in the process of conversation. The “meandering” nature of these conversations led to the emergence of patterns over time: I noticed that people tend to discuss the prospect of leaving or returning to Anosovo as this topic resurfaced “by itself.” Evidently, the issue of “going” or “staying” occupied minds, and therefore my interest to this issue dictated by “the field.”
Each section here contains stories and their analysis in relation to affective infrastructures of (im)mobility. The infrastructures embedded in place are “location-specific” (Fischer and Malmberg 2001, 360) and continue to make themselves felt even through distances of space and time. Some of these connections are between people and the emplaced features of landscapes and technology. Other connections are between humans and animals (Konstantin’s “beehorses” was the first example). For each ethnographic encounter, I show the ties of “affective infrastructures,” from kinship connections to vivid memories of embodied inhabiting of the “place-world. . .actively lived and receptively experienced” (Casey 2001, 689, original emphases).
A Choice to Stay
The conceptualizations of “immobility” as a lack of movement have historically been rampant and cast in “racialized, anachronistic terms of underdevelopment, deficiency, deprivation. . .and the incapacity to move. . .toward civilizational progress” (Khan 2015, 94). The world, we are told, is on the move (Urry 2007). However, “immobility,” or staying, seems to be on the rise, too: it seems reasonable to surmise, due to the population growth, that more people than ever before in history are living and dying in the same place. Not only that; the penchant for movement in some counties seems to go down. Thus, Americans move at the slowest rate on record. 2 Americans seem to live near their parents and die within miles from birthplace (Bui and Miller 2015). Coincidentally, high mobility rates do not mean that moving happens for good reasons. 3 Moreover, “ethnographic vitalism” empathizes an “affirmation of life, potentiality, becoming” (Coleman 2016, 986), and thus sees living in one place as a journey, an exercise of “mobility” between potentialities of “staying” and “going.” Confinement does not associate with free becoming, and yet it can be (Coleman 2016, 700), immobility, likewise.
“Mobility” is often thought of in terms of “drivers,” “desire,” and “aspiration” (Carling and Collins 2018; Collins 2018). Conversely, “immobility” is bound to be imagined in opposite terms, as a lack of drivers, aspirations, and desires. 4 I suggest looking at “immobility” in disadvantaged places as defined by affect: hopes, the sense of belonging, attachments, nostalgia for the feeling of belonging that was once there, for the sublime and the scenarios of the future that the infrastructural development promised. In this sense, staying is agentive. “An active process rather than a by-product of lack of mobility” (Preece 2018, 1784), immobility “can be a desired choice” (Coulter, van Ham, and Findlay 2016, 353). Like labor, migration is simultaneously exploitative and viewed by migrants as their “choice” (Shah 2010, 141), immobility, or staying in a faltering place, could be involuntary, and yet, a decision.
“Immobility” is situated, situational, depends on positionality, and can hardly be defined in absolute terms. A pregnant woman returning to the evacuated zone after the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster felt that “life was too risky elsewhere.” (Allison 2013, 12). Examples of such “paradoxical”—for an outsider—immobility can be multiplied. They include old women refusing to leave the Chernobyl’s “dead zone” (Morris 2012). If tomorrow a planetary catastrophe erupted on Earth, and all of humanity had the means to travel to a new, safe planet, one can be sure that there will still be people refusing to move away. I hypothesize that they will refuse to move because they happen to be particularly sensitive to the affective infrastructures of their home planet.
When Infrastructures Become Affective
The term “affective infrastructures” points at the embeddedness of movement in the materialities—properties and qualities—of infrastructure entangled with affect. The term “affective infrastructure” refers here to (a) the capacity of material, people-made structures to “store” (Larkin 2013, 327) or evoke affect and (b) the connections between humans and agglomerations of objects, other humans, landscapes, and animals in building kinship-like connections and ties. Such “infrastructures of belonging” (Berlant 2011, 27) define movement or absence thereof.
Berlant is a prominent writer of the affective infrastructure in the second sense. Of affective infrastructures in the first sense wrote Alice Street (2012) and Penny Harvey (2018) and Hannah Knox (2017), as well as Harvey and Knox working in coauthorship (2012, 2015). Street analyzes how a new hospital in Papua New Guinea that had to express modernity continued reproducing colonial structures of racial inequality. I suggest that the notion of “a landscape scarred with the physical remnants of successive interventions” (Street 2012, 45), landscape populated with affective infrastructure, can be extended to the landscape of the village and consider an agglomeration of infrastructures. Harvey and Knox described what sort of affect—including such manifestations as hope, despair, annoyance, sense of being isolated and abandoned, as well as disenchantment—is connected to the project of construction of a road in Peru. I describe the feelings that arise in connection to the faltering place the infrastructures of which, I argue, are affective—prompt attachments on the bodily level.
Sara Ahmed argued that emotions shaped by the object in turn shape the object (Ahmed, 2013). I would like to expand her argument to include the place. The understanding that the bear is fearsome predates the fear of a bear that a girl experiences: “The child must ‘already know’ the bear is fearsome. This decision is not necessarily made by her” (Ahmed 2013, 7). Thus, we become the heirs of feelings that are not ours, and patriotic feelings among them. We already know that our “small motherhood” (malaia rodina) evokes patriotic feelings. However, how well we infuse the ready forms of such feelings with our own content shapes the concrete place and the attachment to it. One of my interlocutors, Rodion (a composite character), was able to fill this “empty form of patriotism” with his own emotions which ultimately led to his attachment to the place of his birth while others were leaving it. In this article, I attempt to investigate what Ahmed called “the cultural politics of emotion” and what I call affective infrastructure: the bear is scary, some things are disgusting (Ahmed 2013, 82–100), and the homeland is dear both in a predetermined, pre-individual way, and in a way that we individually infuse the object—and place—with the affective meanings.
Journeys of Staying
From 2016 to 2019, I conducted four separate periods of fieldwork ranging from three to seven months, in Anosovo and other places throughout the region, including the town of Ust Baley and the city of Irkutsk (Figure 1). I collected “narratives of (im)mobility,” which proved to be a subject both elusive and resurfacing in Anosovo: elusive because if people leave, they are not there to weave their narratives. Conversely, if people stay, the attempt to get at the “narrative of immobility” can amount to the creation of such a narrative with your questions. The data collected here is obtained with the use of participant observations. Narratives of primary importance belonged to those who had an experience of living away from Anosovo and returned for good or temporarily and to those who reflected on their staying. When people discussed the pros and cons of staying in Anosovo, I asked follow-up questions.
Author’s Research Region in Eastern Siberia.
During the heyday of Anosovo, 1970, the village population was two thousand, however, the 2020s saw it having dropped to five hundred people. Before the settlements were flooded by the Bratsk dam, the villages at the Angara River had a chunk of their population from the Baltic countries deported by Stalin. Villagers recall their tall crosses at the cemetery, different from the tombs with red stars common for the Russians. With the lift of the iron curtain, the deported returned to their home countries; no one remained, despite years of living in Siberia. Now the population of Anosovo is comprised out of the majority of Russians and a visible minority of Buryats. In the European part of Russia, those Russians will be recognized as sharing a regional identity of “the Siberian,” due to the marked speech and, some would say, to appearance, although others would argue—and I among them—that the speculations of why the appearance is “Siberian” come a posteriori, after the “Siberianness” is already established from speech and the life-stories.
The Cities of the Gone Future
Like many ambitious, messianic, imperial projects crossing borders of nation-states, the Soviet futurity meant to fuse industry, architecture, infrastructure, technology, everyday objects, and ideology into one comprehensive whole, where structures became moving iconographies of the ideas and ideals. In the post-Soviet contexts, ideology and its infrastructural, architectural, and other material elements, were closely intertwined (Humphrey 2005).
The entanglement of ideology and built structures is not limited to the Soviet state. The colonial sublime produces subjectivities (Larkin 2008), and practices of governmentality are generative of affective states (Stoler 2004). However, the Soviet project, being an extraplanetary project of messianic value (Platonov 2015, 34), 5 presents a particular case in the entangled existence of ideologies and infrastructures. One of the Soviet aspirations was to bend the material world to the will of the human and bring “the most primitive cosmic combination of elements to artistic creativity” (Bogdanov 2015, 22). While the Socialist power hammered the stubborn matter and reconfigured the planet, other planets, in the Soviet imaginaries, already all but aligned awaiting Communist conquest (Tsiolkovsky 1981).
Changes in infrastructures were conceived and brought to life to revolutionize everyday living in material settings—byt (everydayness)—as well as to bring to life the new Soviet man, the main enactor of Socialist construction (Lunacharsky 1928). “Byt,” however, is not merely a rendition of everydayness, to which supposedly “no word. . .corresponds” in Western European languages (Jakobson 1987, 277), but a stubborn variable that opposed the “creative urge toward a transformed future” (Jakobson 1987, 277). In other words, byt is that groundedness of the everydayness in the surrounding materialities and matter that precludes the idea from materialization. This is why byt had to be revolutionized, made as efficient as possible, and subject to conveyor-like optimization. The value-laden and identity-producing infrastructures, from the Bratsk Hydroelectric Station flooding the old Anosovo to the roads, were to overpower the unruly forces of nature.
In Siberia and the North, for native peoples in particular, “in the framework of the Soviet ideology, infrastructure had been represented as a particular ‘gift,’ as an accomplishment of a political regime” (Davydov 2018, 25, see also Ssorin-Chaikov 2003). The native people(s) responded by creative reappropriation of such infrastructures and incorporating their elements into their ways of ordering the world, for instance, by creating mobilities in-between static and dynamic forms, where absences and presences trace the periodic movement puncturing the space (Davydov 2017, 2018). The Russian colonization of Siberia before, during, and after the Soviet Union, spawned various contexts where modernity, technology, and infrastructures contrasted “the traditional” or “nature.” Infrastructural development was to redeem the “backwardness” (Schweitzer, Povoroznyuk, and Schiesser 2017).
Anosovo emerged as a result of such efforts of industrialization, after the government-led consolidation (enlargement, ukrupnenie) of settlements after the flood of the Bratsk dam in 1961. The present Anosovo came to life alongside the “cities of the future” like Bratsk. 6 Anosovo had all the crucial enterprises of Socialist modernity: ORS (Otdel Rabochego Snabzhenia, “division of workers’ provision”), lespromkhoz (Socialist timber enterprise), bakery, hospital, and even an airport where small planes Polikarpov Po-2, dubbed kukuruznik (biplane), landed. However, the exodus, launched by the news that the Bratsk dam was going to flood the valley, continued.
In the late Soviet–early post-Soviet time, Anosovo experienced a population drain. An industrial settlement that once was on the verge of turning into a “settlement of the urban type” (posyolok gorodskogo tipa), or a small town, Anosovo became a village with traces of industrial grandeur, such as gigantic empty cisterns or blocks of buildings that belonged to the Socialist timber enterprise Yegorovsky. The enterprise was “city-forming” (“gradoobrazuiushchee”): it provided jobs.
With the collapse of “city-forming” enterprises all over the USSR, dwellers of monotowns and “monosettlements” became increasingly precarious subjects. As they complained, yesterday’s “cities of the future” turned into “the cities of the past.” However, the future, as it was imagined in the past, haunted the present.
When you arrive at the village of Anosovo from the Angara River, you see one-story houses, rusty remainders of ships, and boat shelters along the shore. Anosovo is not compact but spread along the shore, decidedly “a place,” “in contrast to space” (Casey 2001, 638); it unfolds as a populated landscape against the taiga that stretches until the horizon, with no other settlement in sight on either shore of the river. The taiga has marks of people’s presence: bare and tree-leaf patches where firms unlawfully cut pine trees.
“Hard” infrastructure, like electricity, is affective, in its peculiarity, in Anosovo. If places are “made” or “produced” through social practices engaging with the material, architectural, and infrastructural engagements (Duff 2010), in Anosovo, “place-making” includes dealing with intermittent electricity. Despite that the Bratsk dam once was the world’s most powerful electricity provider, Anosovo is powered by diesel generators. Normally, villagers expect the breakdown in the severest temperatures of January and February; by that point, the system is overloaded consistently throughout the winter. During my fieldwork of 2018, the diesel generator broke unexpectedly early—in October. As the electricity was out, I observed a series of momentarily upset expectations, even though intermittent electricity was familiar to the villagers. As the Russian saying goes, you quickly get accustomed to the good things. Whenever people switched on the light and the lamp would not brighten, a moment of confusion ensued before the recollection set into place. “Did it break? Ah, right. The electricity is out.” A sense of interruption sparkled when the consistency and predictability loosened grip over things. An ambivalent, carnivalesque, uncertain, and paradoxically festive world emerged there. “Seriousness and laughter, coexist[ed] and reflect[ed] each other” (Bakhtin 1984, 122). Laughter sparked as an infrastructural hiccup interrupted a process heretofore smooth. The underlying anxiety and annoyance at the malfunctioning infrastructures did not exclude the possibility of amusement; the infrastructure was affective daily.
Immobility Outcomes
The ties with place can form not only despite inconveniences but also because of them, mimicking a sort of “abusive relationship” of “cruel optimism” familiar from Berlant (2011). “Place attachment to ‘home’ is particularly painful during times of post-industrial transition” since the attachment is drenched in the indeterminacies, “contradictions and uncertainties” (Mah 2009, 287–88). The experience of dealing with intermittent electricity is one of the experiences that make Anosovo a “thickly-lived place” as opposed to “attenuated places” (Casey 2001, 686). Once privy to Anosovo, people can’t have quite the same experiences anywhere else, for better or for worse. You would imagine people won’t miss the intermittent electricity, and yet, the quirks of infrastructural circuits specific to the place can, too, evoke a nostalgic longing.
Rodion Romanov (63 years old) returned to Anosovo in the 2000s, after years of living in the cities. The packed or encapsulated “mobility” in the “immobility outcome” of finding himself in Anosovo, in Rodion’s case, involved moving away and back. Rodion left the village as a high-school graduate, but something tugged him back to Anosovo; it is inexplicable, he said. When he was returning, he knew that enterprises were crumbling in Anosovo, but it did not stop him.
When Rodion was little, Anosovo was a new, freshly fledged settlement, rebuilt on a new place after the Bratsk dam flood. Rodion’s mom liked to visit the village club, leaving Rodion to the care of his two uncles. When his caregivers could not deal with a toddler anymore, they took an iron and plugged it in the socket. The iron sent flashes of the short circuit along the village, letting it know to Rodion’s mom in the club that her presence was solely needed. This way of communication was an instance of repurposing of infrastructure (of lighting) in the quality of the creative alternative usage (as infrastructure of signaling), which is characteristic to the places that lack infrastructures (as described by Simone 2004). But such memorable use of infrastructure also proved affective for Rodion, constituting one of his cherished core memories.
This infrastructural engagement, idiosyncratic and difficult to assess in terms of such processes as the identity formation and the development of the sense of belonging, constituted Rodion’s constitutive memory. In Rodion’s perception, Anosovo was a center of such memories. Over time, Anosovo grew in significance for him, while other commitments, including marriage and job, paled in comparison.
“Emotions accumulate over time, as a form of affective value,” said Sara Ahmed (2013, 11). One day in Ust Ilimsk, Rodion told his wife that he was staying in the town only for one more year: “If Anosovo still beckons me, I’ll leave.” A year after the conversation, he and his wife parted amicably as he departed for Anosovo.
Limits of mobility are the ways in which people assert their own freedoms or identity (Coleman 2016, 702); Rodion moving to his homeplace was something springing from and constitutive of who he was. Recalling Anosovo of the 1960s, Rodion flared up. A man who spoke in heavy, measured words, he stood at the center of his kitchen and paced back and forth. His body—legs, arms—jumped into a performance, a dance: he showed, rather than told, a series of scenes from the past. He demonstrated how cylinders of the engine at Karl Marx steamboat moved while the worker shoveled coal in the stove. He performed how out of the teapot that hung above him, the worker poured water on his half-naked, heated, muscular body in the streams of sweat. He exhibited, with the use of his body, how the worker fed the stove with coal and puffed showing the steamboat going down the Angara River.
Rodion’s connection to place was at once particular and yet characteristic of other such connections. He presented vistas of private recollections that partook in the collective memory. Other Anosovians recalled steamboats—and other elements of the bygone—in visceral detail. They spoke of the taste of the sparkling lemonade aboard and shared experiences that marked belonging to a generation and added to the sensorium of the USSR world. Younger interlocutors did not have an intimate knowledge of such things. In the Dutch colonies in the Indies, “sound, smells, tastes, and touch” were weaponized to develop in children of certain origins the “proper ‘feelings’ and ‘attachments’ to things Dutch and. . .‘disaffection’ for that which was native” (Stoler 2004, 9). 7 In the Siberian, predominantly Russian and Russianized, settlement, experiences of tastes connected with the technological development and material changes were marking the belonging and connection to the Soviet project. Sharing in these tastes was a sign of a generation and the state project, whereas those who did not have such experiences were the post-Soviet breed, even though the “post-Sovietness” did not necessarily mean the differences in worldview.
The type of connection that Rodion had with Anosovo was the embodied experiences rather than “memories.” Anosovo’s configurations of electricity, transportation (steamboats), and an old house that he described were inseparable from the place. The memories both expressed and contributed to the sense of belonging. Through the performance that he enacted in his kitchen, Rodion portrayed his affinity to Anosovo. He demonstrated how he was affectively connected to the place and its inseparable features. The infrastructure in his case became affective in a direct way. He also spoke of his sadness and melancholy at the sight of post-Soviet “ruins”: once, the life in Anosovo flourished, but it was no longer the case.
Rodion was one of the few whose recollections and longing for Anosovo were of such intensity that he chose to return. The majority of others, who had similar experiences and memories, did not return. His story presents an example of a longing for the place so powerful that it demands returning; one can suggest that in people who are particularly sensitive to such infrastructural-affective engagements, the attachment to the place will be more pronounced.
Of course, infrastructure does not have to be made of glass, steel, and plastic to be affective. The “infrastructures of social life” (Urry 2007, 12) include relationships, growing, and faltering. People like Konstantin are attached to the place with their connections to living beings (“beehorses”), and resists their loved ones’ “push” to move away; Valentina decides to stay choosing to respect her husband’s feelings even though she dreams about the advantages of living in Irkutsk. Rodion moved back to Anosovo having abandoned an established household and career. He struggled to rationalize his return post-factum; instead of putting it into words, he performed his (be)longing—gave a preview of embodied choreographies connecting him to a place.
The social “affective infrastructures” are site-specific. “Where buildings are demolished the inalienable connections inevitably go too” (Bennett 2014, 663). The connection to the place develops through the affective infrastructures of (be)longing that involve personal ties.
Oleg (25) served in the military in Irkutsk. He returned to Anosovo with Nadia (22), who was born in the city. Anosovo was fun, Nadia said, even though her mom chastised her for choosing a village boy while there were many available in the city. Nadia defended herself saying, “Men brought up in the village are stronger!”
Several months into living in Anosovo, however, Nadia felt that a difficult byt loomed on her. She was pregnant with her second child; her firstborn was one year old. She had to bring in stove timber by herself and was tired from carrying buckets of water in and out of the house all day. After deliberations, Nadia and Oleg decided to move to Irkutsk to Nadia’s parents, although Oleg would rather stay in Anosovo.
When I returned to Anosovo the next year, Oleg was there, alone; Nadia and the children remained in Irkutsk. Oleg and Nadia were officially divorced. He planned to regroup in Anosovo and probe his luck in the city again. He wanted to remain close to his children and pay alimony, but he did not have a job. “There is nothing to do in Anosovo. Everyone is gone,” Oleg said. By everyone, he meant his peers and classmates.
Like many young people throughout the world, Oleg returned to his parents’ house facing “the protracted transition to adulthood” (Coulter et al. 2016, 353; see also Sage, Evandrou, and Falkingham 2013). In the process of staying, going, and picking a location, decisions depend on interpersonal relationships and kinship ties.
The kinship ties, however, do not function uniformly. Thus, Konstantin resisted his wife’s pressure to move to Irkutsk. In Rodion’s case, moving back to Anosovo was accompanied by abandoning a relationship in the city. Oleg now was developing ties with two places: Anosovo, where his parents lived, and Irkutsk, where his dissolved family resided. The “desiring machine” (Deleuze and Guattari 2009) of self was caught in the web of relations “affectively infrastructured” and tugged in various ways to different locations.
“Staying” or “being” in a place is closely connected to one’s sense of (be)longing. The body in movement “is in an immediate, unfolding relation to its own nonpresent potential to vary” (Massumi 2002, 4). There are different places and positions in space that a body can take in any given moment in the process of movement. As in the Zeno paradox, “between one point on a line and the next, there is an infinity of intervening points” (Massumi 2002, 6). Inhabiting one such point with the feeling that “this is precisely where one would rather be” means to belong. Since Oleg wanted to go to Irkutsk, he was as good as absent from Anosovo. He marked his return temporary, which indicated that he “belonged” somewhere else. Thinking about affect “infrastructurally” allows us to see the sense of belonging as a fluctuating flow that circulates in the system of ties: belonging is fluid and can agglomerate and pass through, dissipate, and have moments of shortage.
Mobility Outcomes
The previous section focused on the “immobility” outcomes that involved “mobility”; it presented two cases of returning to Anosovo: to settle for good (Rodion) and to regroup, temporarily, with the intention to leave (Oleg). The next section is devoted to the cases of mobility when people left Anosovo. I show that even in such cases, people maintain ties with the place, through regular visitations or in memories. The discrepancies that arise in the narratives illuminate how difficult it is to make the decision of moving.
Narrative Discrepancies
Those who left Anosovo preserved connection to the place, saturated with affect. This affect is not necessarily that of (be)longing. Sometimes, as for Elena, it is a relief of escape.
Anosovians do not take the decision of moving away lightly, despite the hardships of living. Often, years of deliberation pass before a decisive step, and the decision-making process is convoluted. Sometimes, people express their resolution to stay only to be gone the next year. Sometimes, even as a person develops plans of leaving for years, she then avows that she did not want to go, as does Elena.
Elena and Vasily Krasnovs, in their sixties, left Anosovo for the town of Ust Baley, bought a house and began renovating it. They deepened the floor because the windows were too low for Elena’s tastes, straightened walls and ceilings, and rebuilt the stove. Traces of the ongoing renovation were everywhere; the floor, covered in different pieces of linoleum.
I first met Elena in Anosovo, in 2013. Then she was a member of a tiny circle of Baptists in the village and was an informal leader of the church. She lamented the advent of the last days: she had visited Irkutsk and sat for an hour on a bench counting women wearing skirts as opposed to pants. The latter prevailed, which, to her, was an unmistakable sign of the nearing Apocalypse.
At the time, three persons comprised the church (“us”). 8 The church membership was “inalienable from the place,” in Bennett’s terms (2014, 660). After she left, Elena no longer participated in the circuits of that particular emplaced “affective infrastructure,” although she remained a devoted Christian and wore a kerchief on her head.
When Elena and I first met, she repeated on several occasions that she will not stay in Anosovo. She enumerated, angrily, all the Anosovo’s disadvantages. No road, no central electricity, no water apart from that taken from the Angara River without filters. “Nothing. No civilization,” Elena repeated. Her house, too, was falling in disrepair. She remarked to me, “I will not repaint these windows.” The window frames appeared to be sponge-like in texture as she pressed them, so old they were and apparently full of bugs grinding wood. Her husband suffered from enigmatic asthma that loosened its grip on him in other places.
As Elena and I met again five years later in her new house in Ust Baley, she proudly displayed “the lights of the big city” visible from her garden. “So beautiful!” From the porch at night, one could see the skyline of the city of Angarsk in some 35 miles from here. Elena loved it. The display was a stark contrast to the nights in Anosovo with no electricity.
The “spatial-conceptual relations” with light was part of “the affective structuring of. . .milieu” (Coleman 2016, 703). Elena spoke with a disbelieving horror of the times in Anosovo when her children had to use self-made lamps as the diesel generator powering the village broke by the end of January, “as usual.” They made candles out of animal fat that they called “fattings” (zhiroviki). “Thankfully, everyone tended to a lot of animals.” In the evening, children did homework trying not to stain notebooks with zhiroviki’s melting fat. Now it all seems like some sort of nightmare, Elena said. The necessity to use zhiroviki made her sad and angry, and she was relieved to not have these lamps in her life anymore.
I asked her if she considered going to Anosovo for a visit. “I am not even risking going there,” She replied. “The battered road was bad enough back then, and now? I don’t even want to think about it.”
Surprisingly though, Elena now claimed that she never wanted to leave Anosovo. I told her that, to me, she appeared decisive about leaving. She denied it, “That can’t be.” She recalls that they had even started the renovation, “We foamed the house [zapenili dom—went through log cracks with insulation]. We would have renovated the house, and it would not be that bad. We’d paint the window frames. . .”
The discrepancies in peoples’ accounts show the intense inner work behind such a step-changing location. “Recounting one’s life is an interpretive feat” (Bruner 2004, 693), so discrepancies arise as demands the need for a new narrative. The discrepancy between Elena’s earlier certainty that she needed to move and then denied she wanted to move in the first place is important because, as I show below, she is not alone in readjusting a narrative of mobility. The labor of making sense of the world—a readjustment of a little universe—is required to suit the needs of the construction of a coherent self. “In the end, we become the autobiographical narratives by which we ‘tell about’ our lives” (Bruner 2004, 694, original emphasis). Even when the “drive” to move is so strong that it ends up materializing, the inner work reveals the conflicting feelings, interpretations, and even imagery of self. Even though the hope for the improvement of conditions in a place is not forthcoming, there is nothing “simple” about leaving.
The affective infrastructures of (im)mobility cast into question the very idea that people first make decisions and then move. Perhaps “decisions” are points in a flow of affect, and justifications come later once everything is “said and done.”
Ties with the Nonhuman
As I have been arguing throughout this work, affective infrastructure encapsulates kinship-like connections between humans, animals, objects, and elements of landscape. In her essay “The commons: Infrastructures for troubling times,” Lauren Berlant called for the construction of “the social infrastructures” that are capable to withstand “the unevenness, ambivalence, violence, and ordinary contingency of contemporary existence” (Berlant 2011, 402, 394). Such “social infrastructures” suggest tending to connections (including those of memory and kinship) beyond human, extended to human–nonhuman and other-than-human relationships. For Berlant, these types of connections are encapsulated by the notion of “affective infrastructure” autonomous from “the political imaginaries” (2011, 414). 9 I suggest that in order to reproduce such affective infrastructures, we need to acknowledge that they are out there, worth studying.
Vera (38) assured me that she will never leave Anosovo. As the reason she was not moving—not that I asked, she was musing aloud—Vera brought up her cow. “I always dreamed about having a cow. And now that I have it, I would move somewhere else?” To me, her reasoning was striking because she could just as well keep a cow in the town of Ust Uda (and have year-round electricity supply). But when I returned to Anosovo next year, Vera was gone; her family departed. Was Vera really attached to her cow, or the cow figured in our conversation merely as a rationalization, a pretext for staying? Those need not be mutually exclusive: the attachment and rationalization can go hand in hand. The cow can be both: a genuine connection and a rationalization trope permitting to avoid a decision. In my terms, a tie to the animal is part of the “affective infrastructure” keeping one emplaced, an element in a system attaching a person to something.
Connections to the Distant
The affective infrastructure tying them to Anosovo continues its workings upon Anosovians everywhere. Affective infrastructures are not only personal but also collective. Many of the former Anosovians I talked to in Irkutsk, Ust Baley, Ust Uda, Sredniaia Muia, and other places, recollected Anosovo with a nostalgic longing, but in an abstract way. Some expressed joy that they have left Anosovo. “Thank god I was brave enough!” Says Lidia (45). She is an accountant and was able to find a job in the city. No one she knew, she tells me, regrets moving out of Anosovo. “I will never return,” Lidia said. She meant, she will never return for good, as she did return to Anosovo every summer with her son who loved to spend his summer vacations there.
Thus, Lidia did not leave Anosovo altogether but remained connected to it with seasonal oscillations. Her movement was not an event but rather a process, puncturing space and time and comprising multiple “returnings” along the same circuit of the affective infrastructure: yearly visitations of relatives, renewal of the kinship ties.
Along with things outside of one’s control, the state figured in Anosovo’s dwellers’ narratives as an entity responsible or at least blamed for the affective infrastructures of immobility that people acutely felt. Lidia’s visitations of the village continued despite that maintaining ties with Anosovo became more difficult over the years. The riverboat that used to circulate Bratks–Irkutsk stopping at Anosovo began going only halfway, Bratsk–Balagansk. The official explanation was that the riverboat could not reach Irkutsk anymore because the level of the Angara River dropped. “The water level is only a pretext.” Lidia says. “When the water rises back, the riverboat will not return. This is the unofficial policy, to show people: your presence here is unwelcome, and you have to move away. It is cheaper for them to close the village.”
Not only was Lidia skeptical of any prospect of improvement, but she vocalized the rumor I frequently heard in Anosovo, that the government plan was to squeeze people out of the village. However, the officials of different ranks with whom I spoke denied having such plans. Leonid Petrov, the chief of Oblcommunenergosbyt—the service responsible for providing diesel fuel to settlements—told me that people were welcome to remain where they are in the villages. 10 Any state program to move people away would be expensive, he explained.
However, there was no agenda to improve life for Anosovo or any of the 40 villages powered by diesel generators, either. It was too expensive either way. Even supposing that dragging the electric wire or paving the all-seasonal road could work out for the economy in the long run, the state was busy with immediate needs. Investing money into big projects would take decades to pay off, Leonid remarked. He spread his hands in a trained gesture of powerless acceptance portraying his inability to do anything. Like others caught in the affective infrastructures of the post-Soviet state, all he could do is lament. Anthropologist Anna Kruglova encapsulated the infrastructural deficiencies as: “The state’s claim on modernity can. . .lapse because its reach, however powerful and all-encompassing, is still lacking in comparison to the ontological immensity of space and time” (2019, 485). There was nothing anyone could do to that vastness of space.
However, such “lapses” and lacks come across to the Anosovians as utter and sometimes malicious indifference. Perhaps the rumors of the state’s plans to evict people from Anosovo are conspiracy theories, but an affect of abandonment is there. That the state’s outreach would not stretch as far as the “Leviathan” may like and want, constitutes an “affective infrastructure of immobility” where nothing moved, a circuit of “stuckness” in which Anosovians found themselves.
Conclusion: Entanglements of Affective Infrastructures
The affective infrastructures play a role in the decision and the process of moving and staying. Such infrastructures, I argue, include connections, in different ways idiosyncratic, but also common, to the “hard” infrastructure positioned in the place, and interpersonal relationships, the ties people develop and maintain throughout their lifetimes with other humans, animals, and objects. In other words, the systems wherein the affect is transmitted have structures, and affect is not a surplus of emotion but is at the core of the (im)mobility.
Such affective infrastructures include but are not limited to the transportation, communication circuits, and people communicating their feelings to each other. Affect is being transmitted in the networks of connections, and these systems keep people either rooted or otherwise attached to the place.
Infrastructure in Anosovo remains Soviet at its core. However, the Socialist values that the Soviet infrastructure was intended to produce were discontinued. In the post-Soviet deterritorialization, infrastructural agglomerations produce the sense of (be)longing not only to the place that is three-fourth vacated but, by virtue of the connection to the place, to the seemingly discontinued but potent Soviet project. Anosovo began its existence as a manner of the Soviet “city of the future.” It had a potential to become a “settlement of urban type” but was instead transformed into a rural place. Being one of many settlements that experienced decline due to the wayward process of industrialization sidelining it in the streamline of “development,” “progress,” and “modernity,” Anosovo has been participating in various affective infrastructures and is included in the circuits in often imperceptible ways.
As I’ve demonstrated, Anosovo is a vibrant hub of memories and connections for its dwellers, visitors, and former inhabitants. In the overlapping maps of the region, Siberia, Russia, and the world, Anosovo is a center not unlike thousands of other postindustrial settlements. It is both common and unique, with the people emplaced in it, stories “inalienable” from the place, and its own configurations of infrastructural systems. For example, the diesel-powered electricity system turned out to be a tie connecting people to the place through memories: this connection is by itself not enough to stay, but it features prominently in memories of Anosovians throughout the region. People who stay in Anosovo sometimes do so for reasons that they cannot always fully explain or convey to others but deeply feel.
The “immobility” outcome can include the movement in and out of place. However, even those who moved away tend to maintain ties with Anosovo, either by retaining memories, or by periodic visitations. They continued being included in affective infrastructures of various ties.
Narratives of going away and staying illustrate that the affective connections to a place do not disappear but rather reconfigure in one’s world as the movement happens. The adjustment of the narrative to suit the changed needs show the adjustment of the “affective infrastructural” connection to the place in dynamic. The connection to a place through living beings—like keeping a cow in Anosovo—was eventually outweighed by other considerations.
These individual stories add to our understanding that staying, returning, or going from places of economic decline are active, conscious choices negotiated through a multiplicity of motivations. Active, agential selves conduct movement in the circuits of affective infrastructures, surrounded by various ties, navigating, managing, or escaping connections. Thinking about movement as done within “affectively infrastructure” allows us to see the interplay of im/mobility as a dynamic process full of potentialities. Affective infrastructures of sociality are individual yet collective, as shown by individual vivid memories that are shared by others, albeit with a lesser degree of affective investment. The lack of state’s outreach cannot help but further facilitates the development of affective infrastructures of emplacement. As active governmental neglect elicits deep and conflicting feelings about place, we can expect to see this tendency elsewhere.
Thinking about mobility through “affective infrastructures” offers the following points to consider: first, affective infrastructures of immobility take into consideration various shifting and interconnected systems that influence moving or staying, from hard infrastructures to personal connections to people, places, animals, and objects. The division between what is infrastructural and what is not, blurred: these systems are often difficult to distinguish because the human attachment to the place is messy. Staying itself is not a result but a process, a dynamic in development rather than a stasis of a given result.
Second, the agency of movement in affective infrastructures is volatile and can switch from humans to any other component, including ties and connections that work “through” humans. People may struggle to explain their decisions or have to adjust their narrative. “Something tugged me.” The affect that circulates in such networks propels people to move or compels them to stay.
The term “affective infrastructure” intentionally brings together the material world and the intangible connections. It has a potential to be explored further as we pay attention to the affective register of being in a place of faltering economic conditions. Some people are more sensitive to infrastructures inducing affect, like those cherishing childhood impressions. For others, a smoothly functioning infrastructure elsewhere becomes a decisive factor of moving. Different people perceive various infrastructures as affective in various degrees. The work on establishing connections between people’s predilections and feelings, infrastructural possibilities or affordances, and (im)mobility decisions has to pay more attention to individual stories to explore the specific ties to the place. But these ties will be “infrastructural”: connected to the milieux in an undividable way and positioning a person as an inseparable element of a system.
Supplemental Material
sj-docx-1-jce-10.1177_08912416221130940 – Supplemental material for Affective Infrastructures of Immobility: Staying While Neighbors Are Leaving Rural Eastern Siberia
Supplemental material, sj-docx-1-jce-10.1177_08912416221130940 for Affective Infrastructures of Immobility: Staying While Neighbors Are Leaving Rural Eastern Siberia by Vasilina Orlova in Journal of Contemporary Ethnography
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
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