‘Demo version of a city’: buildings, affects, and the state in Astana

Abstract

This article brings the concept of affect to the analysis of the relationship between buildings and political ideology, as a way of contributing to recent anthropological work on the state. It focuses ethnographically on the contradictory affects of the new built environment in Kazakhstan's capital, Astana, where extensive renovation and construction have been under way since the early 2000s. On the one hand, spectacular new structures induced feelings of hope, pride, and enthusiasm for the state in some citizens. Simultaneously, the unfamiliar designs and material defects of the new built environment emanated affects of estrangement, lifelessness, disingenuousness, and instability. The article examines how these different affects were qualified and mediated discursively. Official 'propaganda of emotion' is juxtaposed with unofficial discursive forms: puns, rumours, and satirical literary fiction. It is argued that largely uncontrolled affects, rather than ideology, rendered 'the state' a plausible, if contradictory, 'fictional reality'.

Falshfasad

“…These sites are horizontal rather than vertical, suffused with eco‐rhetorics and eco‐aesthetics; they are avowed sites of publicness designed for “wild” and “unscripted” types of urban behavior. On the surface, then, they seem to depart from the typology of “hyperbuildings,” iconic structures and spectacular architectural undertakings that have received wide‐ranging analytical attention from anthropologists of post‐Soviet built environments (Grant 2014; Koch 2018; Laszczkowski 2016).…”

“…I thus aim to make sense of the actually existing reality of socialist and postsocialist economy and society. Rather than interpreting the “reality effects” (Laszczkowski 2016) of Moscow's makeover through theories of affect, simulacrum, or spectacle conjured by western European or North American geographers and philosophers, I ground my analysis in the vernacular materialist infrastructural thinking of my Moscow interlocutors. Building on the analyses of ethnographers of architectural fakeness and realness working in late‐capitalist contexts within (Grant 2014; Laszczkowski 2016) and without (C. Smith 2020) the postsocialist world, I investigate the role of “two‐faced buildings” (Grant 2014, 515)—and the “two‐faced rulers” (Laszczkowski 2016, 159) they index—in “making the state feel real” (Laszczkowski 2016, 161) to its citizens.…”

“…Rather than interpreting the “reality effects” (Laszczkowski 2016) of Moscow's makeover through theories of affect, simulacrum, or spectacle conjured by western European or North American geographers and philosophers, I ground my analysis in the vernacular materialist infrastructural thinking of my Moscow interlocutors. Building on the analyses of ethnographers of architectural fakeness and realness working in late‐capitalist contexts within (Grant 2014; Laszczkowski 2016) and without (C. Smith 2020) the postsocialist world, I investigate the role of “two‐faced buildings” (Grant 2014, 515)—and the “two‐faced rulers” (Laszczkowski 2016, 159) they index—in “making the state feel real” (Laszczkowski 2016, 161) to its citizens. But rather than merely describing the “reality effects” of spectacular architectural and infrastructural projects, I also try to understand how far the categories of realness and fakeness, infrastructure and superstructure, allow one to criticize the reality that is materially effectuated by the state (and the political‐economic order within which it is embedded) 9…”

Environment and Post-Soviet Transformation in Kazakhstan’s Aral Sea Region

“…Children are taught about Nazarbayev's concern for the region. Through posters like those in Figures 5.1 and 5.2 (pages 141-2), the dam is enlisted in what Laszczkowski (2016) calls the 'propaganda of emotion' through which the Kazakh state is projected to its citizens. In post-Soviet Central Asia, as around the world, dams are a powerful form of nation-building (Bromber et al 2015;Féaux de la Croix 2016;Suyarkulova 2015).…”

Cultivated Affects The Artistic Politics of Landscape and Memory in Amman’s Gardens

“…Scholarship on urban affect often shows how the encounter with particular places can support or, more frequently, undermine hegemonic narratives (Laszczkowski 2016; Navaro‐Yashin 2012). Such scholarship, however, often treats affective history as a given whole, a sensation embedded in the landscape, brought out through encounter.…”