Baltic Worlds (Sep 2014)
Carbon and cultural heritage The politics of history and the economics of rent
Abstract
The conceptual frame in which the historical past is conceived as a resource for national and state construction — that is, for modernization — appears at a number of different levels. It can be found at the level of the Russian economy’s functioning, at the level of the political order, and at the level of elite interests, the reproduction of which depends on the maintenance of the given political order. In the present article, the economy based on the extraction of fossil fuels and other mineral resources, and the phenomenon of rent as one of the foundations of such an economy, provide a political-economic context for an analysis of the particular conceptualization of reality that is characteristic of official Russian historical discourse. The material I analyze derives primarily from the speeches of important government figures. However, the central arguments and rhetorical topoi I will be describing are characteristic of the entire discursive space of Russia, which is oriented towards supporting the current elite and its political course. The particularity of any metaphorical mechanism consists in the way in which it allows the subjects of discourse to structure and generate reality, grasping it as something objective and external. Analyzing such a mechanism permits us to reconstruct these processes, revealing how reality is discursively produced.
