On the double social life of failure

Abstract

What might it mean to follow failure 'out into the world' (Alexander, introduction to this volume) in a way that is attentive both to its contingent and diffuse effects, and to the work involved in making it socially legible? This essay follows a moment of social breakdown, its reverberations in social life, and the forms of diagnosis it elicited as a way of exploring the double social life of failure. Focusing on the aftermath of Kyrgyzstan's 2010 'Osh events' (Oshskie sobytiia) as they took hold in a multi-tenant and ethnically mixed dormitory apartment for migrant workers in Moscow, I follow failure forwards, exploring how a period of intercommunal violence reverberated in a context of protracted work migration, legal non-recognition, and the digital circulation of blame. I also track it backwards, attending to my interlocutors' practices of diagnosis and excavation. Among Kyrgyz and Uzbeks in Moscow, the Osh events figured as indexical of different kinds of failure -whether of protection, recognition, or proper state care. I take vernacular diagnoses of bardaknormative breakdown -as an ethnographic entry point for thinking about the spatial and temporal afterlives of violence, their articulation in an age of digital mediation, and the ethics of naming and diagnosing failure.Marina Kulikova, her dyed hair pulled back in a tight bun, looks intently at the 15-yearold sitting across her desk. 1 Mansur is thumbing his passport, avoiding eye contact. Marina has a kind but no-nonsense attitude: trained in the days of perestroika, this Russian lawyer has made a career taking on 'difficult cases' . It is late June 2010, and four of us are crowded into her tiny office, knees almost touching. Russia is going through a heatwave and the low ceiling seems to concentrate the muggy intensity of the Moscow summer. 'Mansur, you have to understand' , she says after the silence grows uncomfortable. ' As a lawyer, I may be able to get you temporary asylum (vremennoe ubezhishche). I can try. But there are Uzbeks coming here every day as guest-workers (gastarbaitery). I'll have to be able to prove that you haven't just come here to work. That you really fled Osh' . Mansur continues silently thumbing his turquoise Kyrgyzstani passport, its pages still crisp. It is his uncle, Solih, who has accompanied him to Marina's office on the advice of the Uzbek cultural centre in Kazan' , who replies for his nephew.