ABSTRACT
Understanding failure is one of the key way to understand Soviet and Russian developmental policies in Indigenous Siberia. This chapter explores what failure is and what it does as a chronic state of policies and politics. The case of one Evenki collective, explored in detail ethnographically and historically, is here a microcosm of Soviet-style developmental modernity, which not only resonates with both Scott’s (1998) and Ferguson’s (1994) perspectives on failure but also modifies them as failure read here as a regime of truth of its own kind. I argue that failure constitutes not a limit to modern “legibility” (Scott 1998) but a way of seeing like the state. Failure does not merely depoliticize modernity (Ferguson 1994) but works as a device of naming otherness—in particular, the resilience of “tradition,” but also the imperial debris (Stoler, 2013) and the “enemies of the people.” I submit that the teleological time orientation of Soviet socialism as continuous construction epitomizes a broader view of modernity as an open-ended process in which failure, first, defers and differentiates rather than undermines, and second, that, within its truth claims, it partakes in naming socio-cultural reality.
