Ghost of a flea

Stiob (from the Russian stebat’, to lash or lash out)

"In the mid-2000s, Alexei Yurchak focused on stiob’s formal properties. According to him, stiob requires an ‘overidentification with the object, person, or idea, at which this stiob was directed’ — to the point that is ‘often impossible to tell whether it was a form of sincere support, subtle ridicule, or a peculiar mixture of the two’. Crucially, the ‘practitioners of stiob’ would not be drawn on their positions, ‘producing an incredible combination of seriousness and irony’. This unusual kind of mockery can be interpreted as a reasonably safe strategy of poking fun at an authoritarian regime (e.g. the USSR) when such a regime is going into decline and is no longer scary enough to laugh at in secret only — but is still scary enough not to laugh at openly."

Posted by Ghost of a flea at August 10, 2022 08:53 PM