The problem of tradition and autonomy in the Tomsk scientific microsocium during the Great Patriotic War: autopoiesis and structural coupling

In the article separate episodes from the history of the academic microsociety of Tomsk during the Great Patriotic war are considered. The subject of the study is updated through a conceptualization of the Autopoiesis theory and its sociological reception of N. Luhmann. A brief review of the basic concepts of this theory (autopoiesis, operative closure, structural coupling) is given. Its potential as a view of interdisciplinary tools is studied. It is emphasized that today it is already used in linguistics and literary studies, philosophy of technology and research of the Internet-space. Through the prism of the category "memory", that introduced by Luhmann in the context of autopoiesis, the reference field of the organizational construct of the Tomsk scientific community during the Great Patriotic war - the Tomsk Committee of scientists - is analyzed. It is proved that reference in concept of the Committee to foreign experience of development of science (the USA, Germany) by the Professor-physicist of Tomsk state university V.D. Kuznetsov had paradoxical character and therefore represents the "false", or empty, referent. A brief comparative historical analysis of two periods in the development of Tomsk scientific community - in the Civil (1918-1920), on the one hand, and the Great Patriotic war (1941-1945), on the other hand, -shows us that the structural organization and the "symbolic foundation" of the "Republic of scientists" of Tomsk during the Great Patriotic war were cyclical and self-referential. It is concluded, on the example of relations between the Bolshevik party and the Tomsk community of scientists during the 1920s - the first half of the 1940s, that autopoiesis served as a factor in the preservation of the rising tradition of microsocium, and its coexistence with the party culture developed on the basis of structural coupling. This created between them a kind of space "nobody's land". It is emphasized that during the non-classical period the autopoietic basis, which associated with the pre-revolutionary era, of the Tomsk academic microsocium included the topocentrical aspect (“Tomsk as the oldest cultural center of North Asia”) and the image of the cultural and historical landscape (“Siberia”). This is reflected in the rhetoric of scientists, the choice of the dominant, strategic directions of research activities of the community, symbolic attributes (interest in the history of the region, emphasis on its exclusivity). Autopoietic, primordial codification of the scientific community is fixed in its organizational outline, everyday discourse, reference to supra-individual symbols. This, in turn, is the main feature of “academic autonomy” in a modernised, non-classical sense of this category.

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