Gough, Maria. The Artist as Producer: Russian Constructivism in Revolution

Gough, Maria. The Artist as Producer: Russian Constructivism in Revolution. University of California Press, 2005.

Russian constructivism was a reaction to the Russian revolution in the respect that constructivists tried to identify their place in the new world by challenging (already debated) concept of the artist “as an individual committed to the expression of self.” (8)

Tensions between form as expression of subjectivism (Kandinsky) and of objectivism (formalists). Rodchenko and C – attempts to replace subjective expression with objective analysis. Preoccupation with form, color and faktura. “faktura means ‘texture’ or ‘facture’ – that is, a property of painting, sculpture, and many other arts, including verse. More significantly, for our purposes, it refers to the overall handling or working of the material constituents of a given medium, and thus to the process of production in general… In this sense, faktura is an integral term in the Russian vanguard’s broadly modernist conception of art as a mode of production rather than expression.” (12)

But “what prevents the work of art from slipping into a merely arbitrary arrangement of random pictorial elements?” (34) – formalists go into studies of “composition, construction and rhythm” (ibid). Studying modernists, formalists discover that art progressed from depiction of forms resembling objects – something a priori illusionary – to depiction of color, etc., that is, more ‘real’ objects. Therefore, form of material is used to represent non-illusionary forms of the real world. This, however, poses a problem for them: “to institutionalize the modernist problem of the motivation of the arbitrary that, as Yve-Alain Bois argues, runs through the history of late-nineteenth0century and early-twentieth-century art, particularly abstraction. As noted at the outset, if the non-objective painter’s initial task was to get rid of the referent in painting, his or her next task is to determine the logic or principle by which this new ‘painterly content’ will be organized.” (27) – hence preoccupation with composition, montage, etc.

Vision is illusionary, and therefore appeal to form (to its very faktura, materiality) can help people to see new things – those that old art will never teach them see. Constructivists believed that their spatial experiments would spur socialist industrialization. They saw, therefore, a danger in the fact that many Communists, while staying on radical positions in economic or political questions, would be disappointingly retrograde in regards to art. New social relations could not be expressed through old cultural forms. Constructivism promised to supply these new “cultural forms that are capable of expressing the dynamism of communism itself…” (70).

Karl Ioganson’s experiments with structural constructions as a direct expression of his search for ‘pure’ forms, those that would not be burdened by old ideological constructions. The construction of objects is driven by a rational desire of the greatest possible economy of material and energy; this minimalist agenda determines his aesthetic program. In the end, the rejection of aestheticism for functionalism. Ioganson’s attempt to enter the actual production process in one of Moscow’s factories as an ultimate logical development of the constructivist rejection of art.

Schmitt, Carl. The Concept of the Political

Schmitt, Carl. The Concept of the Political. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2007.

From Tracy B. Strong’s Foreword: “The intense and renewed attention to the work of Carl Schmitt, whether hostile or favorable, is due to the fact that he sits at the intersection of three central questions which any contemporary political theorist must consider. The first is the relation between liberalism and democracy. The second is the relation between politics and ethics. The third is the importance of what Schmitt called "enemies" for state legitimation and the implication of that importance for the relation between domestic and international politics.” (xiii)

The political, according to Schmitt, is the arena of authority rather than general law, and requires decisions that are singular, absolute and final, rather than general and universal. the sovereign decision has the quality of being something like a religious miracle: it has no references except the fact that it is, to what Heidegger would have called its Dasein.” (xiv) Political acts do not require any legitimation; they “have the quality of referring only to themselves, as moments of “existential intervention.” (xiv) Universalist claims of liberalism are, therefore, endanger the political and, therefore, the democratic. “From this standpoint, Schmitt came to the following conclusions about modern bourgeois politics. First, it is a system which rests on compromise; hence all of its solutions are in the end temporary, occasional, never decisive. Second, such arrangements can never resolve the claims of equality inherent in democracy. By the universalism implicit in its claims for equality, democracy challenges the legitimacy of the political order, as liberal legitimacy rests on discussion and the compromise of shifting majority rules. Third, liberalism will tend to undermine the possibility of the political in that it wishes to substitute procedure for struggle. Thus, last, legitimacy and legality cannot be the same; indeed, they stand in contradiction to each other.” (xv) The second point very curiously resonates with Antonio Gramsci’s discussion of hegemony through ‘hegemonic circles’ into which minorities which possess power include most active and dangerous social and political groups to

“The driving force behind this argument lies in its claim that politics cannot be made safe and that the attempt to make politics safe will result in the abandonment of the state to private interests and to "society"… The political defines what it is to be a human being in the modern world and that those who would diminish the political diminish humanity.” (xv)

As for the relation between ethnics and the political, according to Smith (in Tracy B. Strong’s interpretation), “inquiry into the political was an inquiry into the ‘order of human things’.” (xvi-xvii). Five stages that Europe underwent since the 16^th century, ending with the ‘technicity’ of the 20^th century, hence the danger of the Soviet Union, as it tries to appropriate ‘technicity’ as something of its right.

George Schwab: “According to Schmitt in the essay translated here, even ostensibly nonpolitical categories have the potential of becoming political.” (7) Very similar to what Althusser and then French discourse analysts speak of political implications in every enunciation.

Schmitt himself starts with a claim that a definition of a state can be reached only thorough the understanding of the political. “The equation state = politics becomes erroneous and deceptive at exactly the moment when state and society penetrate each other. What had been up to that point affairs of state become thereby social matters, and, vice versa, what had been purely social matters become affairs of state-as must necessarily occur in a democratically organized unit. Heretofore ostensibly neutral domains - religion, culture, education, the economy-then cease to be neutral in the sense that they do not pertain to state and to politics.” (22)

In defining of what the political is, Schmitt uses the logic of phenomenologists: “the political has its own criteria which express themselves in a characteristic way. The political must therefore rest on its own ultimate distinctions, to which all action with a specifically political meaning can be traced.” (26) It’s interesting, that Schmitt clearly differentiates between the political and aesthetics – something that, as Benjamin argues, was not true for either the Bolshevik or the Nazi regimes. Schmitt argues that just as other spheres of human life are defined through distinctions (beautiful and ugly for aesthetics, good and bad for morality, etc.), so there is a basic distinction that defines the concept of the political: the distinction between friend and enemy. Schmitt argues that it is possible to reduce all political meanings and constructs to this basic distinction.

“The political enemy need not be morally evil or aesthetically ugly; he need not appear as an economic competitor, and it may even be advantageous to engage with him in business transactions. But he is, nevertheless, the other, the stranger; and it is sufficient for his nature that he is, in a specially intense way, existentially something different and alien, so that in the extreme case conflicts with him are possible.” (27) Therefore, there can be no neutral party to negotiate a conflict (and, thus, to interfere into the political): since the political is defined ‘phenomenologically’, on its own terms, and is existentially important (without this distinction, there can be no political), no third side can intervene.

Schmitt, curiously, appeals to the ideas of rationality when he explains why the concept of the political is based on the distinction friend-enemy. “rationally speaking, it cannot be denied that nations continue to group themselves according to the friend and enemy antithesis, that the distinction still remains actual today, and that this is an ever present possibility for every people existing in the political sphere.” (28) – that is, rationality is necessary for him to develop his theory, and European rationality becomes that philosophical foundation upon which his entire concept of the political is drawn.

Having defined the political, Schmitt goes on to the state: “In its entirety the state as an organized political entity decides for itself the friend-enemy distinction.” (30) And here, we moves to that section which is directly related to why Koselleck took so much from Schmitt, “Words such as state, republic, society, class, as well as sovereignty, constitutional state, absolutism, dictatorship, economic planning, neutral or total state, and so on, are incomprehensible if one does not know exactly who is to be affected, combated, refuted, or negated by such a term. (30-31)

Curiously, as Schmitt draws so much on the distinction friend-enemy, the political system of the Soviet state comes to mind where this distinction became the most vital in the 1930s, but later, under Khrushchev and then particularly Brezhnev, was reduced to compromises. Also, Benjamin: aestheticization of politics under the Nazi regime should be confronted by the politicization of aesthetics under Bolsheviks.  

But, in Schmitt’s speculations between the state and the political, what about the changing nature of states?

Curiously: “[war] does not have to be common, normal, something ideal, or desirable. But it must nevertheless remain a real possibility for as long as the concept of the enemy remains valid.” (33) And later: “Both [concepts of political sovereignty and political entity] do not at all imply that a political entity must necessarily determine every aspect of a person's life or that a centralized system should destroy every other organization or corporation.” (38-39)

Also: “Should only neutrality prevail in the world, then not only war but also neutrality would come to an end.” (35) Cf: Laclau, Emancipations (discusses the distinction of universal/particular in the same terms). “Every religious, moral, economic, ethical, or other antithesis transforms into a political one if it is sufficiently strong to group human beings effectively according to friend and enemy.” (37) In general, this interplay and interdependence of right and left ideas resembles future collaboration between Derrida and Paul de Man.

It seems to me, that at some point Schmitt is driven in his writing by the experience of German defeat from Western liberal states in the WWI (p. 47-48, for example, where he discusses sacrifice as an important aspect of the political), so his writing is a way to shape the future (and the German state & society) which would be able for an effective mobilization for another European war. This quotation is, in particular, symptomatic of this: “it remains selfevident that liberalism's negation of state and the political, its neutralizations, depoliticalizations, and declarations of freedom have likewise a certain political meaning, and in a concrete situation these are polemically directed against a specific state and its political power.” (61)  and then: “The question is how long the spirit of Hegel has actually resided in Berlin. In any event, the new political tendency which dominated Prussia after 1840 preferred to avail itself of a conservative philosophy of state, especially one furnished by Friedrich Julius Stahl, whereas Hegel wandered to Moscow via Karl Marx and Lenin.” (63)

Curiously, once again a statement that Laclau implicitly involves in Emancipation(s): “When a state fights its political enemy in the name of humanity, it is not a war for the sake of humanity, but a war wherein a particular state seeks to usurp a universal concept against its military opponent… To confiscate the word humanity, to invoke and monopolize such a term probably has certain incalculable effects, such as denying the enemy the quality of being human and declaring him to be an outlaw of humanity; and a war can thereby be driven to the most extreme inhumanity.” (54)

Interesting: the political (can) require sacrifice; hence Schmitt refers to Hegel’s definition of bourgeois as “The bourgeois is an individual who does not want to leave the apolitical riskless private sphere. He rests in the possession of his private property, and under the justification of his possessive individualism he acts as an individual against the totality. He is a man who finds his compensation for his political nullity in the fruits of freedom and enrichment and above all in the total security of its use.” (62-63) – this is a peculiar distinction between the private and the public spheres. Private space is the one which rejects the political; it is embedded in material culture (!!!).

Groys, Boris. The Total Art of Stalinism

Groys, Boris. The Total Art of Stalinism: Avant-Garde, Aesthetic Dictatorship, and Beyond. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1992.

Groys starts by arguing that the complete power over all spheres of life in the USSR gave the Communist Party aesthetic authority over the Soviet society. “the Communist party leadership… was transformed into a kind of artist whose material was the entire world and whose goal was to "overcome the resistance" of this material and make it pliant, malleable, capable of assuming

any desired form.” (3) He, consequently, argues that social transformation of the Soviet society were based on aesthetic principles.

His agenda is, however, too grounded in established stereotypes about the Bolshevik revolution: “Revolution in the West could not be as radical as in the East, because Western revolutionary ideology was too aware of its debt to tradition (a-ha), too heavily relied on previous intellectual, social, political, technical, and other achievements, too highly valued the circumstances that generated it and in which it was first articulated.” This comparison is totally senseless: what Western revolution? What Eastern revolution? “For this reason, no Western upheaval could equal the Russian Revolution's merciless destruction of the past.” – How can “the past” be destroyed? “Russia, however, was aesthetically far better prepared for revolution than the West; that is, it was far more willing to organize all life in new, as yet unseen forms, and to that end it allowed itself to be subjected to an artistic experiment of unprecedented scale.” – nice words, but whom does he mean by “Russia”? “Russia was willing to organize all life…” – another totally senseless construct.

Groys examines the Stalinist art and the Soviet avant-garde of the 1920s in their relations in order to argue that the latter wasn’t an ‘innocent’ victim of Stalinism. He instead argues: “Socialist realism was not created by the masses but was formulated in their name by well-educated and experienced elites who had assimilated the experience of the avant-garde and been brought to socialist realism by the internal logic of the avant-garde method itself, which had nothing to do with the actual tastes and demands of the masses.” (9)

He betrays his position (social, political and ideological) when he discusses the sots art: “The contemporary artistic reflection on the Soviet order as a work of state art reveals a great deal in the system that is inaccessible by other means but that can also be approached only through the history of this state art.” (12) He occupies a position of an art critic, and silences all other possible positions, rather than this—which allows for the construction of his research object, socialist realism, as a universal sphere that defined the entire structure of the Soviet state: “the Soviet order as a work of state art.”

He further substitutes his specific position for the “entire” history: “After the October Revolution and two years of civil war… not only the Russian avant-garde but practically the entire population of the former Russian Empire correctly perceived that this zero point [for the creation of a new culture and a new world] had actually been reached. The country was reduced to ashes, normal life was utterly disrupted, housing was uninhabitable, the economy had reverted almost to the primitive state, social relations had disintegrated, and life gradually began to resemble a war of everyone against everyone.” (20) (my comment: This created an illusion (which Groys shares) that the ground was ready for the radical transformation of the social fabric—but this ‘emptiness’ was less empty, because social relations survived and once people would return material possessions, they will start to re-create, through them, the social world of the past.) Groys argues that avant-gardists rushed for power after the victory of Bolsheviks (although without any empirical evidence), arguing that “This rush for political power derived not merely from opportunism and the desire for personal success on the part of the avant-garde, but followed from the very essence of the avant-gardist artistic project.” (20)

Basically, his main argument about the Soviet avant-garde is this: “in the early years of Soviet power the avant-garde not only aspired to the political realization of its artistic projects on the practical level, but also formulated a specific type of aesthetico-political discourse in which each decision bearing on the artistic construction of the work of art is interpreted as a political decision, and, conversely, each political decision is interpreted according to its aesthetic consequences. It was this type of discourse that subsequently became predominant and in fact led to the destruction of the avant-garde itself.” (21) Sounds nice, but this nice scheme doesn’t withstand any encounter with empirical material.

Crary, Jonathan. Techniques of the Observer

Crary, Jonathan. “Techniques of the Observer,” October, 07/1988, Volume 45, pp. 3–35.

Crary argues that since the nineteenth century, human knowledge of the visual perception and on one’s ability, as an observer, to perceive the world objectively, becomes increasingly challenged (starting with Kant). “From the beginning of the nineteenth century a science of vision will tend to mean increasingly an interrogation of the makeup of the human subject, rather than of the mechanics of light and optical transmission.” (5) Understanding that visual experience can be not correlated with the outside world, but rather originate from one’s body (bodily position?). The rejection of the idea of optical illusions: “For Goethe and the physiologists who followed him there was no such thing as optical illusion: whatever the healthy corporal eye experienced was in fact optical truth.” (9) It determines Crary’s agenda: “My concern here is how the individual as observer became an object of investigation, a locus of knowledge in the first half of the 1800s, and how the nature of vision was thus modified. One feature of this period is the widespread effort by researchers from a variety of fields to establish the bounds of "normative" vision and to quantify forms of optical and other sensory response.” (15) In sum, the new knowledge about the nature of visuality opens the way to shape human subjectivity by manipulating one’s position as an observer through popular visual culture.

Crary then explores different forms of mechanical production of visual illusions (such as diorama, kaleidoscope, Phenakistiscope, stereoscope). He argues that these inventions were dialectically both the product of new visual knowledge and the means by which general public was taught to see in new ways. New forms of optical tangibility, brought by these new forms of visual production, soon “turned into a mass form of ocular possession.” (29) Crary argues that this process was similar to the one that Marx described as a change between use of tools (18^th century) and use of machines (19^th century): where’s in the first case, tools extended human’s “innate powers,” in the latter it reduces human to be part of a machine. New optical devises make observer passive, promising, as a reward, to show him “the real.” “Even though they provide access to "the real," they make no claim that the real is anything other than a mechanical production.” (33) Development and spread of these new models “collapsed… older model of power onto a single human subject, transforming each observer into simultaneously the magician and the deceived.” (35)

Crary, Jonathan. Suspensions of Perception

Crary, Jonathan. Suspensions of Perception. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999.

“This book is based on the assumption that the ways in which we intently listen to, look at, or concentrate on anything have a deeply historical character” (1). Crary argues that the Western modernist project changed the ways in which individuals engaged visual or auditory information. Wants to link changes in perception and attention to social, philosophical and aesthetic developments in the late 19^th century and to link all this to broader (political) developments in the 20^th century. Attention, as Crary argues, is “a means by which a perceiver becomes open to control and annexation by external agencies” (5).

Crary speaks of ‘perceptual field’ which includes discursive objects, material practices, representational strategies, ‘ways of seeing’ and which is involved in the production of effects of power and new types of subjectivities (7). It allows for his justification why modernist artists are a good empirical material in his case: “each of them engaged in a singular confrontation with the disruptions, vacancies, and rifts within a perceptual field” (9). “Attention thus became an imprecise way of designing the relative capacity of a subject to selectively isolate certain contents of a sensory field at the expense of others in the interests of maintaining an orderly and productive world” (17). By the late 19^th century, “attention was not part of a particular regime of power but rather part of a space in which new conditions of subjectivity were articulated, and thus a space in which effects of power operated and circulated” (24). “In the late nineteenth century attention became a problem alongside the specific systemic organization of labor and production of industrial capitalism” (30). “The later nineteenth century saw the onset of a relentless colonization ‘free’ or leisure time… at the end of the twentieth century, the loosely connected machinic network for electronic work, communication, and consumption has not only demolished what little had remained of the distinction between leisure and labor but has come, in large arenas of Western social life, to determine how temporality is inhabited” (77-78).