AUTOMATIC FOR THE MASSES

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 AUTOMATIC FOR THE
MASSES
The Death of the Author and the Birth
of Socialist Realism

PETRE M. PETROV

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS

Toronto Buffalo London
© University of Toronto Press 2015
Toronto Buffalo London
www.utppublishing.com Printed in
the U.S.A.
 ISBN 978-1-4426-4842-5 (cloth)

Printed on acid-free, 100% post-consumer recycled paper with vegetable-based

inks.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Petrov, Petre M., 1974–, author

Automatic for the masses : the death of the author and the birth of Socialist
realism / Petre M. Petrov.

Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN

978-1-4426-4842-5 (bound)
1. Socialist realism. 2. Modernism (Aesthetics) – Soviet Union. 3. Socialist
realism in art – Soviet Union. 4. Modernism (Art) – Soviet Union. I. Title.

NX556.A1P48 2015 700.94709'041 C2015-900238-9

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its

publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts
Council, an agency of the Government of Ontario.

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support of the

Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for its publishing
activities.
To Paola and Mamo.
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Contents

Introduction 3

Part One

1 The Imperative of Form 37

2 The Imperative of Content 55
3 Knowledge Become Practice 70
4 The Organization of Things 90
5 The Organization of Minds 110

Part Two

6 The Anonymous Centre of Style 131

7 The Unbearable Light of Being 154
8 Ideology as Authentication 173
9 The Blind, the Seeing, and the Shiny 194
10 Life Happens 220

Notes 243
Works Cited 281
Index 301
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AUTOMATIC FOR THE MASSES
The existence of proletarian dictatorship is not enough to influence culture. For this, a
true plastic hegemony is needed, a hegemony that would speak through me without my
knowing it, or even against my will. I do not feel this.
Boris Pasternak
Introduction

farmhand Whoare
you? Whose are
you? things
What do you mean, “whose”? farmhand
I mean, what is your master’s name? things
We have no master.
We belong to no one.
(Mayakovsky, Mystery-Bouffe)

This book is an attempt to write the doctrine of Stalinist socialist realism into a
story of modernism and modernity. The provisional title of that story is “The
Death of the Author” – provisional, because it merely focuses under a single
theme several different yet closely linked questions. That title will become
dispensable once the issues to which it alludes and which supply all its
substance are properly grasped. In placing socialist realism within the
framework of modernism, nothing can be further from my intentions than to
accuse the latter of being an incipiently totalitarian enterprise. A meaningful
relationship between two phenomena need not imply genesis or (even less) a
cause-and-effect dependency. As I will argue, the line from modernist culture
to the cultural ideology of Stalinism involved complex mediations and
transformations. When these are taken into account, facile talk of one paradigm
“begetting,” “anticipating,” “implicitly containing,” or “leading to” the other
can only be firmly rejected.
4 Automatic for the Masses

Nowhere in what follows do I assume that modernism is a simple thing that

one can theorize about in passing before moving on to construct equations
between it and other cultural phenomena. Modernism, in this book, will be the
common term for a complex of responses – artistic and intellectual – to the
situation of modernity, a situation that appears in multiple local variants
throughout the West.1 For all its complexity, this heterogeneous field is
amenable to understanding, and understanding necessarily implies the bringing
of discrete particularities under the unity of the general, of the concept. The
variegated map of modernism is traversed by tendencies and themes that give
it a measure of unity; this is what allows us to speak of it as a singular
phenomenon to begin with.2 One of these themes/tendencies is the oft-
proclaimed absence of the author from the scene of creation, that is, from the
“text” understood in the broadest sense. From a complex cultural paradigm, I
have chosen this one facet both because I believe it productively illuminates
other important facets of modernism and because it provides an opening onto
the fundamental driving forces of Stalinist culture.
Efforts to place Stalinism and socialist realism within a modernist framework
are not new. Three decades ago, Boris Groys proposed such a narrative in The
Total Art of Stalinism (1992). A radical and controversial departure from Cold
War studies of Soviet culture, the slim volume undertook to destroy the myth
of an innocent avant-garde falling prey to the crudely concocted artistic
orthodoxy of Stalinism. As Groys saw it, Stalinism was the sole legitimate heir
to the “aesthetic-political project” of the avant-garde. At its most radical,
modernist artistic ideology aims to transform the world, no longer satisfied with
proffering mere reflections of it. In attempting this transformation, the artistic
transcends itself and enters the broad arena of life. “By its own internal logic,
the artistic project becomes aesthetico-political” (Groys 21). By the same logic,
however, it approaches an insurmountable limit, for marginalized artistic
radicals do not possess the means to bring about the grand transformations of
reality their manifestos have projected. Only an organized political power – the
Party in control of the state – can accomplish such a task. And this, according
to Groys, is what actually took place in the Soviet Union in the early 1930s:
Stalinism “took over” the unfinished project that the left avant-garde could
never finish. In Groys’s telling of the story, avant-garde artists are dictators
without real power, while the Stalinists are artists without talent.
It is a tidy and provocative story, no doubt. But it is tidy because it is
oversimplified.3 If avant-garde modernism and Stalinist culture fit together so
neatly in Groys’s account, it is because the complexities of both have been
greatly reduced. The commonalities between the two phenomena are easy to
spot because their marks of kinship are as vague as can be. No one is going to
 Introduction 5

dispute modernism’s anti-mimetic thrust or the “life-building” ambitions of

various avant-garde groups. However, much argumentative labour is required
before these features can be equated with a proto- totalitarian passion for
domination and then made into the defining characteristic of the Russian avant-
garde. Not for Groys this labour: he cites a handful of pronouncements by
Kazimir Malevich, briefly references Velimir Khlebnikov’s posturing as
“Chairman of the World” and “King of Time,” and considers this sufficient for
capturing “the very essence of the avant-gardist artistic project” (20).
Cultural historian Richard Stites has shown that in the wake of the 1917
revolutions, the desire to remake life was expressed by a multitude of disparate
voices on the cultural scene. He quotes Isaak Steinberg, Socialist Revolutionary
and one-time Commissar of Justice:

All aspects of existence – social, economic, political, spiritual, moral, familial –

were opened to purposeful fashioning by human hands. Ideas of social betterment
and progress that have been gathering for generations in Russia and elsewhere
seemed to wait on the threshold of the revolution ready to pour forth and permeate
the life of the Russian people ... Everywhere the driving passion was to create
something new, to effect a total difference with the “old world” and its civilization.
It was one of those uncommon moments of self-perception and self-assertion. The
storm passed nobody by: neither those who hailed it as a blessing nor those who
spurned it as a curse. (qtd in Stites 39)

Clearly, the demiurgic passion was not the monopoly of leftist experimenters
in art. As Groys was well aware, life-building in Russia began not with the
avant-garde of the 1910s and 1920s but with the theurgic visions of Nikolai
Fedorov and Vladimir Solov’ev, before entering the mainstream of Russian
symbolism through the influential cultural philosophy of Viacheslav Ivanov. 4
It was Aleksandr Blok, the symbolist poet, who issued a passionate call “to
remake everything. To organize things so that everything should be new, so that
our false, filthy, boring, hideous life should become a just, pure, merry, and
beautiful life” (qtd in Stites 38; emphasis in the original). 5 On the eve of the
October Revolution, Nikolai Berdiaev issued a very similar injunction: “Art
unavoidably must go beyond its confined existence and move on to the creation
of a new life” (20).6
All of this is to say that the notion of demiurgic purpose is simply not specific
enough to serve as a distinguishing mark either of the avant-garde in general or
of its Soviet instantiation in particular. The psychologicalbehavioural portrait
that Groys presents is not just schematic – it is also misleading. Whatever the
refreshingly defamiliarizing value of seeing the artists of the avant-garde as
6 Automatic for the Masses

aspiring dictators, that portrait remains a distortion and thus illegitimate. It

allows no space whatsoever for utopian desire that is not a disguised lusting
after political power. One could doubt whether Maykovsky’s line “We will
remake life anew – right down to the last button of your vest” (qtd in Stites 38)
implies a definitive plan for totalitarian rule; but there is no doubt that it voices
an ardent hope for deliverance from that “false, filthy, boring, hideous life”
Blok also bemoaned. Nor does Groys make allowance for desire that may
contradict itself – as desire so often does – desire whose self-professed aim is
at odds with its true nature.
Lastly, but all-importantly for the purposes of this study, Groys almost
completely ignores a feature that could well undermine his account’s main
premise: those salient gestures of self-effacement and depersonalization
without which no account of modernism – in Russia or anywhere else – can be
considered complete. Because his story is that of a creative subjectivity inflated
to semi-divine dimensions, Groys has no way of dealing with those expressions
of modernism that repudiated or sought to suppress subjectivity. These cannot
be brushed aside easily: they were multiple and ubiquitous, perhaps nowhere
more so than in post-revolutionary Russia. It was none other than Malevich –
Groys’s prime example of a demiurgic artistic persona – who wrote in 1920
that “if we want to attain perfection, the self must be annihilated – just as
religious fanatics annihilate themselves in the face of the divine, so the modern
saint must annihilate himself in the face of the ‘collective,’ in the face of that
‘image’ which perfects itself in the name of unity, in the name of coming
together” (qtd in T.J. Clark 226). This was in Vitebsk, during the early days of
Malevich’s chairmanship of UNOVIS. At about the same time, in Moscow,
during the early days of INKhUK, artistic individuality was assaulted no less
forcefully. In her study of Soviet Constructivism, Maria Gough points out that
“to suppress any trace of artistic subjectivity” was the movement’s guiding
imperative from its earliest days (Artist 11).7 The very principle of
“construction” (contrasted with that of “composition”) was conceived
explicitly as an antidote to the kind of demiurgic licence that Groys considers
the essential aspect of avant-garde practices (Gough, Artist 11–14).8 Far from
exercising absolute “power over the materials” (Groys 21), the Constructivists
saw their work as ordered in advance – one might say commanded – by the
inherent properties of the material.9 It is not immediately apparent how this
obedience to the demands of the medium can be reconciled with the charge of
“aesthetic dictatorship.”
In fact, one of the most serious difficulties in providing a unified and
convincing account of artistic modernism has to do with reconciling these two
tendencies: the touted centrality of the individual self and its frequent
 Introduction 7

suppression, subjectivity hyperinflated and subjectivity renounced. Astradur

Eysteinsson summarizes the dilemma (apropos of literature):

On the one hand, it seems that modernism is built on highly subjective premises:
by directing its attention so predominantly toward individual or subjective
experience, it elevates the ego in proportion to a diminishing awareness of
objective or coherent outside reality … On the other hand, modernism is often
held to draw its legitimacy primarily from writing based on highly antisubjectivist
or impersonal poetics. (27)

While it is the latter aspect, the death of the author, that will occupy centre
stage in this study, I believe it possible to construct a consistent narrative in
which subjectivity’s foregrounding and suppression are seen not as
contradictory features of modernism but rather as possible reactions to the
same historical circumstances. Below I try to suggest how such a narrative
might go. But first, an explanation is in order regarding the “death of the
author” slogan and its meaning for the present study.

Just like its intellectual kin, the “death of the subject,” the death of the author
presents us with a metaphor. It is most familiar to us as a theoretical-
philosophical trope whose content has been elaborated by a long list of
continental – mostly French – thinkers in a variety of academic disciplines. At
the head of that list are Claude Lévi-Strauss, Jacques Lacan, Louis Althusser,
Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida. This metaphorical
death – whether of the author or, more broadly, the subject – has roughly the
following meaning: man is constituted, not constitutive; he is authored, not
authorial; the human individual is embedded everywhere in structures and
dynamics of which he is not the progenitor and which his consciousness can
never fully encompass.10 Language has been the model par excellence for all
fields of objectivity that can be said to “dissolve” the subject. To explain one
metaphor by means of another: with language as his main field of play, the
subject is the player that is being played by the rules of that very field.
This “Copernican revolution” set in motion by the foregrounding of linguistic
structures threw down a direct challenge to the central and founding role of
consciousness, whether registered in terms of Cartesian certainty, Husserlian
phenomenology, or the doctrine of individual freedom outlined in Sartrian
existentialism. In what was to become the “slogan of the decade” for the France
of the 1960s, Lévi-Strauss could thus declare: “the goal of the human sciences is
not to constitute man, but to dissolve him.” (Burke 13)
8 Automatic for the Masses

But the death of the author is not just a theoretical trope. At an earlier
historical moment, it functioned as a practical metaphor as well. By “practical,”
I mean that it oriented, or enabled, practices of various kinds, including artistic
ones. The content of that other metaphor is not unitary and so is not easily stated
(among other things, the present study will attempt to show how this content
shifted between the 1920s and the 1930s on the Soviet cultural scene). My
principal point is this: at the beginning of the twentieth century, the death of the
author did not have merely cognitive significance; it was also a symbolic act
performed in the specific historical context of the time. It did not merely allude
to a universal state of affairs; it also performed desire, enacted a state of the
world and of man that could or should be. To put it rather crudely: authors
pretended not to be authors, and this pretence, this metaphor acted out on page
or canvas, aimed to effect a change in that which had hitherto been called “art”
and that which had hitherto been called “man.”
Another way of framing the same point is to say that the dispersal of the
subject (and hence, of the author) was not a revelation of the 1960s. It was
already in full view in Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud. But that earlier view was
of a very different kind, insofar as the dispersal was not the end of the story.
Rather, the dispersal was an enabling, energizing, state of affairs that opened
onto another, recuperative state (in Freud’s famous figure of repossession, “Wo
Es war, soll Ich warden”). It allowed, nay, demanded, that man be gathered
again, as something wholly different, beyond – that is, as something greater
than – his former being. Speaking of the three thinkers just mentioned, Paul
Ricoeur captures lucidly this subsequent moment, when, after being
undermined, man is reinstated again on a loftier plane:

All three begin with suspicion concerning the illusions of consciousness, and then
proceed to employ the stratagem of deciphering; all three, however, far from being
detractors of “consciousness,” aim at extending it. What Marx wants is to liberate
praxis by the understanding of necessity; but this liberation is inseparable from a
“conscious insight” which victoriously counterattacks the mystification of false
consciousness. What Nietzsche wants is the increase of man’s power, the
restoration of his force … What Freud desires is that the one who is analyzed, by
making his own the meaning that was foreign to him, enlarge his field of
consciousness, live better, and finally be a little freer and, if possible, a little
happier. (34–5)11

I will not be unfolding on these pages an exegesis of the epoch-making

hermeneutic endeavours of Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud. I merely wish to mark
two separate and historically distinct moments in the death of the author: (1) an
 Introduction 9

earlier one, in which the objective logic that “dispersed” the subject could still
be imagined as a kind of proto-will (most literally in Nietzsche’s “Will to power”
but also in Freud’s “desire” and Marx’s logic of social labour-cum-value) and,
as such, “activated” in practice; and (2) a later moment, when this practical
aspect was lost, the objective logic that mocked man’s mastery of experience
was revealed as a mere faceless combinatory of elements, and the death of the
subject and author was reduced to a purely theoretical postulate that registered
a fact without proposing an act. The present study amounts to a return, in the
Russian context, to the earlier of the two moments, when the metaphor of the
author’s demise functioned as an invitation to practice (an invitation that
Stalinism would later recast as a summons).
From the moment that structuralism proclaimed the death of the author, in
Barthes’s programmatic essay of 1968, that earlier episode was occluded. It is
not that Barthes was unaware of modernist writers who had practised the death
of the author as an act definitive of their artistic creations. Quite the opposite:
these modernist performances were at the very centre of his essay. It is, rather,
that Barthes took them not in their historical significance but in their universal
value. The main ambiguity behind the metaphor – Is the death of the author a
cognitive fact or a historically determined act? – informs the essay from
beginning to end. For Barthes, the Author – capitalized consistently in the text
– is a metaphysical figure that is kept in place by the ideology proper to the
bourgeois world order: “The author is a modern figure, a product of our society
insofar as, emerging from the Middle Ages and English empiricism, French
rationalism and the personal faith of the Reformation, it discovered the prestige
of the individual, of, as it is more nobly put, the ‘human person’” (Barthes,
“Death” 142–3). This situation holds until some time in the late nineteenth
century, when – no reasons given – the belief in the strange apparition begins
to wane. When, “diminishing like a figurine at the far end of the literary stage”
(145), the Author cedes his former dominion, it is time for writing (lowercase)
to shine in all its glory. But this is also when the problems begin for Barthes,
whose story meanders uneasily between historicity and universality. On the one
hand, when he tells us that “writing is that neutral, composite, oblique space
where our subject slips away, the negative where all identity is lost, starting
with the very identity of the body writing” (142), there is little doubt that he is
describing the mode of being proper to écriture, removed from the currents of
time and cleansed of all historicity: “No doubt it has always been that way”
(142). Yet in the next moment, he refers us to writers like Mallarmé, Proust,
and Valéry, who deliberately set out to make their works the uncontested
dominion of language. This leaves us to conclude that modernist literature
fulfils consciously the program that is implicitly contained in the very nature
10 Automatic for the Masses

of writing. A well-nigh miraculous outcome! For Barthes, the false prominence

of the author is historically determined, yet the good riddance that modernism
supposedly initiates does not appear to be grounded in any concrete situation.
The closest he comes to arbitrating between history and universality is the
following brief statement: “the removal of the Author is not merely an historical
fact or an act of writing; it utterly transforms the modern text” (145). The death
of the author, then, is not just an act, not just a moment of practice (although,
it is that too); more importantly for Barthes, it refers to a exemplary modus
essendi of the text, a universal condition, a timeless paragon: the Text as such.
The stream of history ends up spilling into normative universality (that of
pure writing), but how this happens is not entirely clear. Since the vague
reference to the rule of the bourgeoisie is quite insufficient to theorize what
makes metaphysical ghosts like the Author appear in the first place, Barthes
cannot explain what it is that vanquishes those ghosts. Given that in Mallarmé’s
lifetime the economic dominance of the bourgeoisie was as strong as ever, it is
no small surprise that its metaphysical superstructure should have been
undermined with the sudden death of the author. As it stands, Barthes’s essay
fosters the impression that the (re)discovery of the “writerly” is due to the
acumen of a few exceptional individuals. Could it be that, having driven the
individual genius out the front door, Barthes has secretly let it back in through
the rear in order to explain how some modernist writers were able to attain the
essential dimension of textuality?
The main reason for Barthes’s difficulties with history is fairly transparent.
If the author is, indeed, a historical fiction, the question will sooner or later
arise: Is the death of that same personage not a fiction in its own right, a
historically conditioned performance? Barthes wishes very much to evade that
suspicion. As a consequence, he is forced into the intellectually tenuous
position of seeing the death of the author as a historical moment that opens onto
an ahistorical dimension. By contrast, the present study will frame the same
fatality exclusively as a historical fiction, a practical metaphor, a ritual, one that
seeks to resolve symbolically a very real cultural crisis definitive of modernism.
Barthes’s group portrait of modernist literature – to the names of Mallarmé,
Proust, and Valéry he adds those of Flaubert and Brecht and a blanket reference
to Surrealism – is very sketchy indeed, yet sufficient to intimate that modernism
has a vital role to play in the death of the author. With this I readily agree, but
I would challenge Barthes’s understanding of that role and the overall meaning
of the scene he evokes. The implied image of literary modernism as an anti-
metaphysical crusade, with langue on its banner, strikes me as thoroughly
misguided. Anachronism is clearly at work here, which projects the intellectual
rebellions of Barthes’s own time back to the beginning of the century. “In the
 Introduction 11

1970s it became almost routine to analyze the style of a particular writer and
then arrive at the conclusion that, when it came right down to it, the writer’s
work was really about language. Everything was ‘text,’ ‘discourse,’ ‘code.’
Critics were fond of talking about language, and they came to think that the
poets they analysed felt the same way” (Cassedy 9). Barthes may not be the
sole or principal instigator of this critical practice, but in him it is in full
evidence, especially when he deals with Mallarmé. What the critic of the 1960s
feels about language is taken to be what the early modernist poet felt. All of
this comes to grief when one remembers that what Mallarmé was after was not
language as some general signifying environment, but rather the ideal, essential
verbal medium; that he envisioned not a self-enchanted play of inscriptions,
but the inscription of one ultimate truth: “The imperfection of languages
consists in their plurality, the supreme one is lacking: thinking is writing
without accessories or even whispering, the immortal word still remains silent;
the diversity of idioms on earth prevents everybody from uttering the words
which otherwise, at one single stroke, would materialize as truth” (Mallarmé,
qtd in Benjamin 77).
The modernist author does not step down from the pedestal of authority in
order to open a “field without origin,” as Barthes would have it. On the contrary,
he does it so that there will be an origin for the work of art, an absolute
beginning and firm foundation. There is little to learn about the nature of
modernist writing when Barthes goes on to add, “no other origin than language
itself” (146). That modernist writers privileged the medium of linguistic
expression is a truth from the primer of literary history, yet this privileging is
very different from what Barthes’s theoretical platform proposes. For him,
“language denies all origins.” But this statement is thoroughly misleading when
applied to those most committed of all modernist experimenters in language,
the Russian budetliane. In language they sought not the ephemerality of pure
signification but the density of primordial, archaic sedimentations, where some
original fullness of meaning, of the referent’s presence even, might be
repossessed. Their “word as such” (slovo kak takovoe)12 is never the Saussurean
signifier whose default relationality deprives it of substance, but the magic
name,13 the first, most essential word, which holds within itself the intuition of
what it designates. I realize it is somewhat bad manners to force on Barthes’s
text a dialogue with Russian Futurism that it did not itself initiate, but the
reasons for this should be clear: if Barthes’s theorization is at odds with the
thought and practice of modernists who took most seriously and declared most
strongly the primacy of language, then his history of the author’s death
becomes incoherent.
12 Automatic for the Masses

There are other notable absences in Barthes’s abbreviated pantheon of

modernism. His essay is short indeed, but this is hardly the only explanation
for why he fails to mention, next to Flaubert and Mallarmé, the other, no less
famous declaration of modernist impersonality: T.S. Eliot’s “Tradition and
Individual Talent” (1917). Another possible explanation is that Eliot’s
meditations would immediately highlight the blind spot in Barthes’s account.
For although they do position the author in a space that Barthes would be
tempted to call “intertextual,” they do not thereby “disperse” him. On the
contrary: to locate the author at the intersection of traditions is to provide his
work with a substantiality that it cannot have as an individual creation. And it
is in the name of this substantiality that the author is enjoined to become aware
of tradition. “What happens is a continual surrender of himself as he is at the
moment to something which is more valuable” (Eliot 39; emphasis added).
Depersonalization here is coterminous with anchoring, not with the amputation
that Barthes describes memorably as a writing hand “cut off from any voice.”
In Eliot, the hand that writes is made that much stronger in that it is sutured to
the mighty sinews of tradition. In other words, the movement in which the self
is “released” does not stop there. It carries on in order to secure for the act of
writing a super-individual essence and authority. In this double act, it is difficult
to say where dispossession ends and repossession begins, and one should be
careful not stake one’s case on the power of mere words. As the self is
“dissolved” in the flows of tradition, is it also not regained, albeit in a different
form and different measure? To speak of it as ephemeral or vanishing may be
just another way of describing its e xpansion beyond mere individual
subjectivity. What else, if not a self, is speaking on the pages of “Tradition and
Individual Talent,” a self willing to forgo the ambition of absolute originality
in order to find a new “home of meaning” (Ricoeur 55),14 where there will be
sense of belonging (to “tradition”), of rootedness (in “something … more
valuable”)?
Eliot’s “escape from personality” is still performed by a personality;
desubjectifying the text is still a subjective act and should be interrogated as
such. That is to say, we must ask what is at stake for the subject in this act of
abdication. But this means returning the writing subject to the proper historical
situation in which the act is performed and seeing the act as one with this
situation, as a reaction to it. Only from a position of overall understanding of
the modernist moment can we query the true significance of the author’s
demise, if this indeed is the proper name for it. The point is crucial and warrants
repeated emphasis: it is not as a fact that we should take the death of the author,
as some sort of given that it is the task of anthropological philosophy or literary
 Introduction 13

theory to render explicit, but as an act, a moment of concrete happening, an

instance of historically determinate becoming.15
In his reminiscences of the Dada movement, in which he was a principal
actor, Hans Richter emphasizes precisely this fact: the escape from individual
will, from creation as the expression of the subject, is still an act of the subject:
“We felt that we were coming into contact with something different, something
that surrounded and interpenetrated us just as we overflowed into it. The
remarkable thing was that we did not lose our own individuality” (Richter 51;
emphasis in the original). And the sway of the unconscious in the art and poetry
of Dada is nothing like the primordial subversion of the sovereign ego; rather,
it is a willful surrender by the ego to something that might or might not be the
unconscious. Whatever it is, the surrender to it is very much a conscious act:
“We had adopted chance, the voice of the unconscious – the soul, if you like –
as a protest against the rigidity of straight-line thinking. We were ready to
embrace, or be embraced by, the unconscious” (58–9). This hesitation between
the active and the passive voice is an eloquent testimony: one lunges
consciously in order to be embraced by the unconscious. “We were all fated to
live with the paradoxical necessity of entrusting ourselves to chance while at
the same time remembering that we were conscious beings working toward
conscious goals. This contradiction between rational and irrational opened a
bottomless pit over which we had to walk. There was no turning back; gradually
this became clear to each of us in his own secret way” (61).
Freud’s legacy – together with that of Nietzsche – was of course the most
important intellectual catalyst for the twentieth-century deconstruction of the
subject as well as the author. The unconscious was undoubtedly the figure that
cast the most ominous shadow over the ego cogito. Yet in the light of the Dada
statements, the unconscious appears in a peculiar double exposure. It is not just
something that is, an invariant of the human psyche, individual or collective; it
is also an object of desire, and of conscious desire at that. When Barthes writes
about the Surrealist practice of automatic writing (anticipated in some of the
experiments of the Zurich Dada), he leaves out of the story this historically
specific desire as well as its object (Barthes, “Death” 144). It is not a matter of
losing “all origins” but of finding a new pivot whose metaphysical nature is
unmistakable. The fading of the subject, of the modernist author, is a fading for
the sake of something. And this something is often written in modernist
manifestos with a capital letter (in Dada: the Unknown, Chance, Nature). There
is simply no getting away from the implications of this graphic emphasis: we
are being pointed towards a transcendental.
14 Automatic for the Masses

While I do not plan to unfold in the limited space of this introduction anything
like a comprehensive description of the modernist enterprise, I would like to
follow Peter Bürger’s well-known account in Theory of the AvantGarde to
sketch the general situation in which the modernist artist finds himself. In
Bürger’s oft-repeated phrase, the essential fact of this situation is art’s
“apartness from the praxis of life,” an apartness that in the first decades of the
twentieth century becomes an object of explicit and problematic awareness. Art
is ready to own up to the fact that it does not respond to any genuine social
demand. The demand for aesthetic products is now articulated predominantly
through the market and is, to that extent, counterfeit. The modernist rebel reacts
to this by disowning his audience, going even so far as to utterly erase reception.
In some of the most radical views on art articulated in the early twentieth
century, the fate of the art work is not to communicate, to reach across; it is
simply to exist, in a thinglike manner, alongside other worldly entities. 16 Jean-
Paul Sartre traces the birth of this attitude to the middle of the nineteenth
century: “from 1848 on, and until the war of 1914, the radical unification of his
public led the author in principle to write against all his readers … This
fundamental conflict between the writer and his public was an unprecedented
phenomenon in literary history” (119; emphasis in the original). In a similar
vein is Barthes’s declaration in The Pleasure of the Text: “Our modernity makes
a constant effort to defeat the exchange: it tries to resist the market for works
(by excluding itself from mass communication), the sign (by exempting itself
from meaning, by madness) … And even so, modernity can do nothing: the
exchange recuperates everything, acclimating what appears to deny it” (23–4).
Herbert Marcuse states pithily: “The truly avant-garde works of literature
communicate the break with communication” (71). And Theodor Adorno
generalizes this attitude to a defining principle for all genuine art in the era of
liberal capitalism: “What [art] contributes to society is not some directly
communicable content but something more mediate, i.e., resistance” (321).
All of these statements point to a crisis of communication. It is important to
understand that this is also a crisis of being and belonging, an ontological
predicament. The absence of authentic demand for aesthetic productions is an
aspect of a more general problem: the rootlessness of art, its ontological
“baselessness.”17 And it goes without saying that the apartness of art from life
is also the apartness of the subject. The subject’s anguished question, “For
whom do I write?”, is a prosaic version of another, more fundamental dilemma:
“Out of what do I write? When entering the world, what is it that my work
objectivates?” T.J. Clark reminds us that “the thought of belonging and
serviceability (of Economy as an ideal) haunts modernism, all the more so
because belonging and serviceability are sensed to be modernity’s true
 Introduction 15

opposites – the dimension to experience it most ruthlessly outlaws or travesties”

(8). The paradox these words flesh out is only apparent. Developed capitalism
outlaws only genuine serviceability while very much enforcing the utility of
humans as partial functions of a process they cannot grasp, let alone control.
Modernism repudiates this latter, corrupt form of belonging to the social whole
while endeavouring to project viable visions of the former. Yet the anguished
question of belonging is not to be resolved by declarations or radicalizations of
artistic practice. As I argue below, answers to that question can be imagined or
“performed,” but they necessarily remain vicarious satisfactions. Only history
can provide the resolution the question hopes for. Only a radical transformation
in the very constitution of social being would supply art with a sense of deep
inherence in the world (although it is not at all clear whether, in such a
redeemed human universe, it would still make sense to speak of art as a distinct
activity). Of the numerous modernist statements describing a threshold moment
between an unwanted old world and a new one worth belonging to, few are
more concisely eloquent than the proclamation of the International
Constructivists: “We stand today between a society that does not need us and a
society that does not exist” (Doesburg, Lissitzky, and Richter 315). And if there
is such a thing as the cultural act of modernism, then this act is as much a
repudiation of the “society that does not need us” as it is the symbolic
summoning of its worthy successor.
I wish to suggest that the metaphor “the death of the author” has a
determinate meaning within modernist culture and that this meaning has to do
with the themes of summoning, grounding, and belonging. The death of the
author takes place in representation, be it artistic or programmatictheoretical.
One might indeed say that it takes place “in effigy”; but as soon as this is stated,
something important needs to be added: “in effigy” does not take away from
the reality of the phenomenon, it does not make it vaporously unreal. Rather,
its reality consists precisely in this abstract, detached existence. Because art is
constitutively sundered from the totality of social practice, any attempt at
redemption or reversal of fate must be abstract by definition. It must be a
performance from a distance, a kind of magic ritual that seeks to exert real
effects upon an object from which it is objectively separated. A poem by Elena
Guro – the only woman among the Russian Futurist poets – presents in concrete
imagery both the predicament and the solution of which I have just spoken:

A frightened man was saying:

“I’ve been left all alone, I’m wretched”
––––––––
But the snow was melting above the roofs,
16 Automatic for the Masses

Flocks of daws were circling.

––––––––
I sat alone once in an empty room

The pendulum whispered gloomily. I

was tied up by gloomy thoughts, Like
a drowned man.
The room was made hideous
By someone’s imminent parting,
In the disorder of things, and on the sofa:
Books covered with dust and ennui.
The merciless light of the lamp was going bald on the walls,
The closed door was keeping watch
The merciless tomorrow was keeping watch: “You
won’t get away this time!.”
And I suddenly thought: what if I turned
The chairs and the couches upside down,
And tinkered with the clock? ... Then a
new era would begin, New lands would
open up.
Here, in the room was hidden the thread
That ties all things in one,
Blotted out by yesterday’s unkind day By
the calendar of dates.
Here, in the room it was, nearby!
I suddenly believed that it is so. And
that one need not fear anything, But
need search for the secret sign.
And I took it on faith; without fear I now
looked at the room’s closed square … At the
dead door.
––––––––
The wind was tearing the slushy, grey sky,

The wind was flying ’round the city; Destroying

blind alleys and walls.
All that was left was the snow slush of change, Mixed
with manure.
––––––––
The man was bouncing on the droshky,
 Introduction 17

Not afraid of unfaithfulness. (104–5)

Do we not have here, in this eccentric lyrical script, the acting out of the
essential predicament in which the modernist author finds himself? First, the
moment of being-apart, of exile from the fullness of social life, the isolation in
the sphere of the singularly personal, for which the dreary private room serves
as a figuration. The separation (razluka) at first appears to be likewise a
personal affair, no more than an intimate drama between two lovers: she has
betrayed, she has left, his world now lays barren. But if the narrowness of the
individual self is precisely the problem, this cannot be remedied simply by “her”
coming back. A more radical solution is required, one that cannot be contained
within the private sphere, for it is this sphere itself that needs to be abolished.
Nothing less than a transformation of the entire world is called for so that that
the happiness or ruin of a single “I” will no longer depend on another single
“I.” And it is this kind of transformation that the second half of the poem
imagines. The walled-in space of atomized individuality opens with a crash,
and beyond the crumbling enclosures there rises the promise of a new era and
unknown new lands (Prilshlo by nachalo novoi pory / otkrylis’ by strany).
But how can such a broad and radical revolution be accomplished by the
meagre powers of the singular, abandoned self? This kind of feat is patently
impossible. And herein lies the poetic paradox that Guro pursues and exploits.
The feat acknowledges its hopelessness through a spectacular success. It is
accomplished, but in a manner that serves only to confirm the powerlessness
of the hero. It is a magical act, a manipulation from a distance. One works on
the objects in one’s room, overturning chairs and sofas, tinkering with the
clock, and by a miraculous homeopathy, these eccentric actions, still contained
within the realm of isolated individuality, bring about the desired change in the
world at large. Unbelievably, the key to an unheard-of metamorphosis of
human life happens to be hidden in one’s private room.
If the helpless isolation of art from social praxis is the right diagnosis – and
I believe it is – such action from a distance is characteristic of the modernist
project as a whole. One works with the objects in the delimited realm of artistic
craft – words, sounds, surfaces, lines, and colours – in the hope that this
manipulation will affect the whole from which the artist and his work have been
cut off. Much of modernist literature, beginning with Flaubert and the
Symbolists, can be grasped as such a magical ritual in the face of the impossible.
The solution is of course “unreal,” imaginary. But its unreality is also its
ultimate claim to reality, since it is a testimony to something that truly is the
case. For the artistic act of modernism truly is destitute, it really is groundless,
without foundation, sundered from the rest of social labour: “Modern artistic
18 Automatic for the Masses

culture can scarcely be accounted an indispensable element of general culture

any longer, for the simple reason that art has ceased to play a part in the general
organism” (MeierGraefe 54). That this lonely act should wish once again to
matter, to act meaningfully – this desire is its truth, an authentic testimony to
the predicament from which it springs. The delusion begins when the artist
starts to believe that the magic trick might succeed or has succeeded, that the
manipulation of the medium has in fact initiated a transformation in the world
at large, that art has in fact redeemed the irredeemable.
The death of the author should be understood within this essential modernist
scenario. It too partakes of the character of magic ritual. In no way should it be
taken as a fact that modernist theories or manifestos register. Rather, the death
of the author is a symbolic act whose aim is as much to bury as to summon. It
buries the individual self in effigy so that something more real can appear in its
stead. Neither the interment nor the miraculous appearance is real in any factual
sense. But real is the desire that drives the ritual and that makes it
comprehensible to us. The modernist author does not turn over chairs and sofas;
rather, he turns his own self inside out and reads on the reverse side the promise
of a new art for a new world.

If the whole of modern art can be understood as the perpetual intervention of the
subject, one that is at no point disposed to allow the unreflected governance of the
traditional play of forces within the artwork, the permanent interventions of the
ego are matched by a tendency of the ego to abdicate out of weakness. True to the
age-old mechanical principle of the bourgeois spirit, this abdication takes the form
of the reification of subjective achievements, effectively locating them exterior to
the subject and mistaking the abdication of the subject for a guarantee of ironclad
objectivity. (Adorno 37)

This profound diagnosis appears in Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory, a landmark

text in the theorization of modernism and an extended critical apology for the
autonomy of the modernist artwork. In that very “apartness” in which other
Marxist critics have seen the problematic status of modernist art, Adorno sees
something like a badge of honour. The artist must maintain this distance of
alienation, for the alternative is to be complicit in the evil workings of the
“heteronomous world.” What Adorno fails, or does not wish, to recognize, is
that the thing he deplores – the abdication of the ego in favour of “ironclad
objectivity” – and the thing he endorses – the resilient autonomy of the text –
are inseparable aspects of modernist culture. When one takes only the latter,
and treats the former as a peripheral affair – a lapse that might as well not have
 Introduction 19

taken place – one ends up with an account of modernism that is too private to
be very useful.
It takes only a cursory glance at the manifestos of the various modernist
currents to see that claims of autonomy are very often accompanied by claims
of depersonalization. These occur not side by side but rather as complimentary
sides of the same declaration. Russian Formalism, which will be discussed in
greater detail later, furnishes a substantial and convincing illustration. Art, or
the text, is autonomous insofar as it obeys a logic of its own. At any given
moment, this logic, this self- sufficient inner life of the text, can be imagined
as unauthored, as operating beyond subjective control. But in fact, the logic of
the symbolic act is the opposite, as Adorno astutely points out: the abdication
of the ego comes first, after which it is possible to imagine that the text has
generated itself, that it has emerged from some compelling necessity beyond
subjective whim and will.
Nor do I think that the abdication of the ego, whatever its fraught
implications or possible consequences, should be taken exclusively in the
elegiac meaning that Adorno attributes to it. The fact that it is based on
méconnaissance should not prevent us from seeing in it an act of protest and
an omen of possible deliverance. Fredric Jameson has insisted on just such an
understanding of modernism’s gestures of depersonalization (A Singular 133–
6). For him, these are to be read as reactions – often unconscious – to the
subterranean tremors of a social revolution to come – tremors that were felt
across the Western world at the beginning of the twentieth century. 18 From this
perspective, the surrender of the self is not abdication but a foreboding of
imminent empowerment: “Yet the forms still, as symbolic acts, testify to
immense gestures of liberation and new construction which we can only
glimpse retrospectively, by historical reconstruction” (Jameson, Singular
Modernity 136). The “break with a thousand-year-old tradition” (Ball 225) to
which the modernists dedicated so many cries of despair and exhilaration was
driven, in part, by a desire to throw off bourgeois individualism as “an annoying
burden or too heavy, too confining garment” (Gershenzon and Ivanov 11).
The death of the author is certainly related to what Renato Poggioli has
characterized as the “agonistic attitude” of radical modernisms: a performance
of sacrifice in which the self-willed or anticipated destruction of the ego is
offered as a token of the world’s ultimate redemption. “In short, agonism means
sacrifice and consecration: an hyperbolic passion, a bow bent toward the
impossible, a paradoxical and positive form of spiritual defeatism” (Poggioli
66; emphasis added). Modernist declarations about the death of the author were
not always imbued with the pathos Poggioli invokes. Yet the meaning of
consecration and that “bow bent toward the impossible” – which Guro’s poem
20 Automatic for the Masses

images so well – are inextricably part of the symbolic act. The problem inherent
in Poggioli’s account is one that Groys will reproduce later in his treatment of
the Russian avant-garde. Each of them reduces the cultural phenomenon to a
subjective attitude: agonism in Poggioli, demiurgic ambition in Groys. Yet such
character descriptions are bound to remain abstract when they are not grounded
in a careful analysis of the circumstances that determine this or that attitude.
The death of the author is not just about the subject: it concerns in equal
measure the object with which the subject enters a relationship (and that object
is, ultimately, the world). It bears repeating: the ego is relinquished for the sake
of something. We are dealing with a ritual dance unfolding between two
partners: the self and that “something” for the sake of which the self stages its
own vanishing. To describe the act as simply a matter of a human agent
externalizing her dispositions would be to distort it. Although Part I of this
study will describe several such dances with objects, it might be useful to
provide here an advance summary of the dynamic between self and otherness.
Because it has been segregated from the practice of life, because it does not
receive from life what it so sorely lacks, art must produce this missing
substance in effigy. In the place of the use-value it no longer carries, art must
create a new and unique species of value; it must manufacture its raison d’être
out of itself.19 Because an authentic social demand for their creations is not
forthcoming, modernist authors construct a surrogate of this demand in the
form of what I call a demanding object. A demanding object is one that issues
an imperative from within itself, an imperative directed back at the subject. The
meaning of this back-and-forth dynamic is that the object should “necessitate”
or “motivate” the subjective act; more precisely, the subject contrives to
necessitate herself via the object.20 The object is preconceived so that it needs
the subject, presupposes her, “calls” for her being and action – that is, for the
artistic practice. The subject has projected before herself a pattern of
“lawfulness” and treats it as binding. For this game not to descend into
solipsistic self-gratification, the laws in question must be posited as if they issue
not from the human agent but rather from whatever it is this agent works with
in her artistic practice – that is, from the “material” in the variety of its
existences. It matters little whether the material is understood in terms of form
or content. What is important is that the demand come from outside the subject,
from some otherness, so as to have a legitimate claim upon her. In short, the
laws must be objective; they must be the immanent dynamics of some external
and non-contingent reality. They must bind and constrain so that the artistic
practice does not appear gratuitous: “The non-representational or ‘abstract,’ if
it is to have aesthetic validity, cannot be arbitrary and accidental, but must stem
from obedience to some worthy constraint or original. This constraint, once the
 Introduction 21

world of common extraverted experience has been renounced, can only be

found in the very disciplines by which art and literature have already imitated
the former” (Greenberg, “Avant-Garde” 6). The practitioner of art obeys rules
that have subjective origins, although those rules are treated in the opposite
sense – as objective. This is precisely what Adorno has in mind when he speaks
of the “reification of subjective achievements.” As the dance plays out, the
subject has found a place and anchoring, yet no longer in the role of author. In
exchange for relinquishing the claims to origination, the artistic subject has
been fastened within an “ironclad objectivity.”
To give a brief and easily accessible illustration of the “lawfulness” being
discussed here, let us stay with Greenberg a little longer and consider his well-
known discussion of the role of surface in modernist painting. Echoing a
number of modernist practitioners,21 Greenberg points out that the flatness of
the surface in abstract art serves as the artist’s law of conduct.22 The painterly
forms that appear on the surface are treated as objectivations or visualizations
of the principle of flatness. They “lay bare the device,” reminding us that we
are in the two-dimensional space of artistic manipulation (rather than in the
three-dimensional world of illusionistic semblances). What the viewer is
supposed to see in a painting by Mondrian, for instance, is simply the
actualization of painterly-ness as the latter is equated with flatness and the
rectangular enclosure of the picture frame. We are also supposed to appreciate
that the act responsible for the object before us is not “arbitrary and accidental,
but … stem[s] from obedience to some worthy constraint or original.” The
constraint in question is, of course, nothing other than the specific character of
the medium, which is treated as a binding condition for individual formative
activity.23 Ostensibly, the artist is simply the midwife of the process whereby
the essential properties of painting actualize themselves on the canvas, his
personality having merged with (surrendered to) the medium’s immanent telos.
It should be clear from all of this that I do not see the death of the author in
modernism as merely a variation on a theme one might discern in earlier
cultural paradigms. Whatever the apparent similarities with, say, medieval
doctrines of impersonality,24 these analogies obscure more than they reveal. In
modernism, the act of impersonality is one of negation; it is a concerted attempt
to erase from the text the marks of individual, “expressive” subjectivity. For
the medieval auctor, this could not have been the case: the expressive self had
not yet been enthroned, so it could not be dethroned, negated. Nor was there in
the Middle Ages anything like an institution of art premised on the individual’s
pursuit of beauty and truth. A similar objection can be raised against perceived
affinities between Romantic and modernist impersonality. The former
phenomenon accompanied the still-incipient autonomization of art, which had
22 Automatic for the Masses

just begun to emerge from its integration within an overall (aristocratic) “art of
living,” from its dependence on court patronage, and from the strictures of
normative aesthetics. In this context, the Romantic doctrines of inspiration
served not to problematize the status of art but to place the agency of art on
equal footing with that of the divine Demiurge.
The general point of these brief historical excursuses is the same one I made
earlier: the modernist ritual of depersonalization is reactive. It is a response to
a specific cultural-historical moment, a moment of crisis. This gives it its
distinct meaning and identity. Analogies with other historical episodes are
bound to be spurious insofar as the context will inevitably prove to be very
different. For as long as we hearken only to declarations of artistic
impersonality, we could come to believe that the modernist subversion of the
author “is … resplendently anticipated in the Classical and Medieval traditions”
(Burke xvii). But once we move beyond such declarations and reflect on the
deep contexts that nurture them, it turns out that we are not dealing with the
same imagination at all, but rather with discrete metaphors that express in each
case an original, situation-bound content.

The October Revolution did not extinguish modernist art in Russia. On the
contrary, for at least another decade, it provided modernism with a new and
much more concrete impetus, albeit a deceptively objective one. To quote T.J.
Clark again, these were times when “modernism could believe, not absurdly,
that it was on the side of history” (257). Nor did the Revolution put an end to
enactments of the author’s demise. These continued, but in a new context: that
for the sake of which the demise was being performed, that which was to be
the true generator of works, had acquired clear contours and names (the
Dictatorship of the Proletariat, the People, the Economy, History, etc.). After
the upheavals of the Revolution, foreign intervention, and civil war, and after
the chaos, misery, and utopian intoxications of War Communism, the New
Economic Policy (NEP; a period inaugurated by Lenin in 1921) placed the
radical artistic intelligentsia in a situation at once novel and familiar. The
cardinal transformation of life had been initiated but remained woefully
incomplete. The present held open a road to Utopia while prosaically
bespeaking its remoteness. Art was delivered once more to the vagaries of a
market for cultural commodities; but beyond that market, the Bolshevik
government was instituting, by fits and starts, incompletely and ambiguously,
a space of official patronage, a space that at any moment could contract into
nothing or (as it would transpire at the end of the decade) be expanded to
encompass everything.25 That art could once again be a viable part of social
being was no longer an abstract proposition; yet the means by which this could
 Introduction 23

be accomplished remained as unclear as ever. Many radical artists could

recognize their situation in the words of Boris Arvatov: “Since the end of
culture is upon us, [artists] have to acknowledge their own purposelessness and
uselessness … The question now is what artists are to do” (qtd in Gough, The
Artist 104).
The intelligentsia’s gestures of self-erasure were often overtures to a
collective subject whose presence had become palpable, but even more to a
new destiny that appeared at once overwhelming, faceless, and unfathomable.
Against this tantalizing horizon, depersonalization was once again an act with
a double meaning: it could be read as a symptom of weakness (the abdication
of the ego in the whirlwind of historical happenings that exceeded the bounds
of consciousness) or as the tapping of new currents of power beyond the narrow
subjective realm. The literature of the 1920s has left us numerous portrayals
and evocations of the dissolving individualist self, from Blok and Mayakovsky
to Babel and Platonov. I offer here two prominent examples of this common
theme so as to drive home the point that the surrender of the (former, limited)
“I” was at the same time a plea for belonging, a summoning and reification of
a grand super- personal power.
The first example comes from Boris Pilniak’s The Naked Year (1921), in
many ways the defining modernist text of the post-revolutionary period
(despite the derivativeness of its method). Here we find a whole group of
characters exhibiting a threshold psychological state in which a sense of
disaster and destitution is indistinguishable from an experience of radical
freedom and exhilaration. The scions of the noble Ordynin family, Andrei and
the old Prince Andrei (the identical names are a strategic move on the part of
Pilniak, who is very conscious of constructing a composite image out of
discrete fictional figures), are driven from their ancestral home, and as they set
off on foot through the steppe, now owning nothing but the clothes they are
wearing, their inner monologues voice the same experience: material
dispossession has given rise to unsuspected and intoxicating freedom. Later on,
young Andrei’s thoughts connect this personal destitution with the fate of
Russia: “no possessions, everything renounced … without even his own linen.
What if the trains of Russia should stop running – was there no beauty in
destruction, in starvation, in disease? One ought to learn to look everything
straight in the face – oneself too from [outside], only look on, belong to no one”
(144). The previous self is released and becomes merely an object in a strangely
ecstatic field of vision, which now encompasses the entire harrowing landscape
of post-revolutionary Russia. From this “disassociated” point of view, chaos,
tragedy, and destruction become disturbingly aestheticized.
24 Automatic for the Masses

This vision is rearticulated several pages later, now in the words of the
archaeologist, Baudek, for whom too the death and the hunger of the “naked”
1919 are the ingredients for a sweeping enchantment (159–60). Finally we are
introduced to a mysterious figure, referred to simply as chelovek (man), who
seems to be a fictional summation of several of the intelligentsia characters in
the novel (135). As the “man” lies dying of consumption in a stuffy,
overcrowded train car, he feels intensely the dispersion of his former “I” (235).
As the private intellectualized self falls away, a delirious urge replaces it in
which beastly violence and passionate human communion are fused: “The …
man’s heart grew full of most sweet and bestial pain – he had a longing to cry
out and let out and fling himself on the first skirts that came along and be as
hard and as cruel as possible there and then in front of them all rape her and
rape her. Reasoning, decency, shame, stoicism – to hell with them all! The beast
it is!” In Pilniak the crumbling of the “I” unleashes something more powerful
and no longer individualized: the primordial life of instinct, which floods the
trenches of the self and opens the body beyond its apparent limits. The same
agonistic release is then shown to be taking place within the larger, social body,
as the crust of Western civilization falls away to reveal a primordial, Scythian
Russia.
My second exhibit comes from Fedor Gladkov’s novel Cement (1925), later
to be canonized as a paragon of socialist realism avant la lettre. Among the
working-class characters and party activists who crowd its pages, the reader
easily picks out Sergei Ivagin as a special case, a figure deliberately constructed
to “make a point” about the intelligentsia and the Revolution. His personal
drama culminates near the end of the novel, as Sergei is purged from the local
party organization. Paradoxically, his exclusion is what makes him realize he
belongs unconditionally to the Party. In Sergei’s inner monologue, which
comes right after the official notification from the “purge commission,” the
agonistic scenario plays out in full force:

Only one thing then was necessary: the Party and Party work. No personal life.
What was his love, hidden in unseen depths? What were these problems and
thoughts which tortured his mind? All were survivals of an accursed past. All came
from his father, his youth, the romanticism of intellectuals. All this must be
extirpated to the very root. These sick figments of the mind must be destroyed.
There was only one thing – the Party; and everything to the last drop of his blood
must be given to it. Whether he would be re-admitted or not made no difference;
he, Sergei Ivagin, as a personality, did not exist. There was only the Party and he
was an insignificant item in this great organism. (296)
 Introduction 25

This is as much an act of self-consecration to the cause as it is a suicide note.

The two deeds are, again, one: letting go of the self is what allows Sergei to
dissolve into – and thus fully belong to – the impersonal force through which
history is being made.
Automatic for the Masses is not about literary demises of individuality,
however, but about gestures of depersonalization performed in literary and
artistic theory. My aim is not to document these gestures; for the most part, they
are common knowledge among scholars of Russian modernism. I want instead
to examine them closely so as to lay bare their inner meaning and common
significance. The post-revolutionary decade (1918–28) abounded in artistic
doctrines and theories of creativity that challenged, from a variety of
perspectives, the authority and autonomy of the author. 26 The decade after that
saw the institutionalizing of socialist realism and the thoroughgoing
regimentation of cultural production in all spheres within the newly created
artistic unions, which were directly controlled by the state. Within these
institutional confines, there were people who casually called themselves
“authors” (socialist realism proudly proclaimed the unprecedented freedom of
individual creativity in the land of the Soviets), but their authorship was only
nominal. The connection between the two cultural frames is not causal in any
direct or simple way. It is difficult to hold that socialist realism “implemented”
the theoretical ideas of the 1920s. Speaking against such an assertion is the
violence with which the Stalinist establishment rejected all of the theoretical
heritage of the previous period. Yet a connection exists. The symbolic act of
the author’s death did not end with the end of the 1920s; it continued to be
staged within the institutional framework of official Stalinist culture. Endowed
with a new meaning, it entered the very definition of socialist realism as a
representational system. Thereby, it also became part of the general state
project of building socialism. More precisely, the death of the author was now
staged as a ritual that confirmed the immanence of socialism in “one separately
taken country.”27 In place of the various “demanding objects,” which the
theorists of the 1920s had posited as regulatory of artistic practice, there was
now a single overwhelming positivity: socialism itself. And the enterprise of
socialist realism involved, in the first instance, schooling writers and artists to
“see” this positivity, which in turn presupposed a new kind of surrender:
authors were expected to let go of their individualistic selves so as to be
possessed by the materialized grace of history.
My argument that modernism and socialist realism held ground in common
will not concern in the least the properties of their respective artistic discourses.
It is immediately apparent that modernist and socialist-realist texts have very
little in common. The kinship I wish to explore theoretically concerns the status
26 Automatic for the Masses

of the text, not its formal or semantic features. The death of the author, I will
argue, is a symbolic performance wherein the actual text – the cultural artefact
that is the finished product of practice – acquires the status of a token. The text-
token completes, “materializes,” the symbolic act of surrender and, beyond it,
the agency that has come to take the vacated place of the author. This token-
being of the text characterizes socialist realism no less than artistic modernism.
Of course, there is a sense in which any text, from any time or place, can be
taken as a token of something. For instance, we can take Dostoevsky’s writings
as a token of his Great Russian chauvinism or Nietzsche’s as an index of his
problematic relationship with women. But such taking-ofsomething-as-a-token
– a taking guided by our own interests and by what we think we perceive behind
the author’s back – has nothing to do with the situation in which something is
produced and given to us as a token. In the latter case, the object being offered
does not wait for the recipient to invest it with evidential value; it is not in that
recipient’s hand that it first becomes a token. The object is a token beforehand,
insofar as it circulates in a pre- existing sphere of symbolic exchange in which
certain symbolic behaviours have become a matter of convention. Similarly, it
is not for us to assign the status of a token to modernist texts such as Vladimir
Tatlin’s counter- reliefs. They come to us as such, because they were imbedded
in a symbolic plot of willed depersonalization and cannot be adequately
apprehended outside of it. From within their own immanent context, they
address us as tokens of necessary practice, a practice guided by a demanding
objectivity that complies with the intrinsic properties of utilitarian materials.
When we contemplate Tatlin’s constructions, we are contemplating not just the
objects before us but the entire “plot” whose materialized outcomes they are.
Otherwise, the objects would remain inscrutable for us.
To say that the text is a token is to make a vital distinction between what is
conveyed in the text and what is conveyed by means of the text. In the latter
case, the text is apprehended in toto, as a single gesture. Its “insides,” the signs
from which it has been woven and which may refer us to the world we know,
have congealed into a unitary externality, one total sign, namely, the token. Let
me offer a small, mundane example to illustrate the distinction. I could show a
friend of mine a picture of Kazan Cathedral in St Petersburg so that he can
become acquainted with an interesting architectural monument he has never
seen before. Or I could send him more or less the same view from the Nevsky
Prospekt framed as a postcard. In the first instance, I would be showing my
friend something in the picture; in the second, I would be showing him
something by means of the picture. The object being pictured is the same (the
photograph might even be identical) but the context of communication is not.
Even if I do not write anything on the back of the postcard, it will still function
 Introduction 27

as an easy-to-read token of my having visited St Petersburg and having thought

of my friend while there. Of course, nothing rules out the possibility that my
friend will carefully examine the depiction of the cathedral, making it the
primary object of his interest. But even if he does, this will not in any way
change the “objective” status of the sign. For this status is determined not by
how one particular recipient treats the picture sent to him but by the already
established culture of symbolic gestures (here, the sending of postcards). Since
I have mailed the picture as a postcard, I certainly expect that my friend –
whatever his idiosyncrasies – will read not only the photographic
representation but also the cultural ritual in which this representation has been
embedded. When the recipient is aware of the ritual and participates in it
adequately, he is able to look past the photographic image, abstracting from its
wealth of details and treating it simply as one total sign, a representative “view”
of St Petersburg that betokens the sender’s sojourn in the city.
In artistic modernism, the text’s representational message is reduced or even
extinguished altogether in favour of the gestural message, the showing-by-
means-of the artefact. Marshall McLuhan’s famous dictum, “The medium is
the message,” can be reinterpreted along these lines: the modernist text is a
token of the formative dynamics that have brought it into existence. The text is
a materialization of these dynamics, a sample of their impersonal “work.” By
means of the text, the artist demonstrates what it is to let Language speak, the
Surface dictate its painterly appropriations, the Material reveal its structure and
utility, and so on. But in socialist realism, too, the text has the status of a token.
Stalinist literature and painting are representational through and through, but
that representational content – like the postcard photograph of Kazan Cathedral
– is embedded in an institutionalized ritual of communication. The ritual is not
something external to the text. We cannot abstract from it, for then the objective
status of the sign would be lost to view. To adequately apprehend the
socialistrealist text, we must inhabit, analytically, the cultural-ideological
performance within which it functions and grasp the symbolic act of which it
is the material token.
To that end, my focus throughout this book will be not on the artistic texts
themselves but rather on the discourses – cultural theories, artistic programs,
ideological pronouncements, and the like – through which the status of the text
as a token is framed. I hope to extract from these discourses the general logic
of the symbolic performances, their common “plot,” through which artistic
practice assumes the appearance of a work mandated by imperious objectivity.
To that end, Part I offers an analytical survey of some of the most prominent
artistic and theoretical platforms of the post-revolutionary decade. In order of
presentation, these are Formalism; the sociological method of Valerian
28 Automatic for the Masses

Pereverzev and his followers; the “science of organization” (tektology)

expounded by Aleksandr Bogdanov; the Constructivist movement; and the
artistic-ideological platform of the “Onguardists.” My analyses do not aim to
capture some agreement, or even vague similarity, on the level of stated
positions. In those years, allegiances were few and far between antagonisms
and collisions.28 But underlying the sometimes ferocious clashes among artistic
organizations and academic and ideological factions, there persisted one secret
and stubborn life common to them all. I will be attempting to capture this life,
which animated the thought of the Formalists as well as that of their Marxist
critics, the aspirations of the neo-Futurists, and the political manoeuvrings of
their sworn enemies in RAPP. This was not the life of thought, not the stirring
of some essential idea that the opponents, in the heat of their disputes, did not
recognize as common. Rather, it was the life of the object in general, the
cultural existence of “this,” before “this” b ecame concretized as this or that,
before it was apprehended as “form,” “content,” “product,” “word,”
“consciousness,” “history,” and so on. Under these various names are to be
found different versions of what I have referred to as the demanding object. So
I will not be writing the history of organizations and movements, but rather an
abbreviated biography of this demanding otherness – of the general “this” –
that both knowledge and practice take as their field. In this field I hope to
delineate something like common plot, a shared order of happening in which
heterogeneous phenomena participate.
What united the theoretical and artistic platforms of the 1920s was a
distinctly modern desire to save the creative act from contingency, to motivate
it, by anchoring it in a determinate “law of conduct.” Formalized as this or that
artistic method, the law in question was derived directly from the nature of the
medium and interpreted as binding upon the subject. In responding to the
demand implicit in the object, the human agent is less a creator than a
technician, less an originator than an executioner. The insubstantiality or
insufficiency of the subjective – this essentially negative fact – then acquires a
positive, enabling, and prospective aspect. The displacing of the subject from
the centre of creation instantiates a new kind of truth. This happens in a single
motion, a single act: as individual consciousness and will are found incapable
of accounting for the essential constitution of “this,” there opens, beyond their
limits, the territory of the “objective.” Its shapes are different: for the Formalists,
objective are the workings of the “constructive principle” (against the
traditional emphasis on intended meaning and expression); for the
Pereverzevians, objective are the workings of the “socio-psychological
complex” (once again, as opposed to the author’s intent and explicit semantics
of the text); for the Constructivists, objective are the dynamics of social
 Introduction 29

movement in its various permutations (in opposition to the movement of

individual invention); for the Onguardists, objective is the “knowing” of class
ideology (rather than the unmediated cognition whereby individual proletarian
consciousness apprehends the world).
Two things take place in the plot we shall follow: (1) something true is
brought out of concealment and instantiated as a now-manifest “construction,”
“organization,” “operative principle,” “tectonic,” and so on; and (2) in the same
movement, the individual expressive self dissolves into the impersonal
mechanism of a cognitive or practical operation (“method”), accessory and
transparent to the essential operations of history, society, language,
consciousness, and so on. In short, depersonalization appears as accessory to
the act of demonstration. As noted earlier, it is important to understand that
these two aspects are interrelated, that indeed they belong to a single order of
happening: the constitution of otherness (“this”), its production in the
dimension of the “objective,” is predicated on the self-induced fading of the “I,”
its relegation to the impersonal. This is one event, one symbolic act.
Stalinism “fulfilled” the desire implicit in the symbolic death of the author
that modernist culture enacted: the desire to belong. That fulfilment was purely
formal, of course. The socialist-realist author was posited as someone fully
integrated with the life of Soviet society. The cognitive transparency to which
every realism lays claim was, in Stalinist socialist realism, premised on
belonging: only he who truly was part of the struggle for socialism could
represent the world truthfully. In Stalinist ideology, the Soviet Man was
supposed to be a new kind of human being, one who not only worked harder
but also felt more deeply and saw more clearly. As for the empirical socialist-
realist writer, he had to impersonate that posited being and enact that optimal
seeing. The text he produced was thus by default a token of whether he was or
was not a creature of socialism – an ontological certification. In the doctrinal
framework of socialist realism, to write is to provide an occasion for the world
to explicate its immanent logic; but that occasion will be opportune only if the
writer is “one of us,” a true Soviet person.
Chapter 6 expands on the kinship between modernism and socialist- realist
artistic practices. Important for appreciating this kinship – without overstating
its scope – is a notion of the cultural act as a performance that goes beyond the
physical limits of the text. In modernism, art must not only convey meaning
but also betoken its own meaningfulness. I maintain that both modernism and
socialist realism feature symbolic rituals in which artistic practice is presented
as driven by imperative objectivity. But the commonality ends when we
consider how the symbolic performance takes place. In modernism, it occurs
in the context of genuine disquiet over art’s lost moorings and the threat of its
30 Automatic for the Masses

commodification, against which there takes place a multidirectional and open-

ended pursuit of an “art of determinate necessity” (Spengler 293). Stalinism,
by contrast, instituted this kind of art as a fait accompli, as the axiomatic
outcome of a world history that had reached its fruition and that had begotten,
at its grand finale, a grand organic style. Socialist realism is the staging of an
aesthetic that springs directly from the soil of collective life, a compelling
formative force that uses individuals as transitory vehicles for its realization.
The ideological scenario for how this force takes hold of individuals is the
subject of chapter 7. Here I define in a preliminary way the relationship
between the representing and represented in the world of “advanced socialist
construction” (which in Stalinist Russia was ushered in by the aheadof-
schedule completion of the First Five-Year Plan). These two instances, I argue,
do not relate as “subject” to “object.” To procure a true image of reality, a very
different relationship must be instantiated. The world of Stalinist socialism
constitutes a peculiar kind of representational object. Comparing it to the
objects considered in Part I, we find that this one is not about to perform its
own analysis; it has already done so. The culture of the 1920s is essentially
futural; Stalinist culture is essentially perfective. Because it has understood
itself already, in the present the world shows. It is exhibitionistic. In this quality
– which, translating an expression of Sergei Eisenstein’s (uvidennost’), I will
call “seen-ness” – it proves to really not be an object in any accepted sense of
the word. Nor, for that matter, is the position of the representing “someone” the
position of a subject. In the place where we would expect to find the subject,
we find an empty spot. That empty spot is reserved for any potential “one” in
whom the selfknowing of the world, its being-foreseen, would be confirmed.
Chapter 9 further develops this dialectic in order to show how the empty spot
was filled concretely, how the Soviet writer was recruited to it. Before this step,
however, chapter 8 attempts to both clear and map the territory on which the
question of recruitment, or subjection, will be asked – the territory of ideology.
It goes without saying that socialist realism was an ideological phenomenon.
What is usually understood by this is that the cultural establishment
retransmitted the dogmas of the political establishment. But in this chapter I
explore a different sense in which socialist realism was ideological: it was not
that it clothed the party line in the persuasive garb of aesthetics, but that it
staged the very functioning of ideology, in that broader and value-neutral sense
in which ideology can be taken as synonymous with culture. Because socialist
realism was the name not just of an artistic method but of a project for a
sweepingly new human culture, it simulated the objective existence of culture,
its well-nigh automatic generation by the socio-economic process.
 Introduction 31

Analogous to the distinction between the representational message of a text

and its token-value, we should distinguish between two levels in the operation
of Stalinist ideology. On one level, it produced substantive claims about the
world (how the world is and how it should be) and supplied facts that seemed
to confirm those claims. On another level, it offered statements about ideology
itself and administered rituals that demonstrated how people were possessed by
(or dispossessed of) ideology. This metalevel, which I refer to as the ideology
of ideology, concerns not the factual content of this or that cognition but the
very status of knowledge and the genesis of consciousness in general.
Ideological assertions about the real world can be verified by facts; but claims
about what it means to have (the right) ideology, to be a subject possessed by a
given form of consciousness, cannot be: the truth of such claims can only be
“exhibited” through symbolic acts and tokens.
I draw on Louis Althusser’s classic essay “Ideology and Ideological State
Apparatuses” to show the kind of relationship between ideas, social practices,
and individual subjectivities that the (meta-)ideology of Stalinism stages.
Althusser maintains that individuals are the supports of an objective and
impersonal structure of social (re)production; because it needs its supports, the
structure produces the individuals as subjects – that is, it supplies them with the
requisite beliefs for performing the requisite tasks to which they are assigned.
Because the mechanism of social (re)production is the primary given, it could
be said that this mechanism endows subjects with ideology and “acts” them in
their respective roles. Althusser’s is a critical theory of ideology, but it leaves
room for a positive interpretation of ideology-cum-culture. On such an
interpretation, ideology would still be a necessary outgrowth of the social
infrastructure, it would still have a firm hold on the individual-as-subject, but
now this recruitment would not be coterminous with misrecognition, alienation,
and exploitation. Such, I argue, is the meta-ideological vision native to Stalinist
culture.
It is easy to see how this vision turns specific ideological representations into
tokens: it is not enough for me to hold such-and-such views and beliefs, or to
profess these in my art; I must show, by means of my artistic representations,
that I belong firmly to the social whole and, insofar as I do, that an objective
historical process has engendered me as a subject and endowed me with views,
beliefs, and so on. In short, I must believe in such a way as to show that history
believes in my stead. In chapter 7, I suggest that the Soviet writer came to be
in an empty spot circumscribed by the power of Stalinist socialism to make
things apparent, to lay bare. In chapter 9, I illustrate and develop this argument
by examining the grand founding event of socialist-realist culture: the First All-
Union Congress of Soviet Writers (August–September 1934). I approach it as
32 Automatic for the Masses

a public spectacle that afforded writers the opportunity to come face to face
with socialism-inthe-flesh and perform the symbolic act expected of them (i.e.,
show themselves as being “acted” by the self-revelatory movement of “our
(Soviet) life”). As previously suggested, the possibility of depicting the world
in its essential reality was predicated on belonging, on being-Soviet, which, for
its part, was made synonymous with being-acted. Following the logic of these
conditions, I arrive at the ideological character of representation in Stalinist
culture: representation (in the sense of “depicting,” showing, reflecting upon)
was an agency that had become detached from the person; he was more its
object than its master; as a function of his belonging to “our world,” this agency
happened to him in the manner of grace.
By way of conclusion, chapter 10 expands these reflections beyond the realm
of artistic practices. I discuss Mikhail Chiaureli’s film The Vow (1946), which
offers a striking fictional presentation of ideal Stalinist subjecthood. The film
presents us with a group of characters, builders of socialism, whose lives we
follow from the mid-1920s to the end of the Second World War. The story of
each and all of them tells us that their achievements are not their own. Through
their efforts, socialism has been built and victory in the war has been won, but
the power that propels them in this effort, and that guarantees in advance that
it will succeed, comes to them from somewhere else. It springs into their lives
from that same empty spot discussed previously as an abstract space, now
rendered in The Vow with vivid literalness. What in regard to the act of artistic
representation has manifested itself as the power of exhibition, of making-see,
now manifests itself as the general power of fulfilment, of making-happen. In
the film, among other things, that power charts the trajectory of individual
human lives. It does so by recruiting and then “acting” these individualscum-
subjects in the quotidian enactment of a world whose ways have been
objectively preinscribed and that, for this very reason, has as its only destiny
fulfilment as such.
PART ONE
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Chapter 1

The Imperative of Form

In the writings of those who have come to be known as the Russian Formalists,1
“form” is the conceptual space in which the death of the author occurs, even if
it is not announced in quite so dramatic a fashion. It has traditionally been
argued that in their pursuit of “scientific” objectivity, the Formalists sought to
eliminate the subjective factor both from the history of aesthetic phenomena
and from the analysis of specific texts – that they arrived at something like
“system” by taking language as their model and jettisoning the stuff of genetic
explanation, intellectual speculation, psychological conjecture, and social
commentary.2 The German tradition of Kunstwissenschaft (Hildebrand,
Worringer, Wöfflin) and the work of Aleksandr Potebnia (1835–91) and
Aleksandr Veselovskii (1838–1906), in Russia, are then cited as significant
precursors in this endeavour.3 But should we not be wary of positing the “new
pathos of scientific positivism” (Eikhenbaum, Literatura 120) as a prima
causa?4 Perhaps it was just the opposite – that the Formalist “science of
literature” became practicable because some change had already occurred in
the life of the object, a change that made it possible for art, folklore, or belles
lettres to be conceived as fields of verifiably objective cognition. What I have
in mind is a kind of object (of study, but also of practice) whose life is fully
internal to itself; in the present case, this means internal to the “literary” or,
more broadly, the “artistic.” No meaningful relationships, no causes of
significant permutations in the object, are to be found outside of it.5 This is
what makes it “systematic,” and this is what first grounds any claim to scientific
rigour. The human agent – the artistic subject, the author – is just one of those
extrinsic factors that will prove inessential in the constitution of the object; and
this, in turn, will render the very appellation “author” problematic if not
vacuous. To anticipate a bit: the only way the figure of the
38 Automatic for the Masses

individual writer can remain pertinent is insofar as its doings are synchronized
with the logic of the “literary”; the human agent simply executes that which the
object’s intrinsic dynamic already presupposes. In other words, the literary
field is posited in such a way that one can imagine something like a volition on
the side of the object, a volition that the individual writer obeys; and only
insofar as he obeys it can he be considered a worthy inhabitant of this field.
In art, the Formalists descried a movement that occurred fully outside the
subjective sphere and that carried art through time while also carrying the
promise of a scientific study of things aesthetic. This movement traversed
singularities – of this person, of this “school” or “movement” – yet the force
that propelled it belonged to the object itself. Something in the very nature of
art provided the impulse towards new harmonies and cadences, new
perspectives and compositions. This impulse reverberated in the soul of every
true artist, but no soul, no matter how great, was to be for art’s principle either
an absolute beginning or even a privileged abode. Osip Brik, the “astute
Formalist impresario” (Erlich 67), expressed this most emphatically when he
vouched that even if Pushkin had never been born, his immortal Evgenii Onegin
would have been written all the same (“T. n. Formal’nyi metod” 213). It is as
if this work, whose author was, ultimately, Pushkin, had been programmed,
“scheduled,” in some arcane computation of form. Even if we disregard Brik’s
aphoristic foray, we should take note of the new meaning it gives to the old
phrase “work of art” (proizvedenie iskusstva). The genitive attribution becomes
more intimate, more engaged: “work of art” means not just a thing that belongs
to some predefined category, “art”; it means, almost literally, actual work,
activity of production (proizvedenie approaching proizvodstvo), performed by
the impersonal agency of art itself. Brik is really saying this: Evgenii Onegin is
a particular instance of work that needed to be done, that would have been done
even without Pushkin. For art is no longer merely a collection of things with
ascertained aesthetic properties; nor is it the generic activity performed on an
object that turns it into something beautiful. Outside of these definitions, art is
primarily something that works autonomously, a device that performs tasks that
have been programmed into it. As such, it is susceptible to objective description
in terms of elements and functions.
It is rather significant that the manifesto of Russian Formalism was an article
by Viktor Shklovskii titled “Art as Device,” even if priem in the Russian title
(“Iskusstvo kak priem”) does not quite support the point I am making. Priem
is “device” only in the more archaic meaning of the English word, which allows
us to “leave someone to their own devices.” Priem has a more instrumental
inflection; it presupposes human agency. It keeps us in the still human sphere
of strategy, dexterity, and ploy, of possible unpredictability and cunning winks.
 The Imperative of Form 39

Machines do not operate through priemy (pl.); the provenance of priem is

decidedly not the mechanistic or the technological, unless it is that original
techne with which Aristotle designated the skill of the artisan-artist.6 Still, the
English “device,” precisely in its most mechanistic sense, conveys an essential
aspect of what Shklovskii and the other Formalists understood to be the true
nature of art.7
Artistic form is an autonomous mechanism whose functioning can be
described synchronically as well as diachronically. In “Art as Device,”
Shklovskii emphasized the latter aspect as he spoke of art’s ability to renew our
perception of things. He made very few references to “form,” but he made
extensive use of the term ostranenie: “making strange,” “defamiliarization.”8
For too long had form been viewed as something imparted onto the object and
thereafter belonging to it as an unalienable property; what Shklovskii wanted
to underscore was not a property but a process, a shift (sdvig) rather than a
shape. The function of “making strange” constituted for him the positive phase
in the life of form; the negative phase was that of “habitualization,” or what the
Czech Formalists will later term “automatization.” The former encompassed
the realm of the artistic proper, yet the latter was equally integral in the
generation of aesthetic shapes. Each phase not only presupposed the other but
actively called it forth: every artistic form fades with time, making necessary
the emergence of a new one; conversely, as soon as a new form appears, its
irrevocable aging begins, bringing ever closer the twilight hour when it will
sink below the threshold of vivid perception: “Each art form travels down the
inevitable road from birth to death; from seeing and sensory perception, when
every detail in the object is savored and relished, to mere recognition, when the
object or form becomes a dull epigone which our senses register mechanically,
a piece of merchandise not visible even to the buyer” (Shklovskii, Khod 88).9
Above and beyond the particular forms that have superseded one another
throughout the history of art, one can think of Form as the general logic of this
supersession, as that which perpetuates itself in ever new instances.
It should be emphasized that there is no contradiction in Shklovskii between
the imperative of deautomatization and the automaton-like logic of Form. One
pertains to the subjective side, the pole of reception; it tells us what art is (or
should be) on the level of perceptual experience: an event of defamiliarization.
The other concerns the objective side of textual generation, the inner workings
of art; all we find here is an impersonal logic of deformation and differentiation.
The objective logic makes possible the subjective effect, the experience of
renewed perception. Shlkovskii’s starting point was to identify art with that
experience. Yet equally important for him, and for the new science of literature,
was the vision of art as an impersonal will-to-form that objectified itself in
40 Automatic for the Masses

identifiable (and analysable) “devices.” There is a good reason Shklovskii was

so fond of popular fictions and fairy tales: where authorship is immaterial, one
is able to observe the form-giving impulse in its primal, unadulterated
manifestations.
In the mid-1920s, Iurii Tynianov would describe the objective aspect of art’s
genesis in a much more satisfactory (“systematic”) manner, as the historical
unfolding of pure oppositions:

And so in the analysis of literary evolution, we encounter the following stages: 1)

in regard to the automatized principle of construction, there emerges, dialectically,
the opposite constructive principle; 2) its application commences – the
constructive principle seeks the easiest employment; 3) it spreads over the greatest
possible mass of phenomena; 4) it becomes automatized and calls forth the
opposite principle of construction. (“Literaturnyi fakt” 108)

And so art traverses time in the dialectical shuttle of oppositions, perpetually

rediscovering itself in what the Formalists called “differential quality”
(differnentsial’noe kachestvo)10 – an evanescent quality, to be sure, since it
exists only in the momentous motion with which the new form distances itself
from the old (the latter no longer experienced as “form” but as the habituated
existence of the content).
Human intelligence, skill, imagination, and talent are, of course, involved
throughout the life of form. At each moment in time, it is general human
experience that brings about the habitualization of the object, and it is human
creativity that rescues the object from its tarnished existence. But the agency
of the individual, of the human subject in the singular, is now subsumed within
the impersonal agency of the general mechanism. Even if he was to reach to
the most intimate of his being, to the most idiosyncratic of his subjectivity, the
individual author could not be the originator of the artistic work. To a very
significant degree, the object over which he labours is “conceived” somewhere
else: in the impersonal logic of his craft’s historically operative logic, in the
diachronic automaton of form.11 Of course, such a “conception” does not
prefigure every detail of the artistic object: there is an inner wealth in each text
or artefact that cannot be accounted for by the simple interplay of differentials,
and this wealth is still the work of the artist. Yet what sets him to this work,
what “employs” him in the task of creativity, is the necessity underlying the life
of form: “Art is not created by the individual will, by the genius. The creator is
simply the geometrical point of intersection of forces operative outside of him”
(Shklovskii, Khod konia 22).12 What previous ages referred to as the “artists’
calling” still resounds, but now it is the impersonal logic of literary history that
 The Imperative of Form 41

calls: “The freedom of the individual writer lies in his capacity to hear the voice
of history … Creation is an act of historical self-awareness, of locating oneself
in the stream of history” (Eikhenbaum, Skvoz’ literaturu 236). For the aesthetic
thought of the past, it had seemed obvious that the individual selects the means
for his artistic expression. But now it has become possible to conceive of a
scenario in which the artistic device “selects” its master: “a set of artistic forms
brought forth by the inner laws of their development, seeks out an adequate
milieu or creative personality for its realization” (Jakobson,
“Randbemerkungen” 373; emphasis added). The symbolic achievement of
Formalism – the achievement that interests me most here – is to imagine
literature as a work driven by necessity, as a kind of practice that satisfies an
objective demand. It is not a social demand (at least not in any direct way), but
the impersonal need of the craft itself, the imperative issued from its own inner
logic.
By what name should we call the producer of the artistic text in such a
scenario? Does he deserve the title of “author,” if the formative impulse guiding
his activity antecedes his creative will? It is best to call him operator of the
device, since the device – even if only in potentia – is there before him
(“brought forth by the inner laws” of form) and needs to be put to work. The
demanding object demands its realization. “Hitched” to it by a necessity of
which he is not aware, the artist works with it, on it, and for it. So that form can
implement its new operative principle,13 it must employ a human agent. Thus
the individual, in realizing his “artistic calling,” becomes just that: an employee
of form,14 or, as Foucault will describe him half a century later, an “executant
in a pure economy of the Book in which the discourse would compose itself”
(The Order of Things 306).
But there may be, still, a prouder mission and a higher title for the human
subject in the world of art. Does he not exceed the role of a mere technician
when, in a sudden leap of consciousness, he comes to recognize his craft for
what it really is: a contrivance, in which there is nothing more than the interplay
of conventions? When in self-awareness he undertakes to unveil the play of
form as play, to show us the artifice of art, does he not become once again a
subject of the text in the full sense of the word? For the Formalists, this promise
was burdened with the same ambiguity that characterizes the problem of
authorship. An individual, it is true, is capable of consciously apprehending the
conventionality of this or that form; it happens all the time; innumerable are the
moments in history when a particular aesthetic convention becomes the object
of parody, stylization, exaggeration, inversion, and so on – all the different
modes in which the device can be “laid bare.” But the individual consciousness
cannot claim too much credit for such revelations. For here, too, consciousness
42 Automatic for the Masses

is only registering – sometimes early, sometimes late – an effect that proceeds

from the objective movement of form through history. Carried in the abrasive
stream of human experience, art itself brings about the exposure of its
conventional nature.15 When a form wears out and its mystical union with the
object is no more, it shows itself for what it truly is: merely a manner of
presentation. Its routine perpetuation turns into “mannerism,” and the time
comes for it to be exposed, for the device to be laid bare.
The diachronic life of form is a sequence of deformations in which each new
instance does violence to a pre-existing norm. But synchronically as well,
artistic form is just that – deformation, an instance of “organized violence”
(Jakobson, O cheshskom stikhe 15). In the simultaneity of every moment, no
less than in a historical perspective, form deforms. It is actively opposed and
effectively negates its other – the habitualized existence of the medium. Verbal
discourse, for example, is at its most habitual in its quotidian communicative
function. And so poetic language can be defined, for each moment in time and
generally, in opposition to conversational, practical speech:16 “poetry, which is
nothing other than utterance oriented toward expression, is ruled … by
immanent laws; the communicative function, which characterizes both
practical and emotional language, is minimized here” (Jakobson, “Noveishaia”
30; emphasis in the original).17 Such a definition does not mean that poetry or
literature can be grasped as substance, even if, a little later in the same article,
Jakobson speaks of “literariness” (literaturnost’) as the distinguishing quality
of literature and the object proper of literary studies. The literariness,
perceptibility, or faktura, of the text is a relational quality,18 indeed, an effect:
this quality is “in effect” only against a specific background (a linguistic norm,
a textual tradition)19 and only for as long as this background remains pertinent. 20
This is why the value of a literary text can be appreciated only after a careful
historical study. The task of the literary historian is to re-create faithfully the
background against which the text had “actualized” a certain set of devices.21
In every text now, in the place of the old duality of form and content, we
have the dynamics of the deforming and the deformed, dynamics that belong
wholly to the domain of form. Only by way of a sloppy schematism can one
speak of “content” that inertly awaits its other – a shaping force approaching
from somewhere else.22 When analysing narrative, Shklovskii distinguished
between fabula and siuzhet – a series of events given in the proper temporality
and sequence of their occurrence versus the manner in which they are presented
in narration (“Sterne’s Tristram” 296–8)23 – but this does not mean that the
“story told straight” is somehow prior to its deformation. On the contrary: the
story can only exist as deformed, as siuzhet; only in retrospect, after the siuzhet
has taken its course, can the fabula be reconstructed.24
 The Imperative of Form 43

The Formalists were particularly fond of those moments in literature when

form could be shown to engender “content” from its own inner necessity.25 Is
not the plot of the fairy tale – this purest of narrative forms – at its purest an
enchanted meandering whose sole destination is the postponement of the end?
For this enchantment to proceed along its winding path, there is a need for
material, for some pliant stuff from which twists and turns can be made. The
little hen cannot just take water from the sea and bring it to the choking rooster;
first, she must give the sea a wild boar’s tusk; but the wild boar will part with
his tusk only in exchange for an acorn; when asked for an acorn, the oak tree
(for some unknown reason) demands cow’s milk; the cow, of course, wants hay;
the reaper needs bast for his shoes; and so the little hen’s journey continues
through another dozen places and another dozen helpers (Shklovskii, “Sviaz’”
43). “Of course, these crooked roads are caused by specific conditions – by the
requirements of the siuzhet” (Shklovskii, “Sviaz’” 48). In seeking its fulfilment,
a form calls forth “content” not as an antinomic – if complementary – other but
as its own second term.26 So instead of “content,” it is proper to speak of
“material,” since “the idea of ‘material’ does not lie beyond the limits of form;
the material itself is a formal element” (Tynianov, “Literaturnyi fakt” 261).
Unlike content, material does not exist for itself: it exists solely for the
functioning of the dominant formal device; it is there to be moulded, deformed.
But let us take note of this apparent theoretical oxymoron: for the Formalists,
form is violence and deformation only to the extent to which it is also law and
organization. Shklovskii’s early definition of the text as the “sum total of all
artistic devices employed in it” (Rozanov 15) eventually gave way to the vision
of a systematic ensemble of functions:

We should no longer speak of a literary work as a “sum total” of its various aspects:
plot, style, etc. These abstractions are far outdated: plot, style, etc., exist in
interaction – the same interaction and relation that exist between rhythm and
semantics in verse. A work of literature represents a system of interrelated factors.
The relation of any one factor with the rest constitutes its function in regard to the
whole system. (Tynianov, “Oda” 227; emphasis in the original)

Since formal devices are not planted haphazardly in it, but are coordinated into
a totality, the text itself is a device, a higher-order mechanism.27
And if we were to ask once more, “Who is the subject of this mechanism?
Who is responsible for this organization of elements and functions?,” the author
would be, as before, the wrong answer. The author’s subjectivity is, once again,
insufficient to “cover” the formative work performed by the text. In Romantic
aesthetics, the mystical conception of the Genius had served to account for the
44 Automatic for the Masses

organic unity of the work of art.28 But no depths of the human being, no matter
how mystically conceived, can account for the same work of art seen as a
systematic totality. Such a totality has no subject, no human “coordinator.”
What totalizes the sum of elements into a textual whole is their subordination
to a governing constructive principle:

It is abundantly clear that every literary system is formed not by the peaceful
interaction of all factors, but by the domination, prominence, of one (or a group)
of them that functionally subordinates and “colors” the rest. Such a factor bears
the name … dominanta (Christiansen, B. Eikhenbaum). This does not mean,
however, that the subordinated factors are not important and that they deserve no
attention. On the contrary, the action of the governing factor, the dominanta, is
manifested precisely in this subordination, transformation, of all factors. (227)

In Gogol’s “Overcoat,” for instance, it is the “devices of verbal mimicry and

gesture” that play the dominant constructive role (Eikhenbaum, “Kak sdelana”
46). As they are “actualized,” the element of plot is subordinated, deformed.
The slim story line is there to support (“motivate”) the deployment of the
dominanta.29
What the constructive principle “does” can never be entirely intended by the
author. Just as the author cannot control the ways in which the constructive
principle of his work was generated – here the evolutionary laws of formal
differentiation have their say – so he is incapable of fully controlling the ways
in which this constructive principle fulfils itself within the text. His intention is
inevitably overridden by a necessity programmed into the very functioning of
the device:
Let us add: the author’s intention can be no more than a ferment. In handling the
specifically literary material and obeying it, the author departs from his intention.
Thus [Griboedov’s] Woe from Wit was supposed to be in a “high,” even
“magnificent,” style, but turned out to be a political, “archaistic,” pamphlet
comedy. Thus Evgenii Onegin was supposed to be, at first, a “satirical poem,” in
which the author “chokes on bile.” But while working on Chapter Four Pushkin
already writes: “where is my satire? There is no trace of it in Evgenii Onegin.”
The constructive principle, the relatedness of elements within the work, turns
the “author’s intention” into a ferment, no more. The “creative freedom” proves to
be an optimistic slogan, which does not correspond to reality, and gives way to
“creative necessity.” (Tynianov, “O literaturnoi evoliutsii” 278)

It is rather easy, from our current place in history, to take issue with the
theories of the Formalists, to approve or disprove, to be critical (in the good
 The Imperative of Form 45

sense of the word), to interject with a “Well, yes” or an “Oh, no.” We are,
understandably, tempted to evaluate their writings in the light of subsequent
conceptual developments and to apply to them the standard of more current
truths. “Well, yes, we know that the author’s intention matters little, that it tells
us next to nothing about what the text really does. The intentional fallacy is a
truism for us.” “Oh, no, the text is never such a fully coherent system of
elements and functions as to warrant analysis in terms of some absolute laws
of artistic construction or aesthetic evolution. Poststructuralism has taught us
to be wary of such totalizing conceptions.”
I am consciously resisting this temptation to be critical, to arbitrate between
the Formalist “contribution” and subsequent theoretical thought. The
perspective I have adopted excludes the very idea of “contribution,” of the
“lasting value” of this or that conceptual legacy. It is not even a question of
whether the Formalists were right or wrong, whether their notions did justice
to the object of their study. Once again: I take the theories of the Formalists not
from the point of view of truth, but from the perspective of pure happening; not
as a cognitive claim, but as a symbolic scenario. We must refrain from asking,
“Is this knowledge adequate to its field?,” in order to ask, “How does this
theory script the act of creation? What symbolic role does it give to the
practitioner of art, and how is this role justified?” From this kind of perspective,
analytical concepts are not claims to truth; they are figures, in the present case
– figures of thought. They are arranged in a topology, where they “take place,”
do something. We are allowed to view them as “actants,” as heroes of sorts.
A declaration made by Jakobson in 1921 lends support to such a vision: “If
the study of literature wants to become a science, it must recognize the artistic
device as its only ‘hero’ [geroi]” (Noveishaia 32). A few years later, Vladimir
Propp faced a terminological dilemma when analysing fairy-tale plots in terms
of typical actions (“functions”). Since these were performed not only by
humans but also by animals and all kinds of fantastic creatures, the designations
“hero” and “character” were bound to be misleading. Propp labelled this larger
category of narrative agents “dramatis personae” (personazhi). To
accommodate the same non-coincidence between human subjects and subjects
of the narrative action, A.J. Greimas introduced the term “actant.” Are we not
in a similar situation when we discover that, in the world of art, a function
traditionally centred in the human subject is suddenly being performed by the
decidedly non-human figure of the “device,” or the dominanta? Considered in
a purely functional way, the dominanta does, approximately, what the “genius”
or the “poet’s immortal soul” has done before. They all have the same function
in artistic creation; they are the same “actant” in different guises. Here is how
46 Automatic for the Masses

Friedrich Schlegel spoke of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister, more than a century

before the first Formalist manifestos:

But the reader who possesses a true instinct for system, who has a sense of totality
or that anticipation of the world in its entirety which makes Wilhelm so interesting,
will be aware throughout the work of what we might call its personality and living
individuality. And the more deeply he probes, the more inner connections and
relations and the greater intellectual coherence he will discover in it. If there is any
book with an indwelling genius, it is this. And if this genius could characterize
itself in detail and as a whole, then there would be no need for anyone else to say
what it is all about, or how it should be taken. (65; emphasis added)

I have highlighted the word “system” as a reminder of its central place in

Formalist poetics. Like Schlegel, the Formalists spoke of the artistic text as a
system; they too saw in it a “totality,” a “coherence” of “inner connections and
relations.”30 Yet for them, it was not the “indwelling genius” that, by fulfilling
itself, makes the text into a totality, but the “governing constructive principle.”
The “personality and living individuality” of a work was, for them, not the
correlative of a subjective presence (the author’s), but the result of an objective
process, which could be analysed in its discrete moments.
Another crucial difference prevents us from seeing the Formalist notion of
system as a variation on a theme already rehearsed in Romanticism. While in
both cases we are dealing with a process of totalization, it is important to note
how differently this totalization is brought about. The constructive principle is
something fully autochthonous to literature. After all, the Formalists’ main
preoccupation was to distinguish the operative logic of the literary from that of
any other “series.” The Romantic genius, on the other hand, is found at work
in a great many worldly phenomena. This is what allows it to mediate the
principal dichotomy of Romantic thought: that between natural creation and
human artistic production. And one last, all-important, divergence: the theme
of dissimulation is missing in the Romantic corpus of aesthetic writing. Paul
Ricoeur’s contrast between the hermeneutic of Freud and that of religious
phenomenology is applicable for setting apart the Formalist and Romantic
visions of the artistic text: one pivots on the problematic of distortion and
concealment, the other on the problematic of depth (Ricoeur 7).
As the text thus loses its anchorage in the figure of the author, another
persona enters the plot in what seems, at first, to be a merely ancillary role. I
have in mind the persona of the analyst. In the Romantic “work of genius,” the
generative spirit is immanently present, it is always already realized. From then
on, it is up to the “reader with a sense for system and totality” to apprehend it.
 The Imperative of Form 47

If this reader were never to come along, the text would not be deprived of the
genius that inhabits it. Not so in Formalist poetics, where the effectiveness of
the artistic device is always relational. For any moment in the past, there is
reconstructive work to be done so that the (differential) qualities of novelty,
originality, transgression, and so on can re-emerge in their original pertinence,
no longer felt today. But in a synchronic perspective too, the text’s “in itself”
is never given to us directly. What for the reader is the undefined experience of
individual style, is the objective work of a dynamic system, one whose
elements and functions are susceptible to meticulous and exhaustive analysis.
Only when this analysis is complete can the preconscious experience of style
become the conscious apprehension of the text’s identity.
Thus, in order to show itself as what it truly is, the text must “pass” through
this new place – the repository of hermeneutic knowledge. The analyst is, to be
sure, hardly more than the “guardian” of hermeneutic cognition. But since the
place he occupies is indispensable to the historical existence of the text, the
importance of his role cannot be underestimated.
To convince ourselves of this, we need only consider the place of the analyst
in Freud’s theory of the unconscious, which is roughly contemporaneous with
the Formalist movement in European art criticism. In the Freudian analytical
situation, the “text” that issues from the subject behaves in the same way as the
artistic text in the vision of the Russian Formalists. We find a similar plot
operating here, albeit from the perspective of content. With the Freudian dream
– the psychoanalytical “text” par excellence31 – we are once again at the site of
a deformation: the dream thoughts (the “latent content” of the dream) appear
disfigured in the dream representation (the “manifest content”). Their
ostensible author – the dreaming subject – cannot be expected to know what
the dream truly represents. All she sees is the enigmatic, ludic hieroglyphics
presented to her in her sleep (the manifest content), and even these are often
blotted out by waking consciousness. The dream images are, of course, related
to the original “message” by hard links of determination. But between
“message” and “presentation” a deforming instance intervenes, a mechanism,
a device. Employed by what Freud calls the “censor,” this device has every
right to be called poetic, since the principles of its functioning – displacement
and condensation – are also the principles of figurative speech:32

A psychic force is expressed in dream activity which on the one hand strips
elements of high psychic value of their intensity, and which on the other hand
creates new values by way of over-determination from elements of small value,
these new values subsequently getting into the dream content. If this is the method
of procedure, there has taken place in the formation of the dream a transference
48 Automatic for the Masses

and displacement of the psychic intensities of the individual elements, of which

the textual difference between the dream and the thought content appears as a
result. The process which we assume here is nothing less than the essential part of
the dream activity; it merits the designation of dream displacement. Dream
displacement and dream condensation are the two craftsmen to whom we may
chiefly attribute the molding of the dream.
I think we also have an easy task in recognizing the psychic force which makes
itself felt in the circumstances of dream displacement. The result of this
displacement is that the dream content no longer resembles the core of the dream
thoughts at all, and that the dream reproduces only a disfigured form of the dream
wish in the unconscious. But we are already acquainted with dream disfigurement;
we have traced it back to the censorship which one psychic instance in the psychic
life exercises over the other. Dream displacement is one of the chief means for
achieving this disfigurement. Is fecit, cui profuit. We may assume that dream
displacement is brought about by the influence of this censor, of the endopsychic
repulsion. (Freud 286–7; emphasis in the original)

Several places in this lengthy passage warrant added emphasis. First, there
is the personification of objective psychic forces as “craftsmen,” which, after
the earlier remarks on typical actions and “actants,” I take as more than a
stylistic embellishment. These are Freud’s new “heroes,” just like the device
was to be the “only hero” for Jakobson and his colleagues. Second, there is
Freud’s note concerning “textual difference,” which should remind us of the
textual difference that exists between fabula and siuzhet in Formalist theory. Is
not the latent content of the dream precisely the fabula that becomes distorted
on the plane of representation (siuzhet)? The fact that Freud operates on the
side of content becomes significant here: while, for him, the “this is it” of the
dream text is its fabula (the concealed wishthoughts, which he seeks to decipher
by undoing the “crooked” ways of their signification), it is just the other way
around for the Formalists (who seek to make perceptible the “crookedness”
itself).33 For Freud, it is the meaning of the text that is hidden (behind the
apparent triviality or sheer nonsense of the dream narrative); for the Formalists,
the meaning of the text hides the determining role of formal construction. Still,
from a purely formal point of view, the scenario is the same: in both cases, the
“this is it” of the text, its “moment of truth,” is systematically occluded and
must be systematically recovered through an analytic method that is transparent
in relation to the original production of the text.
With Freud, but also with the Russian Formalists, we enter through the front
gate into a distinctly modern existence of the textual, characterized as it is by
an essential split. In this new existence, what presents itself “initially and for
 The Imperative of Form 49

the most part” as the text, the manifest, is manifestly not it. Behind it, in an
obscurity neither too heavy (since it can be dispelled almost routinely by a
hermeneutic that claims scientific status for itself) nor too light (since it inheres
in the very being of representation), lies the latent actuality of the text, its raison
d’être. Yet this split is not as dramatic as the one we find in Hume, Kant, or
Schopenhauer – the rift between “the world as representation,” on the one hand,
and the world as it actually is, on the other. Starting from some moment in the
second half of the nineteenth century (in Marx this moment is already current),
dissimulation is lodged in the very heart of representation. By its nature, that
which comes forth as the text comes forth as something other than it truly is. 34
But – a crucial qualification – this is a systematically produced dissimulation,
and not the chasm of some post-lapsarian divorce between essences and
appearances, the thing-in-itself and its renditions by finite human
consciousness. And because it is systematically produced and systematically
sustained, this dissimulation can be systematically overcome.
Freudian psychoanalysis is the prototype for what Ricoeur has theorized as
the “hermeneutic of suspicion.” Marx and Nietzsche are its other two great
practitioners.35 The hermeneutic in question approaches symbols with the
conviction that they conceal truth rather than reveal it. “Interpretation is
lucidity’s answer to ruse” (Ricoeur 159). Meaning lies hidden behind a false
appearance and is to be uncovered only through an act of demystification. The
reader must cast away the manifest externality in order to possess, beyond it,
the latent yet genuine meaning. As such acts of demystification are the main
items of interest in Part I of this study, I should state how my perspective differs
from Ricoeur’s. As a philosopher, Ricoeur treats the hermeneutics of faith and
suspicion as universals. He opposes them as two principal modes of
interpretation before showing, through (and beyond) a reading of Freud, how
their antithesis can be overcome dialectically. By contrast, I adopt a more
historicizing approach. I discuss modernist procedures of knowledge in which
the dissimulative constitution of the object motivates (i.e., enables and
legitimizes) certain practical comportments and “interventions” on the part of
the subject. As I see it, the demystifying act is practically oriented from the
outset, for the principle of dissimulation it uncovers furnishes the subject with
a “project” (to do away with dissimulation) and a binding law of conduct. In
chapter 3, I will have more to say on the relation between this hermeneutics
and the practice it authorizes. Presently, I note that in the cases I consider,
starting with the Formalists, it is not a matter of some subjective attitude –
“suspicion” instead of “faith” – setting the parameters of truth. Rather, it is a
matter of certain historically and culturally specific “vis-à-vis” with an object-
field whose inner logic creates the conditions for its misrecognition. By the
50 Automatic for the Masses

same logic, the object invites – nay, demands – a particular kind of interpretive
and practical comportment (this is what makes it a demanding object). Yet it is
not a mere question of wresting covert truth from overt falsity. It is a question
of grasping as truth, as essence, the very principle that generates false
appearances.
In Freud, the manifest content of the dream is a dissimulative show insofar
as the Traumwerk presents itself as a random formative activity that juggles
together the trifles of the quotidian and thus conceals the all- important message
of desire. For the Formalists, we read in reverse: the text is dissimulation in the
sense that it almost always comes forth as “substance” (content of some kind,
a message, a story, a personal expression), while its in-itself, its true being as
literature, consists in non-substantive deformation – the pure negativity of form.
And this is where the hero of hermeneutics comes in. He exposes the
dissimulation and overcomes it. His competence bridges the gap between the
two hypostases of the text – in Freud’s terms, the latent and the manifest – and
makes it one again, restores its identity/truth. It is not just a matter of
discovering the particular message of desire or the particular formal
construction hidden behind the manifest appearance. At a more radical level,
the hermeneutic in question demonstrates that Desire and Form are the very
engines of dissimulation; they run the show of false appearances.
In the moment the dissimulation is exposed, the text – a dream or a piece of
literary writing – acquires a new status. The analyst has taken it as a token of
something (a repressed wish; a constructive principle at work). To wit, he has
read it not for what the text says or shows overtly, but for what is being
conveyed covertly through it. Something is bespoken without being spoken of.
Something is being fulfilled, or realized, by means of the text without actually
being represented in it. The Freudian dream is anything but a representation of
desire. The crux of the psychoanalytic approach is precisely this: that desire
cannot appear directly in dream images and words lest it overwhelm the ego.
Desire exists in the dream not as the object of representation but as
representation’s organizing principle – as the rule of deformation, which is also
a rule of deception. As such, it is everywhere and nowhere. It is realized by the
totality of the dream signs (the entire dream narrative is the acting-out of the
illicit wish), but nowhere in those signs is it pictured or spoken as such. And so
it is with the constructive principle in the great majority of texts handed down
by the literary tradition. The deformation of the material betrays the workings
of a non- human agency, an autonomous mechanism, but the mechanism itself
is not represented as such. The status of the text as a token (in the eyes of the
analyst) is a direct consequence of the fact that its veritable origin and raison
d’être are dissimulated. If the text itself spoke of them, one would not have to
 The Imperative of Form 51

search for something behind its signs and read those signs, in their totality, as
a token of the hidden; there would be no need to read through the representation
so as to get beyond it, where the principle of its organization lies; there would
be no need for the hermeneutic. And vice versa: the text needs the hermeneutic,
it calls for the exercise of method, because it is constituted through a systematic
and objectively operative dissimulation; this is what makes it a demanding
object.
Before bringing this first enactment of the plot to a conclusion, one seeming
contradiction remains to be addressed. Why is it that, on the one hand, artistic
form in the writings of the Russian Formalists appears – both synchronically
and diachronically – as the “work of the negative,” while, on the other hand,
there is talk of some latent actuality of the text, of its “in itself,” of the text as
it truly is, and so on? Why does Jakobson speak of the “literariness” of literature
in the same way Shklovskii speaks of the “stoniness” of stones? And are not
terms such as “device,” “system,” and “totality” meant to convey a more
substantive understanding of the aesthetic? What we are witnessing here is not
a contradiction proper but a peculiarity of the plot that interests us. True, when
taken by itself, in the Formalist perspective, the textual can only be grasped as
unfolded negativity, the evanescent interplay of differentials. Thus the object,
the “text,” is lost – it is, really, nothing.36 Yet it is grasped, and this hermeneutic
grasp is inscribed as something substantive that pertains to the object. The
performative of knowledge is included within the known as the very “soul” of
the latter.
In its most typical application, the Formalist hermeneutic demonstrates how
the artistic object systematically defies understanding in terms of content. But
for this purely negative characteristic to be seen as immanent to the text, as its
positivity, we must suppose that the text is capable of somehow retaining within
itself that which its formal movement negates, distances, “makes strange”: “for
the older technique or content must somehow subsist within the work as what
is cancelled or overwritten, modified, inverted or negated, in order for us to feel
the force, in the present, of what is alleged to have once been an innovation”
(Jameson, A Singular Modernity 128).37 Taken on its own – as printed words
on a page, as daubs on a canvas, or as audible vibrations in the air – the text
does not seem to possess such a power. Thus for it to subsist in its original and
true being (as a specimen of the Literary), it must be understood as containing
and carrying through space and time that which appears external to it – its own
expert reader; but optimally, it must contain and carry him in such a way that
“he” is no longer “he” – some principally detachable instance of human
intelligence – but somehow a part of the textual mechanism itself, a builtin
reader,38 as it were, a reader-device.
52 Automatic for the Masses

This is difficult to imagine, but it does point us to the horizon of the most
radical modernist experiments in literature and art: to create a sign that would
be its own interpretant, that is, a sign that would not depend on knowledge of
conventions in order to exercise its effect. If every violation holds its
significance only for as long as the violated canon is in place, then the sole
possible way to eschew historical relativity is to perpetrate an act of absolute
violence. To inflict on the material a deformation so radical that it will be read
everywhere and always as deformation. Not to undermine a particular idiom
of artistic communication, but to subvert communication as such. Not to speak
differently, but to jettison representational discourse altogether so that the text
will exist as pure and unequivocal bespeaking. Not to introduce a new formal
device, but to make Form as such the dominanta of the work, its sole generative
principle. One could write so as to make it seem as if Literature were writing
itself or Language were speaking itself. One could string words so as to make
it evident that the words themselves have generated their compelling sequence
(in accordance with their phonetic, morphological, or graphic properties). That
is, one could perform literary work as a symbolic act of submission to the
necessities of form, and the product of this work would be read, everywhere
and always, as a token of literature’s ownmost essence: the Word as Such.
Russian Formalist theory was more than modernist poetics, but it was that
too.39 The personal ties between the members of the school, on one hand, and
Futurism and its Soviet avant-garde offshoots, on the other, are well known. So
are the parallels between the theoretical formulations of Opoiaz and modernist
artistic programs. The seminal concept of defamiliarization is to be found in
“vernacular” form in declarations pre-dating Shklovskii’s essays.40 The
generation of content out of (verbal) form was an idea taken directly from
Futurist manifestos.41 The cult of the self- valuable word found its first priests
not in the Formalist critics but in Khlebnikov and Kruchenykh. In the writings
of the latter one also finds the imperative for deformation and the initial
theorization of poetic faktura and sdvig;42 the emergence of new perception
from the devices of irregularity;43 and the stipulation that words be combined
according to their phonetic valences, not their semantic properties. 44 All of this
is to say that the Formalists’ philological poetics cannot be easily separated
from the Futurists’ “poetic philology.”45 The intimate relationship often made
it difficult to determine whether an idea had been generated by avant-garde
artists and subsequently taken over by the philologists or the other way around.
The main reason “formalism” became the term under which, in Stalinist times,
every kind of modernist experimentation was censured was that the school of
criticism was seen from the outset as an expression of modernist tendencies in
art.46 Thus it is perhaps more productive to see Formalism not as a school of
 The Imperative of Form 53

critical thought and discipline-specific theory but rather as part of a broader

cultural movement in which textual and metatextual practices intertwined, each
drawing from the other.47 On this view, it cannot be said, as Burke does, that
Formalism’s treatment of the author is but a matter of methodological
convenience, a provisional manoeuvre that clears the way to the object proper
of literary science (The Death 71). It is also a symbolic act that motivates the
practice of art by anchoring it in a (supposedly) objective dynamic. The death
of the author is, at the same time, the projected rebirth of Art as a fully autotelic
principle. He who no longer is an author acquires a new function, or “calling”:
to hearken to the laws of form and thereby ensure that the autotelic movement,
on page or canvas, is such indeed.
Chapter 2

The Imperative of Content

It is bound to seem a scandal of sorts that in my approach to the culture of

socialist realism the first step should be Russian Formalism – a movement that
was to be forcefully extinguished at the end of the 1920s, a movement whose
name was to become that of a heresy in both aesthetic criticism and artistic
practice during Stalin’s time.1 Perhaps it would have been more prudent to head
straight to some properly Marxist aesthetic doctrine, which, whatever its
shortcomings or unorthodoxies, could not but prove more akin to the spirit and
the letter of socialist realism. After all, from very early on the Formalists were
recognized as the main ideological enemies of Marxism in the field of
aesthetics and art criticism.2 This objection falls with the reminder that we are
not tracing the genesis of socialist realism as a genesis of ideas. The kinships
and genealogies, the thematic affinities and resemblances, that emerge dutifully
in that venerable mode of inquiry called “history of ideas” have little
argumentative weight here. But this means that no criteria are available for
anticipatory judgment on whether this or that theory, this or that methodology,
“approximates,” “foreshadows,” or “prepares the ground for” socialist realism.
Soviet cultural history adds a supportive footnote to this methodological
position. It is well known that nothing like a Marxist aesthetic doctrine was
bequeathed to the 1930s by the 1920s. All attempts to formulate such a doctrine,
to elaborate a critical methodology on the basis of historical materialism, failed
to survive Stalin’s “cultural revolution”; between 1928 and 1932, such attempts
were branded as so many deviations from the proper study of things aesthetic,
thus virtually sharing the fate of Formalism. Schools of critical thought that
only a few years earlier had been the main players in the vigorous debate on
Marxism in the arts – the followers of Bogdanov, the leaders of RAPP, the
group around Voronskii at Pereval, Pereverzev and his disciples, the theorists
56 Automatic for the Masses

of LEF – had been neutralized by the early 1930s (the most tenacious of them,
RAPP, survived until the Party resolution of April 1932). By the late 1920s they
had already acquired the derogatory suffix “-shchina” (bogdanovshchina,
voronshchina, pereverzevshchina); during Stalinism, these verbalized essences
would be used – depending on the context – as either cautionary references or
terms of indictment.3 And it is difficult to say whether being charged, say, with
voronshchina – a reactionary blend of intuitivism, irrationalism, and
voluntarism that was said to distil Trotskyism in the realm of literary
scholarship – was any less stigmatizing than being charged with formalism. 4
Still, these instances of knowledge, these schools of (professedly) Marxist
thought, which Stalinism would eventually abolish, have legitimacy for us in
the present context – a legitimacy perhaps no greater but also no less than that
of Formalism. This is not because they anticipate or approximate a later
theoretical orthodoxy, but because they rehearse one and the same general
scenario: the emergence of the work of art from “behind the back” of its
(supposed) author.
The most elaborate, internally consistent, and methodologically rigorous
attempt to formulate a textual analytic and to implement a corresponding
practice of critical reading was that of the “Sociological” or “Pereverzevian”
school – an academic group formed in the second half of the 1920s. 5 The
group’s programmatic statements are contained in a collection of critical essays,
Literaturovedenie (Literary Studies), published in 1928.6 These essays were
remarkably consistent with the earlier writings of the group’s leader, Valerian
Pereverzev (1882–1968),7 but went beyond them – especially two substantial
contributions by Genadii Pospelov – towards elaborating a full-fledged science
of the literary.
In Pereverzev and his followers we find something quite contrary to the
theories of the Formalists, whom the former attacked on numerous occasions. 8
For the Pereverzevians, as for most Marxist-minded critics of the time,
Formalism was a survival of bourgeois consciousness,9 an offspring of the
divorce between reality and its ideal figurations, with the latter perceived as an
autonomous realm that sustained itself, in the air as it were, through powers all
its own. The falsity of this view accounted for the principal methodological
falsity of Russian Formalism: its fundamental disinterestedness in the genesis
of the artistic fact and its propensity to treat that fact descriptively rather than
etiologically.10 Against the Formalist science of literature, based on a study of
the intrinsic laws of the “literary series,” the Pereverzevians never tired of
repeating that the literary fact can only be known objectively in its causal
relation to the extraliterary. More than a mere principle of scientific
investigation, etiology was for them synonymous with the scientific itself: “All
 The Imperative of Content 57

that is required is that the critic see the work of art as a causally conditioned
phenomenon of life, that he consider his main task to be discovering this causal
relationship, i.e., the scientific explanation for the appearance of the work of
art” (Pereverzev, “Theoretical Premises” 39).
Obviously, we are dealing not with mere differences but with a fundamental
rift that is as much methodological as ideological. Formalism, on the one hand,
and the brand of Marxist analysis of literature practised by Pereverzev’s group,
on the other, present themselves as irreconcilable experiences of the literary.
With the latter, indeed, with all traditional Marxist literary criticism, an entirely
new dimension is adjoined to the manifest “there-ness” of the artistic text – the
dimension of socio-economic being, which is absent as such from classic
Formalist theory. Yet as we register this heterogeneity of positions, we must
also register the dialectical twist whereby it is taken up and sublated within a
higher level homology. For did we not witness, in the discussion of Formalism,
that the experience of the textual is characterized precisely by a displacement
such that what is manifestly there as the text is really “not it” or, at least, cannot
be relied upon to ground any definitive truth about the text? And so it is that
precisely when they opposed themselves to Formalist readings of literature,
when they denied the selfsufficient existence of the literary series, the
Sociological critics showed themselves to be fully partaking of this very
experience. When they insisted that the seeming autonomy of the aesthetic
realm, its (mis)representation as something detached from the coarse reality of
social existence, should be unmasked as the ideology of one particular social
formation (the bourgeoisie), they too were confronting this realm as a scene of
dissimulation. For the Formalists, it was the “overgrowth” of content and
referentiality, of ideas and subjective expressions, from underneath which the
mechanisms of formal construction must be brought out; for the Marxist
Sociologists, it was the independent and ideal existence of the literary that had
to be demystified in order for us to see the mechanisms by which social life
reproduces itself.
To identify and dispel the dissimulation of literature’s ideal being involves
identifying and dispelling also the illusion of its privileged relation to the
personal “inner world.” Thus, just as inevitably as Formalist methodology
displaced the individual author by “hitching” him to the broader movement of
objective “forces operative outside of him,” we find this displacement in the
methodology of the Sociological school. Here, the movement of external forces
is also objective, but the objectivity in question is different:
It is not in subjective process that a literary scholar operating on the basis of
Marxist methodology should seek an explanation for poetic phenomena, but in
objective reality, not in the movement of ideas but in the movement of material
58 Automatic for the Masses

reality … Nothing in the poetic fact can be explained by the poet’s intentions,
because from the Marxist standpoint it is not thought that is definitive, but being.
It is not the idea on which a work of art is based, but being; and literary scholarship
must discover not the idea but being as the basis of the poetic phenomenon … A
literary scholar’s task consists in discovering the objective reality in a work of
literature which provided the material for it and determined its structure. Marxist
research consists in discovering this being and elucidating the organic, necessary
connection between the given work of art and the being in question. (Pereverzev,
“Essential Premises” 55–6)

Once again, there is no need to arbitrate between the Formalists and Pereverzev
in order to decide which dimension should count as the truly or ultimately
determining one: the objective dynamics of form or the objective mechanism
of social being (just as there is no need to arbitrate between Marxism and
psychoanalysis as to whether the ultimate unconscious is not, after all, the
socio-economic). At this point, all we need to do is take note of the fundamental
fact that emerges at the formal convergence of these two otherwise
irreconcilable currents of thought: the author is not the author, the individual
subject is not enough. But this fact does not emerge in isolation; it stands as the
centrepiece, the main event, of a plot whose constitutive moments were
sketched out apropos of Formalism. Now, in the writings of the Sociological
school, we can follow this plot as it unfolds in the dimension of “content.”
Anterior to every literary text stands the social being of which Pereverzev
speaks, as a unity of objectivity and subjecthood, that is, as an objective world,
which is also and equally consciousness (Pereverzev, “Theoretical Premises”
41–2; “Essential Premises” 59).11 The textual is always a manifestation of the
latter, but in such a way that the duality-in-unity we find outside the text is also
to be found within it. Since consciousness cannot become manifest except
through representations (“images,” obrazy, as Pereverzev calls them), the
literary text also gives us a “world” (represented objectivity) that is equally and
simultaneously a self (representing subjectivity).
Pereverzev’s monism – inspired by the empiriomonism of Bogdanov –
allowed him to solve rather easily the question of whether literature is capable
of adequately reflecting the objective world beyond the page – a question that
had been a stumbling block for the materialist critics of the preceding century
(Chernishevskii, Dobroliubov, Pisarev). They had thought literature fully
capable of proffering such a reflection; but in those cases – hardly incidental –
when the world appeared crooked in the mirror of representation, there was
little for them to do but deliberate on the inadequacies of this or that author’s
world view.12 Now Pereverzev could dispense with the problem altogether by
 The Imperative of Content 59

confidently declaring that representation is always adequate to reality, provided

that the two terms are properly understood: “Yes, art reproduces reality exactly,
retaining its unity of object and subject; it reproduces the objective basis of
consciousness, which is actual reality” (“Theoretical Premises” 43). The key
word in this statement is “reproduces.” Art does not “reflect” reality; it
reproduces reality; it participates in the larger process through which a form of
collective life, an instance of social being, perpetuates itself. When “reality” is
understood to be synonymous with this very social being, its reproduction in
literary artefacts can only be more or less successful, never “false.”
Of course, it is possible, in a heuristic abstraction, to separate the world
depicted from its depicter and to speak of how the former is a distorted copy of
the world as it actually is or was; just as it was possible, for the Formalists, to
distinguish between the events of the story as they actually took place (the
fabula) and the arrangement of those events in a story (the siuzhet).13 But such
a heuristic abstraction should not lead to the idea of an objective world pre-
dating and awaiting a consciousness that may or may not represent this world
adequately. Just as the story can only exist as narrated – that is, as (de)formed
by the movement of storytelling – the world can only be given to us as
someone’s world – an objectivity already in the shape of subjecthood. As with
the Formalists, for whom formal distortion is prior to – what comes, a
posteriori, to be perceived as – the distorted material, in Pereverzev the
“subjective” deformation is ontologically prior to the deformed “reality.” He
often reaches for the apparent pleonasm “ actual reality” in order to dispel the
notion of some naive and simple objectivity unadulterated by the presence of
the subjective. An “actual reality” is one in which the “subjective,” hence also
the “distortive,” is factored from the very beginning.
Because the distortive work of consciousness – including, of course, artistic
consciousness – has no positive “outside” (this consciousness, at least for
Pereverzev, can never be fully transparent to its own objective determinations),
distortion itself turns into a positive characteristic of the object under
investigation, that is, the literary text. Since every representation is at the same
time a misrepresentation (of the objective conditions underlying a given form
of social life), misrepresentation does not come with a negative sign, as a lie or
mystification. For those same objective conditions of social existence that have
been “misrepresented” in the text have also determined, in some moment
anterior to the text’s production, the specific character of this very
misrepresentation.14 Because we can always count on it to be there, and because
– even more importantly – we can always count on it for the key to undoing its
own masquerade, misrepresentation must be thought as one with the objectivity
it camouflages, as in fact belonging to it. But thus conceived, what we have
60 Automatic for the Masses

been referring to as “misrepresentation” is, really, dissimulation; and the new

objectivity, to which dissimulation belongs not as a negative moment, a
deterrent, but as a positive determination, is none other than Pereverzev’s
“actual reality”: objectivity grasped together with the immanent laws of its
subjective deformation.
Pereverzev was fully aware that the Formalists had spoken of deformation
as an essential fact pertaining to things literary and artistic. Yet he insisted that
the Marxists “knew [this fact] long before Shklovskii” and that they knew it
differently: “They [the Marxists] know that the mechanism of deformation, a
device through which social reality is formed, is determined by the base and
causally dependent on the base, and that it is in the base that an explanation and
understanding of deformation must be sought” (“Formalists” 138; emphasis
added). When the base – which is to say, the material conditions of social
existence – is thought in a dialectical unity with the mechanisms whereby these
conditions shape human consciousness, we end up with Pereverzev’s monistic
“social being.” As it “deforms,” the base also determines and structures social
reality (in its “subjective” manifestations).
The same mechanism of dissimulation-organization is found operative
within the artistic text, which is always a concretion of a particular class
“character,” “attitude,” or “will” – that is, of the subjective aspect of social
being. On the most general level, the text dissimulates, inasmuch as this
concretion of social being comes across as a reified world, as depicted
objectivity, thus concealing its subjective dimension and occasioning the
“realist” or “referential” illusion. We fall prey to this illusion when we try, for
instance, to relate Pushkin’s Captain’s Daughter to the historical reality of
Pugachev’s rebellion. In doing so, we fail to see the “depicter within the
depicted” (Pereverzev, “Essential Premises” 59–60). In this particular case, the
“depicter” is a rather different reality: the class reality of the urbanized and
well-educated small landed gentry. The reality of Pugachev’s rebellion, in
being depicted, is also being subjected. In other words, it is being reconstructed
in accordance with the laws of perspective immanent to another world. But this
means that it is also subjected to deformation. The irreducible measure of non-
coincidence between the artistic representation and its real-life referent had
been viewed by the Formalists as a result of the laws of artistic construction.
The critics of the Sociological school saw a similar discrepancy but attributed
it to the immanent laws governing the historical process. 15
It should be amply clear by now that when the latter spoke of the subjective,
they did not mean the individual subject, the author, or even the social group to
which he belonged. What they had in mind, rather, was the “character” of
reality itself, the “subjective aspect of social relations between people”
 The Imperative of Content 61

(Pospelov, “K metodike” 67). The text is the place where the immanent
principles of the social world’s organization become the immanent laws of the
unfolding artistic content: “In the artistic works’ system of imagery, social
reality (a unity of representation and essence, ‘form and content’) presents itself
as detached and consciously apprehended in the image. The whole system of
images, in its interconnection and logic of development, is none other than the
interconnection, logic, and lawfulness [zakonomernost’] of reality itself, given
as an artistic consciousness” (Bespalov, “Problema” 26). This consciousness,
which belongs to social reality in toto, both “contains” and transcends each
individual subjectivity. Clearly, the individual subject is incapable of knowing,
willing, and intending everything that the trans-individual consciousness “does”
by way of artistic representation. Much of the work takes place behind his back,
eludes him.16
With regard to the bourgeois author, this drama of consciousness is
particularly poignant, for he misrecognizes even the basic fact that he belongs
to a class collectivity and that he is writing as part of it. His understanding of
himself is that of a unique consciousness, free to encounter the world on its
own and to make sense of it. In its manifest being, therefore, his text offers us,
typically, a personal quest for knowledge and beauty, for self- expression and
identity (usually within the narrow limits of individual ethics and psychology).
But we discover “the depicter within the depicted,” the latent actuality of the
text within its manifest being, when we ask, “What social reality immanently
tends to present itself as a ‘world’ to be known and conquered through the
individual’s own powers and skills (including artistic skills), through
independently accumulated experience and hard-won sense of self?” The
answer is forthcoming: the reality in question is one in which the relations of
production imply the (latent) fact of ever greater interdependence between the
individual members of society, while also posing the (manifest) imperative for
competition, specialization of skills, disassociation from traditional forms of
collectivity, and so on.17
As social being is reproduced in the text, so also is the dissimulation peculiar
to it. Manifestly, Maksim Gor’kii’s early stories depict the conflict between two
character types: the “restless” – those who yearn for an escape from the bleak
reality of their social existence – and the “fellow-travellers” – those who
acquiesce to it. Around these two poles, a series of semantic oppositions is
established: “the exceptional and the ordinary, the free and the bounded, the
rebellious and the conceited” (Bespalov, “Stil’” 301). In Gor’kii’s legendary-
allegorical tales, the conflict is usually recast as one between the anarchic and
virulent freedom of the “natural man” (Larra, Danko, the Man) and the stifling
enclosures of the man-made world (the domain of civilization). Yet, the
62 Automatic for the Masses

Sociological critic informs us, these manifestly irreconcilable opposites are in

fact two sides of one and the same “socio-psychological tendency” (sotsio-
psikhologicheskoe ustremlenie)18: in the age of industrial capitalism, the urban
petty bourgeoisie in Russia is threatened with extinction by the spread of large-
scale, machine-driven production; the class’s unstable position, above the
social bottom but below desired material prosperity, translates into a
psychological oscillation between rejection of reality and hopeful
reconciliation with it (301).19 This is a single psychological “complex,” whose
moments have been separated in artistic representation and embodied as
different and indeed conflicting realities (300–1). But the masquerade of
representation does not end here; it scrambles also the vectors of desire. The
desire for stable prosperity on the part of the lower urban bourgeoisie, frustrated
as it is by the actual socio-economic conditions in Russia at the turn of the
century, dissimulates as a dreamy striving for freedom opposed by a
monotonous and stagnant life. Along the same lines, an idealized “state of
nature” emerges as a redeeming alternative to the artificiality of human
civilization. The actual fear of an impoverished and declassed existence
(bosiachestvo) is represented/deformed in Gor’kii’s stories as a romanticized
vagrancy (brodiazhnichestvo) outside the bonds of a social group, family, and
property (297), while the actual but impeded desire – to belong permanently to
the prosperous bourgeois world and its culture – is represented/deformed as its
own wishful denial.
And lest we think that these transmutations are due to some idiosyncrasy or
bad faith on Gor’kii’s part, Bespalov sets the record straight: “The social
tendency expressed in the central image [of the ‘restless’] is not the author’s
commission, his conception or intention, not his political, ideological
convictions; this is the objective directionality [napravlennost’] and social
content expressed in the image, independent of the will and intentions of the
author” (280). If, in the writings of the Formalists, an objectively ascertainable
dynamic of form traverses/overcomes the author’s individual consciousness, in
the theories of the Sociological school the same function is performed by the
“objective … social content.” And the function in question is that of an
impersonal, supra-individual volition. One and the same cognitive scenario is
played out in two ostensibly heterogeneous dimensions. Ostensibly, two
different sets of phenomena are being encountered, divergent realities are being
asserted and known as “real,” incompatible positivities are being called upon
to ground epistemological certainties. Yet despite their divergent paths, the
idealist poetics of the Formalists and the materialist hermeneutics of the
Sociological school arrive at the same vision: the formidable weight of a new
objectivity has come upon the individual subject; it now envelopes him and
 The Imperative of Content 63

“instrumentalizes” his consciousness towards its own ends; it summons him

forth in a voice that is misheard and, as misheard, it is always obeyed; it acts
through him so that he is never equal to what he himself has “done”; an
impersonal agency is now accountable for this work, concretized within each
particular text as the agency of a particular “device” or, as we are about to see,
the agency of a particular “image.” Consequently, for the literary analyst the
text assumes the value of a token inasmuch as it – regardless of the specific
plot, genre, or style – furnishes an example of this agency at work.
To identify an extraliterary determinant, a socio-psychological “character”
(Pereverzev), “tendency” (Bespalov, Ulrikh Fokht), or “complex” (Pospelov,
Vasilii Sovsun), was insufficient if this determinant could not be shown to be
immanently of the text, to have a uniquely literary existence.20 Just because
they denied the independence of the literary series, the critics of the
Sociological school were not going to deny the specificity of literature among
other superstructural phenomena – or, for that matter, the possibility of poetics
as a discipline distinct from economics, sociology, social psychology, and
socio-economic history.21 With no less passion than the Formalists, Pereverzev
insisted on the particular character of the literary sphere (Poliakov 21–2); he
too was a committed “specifier” (spetsifikator).22 Closely following the doyen
of Marxist aesthetics in Russia, Georgii Plekhanov, Pereverzev saw “play”
(igra) and “image” (obraz) as determinants of artistic phenomena in general
and of literature in particular:

The concept of art is closely associated with that of the image as a specific feature
of art. Art is always action; it consists in reproducing behavior characteristic of a
particular form of life, behavior otherwise known as psychology or character.
When this form of life reproduces the system of behavior characteristic of it, apart
from the immediate battle for life, it is playing. The system of behavior reproduced
or, what is the same thing, the character or psychology reproduced, is the image.
It is impossible to reproduce behavior, to play, without the image. The image
constitutes the essence of play. Play without the image, without reproduction of
the system of behavior or character, is simply unthinkable, it is simply impossible.
Art is play and art is image are essentially equivalent formulae, because play can
be realized only in the image, because to play means to present an image. In play,
the image is merged with the organism at play and has no existence apart from that
organism … In art, the image becomes separated from the player; it becomes
objectivated and takes on an independent existence … It is in this objectivation
that the act of artistic creativity consists. It is through the objectivation of play,
through its embodiment in the matter of the external world, that the artist creates
64 Automatic for the Masses

images. In art, social character, the subject of play, becomes the object known as
the image. (Pereverzev, “Problems” 155)

Partly because of its lingering connotations as the word for “icon,” the
Russian obraz resolves more easily the tension between sensuousness and
sense – between the depictive as such and its semantic fulfilment – that
characterize its English counterpart. So even when Pereverzev speaks of the
“objectness” of the image, its independent existence in the materiality of the
artistic medium, the next step is inevitably implied: to show that a
representation is always inhabited by the (social) subjective, that it is not only
a sensuous concretion (“image” in its most literal meaning) but also “character.”
This transition is facilitated by the fact that in one standard usage, obraz indeed
means a depiction of a person, a character, a verbal or iconic figuration-
individuation of the human.
The capaciousness of the Russian term allows Pereverzev to think of the
artistic image as an agency, almost a living entity;23 but it also allows for a
common misreading of his argument. That misreading collapses the social
character (kharakter) reproduced in the text with a fictional character (obraz,
geroi, personazh) from the text.24 Although a fictional persona (a literary “type”)
can exemplify a class psychology,25 such a relation does not exhaust the
reproduction mechanism that Pereverzev has in mind. The first thing to be said
of this mechanism is that it is one of structural reproduction.26 A structure of
social relations, once it has been subjectivized as a “system of behaviour,” is
reproduced (objectivated) in the text as a structure of images.27 In other words,
the social “character” is identified with the structure as such and not with
separate instances of representation within it (fictional characters). 28 An appeal,
therefore, must be made to a more general meaning of obraz, as well as “image,”
so as to allow both terms (not without some semantic strain) to stand for the
totality of what the text depicts (an “image of the world” or an “image of
reality”) and thus be virtually synonymous with two broader terms: respectively,
izobrazhenie and “representation.”
This might be an opportune moment to remember that in the Formalists’
theorizing of artistic construction, “device” appeared on two distinct levels of
analytical description: as a designation of a particular instance within a totality
(an individual device within the text), and as a figuration of that very totality
(the artistic text, or even art itself, as a device). And the same is the case with
obraz in the poetics of the Sociological school: it appears both as an
individuation within the text (a portrayal of something or someone) and as an
individuation of the whole (a historically and classspecific representation of
reality in its subjective dimension). In that it is a dynamic interaction of formal
 The Imperative of Content 65

devices, the text in Formalist poetics is itself a Device, something that functions
in a certain way, a working mechanism. Similarly, by virtue of being a peculiar
organization of images, the text can be imaged forth by Pereverzev and his
followers as an entity that behaves in a certain way, as an Obraz, a character-
image.29
In Formalist theory, the identity of these two levels – the particulars of artistic
construction and its totality – is secured through the “governing constructive
principle” (dominanta): because all formal elements in the text are governed in
their functioning by this principle, they function as a whole, a Device. A similar
situation obtains when the text is considered from the point of view of socio-
psychological content. Here the totalizing mediator is called, variously, a
“tendency,” “principle,” or “complex.” Because, as bearers of meaning, all
individual image-motifs serve to articulate a tendency or principle, they are not
an inert cumulation but constitute a systematic whole. In this way a transition
is also implemented from object to subject, from the depicted to its depicter:
through the manifest “thereness” of a represented world, a trans-individual
agency becomes intelligible so that this image of the world is now, equally, a
Character. For the analyst, therefore, it is a question of identifying the
“tendency” or “principle” that has thus totalized the text: “Marxism approaches
literary phenomena with confidence, in full awareness of the fact that it will be
able to dissect the whole fabric of the poetic with the sharp scalpel of its method,
reaching the core where the object and subject, both the depiction and the
expression of being, are organically combined, where the principle of its
regular laws and necessity reveals itself” (Pereverzev, “Essential Premises”
63).30
The scalpel referred to above is, obviously, a tool of dissection only to the
extent to which it is also a tool of reconstitution. For it is through this surgical
intervention alone that the text handed down to us by tradition can be reinstated
into its truth. Only at the site of the analytical incision does it reconnect with
itself, revealing its true nature as a reproduction of social being. That this truth
is in no way manifestly given, but is subsequent to the hard labour of the analyst,
is emphasized time and time again by Pereverzev and his colleagues:

[The] first step in a Marxist investigation of the poetic text consists in finding the
subject in the object depicted in the literary work, in discovering the depicter in
that which is depicted. It is not so very easy to do this. Finding the subject in
question in the object depicted requires a close examination of all the elements of
the poetic structure, strenuous attention to the smallest details of the scene
portrayed, persistent thought, scholarly sensitivity, and even vigilance and
perspicacity. (Pereverzev, “Essential Premises” 60)
66 Automatic for the Masses

The moment when the textual Darstellung is shown to be a necessary and

lawful structuration governed by a single principle/tendency is the moment
when the anagogic level is attained, when the “scene portrayed” acquires the
features of a living being, a trans-individual personality (Obraz).31 But, from
this, it follows once again that the anagogic (Social-) World-cum-Character
should be identified with the textual structure as a whole and not with a
particular embodiment within it (a fictional character, “hero”);32 it is to be found
in the totality of interrelations that constitute this structure. 33 He who brings
these interrelations to the light of knowledge and shows their “regular laws and
necessity” – the carrier of specialized knowledge, the analyst – is an
indispensable agency in the biography of the text.
Once the content-generating principle or tendency has been identified, the
textual elements, on all levels of the structure, can be seen as falling into two
distinct categories: the “autogenic” and the “heterogenic” (Pospelov, “K
metodike” 101). In the former, the organizing principle has been realized more
or less directly; the latter, by contrast, contribute indirectly to its realization. In
the former, according to Pospelov’s terminology, the principle is “subjectified”
(sub”ektivirovan); in the latter, it is only “objectivated” (ob”ektivirovan):

The organizing [socio-psychological] complex can be subjectified in the literary

work, in which case the work would contain an organizing image or images, those
images into which the organizing complex is subjectified. In the other case, the
organizing complex can be only objectified in the literary work, and then the latter
would not feature an organizing image. [Griboedov’s] Woe from Wit can serve as
an example of the first instance: the socio-psychological complex subjectified here
in the character of Chatskii organizes the structure of the play. [Gogol’s] Dead
Souls can be cited as an example of the second instance: none of the socio-
psychological complexes subjectified into the character-images of the “poem”
organizes it fully; the organizing complex here is objectivated in all these images
and organizes them from outside.
(Pospelov, “K metodike” 83–4; emphasis in the original)

Pospelov’s taxonomy of images parallels the Formalist theory of the dominanta.

The latter assumes all textual elements to be formal but still distinguishes two
general classes of these: the foregrounded, or dominant, ones, and those that
function – relationally – as supporting material.34 With the Sociologists, by
contrast, all we find in the text are elements of content; but here too it is
necessary to introduce an internal hierarchy: some of these elements (images)
are direct conveyors of the generative subjectivity, while others participate in
its manifestation only indirectly. Through Pospelov’s abstruse language we can
 The Imperative of Content 67

glimpse the reason for the rather symptomatic misreading discussed earlier. In
principle, all character-images in the text are equally important for the
realization of the “organizing complex,” but in certain circumstances, some of
them (i.e., the “autogenic” ones) come forth as “more equal than others.”35 In
these circumstances, one characterimage – let us say, Griboedov’s Chatskii –
can seem to have determined from within, through an agency all its own, the
textual presentation. It would then seem that, in our example, all other
characters in the play, their roles and trajectories, the manner in which they are
presented, are subordinated to the character of Chatskii.
But is it even possible to conceive of a character-image as fully
autochthonous in relation to the structuring principle of the text-as-totality, and
thus as fully embodying the anagogic Character (Obraz) that reproduces itself
through the text? For the critics of the Sociological school, the answer was
firmly negative. A positive answer would have implied that the much-sought-
for nexus of the representational structure – the point where a represented world
“turns into” a self-reproducing/representing subject – was not hidden at all, but
was there, on the surface of representation, in the body of a fictional character.
Rather than residing in the space of hermeneutic cognition, this nexus would
have been found in the space of the diegesis itself: in the figure of one of its
characters, the text would have appeared to have always already “read” itself;
its latent actuality would also have been its manifest “face,” rendering the
intervention of specialized knowledge quite unnecessary.
The principal fault for which the Pereverzevians were always condemned, in
Soviet and Western criticism alike, was their “mechanical sociologism.” Their
method passed far too easily from social world to text. Reality reproduced itself
as literature almost automatically. There were not enough “transmissions” from
one to the other, and there were never, in the authors and texts analysed by the
critics of the Sociological school, instances of incompleteness or ambiguity.
The reproduction succeeded every time, and thoroughly. Each writer they
discussed turned out to be an optimal medium for this or that socio-
psychological tendency. Indeed, the impression was created that the author was,
in each and every case, fully permeable in relation to the transpersonal
ustremlenie.36 As a critic of today expresses it, “Persons, organized by class,
molded by material conditions, and fixed in their destiny by economic laws,
had become as predictable as things” (Emerson 79). Because of this
predictability, the figure of the author was regarded by the Pereverzevians as
methodologically inessential. After all their talk of subjectivity, the
Sociological critics had to suffer being reprimanded for underestimating the
subjective factor in literary creation. Indeed, the individual subjective had no
68 Automatic for the Masses

role to play in their study of literature other than to fulfil unconditionally the
dictates of being.
All of this is true enough. The simplifications and failings of Pereverzevian
criticism are plain to see. Yet as with the Formalists, it is not my intention to
evaluate the intellectual solidity of the theoretical enterprise. What interests me
is the imagination that sustains the theory and plots out the field of literature,
regardless of the cognitive sins that may accrue to this imagination in the
process. The most intriguing aspect of the Pereverzevian legacy is precisely its
biggest intellectual zagib,37 the point where matters are obviously pushed too
far so that the result becomes untenable. I have in mind the picture of “reality
itself, and not the artist … recreat[ing] itself in the work” (Poliakov 30), and
the cognate vision of the “poet … swallowed up by being” (Poliakov 32). Here
we are in the realm of metaphor proper, where one thing is substituted for
another: being replaces the individual artist as the actual creator of literature.
The metaphor’s value lies not in what it might teach us about literary matters,
but in the covert desire it channels: to imagine art as driven by necessity, to see
creative writing as unconditional, well-nigh automatic, activity. For if the
individual creator is “swallowed by being,” he is thereby also secured,
anchored, in it. His productions are rescued from arbitrariness by default, for
they are the autobiography of being (in one of its class-determined forms).
Note that the metaphor not only declares but also proposes; it is not just
analytic but programmatic; it is a trope not merely for what is but also for what
could or should be. It projects a new kind of artistic practice that would be the
conscious appropriation of the theoretical vision. It would be the conscious
attempt, on the writer’s part, to understand the napravlennost’ of reality and
synchronize himself with it, to submit himself to the objective volition implicit
in his world, so that his work would be, indeed, the autobiography of being.
But this implies that artistic practice is to be premised on the practice of self.
Since it is a transpersonal subjectivity that is always objectivated in literature,
the individual must begin by fashioning his self in the image of that subjectivity.
Whereas Formalism places the writer face to face with Art-as-Device,
Pereverzevian criticism places him in relation to Being-as-Character. The first
is otherness in the shape of objecthood, the second, otherness in the shape of
subjecthood. But both are forms of “demanding” otherness, whose
dissimulating systematicity is no sooner registered as a fact than it becomes the
motivation for an act – an imperative addressed to the very individual whose
right to authorship has just been revoked. How this imperative became a
practical project for refashioning the writer’s consciousness is the subject of
chapter 5.
Chapter 3

Knowledge Become Practice

Thinking as a modern, which is to say, being part of intellectual modernity,

often meant finding oneself as an actor in a scene of dissimulation similar to
the ones described in the previous two chapters. It meant regarding particular
fields of experience as fields of false appearances whose falsity was, even so,
a moment of truth. Grasping truth, then, was a matter of showing how
appearances are generated, laying bare the device that has produced them and
ordered them. It involved proceeding, by rigorous method, from the manifest
to the latent actuality of “this,” steering one’s way, for the most part, in the
blind spot of the average empirical consciousness. This amounted to practising
objectivity in the realm of knowledge. The very definition of the “objective” in
such a scenario was premised on this game of law-governed hide-and-seek.
Lenin, whose was most certainly a modern mind, wrote in 1908:

The paramount thing is that the laws of these changes [in social being] have been
discovered, that the objective logic of these changes and their historical
development have at bottom and in the main been disclosed – objective … in the
sense that social being is independent of the social consciousness of men. The fact
that you live and conduct your business, beget children, produce products and
exchange them, gives rise to an objectively necessary chain of events, a chain of
development, which is independent of your social consciousness, and is never
grasped by the latter completely. (Materialism 339; emphasis in the original)

For Lenin, then, “objectivity” is that aspect of social being that is constitutively
in excess of the operative consciousness with which individuals play their part
in that very social being. It is not a simple opposition between the logic of the
whole process and the partial perspective of any single actor in it, as if the
 Knowledge Become Practice 71

whole were just too big, too complex, to be grasped by those who occupy but
a minuscule point within it. Rather, the very logic of the whole is such that it
operates by means of its own misrecognition. (Any form of social life would
implode if the majority lived in full consciousness of being exploited while the
minority beheld, without ideological embellishments and mystifications, the
naked truth of their class existence.)
Twentieth-century humanistic knowledge has made three realms of such
dissimulating objectivity especially prominent: the socio-economic sphere,
human interiority, and language. For us so far, “this” has been “text,” and “this”
has turned out to be a systematic organization of elements and functions, a
dynamic ensemble of interrelations, a totality, whose objective determinations
exceed the purview of the individual who is its putative master. From the
middle of the nineteenth century to the early twentieth, the same basic fact was
registered by political economy, psychoanalysis, and linguistics: “this” exceeds
the grasp of he who possesses and uses it. With Marx, the economy was seen
as exceeding the market, with its laws of supply and demand; with Freud, the
psychic apparatus was seen as exceeding the jurisdiction of the ego cogito; and
with Saussure, “language” was seen as exceeding the immediacy of its own
deployment in speech. The measure of this excess was defined, respectively,
by the production of (surplus) value; the operations of the unconscious; and the
(differential) mechanism of signification. Instituting a peculiar modern
cryptology, these items are more (or less) than mere facts, more (or less) than
“real.” For they set the terms for a completely new experience of what is true
and what is real, and they are, to that extent, immune to ontological or
epistemological challenges. In relation to the individual subject, they define the
extent to which the fullness of the empirical, of “this,” evades her. These are
the names of modern hungers, the respective obstacles that prevent an adequate
consciousness of social existence, the full absorption of the inner into the self,
and the possibility to truly author one’s meanings. Because there are those
“primary processes” called the production of commodities, the unconscious,
and signification, we must understand that sociality, self, and meaning are not
fully present to the individual subject. Rather, they are presented away from
her, re-presented.
What separates the thing of use from the commodity, the psychic act from its
true significance, the intended from the realized meaning of speech, is a
movement of re-presentation with no subject. “Re-presentation” here stands for
the process of casting away values supposedly present to the individual, where
“casting” is equally “throwing” and “giving shape.” Through commodity
production, signification, and the “primary process,” the elements that
constitute the individual’s material, linguistic, and psychic life are “cast away”
72 Automatic for the Masses

to another place, onto “another scene” (andere Schauplatz, as Freud has it). In
the sense I attribute to it here, “re-presentation” is tantamount to transvaluation:
both a transposition and an assignment of value somewhere else.
Who is the author of re-presentation, understood in these terms? Who
imparts the definitive value-form to the materialities of outer and the
intangibles of inner life? Thus far we encountered only very particular answers
to this question, arising from two particular experiences of “this” as “artistic
text.” The answers have been “formal construction” and “sociopsychological
complex.” With respect to the experience of “this” as “social life,” “interiority,”
and “communication,” other particular answers could be phrased, respectively,
as the “economic system,” the “psychic complex,” and the “mechanism of
signification.” Obviously, the nominal terms in these phrasings are readily
substitutable for one another (we can just as well say the “complex of economic
relations,” the “psychic mechanism,” the “system of signification”), which
points us to the general answer: the generator of representations, their true
“author,” is the system in its systematicity, the Device as such. Far from being
mere cumulations of facts or events, the economic, the psychic, and the
linguistic-semiotic were found to be systematically working aggregates. Never
mind that the “work” in question appeared sometimes with the grinning face of
deceit and sometimes under the countenance of play (the play of the signifier,
the ruses and jokes of the unconscious, the ludic existence of the commodity
form).1 To be sure, deceitfulness, or dissimulation, is not a characteristic of the
Device and the work it performs, but rather of its relation to the average
individual consciousness.
This basic situation – which warrants the label “predicament” only insofar
as we are assuming the point of view of the “castaway” (i.e., of the supposedly
centred individual subject) – becomes “plot” when we figure into it the act that
ends the masquerade and exposes the dissimulation. Thus far, we have
encountered that act as a hermeneutic exercise, a deployment of a cognitive
method, a conquest of specialized analytic knowledge. But this is only half the
story. Next I would like to consider how this same hermeneutic serves to
ground praxis, how it motivates or legitimates particular practical interventions.
Just as the hermeneutic can have various fields of application, so the practices
in question can be found in various spheres of modern life, one of which is the
artistic. But their common form is this: to act as if my act is the unfolding of a
(previously concealed) objective logic, as if it is called for by imperative if
latent necessity, as if it is the impersonal work of the Device itself.
The dynamic between theoretical and practical hermeneutics is illustrated
most easily with the example of Russian Formalism and Futurism. As noted
earlier, the former was much more than the coming to consciousness of an
 Knowledge Become Practice 73

extant poetic practice, although it was that too. The kinship between the two
movements is undeniable and was often commented upon during the 1920s. 2
Without pretending to scientific rigour, the Futurists were writing their own
rudimentary Formalist theory in the manifestos and proclamations that
accompanied their works. Already by 1913, a few years before the first
Formalist publications, Kruchenykh had pointed to “this absolutely new way”
of making poetry, which “will be the combination of words according to their
inner laws, which reveal themselves to the wordwright, and not according to
the rules of logic or grammar, as was the case before us” (“New Ways” 72). He
also spoke about the deformation of the linguistic material, of “our new devices”
(75) and the resultant “new perception of the world” (73) – all of this before
Shklovskii formulated his theory of defamiliarization. In large part because the
poetic practice of the Russian Futurists aimed to bring about that liminal
moment in the existence of art, when the text would be nothing more than the
blunt exposure of its own formal (phonetic) determinants, someone like
Jakobson could be convinced that “the language of poetry strives to reach, as a
final limit, the phonetic, or rather …the euphonic phrase – in other words, a
transsense speech” (Noveishaia 313).
The critical analysis of literature in terms of formal devices was rendered
possible because there already existed a species of literature that performed a
practical analysis of textuality and language. Most conspicuously in the poetry
of Khlebnikov and Kruchenykh, the act of writing itself became the
overcoming of dissimulation, as it demonstrated the essential dimension of
poetic speech (hitherto concealed behind representational content and the
“rules of logic”). And this concrete demonstration was in turn always ready to
become a general statement, to be abstracted into “theory” by those who carried
it out. The transition from theory to practice, and vice versa, was more than
routine – it was necessary. To draw a rigid distinction between the two is very
difficult. It is most sensible to think of a single programmatic activity with two
aspects: the production of literary texts, and the production of statements about
literature and art. The two aspects complemented each other: the poems were
offered as illustrations of how real literature was (to be) made, that is, as tokens
of its essential dimension; while the “theory” explained how the poems were
to be received, that is, it substantiated their token-value. Because the enigmatic
and often nonsensical words on the page did not explicate their own raison
d’être, another type of discourse was needed that would make clear, not their
representational signification, but their gestural significance. Such was the
common procedure of Kruchenykh’s manifesto pamphlets: this or that
principle of the new poetry was proclaimed, after which a poetic text – his or
somebody else’s – was quoted in order to show the said principle at work. For
74 Automatic for the Masses

instance, Kruchenykh offered his own famous verse “Dyrbul-shchyl” as a token

of the liberated Word after he meditated thusly on the new procedures of poetry3:

The structure [struktura] of the word or of verse consists of its component parts
(sound, letter, syllable, etc.); let’s symbolize them as a – b – c – d.
The texture [faktura] of the word consists in the arrangement of these parts (a
– d – c – b, or b – c – d – a, or in still other ways); texture is the making [delanie]
of the word, its construction, layering, accretion, the distribution in one way or
another of syllables, letters, and words. (Faktura 2; emphasis in the original)

In Kruchenykh’s usage, struktura refers to the systematicity of language and

poetic speech as latent, while faktura refers to the moment when this
systematicity is made manifest through literary practice, through poetic
“making.” The structure of the word is a fact, the truth of its immanent
organization. This fact is treated as binding upon poetic practice, as its
motivation. It calls for the act of poetic delanie, which is nothing other than the
laying bare, the demonstration, of that same immanent organization. The end
result of this is faktura. Faktura is struktura made visible. The object – in this
case the poetic text – is a “thing made” (sdelannaia veshch’). It cannot be
judged on the basis of what it itself articulates as verbal meaning (which could
be quite minimal indeed or outright nonsensical). Its true significance can only
be apprehended if we are aware of the symbolic performance that is its
inalienable context. “Dyr-bul-shchyl” does not tell its reader: “I am a concrete
example of poetic faktura, a token of Languagelaid-bare.” This message is
nowhere in the signs of which the experiemental piece of poetry is composed,
just as desire as such is nowhere to be found in the images or words of a dream.
The significance of the text, rather, resides in the principle of its construction.
And insofar as this principle – the combination of sounds, morphemes, and
verbal forms according to supposedly immanent affinities – actualizes the
anonymous agency of Language itself, the text functions also as a token of the
author’s demise.
We now turn to that other side, the side of the “real world,” where the making
of words and things takes place: from the systematicity of “this” as discovered
by knowledge, to the systematicity of “this” as a motivation for practice. This
is not just a thematic turn serving the purposes of the present discussion; it is
just as much a call that resounded in Soviet culture of the post-revolutionary
years:

Our epoch is characterized by the fact that mankind, because of the increasing
collectivization of the productive forces of society, is moving from systematicity
 Knowledge Become Practice 75

in knowledge (in this case, theoretical linguistics) to systematicity in practice, to

organization (the construction of language). Mankind is beginning consciously
and intentionally to create and advance those elements of life that, up to now,
seemed to be beyond the jurisdiction of society’s organizational-practical
interference (psychology, the laws of physiology, the labor process and along with
these, language). (Arvatov, “Rechetvorchestvo” 91; emphasis in the original)

While his essay’s main theme was the possibility of creating a new language
for a new society, Arvatov obviously had a much broader frame of reference.
He envisioned a transition “from systematicity in knowledge … to
systematicity in practice” across a multitude of spheres of human experience,
of which the linguistic was but one. The “elements of life” in all of these
spheres, hitherto constellated in the shadow of empirical, individual
consciousness, had begun to emerge from that shadow. And there had opened
now the prospect of a human creation – of “construction,” as Arvatov calls it,
of “making” (delanie), as Kruchenykh calls it. But this proud, revolutionary
activity will not reinstate the individual’s alienated rights to authorship, nor
will it simply transfer them onto some collective subject. Whoever their subject
proper, “making” and “construction” do not quite amount to authorship, for
“making” here does not mean original creation, and “construction” is not to be
understood as erection ex nihilo. The kind of praxis these acts constitute is less
originary than regulatory. And thus it is not by chance that where Kruchenykh
uses “making” and “construction,” he also speaks of “arrangement,” and where
Arvatov writes “construction,” he equates it with “organization.”

“Organization” became a buzzword on the Soviet cultural scene of the 1920s,

when it was very common to speak of items as different as clothes, films, and
human physiques as needing to be “organized.” In large part, this grew out of
the theoretical work of Aleksandr Bogdanov (pseudonym of Aleksandr
Malinovskii [1873–1928]), Lenin’s chief opponent in the fractional struggles
of 1907–9 and the principal target of the Bolshevik leader’s vitriol in
Materialism and Empirio-Criticism (1908).4 Long before founding the
Proletkult movement (in 1917, on the eve of the Revolution), Bogdanov was
working on an analytic of universal life in which the project of a revolutionary
culture would be firmly grounded. He believed that Marx’s hermeneutic had to
be expanded towards the utmost horizons of the empirical world (Bogdanov,
Tektologiia 134). The positive knowledge derived from studying the historical
experience of mankind was to be coopted by the positive findings of the natural
sciences. At their meeting point, these two hitherto disconnected pursuits were
to coalesce in a new, truly universal science (50–2, 78–9), a “strict, structured
76 Automatic for the Masses

system of universal understanding” (Filosofiia 13).5 In his Marxist-positivist

crusade, Bogdanov drew substantially on the work of Ernst Mach (1838–1916)
and Richard Avenarius (1843–96), dutifully reproducing in his own copious
writings the empirio-monistic amalgamation of the psychical and the physical,
of acts of consciousness and facts of nature.6 The Tektology (1912–29), his
grand theoretical project, was to institute a monistic science of all experience
by generalizing the apparently heterogeneous existence of physical phenomena,
on the one hand, and human ideas and doings, on the other.
The sprawling treatise, on which Bogdanov worked to the very end of his
life, was conceived as the culmination of an intellectual trajectory comprising
the three-volume Empiriomonism (1904–6) and Philosophy of Living
Experience (Filosofiia zhivogo opyta, 1912). Empiriomonism was an
exposition of Bogdanov’s own philosophical method, which the author did not
hesitate to place above all preceding philosophical thought. The goal in
Empiriomonism had been to renew philosophy; in the 1912 book it was to
transcend philosophy. Here Bogdanov undertook, in a popular form, a critique
of philosophy both as a type of knowledge and as a tradition of specific,
historically bound systems of thought. Even as he touted the superiority of his
empiriomonism over Mach’s empiriocriticism and Marx’s dialectical
materialism, he insisted on the limitations of the philosophical enterprise as
such, including his own version of it, and pointed beyond it to a yet unrealized
“science of the future” (Filosofiia 259–66). Where philosophy ended, a wholly
different type of knowledge was called for that would be not so much a making
sense of experience as a methodology for its concrete transformation. The
Tektology was intended to be the systematic exposition of this last, superior –
because immediately practical – type of cognition, an instrumental science of
organization that would take the place of philosophical reflection: “as it
develops further, tektology renders philosophy superfluous; it stands, from the
very beginning above philosophy, whose universality it supplements with a
scientific and practical aspect” (Tektologiia 142–3).7
Where others saw heterogeneity, Bogdanov saw a common mode of being
for all things available to experience. And the name of this common mode of
being was “organization”:

Drawing on the facts and ideas of contemporary science we reach the only
exhaustive, the only monistic understanding of the universe. The universe presents
itself as an endlessly unfolding panoply of forms at different degrees and levels of
organization: from the unknown to us elements of the ether to the human
collectives and the planetary systems. All these forms – in their interweaving and
mutual struggle – constitute the universal organizational process: endlessly
 Knowledge Become Practice 77

dividing itself into parts, boundless and seamless in its wholeness. Thus, the realm
of organizational experience coincides with the realm of experience as such.
Organizational experience is nothing other than all of our experience considered
from an organizational point of view, i.e., as a world of organizing and
disorganizing processes. (Tektologiia 73; emphasis in the original)

In this world-picture, embracing as it does the human and natural realms,8 every
fact can be understood as composed of activities and resistances, 9 of
“organizing” and “disorganizing” elements (Bogdanov, “Taina” 398–401,
Tektologiia 118–25).10 To that extent, every moment of experience, regardless
of its provenance, falls under the competence of tektology, the general science
of organization (“Taina” 401).
As can be seen, both “experience” (an Ur-concept for Mach and his
followers) and “organization” are fundamental notions for Bogdanov; their
jurisdictions coincide, covering the entirety of being. To speak of the world is
to speak of the sphere of experience and also of the sphere of organization:
“Never in the world, in experience, has there been something which has not
been organized” (Bogdanov, qtd in Jensen 158). Yet the cognitive weight of the
two terms, “experience” and “organization,” is different, just as the relative
value of the subject is different from that of the predicate in the elementary
structure of the judgment. “Experience” functions as the subject, the empty
position for which content needs to be supplied in the further movement of
thought. “Organization” is the predicate that supplies the content; it is the
“punch” of Bogdanov’s most basic argument. Just as “God” is something
completely abstract, indeterminate, until the predication is completed (e.g.,
“God is love”), so is “experience” before Bogdanov supplies the all-important
determination: “Experience is organization.”
A derivative of this basic argument is that the science of all experience is the
science of organization, the all-embracing discipline of tektology. As Bogdanov
explains (Tektologiia 92), the word “tektology” derives from the Greek sememe
for making, building, constructing (teuchô, tekton). A science of organization
it is, but a science that wants to make and do just as much as it wants to know.11
Like Pereverzev and many other leftist thinkers of the time, 12 Bogdanov was
wont to quote Marx’s imperative for a cognition that does not just interpret the
world but transforms it.13 That the world is ubiquitously “tektological” means
that it is ubiquitously open to “organizational-practical interference.”14 If
everywhere we turn we find only a factually existing organization of things,
ideas, or activities, then all of these fields of objectivity, in their bewildering
multiplicity, offer themselves as fields for organizational praxis (106). The
world is one enormous demanding object. It calls for organizational doing. And
78 Automatic for the Masses

it is a real shame that language, as we have it and use it, does not bear out this
universal demand. For we can say “to organize a party,” or “to organize a
meeting,” but why do we still say “to write” rather than “to organize” a book,
to “construct” rather than “to organize” a building (95–6)?15 Yet the
construction of a building and the writing of a book are both organizational
activities, for they involve coordinating multiple elements into an effective
whole (99). The linguistic impediment proceeds from the impediment of
history; it is the stuttering of a defective historical world in which human
endeavour has been disjointed, split into specialized “occupations,” and is no
longer recognized as common and one.16
Note that Bogdanov uses “organization” in two different senses, which hold
in English usage as they do in Russian: organization as a fact and as an act, as
an objectively existing state of affairs and as activity. 17 The duality is highly
analogous to that of struktura and faktura in Kruchenykh. The first term stands
for an implicit demand, a latent imperative; the second is that same imperative
taken up in practice, a putting-into-action of what the demanding object calls
for. As long as we are in the world of nature, the distinction between
organization as a fact and as an act poses no problem. Crystals, planetary
systems, and living bodies are all organized entities; the agent is implied and
irrelevant: nothing is to be gained by identifying Nature as the “organizer” of
these structures. The fact has precedence over the act. As soon as we cross over
into the man-made world – that part of Nature’s region that has been processed
through human labour and thought – ambiguity sets in. “A society of men” is
both a fact and an implicit mission; it is both a neutral description and a tacit
call to action. The genitive works both ways: to assign to the organizational
structure (society) its constitutive elements (men), leaving in abeyance the
question of agency; or to charge these same elements (men) with the
responsibility for their own creation (society). Alternately, man stands as that
which is being “organized” and as that which organizes, as the object and
subject of tektological activity.
In thinking and toiling, ordering and executing, man is the organizer of
materialities and ideas, of materialities through ideas, of life. Yet for the entire
expanse of human history, this very life, as an objective system of interrelations,
has exceeded the purview of its supposed organizer.18 The fact of organization
has been in excess of the act. In the bourgeois world, this discrepancy manifests
itself as a conflict between an individual, “specialized,” subjective
consciousness and the objective-latent communality of human experience:

The “absolute” individual “I” expresses the socially fragmented experience of man
and his existential opposition to others. It is clear that the unity of the social whole
 Knowledge Become Practice 79

is outside of his field of vision. Not only is this unity invisible to the individual: it
is also imperfect, elemental, unorganized, full of existential contradictions. The
individual is overcome by these contradictions of the unattainable and
incomprehensible whole; he is powerless in front of them; the elemental forces of
social life reign over him. (“Sobiranie” 37; emphasis in the original)19

Closely following Marx,20 Bogdanov rehearses here the already familiar

scenario in which a totality of interrelations outstrips the powers of the
individual and thus remains transcendent to his consciousness. When he says
“man,” Bogdanov, clearly, does not mean this atomized individual. Rather,
“man” is an ontological imperative addressed to the individual. As he explains
earlier in the same essay, “man” is more than either the corporeal or psychic-
ideal identity of the individual subject: “Man is the entire world of experience”
(29; emphasis in the original). Such a definition, of course, in no way means
that a single person could possibly possess all experience accumulated by
mankind through its history (43). What one could possess, however, is the
common element of all human experience: those organizational forms and
methods that underlie and unify the life of nature and human civilization. This
optimal condition would permit each person to relate to and assimilate, if
necessary, the experience accumulated by any other (43–4).
We are given to understand that the atomized individual of the bourgeois
epoch is a historical distortion-dissimulation of man’s genuine being. A
historically specific organization of socio-economic relations has “presented”
man away from himself and into the “individual.” The predicament of this re-
presentation can be reversed through what Bogdanov calls the “conscious-
systematic gathering of man” (42).21 Man is to be gathered back from his
incomplete and dissimulative existence as an individual- subjective monad, he
is to be retrieved from his being-represented. But what and whose is the agency
through which such a lofty project would become reality? Does this agency rest
with “us who know”? Is it a matter of “us who know” installing consciousness
in “them who don’t,” of educating the masses, of organizing their communal
existence? Bogdanov’s answer is equivocally affirmative: the “conscious-
systematic gathering of man” can be “our” doing only because it is the
immanent doing of the objective historical process itself. For there, in the
historical reality of today, the gathering of man is already under way. The same
inexorable mechanism that has fragmented human being is now working
towards manifesting the truth-reality of that being.
Definitive of the productive activity of every individual is the fact that it
takes place within a specific organization of society’s productive forces. As the
forces of production develop, they obscure ever further this essential fact. In
80 Automatic for the Masses

advanced bourgeois society the process reaches a crisis, which is at the same
time anastasis. The specialization of production, the furthest alienation of
labour from labour’s true character (as humanity’s collective contest with
Nature), has made man a “cog in the machine,” it has reduced him to a mere
accessory. Yet there, where he is at his most atomized, where he has become
one blind motion, man is inexorably driven back to the fullness of his genuine
being. And what brings him back from re-presentation, what “retrieves” him or
“gathers” him, is, once again, a Device:

The machine was born in the world of competition and social antagonism. As we
know, the machine sharpened and brought to the limit this competition and this
antagonism. But, thereby, it also sharpened and increased the need for
development. In each sphere of [capitalist] competition there arises the need for
ceaseless, planned perfection of technologies. This need is satisfied through the
elaboration of new technical methods.
The common technical methods bring machines ever closer to their highest type:
the automatic mechanism. This process … decreases, immediately and directly,
the importance of specialization by increasing the homogeneity between various
forms of labor. (41–2; emphasis in the original)22
And further still, the increased homogeneity of various labours calls forth a
future in which the machine will relieve man of all but one task: that of
supervision and organization (Bogdanov, Tektologiia 108). As it becomes more
self-sufficient, the machine progressively eliminates the great divide in man’s
existence – the one between intellectual and manual labour, between command
and execution (Bogdanov, “Sotsialisticheskoe ob-
shchestvo” 93; “Kollektivisticheskii stroi” 300). It calls into existence a new
type of human being in whom the “practical” is immediately the “intellectual,”
and vice versa: his practical involvement is the exercise of his organizational
intelligence (Bogdanov, Filosofiia 320–1).
As it works, the automated mechanism of the machine also works out the
latent reality of human existence. As it manufactures material goods, it also
produces the realization that this existence is communal and shared, that it is,
essentially, organization. In other words, the machine produces (tektological)
consciousness.23 And thus, as history draws closer to its great turning point, the
machine comes to manifest in a powerful metaphor the nature of the historical
process itself. For is history not just such a mechanism that works
systematically and works out in the determinate course of its operations the
genuine organization of human life?
If the machine can be experienced as a maker of a veritable historical
revolution, it is just as true that the Revolution taking place in history can be
 Knowledge Become Practice 81

experienced as a machine-like process, inexorably precise and effective in the

execution of its “iron formulas”:

The materialist dialectics of class struggle – here is the genuine algebra of the
revolution. What the naked eye sees on the arena [of history] is chaos, turbulence,
formlessness, and boundlessness. But this chaos has been calculated and
accounted for. Its stages have been foreseen. The lawfulness [zakonomernost’] of
their succession has been anticipated and clasped into iron formulas …
Revolutionary strategy is not formless, like an elemental force, but complete, like
a mathematical formula. For the first time in history we see the revolutionary
algebra in action. (Trotsky, “Vneokt’iabr’skaia literatura” 2)

For Bogdanov, however, the machine was not so much a diachronic as a

synchronic metaphor. It offered, in a single image, the character of an entire
historical epoch, a stage in the organization of production that was just being
inaugurated at the time he was writing. The machine was a synecdoche for the
entire complex of modern industry ruled by advanced technology – and on a
higher level of generality, for the dawning age of automation. And since every
major period in history was characterized (synchronically) by a definite
tektological configuration, the machine, in its singular presence, announced a
qualitatively new moment in the organizational genesis of mankind. And
because of this, it also stood as an omen for a radically different gradation of
consciousness, an epistemological leap. The self-regulating machine
complexes would revolutionize not only the relations of production, but
cognition as well. This is because, in Bogdanov’s meta-history, every major
epoch of tektological development produced its own distinct episteme as the
organizing tool of a particular dominant class. “A different practice gives birth
to a different logic” (Bogdanov, Filosofiia 222).
For its part, the episteme, that is, the configuration of knowledge
characteristic of this or that period of civilization, was based on a specific way
of understanding causality (21, 221). Thus the eras through which human
cognition had passed were just as many as the types of causality mankind had
known. In The Philosophy of Living Experience, Bogdanov distinguished two
such paradigms in the previous history of human knowledge, one based on
authoritarian social relations, the other born out of relations of exchange. 24 In
the former model, every cause is modelled on executive will, whose prototype
is the will of the patriarch or sovereign;25 in the latter, cause and effect are in a
relationship of necessity, whose prototype is the impersonal necessity with
which the market confronts each individual Homo economicus (Filosofiia 21–
46).26 In its highest development, machine production promised to inaugurate
82 Automatic for the Masses

a third, terminal form of causality and with it one last episteme.27 So we should
add one last item to the list of what Bogdanov’s machine stands for: the
automated mechanism is the material image of something immaterial, of the
most basic notion, which coordinates all other elements of knowledge into a
system, the relationship of relationships – causality as such.
What, then, is this last form, or scheme, of causality that Bogdanov saw
instantiated in the operations of automated mechanisms? He calls it “labour
causality” (trudovaia prichinnost’), and he imagines it as a relationship in
which there is no subordination of one term to another (as had been the case in
the authoritarian model), nor are there any fetishized principles, primal matters,
unknowable things-in-themselves (as had been the case in the paradigm of
abstract causality). There are only transformations from one quality into
another. All entities and concretions are provisional. At the same time, nothing
is ever destroyed; it only passes into a different form of existence. The direction
of change is reversible, which means that “cause” and “effect” are not absolute
coordinates or values; at root, they are one and the same (Filosofiia 223–4).
The age-old question about the true nature of things is foreclosed; since things
are only transient moments in a total energetic flow, one should ask about
functions, not origins; everything is process, and nothing is essence; relations
and interactions erode all substances; being is fully dissolved into becoming.
Engine-driven machine technology emblematizes this type of causality
insofar as its operation is premised on the transformation of force and the
conversion of energy (222). The machinic complexes offer to view, over and
over again, the spectacle of absolute mutability: the chemical combination of
oxygen and coal passes into heat; this heat produces steam, which gives rise to
pneumatic pressure; the pressure brings pistons into motion; this motion itself
mutates from one kind into another as it is communicated to wheels, belts, and
finally to machine tools that work directly on the material and give shape to
new products (222). And what this spectacle reveals to the consciousness of
men is that every force, every type of energy, can become the source for any
other; they are substitutable, vanishing moments in the enduring effort of
overcoming Nature’s resistance (222). Since energy passes into energy, the
initial and final terms of the process are identical; the cause is, essentially, the
same as the effect – or, differently put, their distinction–opposition is rendered
obsolete (227).
The labour of men, too, figures in this cycle of potentially limitless
transformation:

And so, the practice of machine production contains within itself a new point of
view. This point of view aims to become, and indeed becomes, universal. Human
 Knowledge Become Practice 83

activity finds its place among the series of mutating forms that energy assumes.
The laborer’s effort is one of the links in the chain of production; it engenders
other links, it is capable of replacing those links or be replaced by them … As
regards those elemental forces of nature that have not yet entered the chain of
production, exact science … reveals their homology, or identity, with those forces
that have entered [production]. This means that every phenomenon, every natural
process, is for the labor collective a possible source for the generation of any other
desired processes. In this consists the practical connection of phenomena, the
practical unity of nature. (223; emphasis in the original)

When Bogdanov says that “machine production contains within itself

[ zakliuchaet v sebe] a new point of view,” we are given to understand that,
whatever its uses in industry, the machine is also an epistemological catalyst.
To all its other powers, this one should be added: the power to make see, to
render perceptible. Its operation, then, can be viewed as analogous to how the
Futurist text of Kruchenykh operates (at least ideally). As we saw, the latter
presents the reader with struktura as faktura, which is to say that the inner
constitution of the linguistic medium, the Word as such, is rendered perceptible.
The reader experiences how sense is born from the combination of basic
morphological elements and – hopefully – comes to realize the identity of form
and content. Content turns out not to be a world subsisting apart from the verbal
means, but a (subordinate) moment in the process of rechetvorchestvo
(language- or word-creation). In Bogdanov, engine-powered machine
production presents the worker with a dynamic aggregate in which all
substantive moments vanish. Because matter passes into force and force returns
again to matter (in the finished industrial product), the opposition of these two
terms collapses in plain view. With it collapses also the more general opposition
of means and ends. Just as everything, including matter itself, turns out to be a
form of energy, so every end proves to be a means.
Both the ideal Futurist text and Bogdanov’s idealized machine are
contraptions for awakening perception. And because of this homology, it is not
difficult to visualize the Futurist text as a machine (since it is a working
aggregate of elements) and the machine in Bogdanov as a text (since it is
something the labourer’s mind reads to discover the truth of his own existence).
The analogy can be extended further, towards the concept of the “device laid
bare.” For the Formalists, all texts are instances of formal organization, but not
all of them show themselves as such. And only in the present day, in modernist
poetry, do we have a type of literature that consciously sets out to lay bare its
true nature as a formal Device. For Bogdanov, we can state the following:
everywhere in the universe there are to be found tektological processes, and
84 Automatic for the Masses

everywhere in mankind’s history we come across forms of social organization

of labour. But only in the present day do we begin to see the outlines of a
process that is unitary (i.e., social) not just in itself but also for itself. Automated
machine production lays bare the Device of human history as a whole: the
collective effort “to gain mastery, step by step, over phenomena and things so
as to derive some of them from others in a purposeful [tselesoobraznyi] manner,
and use some of them for the overcoming of others” (226). Only with an
organization of labour in which everything is treated as a technical matter, that
is, as a potential that can be rationally exploited, does the world reveal itself for
what it is: the arena of mankind’s organizational activity.
It may appear that the name with which Bogdanov christens the third,
ultimate type of causality – trudovaia prichinnost’ – is poorly chosen. After all,
every causality is labour causality insofar as every method of knowledge is
rooted, in the last instance, in social practice, in the labour process. 28 Yet it is
also true that in the course of history, this primary given – labour – has been
mediated through power–authority and the process of exchange. And when it
is mediated, it is also obscured, lost to consciousness (63). In the dissimulated
perspective, the primary given becomes the sovereign will of the master-
organizer or the anarchic and abstract will of the marketplace. Only in the third
and final historic frame is the authentic source of all causality recovered and
made native to consciousness. So it is proper that only the final form of
causality should be called trudovaia prichinnost’. Only here is human practice
allowed to become aware of itself as that which bonds the “unity of nature,”
the cause of all causes.
As can be seen from the foregoing discussion, the theme of dissimulation
and its overcoming is central to Bogdanov’s thinking. It should be emphasized,
however, that this theme is played in a register more radical than anything we
have encountered so far. To wit, the dissimulation in question concerns not this
or that blindness of knowledge, the inadequate cognizing of one field of
phenomena or another, but the very nature of knowledge itself. If we go back
to Lenin’s words quoted at the beginning of this chapter,29 we can see that they
register the inability of everyday consciousness to grasp the general logic of
social life. The dissimulation Lenin has in mind, then, has to do with the way
the socio-economic process presents itself to knowledge (in its unscientific,
existential–practical form). With Bogdanov, however, the ultimate problem is
not what knowledge knows or fails to know, but what knowledge is.
It is a peculiarity of the human (as opposed to the natural) world that
organizational activity proceeds through the mediation of knowledge. This is
the very pinnacle of creation, the highest level of the universal tektological
process (256); but it is also where the unitary principle of organization betrays
 Knowledge Become Practice 85

itself. It appears no longer as a unitary principle, but as a duality. In the human

kingdom, unlike anywhere else in the universe, the tektological process unfolds
in two guises: as “practice” and as “knowledge.” They are one and the same
thing, just as, for the Formalists, “form” and “content” are ultimately
homologous. Knowledge is simply another type of practical organizational
activity. It is an extension of practice, just as “content” is an accessory of “form.”
In both cases – with Bogdanov and with the Formalists – there is really just one
principle (“practice,” “form”). Yet this principle is such that its very operation
produces something other than itself, a seemingly heterogeneous nature, an
appearance of radical otherness (“knowledge” and “content,” respectively).
This is just how the principle works:
dissimulation is programmed into it. But a return to identity is too …
In itself, knowledge is practice. But it must become this also for itself. The
latent fact must turn into explicit awareness. Knowledge must know itself for
what it truly is, that is, as an aspect of a unitary organizational process through
which humankind makes a home for itself in nature. How can this coming-to-
consciousness be attained? Bogdanov hashed together a putative prehistory of
mankind whose goal was to show that, originally, discourse was nothing other
than action in verbal form (19–20). The first words were formed from primal
cries with which our most distant forefathers urged action upon one another.
Verbs, therefore, hold priority in the inventory of language, both because they
were its very first items and because they are the most authentic testimony to
the derivation of speaking from doing (228). In the beginning was the deed,
indeed (198). Language is originally and essentially actional, and so is
knowledge. With time, however, this essence was obscured, mystified. The
organization of social practice is responsible for the dissimulation, and only it
can bring about the lifting of the veil.
When advanced, machine-driven industry demonstrates that every motion,
quantity, and thing is but a form of energy, a moment in a selfsame process, this
realization has direct bearing on the nature of knowledge as well. Now practice
and cognition, too, can be seen – potentially, by everyone – as moments of a
selfsame activity. Their natures will no longer stand opposed, for in the
dawning socio-economic world it will be possible to witness them as passing
into one another as a matter of course, just as heat passes, through the
evaporation of water, into steam, and steam into mechanical movement. The
terminal form of knowledge, for which labour causality will be the dominanta,
will apprehend fully “the practical connection of phenomena, the practical
unity of nature.” But this means that this knowledge will treat itself as
participant in this unity, that is, as an integral moment of practice. And when it
does so, it will in fact be an active participant. The coming-to-awareness will
86 Automatic for the Masses

produce a qualitative change in the nature of knowledge so that it will actually

behave as a practical agent in the world.
Bogdanov identified knowledge with practice much more directly than Marx
ever related the superstructure to the base. Bogdanov’s principle of
sociomorphism postulates that the methods for knowing reality are nothing
other than the methods of socio-economic practice transposed onto a different
realm: “first come the actions of people, in a certain interrelation and
interdependence engendered by the very course of their struggle with nature;
thoughts come after, as the abbreviated images of these actions: the practical
organization of labor efforts precedes the cognitive organization of the
elements of experience and produces [the latter]” (242). And a little further in
the same text: “thinking takes its forms, in the last instance, from social practice;
or put differently: the relation of elements within cognition is based on the
relationship between the elements of labor activity in the social process” (243;
emphasis in the original). Hence, it would not be an exaggeration to say that
for Bogdanov the individual thinks with the social organization to which he
belongs,30 or, even, that when he thinks, it is the social organization that “thinks”
him. This may sound very similar to certain formulations of the structuralist
critique of the subject, to be found in the writings of Lévi-Strauss, Althusser,
and Foucault.31 My use of the term “episteme,” which Bogdanov himself never
put to paper, was a conscious gesture to indicate this affinity. But, presently, I
would like to indicate also the significant divergence between the two
enterprises. This will allow me to rearticulate on a concrete example a thesis
concerning the death of the author that I advanced in the introduction to this
book.32
In both cases just mentioned, individual consciousness is seen as determined
and is denied authorship of its own cognitions by a largely unconscious “logic”:
the paradigm of socio-economic organization in Bogdanov; the combinatory of
pensée sauvage in someone like Lévi-Strauss. But the kinship between the two
theories goes no further. The structuralist symbolic logic is the ultimate given:
it does not articulate some further, “higher” significance; it is not the “story” of
anything; it is the field in which meaning is produced, but this field itself is
without meaning. Hence, the structuralist dispersal of the subject, too, is a
terminal condition; no horizon opens beyond it. We are dealing with a
universalizing postulate: the subject is dispersed in a field of signs because this
is just what it means to be human, to live through language, to be in a state of
culture. Things stand very differently with Bogdanov, for whom universality is
something that works itself out in history. For him, as a follower of Marx, the
transsubjective logic issues from a single principle and can therefore be
expected to return to it one day, which means, become true to it. The principle
 Knowledge Become Practice 87

in question is “labour,” or even better, the effort to make a home for man in
nature. Even when the structure of human knowledge is at its most alienated
and “meaningless” – when an abstract system of total exchange, mediated
through monetary signs, dictates its laws to thought – it does not cease to be
rooted in this most essential fact, it does not cease to be a logic of labour. In
other words, the symbolic logic with which Bogdanov is dealing may appear
“meaningless” in one of its historical manifestations, but in itself it is endowed
with meaning, or essence, which some ultimate stage of history and human
knowledge can repossess.
Bogdanov, then, is a modernist thinker of the lineage (if not the stature) of
Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, because for him the dispersal of the subject is not
a terminal but a provisional moment that enables a subsequent project of
repossession – the very project he calls the “gathering of man.” His critique of
subjectivity, unlike that of the structuralists, lives in history. It speaks from a
determinate moment in time and, from there, assaults a particular historical
form of subjectivity: bourgeois consciousness.33 Where this consciousness is
found to be “false,” the prospect opens for its transcendence in a further
historical episode. In other words, the very plotting of Bogdanov’s theory is
projective: it opens to a qualitatively new future and provides a blueprint for it
(no matter how schematic). The scenario of dissimulation that we find in
Bogdanov has the value of an omen and a summoning. For if one positions
himself within history and is able, from that point of view, to regard the scene
of social-practical organization as a spectacle of dissimulation, this by itself is
a most telling sign. It means that the conditions are already ripe for the
inauthentic state of being to be overcome. The very act of cognition by which
the dissimulation is revealed as such implies that a new form of organized
human practice is already on the historical scene, for this is the only place from
which the new demystifying cognition can spring.
To convince ourselves of the projective, anticipative, future-oriented
character of Bogdanov’s thought, we need only open to the very last words of
his Philosophy of Living Experience:

Philosophy is living out its last days. Empiriomonism is no longer fully philosophy,
but a transitional form, since it knows where it is going and to what it should cede
its place. The foundations of a general organizational science will be laid in the
years just ahead, its blossoming is a result of that gigantic, feverish organizational
work that will create a new society and will end the painful prologue of mankind’s
history. This time is not so distant. (272)
88 Automatic for the Masses

The present-day organization of practice is treated here as a demanding

objectivity. This objectivity is already shaping the future and demanding a form
of knowledge appropriate to it. The fact that such an organization is emerging
there, in the world of today, is taken by Bogdanov as an imperative; the fact
calls for an act. And the act in question is not this or that particular undertaking
in industry, politics, or administration, but primarily the project of making
knowledge itself actional. Bogdanov is inserting himself, his own work, within
the plot of dissimulating and demanding objectivity. This work itself is the
taking up of the said imperative and the attempted implementation of what is
being called for. “Philosophy is living out its last days” because the type of
cognition that philosophy epitomizes no longer corresponds to the most
advanced forms of practical organization. Bogdanov’s empiriomonism is
philosophy’s final act by which the entire enterprise is laid out, taken in with a
parting backward glance, before being abandoned. It is the ultimate
philosophical “point of view” (tochka zreniia); and what this point of view
makes visible is both the inherent limits of philosophy and the necessary
emergence of a new system of knowledge, a general organizational science,
“with the help of which humanity would manage to organize in a planned
manner all its creative powers, its life” (271).
Now we can see why Bogdanov could not have proceeded directly to the
project of the Tektology, even if the work had shaped itself fully in his mind in
the first decade of the twentieth century (which was far from being the case). A
prior, facilitating step was necessary, a general “theory” (for lack of a better
word). This theory, developed most extensively in Empiriomonizm and
Philosophy of Living Experience, provides the “motivation” for the subsequent
work by explaining why it is necessary. It draws up the plot within which the
writing of the Tektology will count as the culminating symbolic act. And the act
itself is nothing other than the implementation of what the theory had found to
be necessary in the current historical moment: the realization of the latent-
authentic nature of knowledge as a practical-organizational agency. A very
peculiar act it is, for its outcome is not this or that empirical state of affairs, but
activity as such. In other words, the symbolic act the Tektology executes is the
act by which knowledge effects, from within itself, a passage into the
dimension of practical activity.
Chapter 4

The Organization of Things

“The things are coming!”

Mayakovsky, Mystery-Bouffe

Largely left out of the previous chapter was Bogdanov’s theory of culture,
which constitutes a distinct and important aspect of his oeuvre and is certainly
the main focus of interest for students of Soviet culture. Part of the reason for
this omission is that Bogdanov’s view of culture is simply a variation of his
view of knowledge. Literature and the arts are for him elements of the
ideological sphere, just as scientific cognition is. All of these participate in the
scenario of dissimulation that plays itself out over the entire course of human
history. And just as with cognition, the artistic forms of ideology presuppose
the moment of laying-bare, of return to their hidden but authentic character as
practical-organizational endeavours.1 These ideas of Bogdanov’s became
foundational for the program of Proletkult, a movement that – at least in its
blueprint – set out to create the culture and science proper to the new dominant
class.2 Carried by such emissaries as Arvatov, Valerian Pletnev, Nikolai
Chuzhak, Sergei Tret’iakov, Nikolai Tarabukin, Dziga Vertov, and Sergei
Eisenstein, these ideas travelled beyond the studios of Proletkult, significantly
shaping what came to be known as the Soviet avant-garde. In this sense, the
concerns of the present chapter will not take us too far from Bogdanov’s
positions.
What I wish to consider in the following pages is not a knowledge that
gathers its history in order to change its own nature but rather a cultural practice
(formerly called “art”) that aims for an analogous transformation. This practice,
which shuns the label “aesthetic” and instead calls itself “ organization,”3
 The Organization of Things 91

“construction,” “engineering,” “production,” or simply “making” (delanie),

takes its bearings from the material on which it works. In the material, which
can appear in a wide variety of forms, the cultural agent – formerly “artist” –
imagines an immanent dynamic that prescribes in advance how the material is
to be treated, how it is to be fashioned into a thing (veshch’). In short, the agent
confronts a demanding object. And because the object is able to specify its own
making, the agent proceeds as if he exercised no originary agency, as if he were
not an author but merely the executor of the will that issues from the demanding
object. The duality of fact and act discussed in the previous chapter will return
over and over again in the present one: a latent organization discovered as
something factual, existing there, will furnish the maker with a binding “law of
conduct,”4 supplying an authoritative motivation for the cultural act.

In one of the inaugural statements of the newly formed Left Front of the Arts
(LEF), Nikolai Chuzhak expressed eloquently this essential relationship
between a nascent practice and the imperative objectivity of its field: “There –
an entire uprising of things [is taking place] as a result of some process of
dialectically developing matter, produced by an unknown collective artist-
creator; and here – even the very construction of the thing, even the production
of values [exists] as some barely reachable, dreamedof ideal!” (“Pod
znakom”13; emphasis added). Ostensibly, “here” is my studio, my writing desk,
the place where something called “art” is still being made – the sanctified
domain of aesthetic creation. “There” are the streets and the masses, the
factories and production, the exertion of labour at its most pragmatic, and the
procession of life at its most mundane. But “here” and “there” are also the
essential coordinates of representation in the traditional sense, the places,
respectively, of the representing subject and the object to be represented. And
the project of the Soviet avant-garde should be understood, most broadly, as an
attempt to collapse the distance between the two, to make them one. This
project, in its various modes and phases – from “objectism,” through
Constructivism and production art, to the biography of the object and the
literature of fact (faktografiia) – unfolds in the dramatic divide between “here”
and “there,” between a point of departure, where the subject and his expressions
still subsist, and a point of anticipated fulfilment, where they are to be abolished,
swallowed up by the movement of “dialectically developing matter.”
A type of cultural agency is thereby constituted whose character consists in
the symbolic disavowal of one’s being-here. Saying this amounts to much more
than restating Bakunin’s famous “I don’t want to be ‘I’, I want to be ‘We’.”
Certainly, the space from “here” to “there” can be understood as the separation
between the individual and the collective and further thematized within the
92 Automatic for the Masses

drama of the Russian intelligentsia, ongoing since the middle of the nineteenth
century: its desire and inability to merge with the masses, to be the true voice
of the narod, and so on; much in the history of the Soviet avant-garde would
testify to a similar desire and a similar inability. But if we are to avoid uncritical
conflations, we must see how the masses of the 1920s are different from “the
people” of the nineteenth- century Russian populist movement – and, for that
matter, from any other figuration of the communal in Russian cultural history.
To start, the masses of the 1920s are working and producing masses, by
which I mean some fairly obvious and some not-so-obvious things. Empirically
speaking, these are proletarian masses working in factories that produce
material goods. In so doing, the empirical masses stand in, “fill in,” for
something beyond them, something non-quite-empirical: modern-age
productivity, the working totality of the economy as such. The masses are not
quite it. They are not quite “there” yet. These millions of bodies, minds, and
muscles are still not one with the Device that works through them, the Device
whose most truthful figuration is not the organized working collective but the
perfect cohesion and regularity of the machine. In this sense, the Soviet
machinism of the late 1910s and early 1920s was driven as much by sober
utilitarian concerns as by the anxious realization that the human mass is an
imperfect subsidiary to the machinedriven mechanism of production. 5 In those
days it was possible to claim, as Aleksei Gastev did, that the people were not
yet worthy of the infrastructure created through Lenin’s electrification program
(Vosstanie 21).6 Gastev’s attitude was echoed in the exasperated words of
Sergei Tret’iakov, a leading spokesman for LEF: “Every movement, every step
of the people, their inability to achieve harmony in work, even their inability to
walk in the street in a sensible way, to get on a streetcar, to get out of an
auditorium without crushing each other, is a sign of the counterrevolutionary
action of tonguetiedness, blindness, and lack of training” (“Otkuda” 202).7
Just under the streets, with their hustle and bustle, beyond the exertion of
labour at its most pragmatic and the procession of life at its most mundane, lies
the essential but latent reality of all these things: the actuality of the masses as
an organized communal collectivity, the actuality of labour as a totality of
productive activities, and the actuality of life as a process of “dialectically
developing matter.” To say that the (empirical) masses, the forms of labour, and
quotidian life in general, are “not there yet” is to say that these are things to be
worked on, organized, interfered with, that these are the demanding objects of
a revolutionary practice. For the Soviet avant-garde, this practice begins from
an inherited state of affairs characterized by falsehood and distortion, from a
“here” as a dissimulative plane of being. Here is the proletarian multitude, still
not living, still not acting as the total unity that it is; here is language, whose
 The Organization of Things 93

communicative efficiency lies dormant beneath a multitude of unnecessary

conventions passed down from hoary pasts; here are all the things we use in
our daily life – food, furniture, clothes – still cast in obsolete shapes and
volumes; and, finally, here are all the things called “works of art.”
In the realm of artistic production, the predicament of not-being-thereyet
arose from the inherited relation between a representing instance and
represented objectivity. The very difference and distance between one and the
other was seen by the cultural workers grouped around LEF as the source of
falsehood and distortion. For them, the page, the canvas, and the stage – those
traditional enclosures of artistic representation – framed the disingenuous
existence of the object. The “creative personality” was its equally disingenuous
subjective counterpart.8 It seemed obvious that if the object were made in
absentia, re-presented, it could not possibly be the “real thing” as it existed out
there in the real world. The truism of this proposition did little to soften
Mayakovsky’s passionate rejection of “celestial delights and bookish passions”
in favour of “rye bread to chew […] / living woman to live with” (Misteriia
170). Art as the distortive making of the object was to be abolished in favour
of a true “creating of things” (tvorenie veshchei); the creative personality was
to be succeeded by a skilled maker, something between a dexterous artisan and
a disciplined technician. From the pages of the Futurist “Art of the Commune”
(Iskusstvo kommuny), Osip Brik demanded: “Not to distort, but to create
[tvorit’]. And not an ideal haze, but a material thing … We love our living,
material, carnal life … If you, artists, are capable of creating, of making, then
make for us our human nature, our human things” (qtd in Mazaev 134).
The task was simple: to produce useful material things, things to be chewed
on and lived with. For the word “art” to retain any positive meaning, it would
have to refer exclusively to this task. In Brik’s definition, “art is the direct,
material creation of things” (qtd in Mazaev 136). But much more vocal on the
cultural left were the likes of Arvatov, Tarabukin, Aleksei Gan, and Igor’
Terent’ev, who felt that the word “art” was irredeemably tainted by what it had
previously named and who preferred to speak instead of “craft” or simply
“qualified labour.” As Voronskii, an unsympathetic contemporary, observed:
In our times, writers and critics of the so-called left front (“Lef,” “Gorn,” the
Formalists belong here as well) are leading a rather energetic campaign against
the interpretation of art as a creative act. “Artistic creation,” “intuition,”
“inspiration” are subjected to vicious derision: some consider these concepts
bourgeois or aristocratic, to others they seem unscientific. They attempt to replace
them with “work,” “skill,” “craft,” “energetic word- treatment” [slovoobrabotka],
“device,” “technique,” “the making of things.”
(qtd in Dadamian 203; emphasis in the original)
94 Automatic for the Masses

Many years later, Eisenstein recalled the same scene (in which he had been one
of the main actors): “Everywhere around – an irrepressible clamor on the ever-
same theme of art’s destruction: to liquidate its central feature – the image – by
means of the material and the document; its meaning – by means of
nonobjectivity; its organics – by means of construction; its very existence –
through abolition and replacement with the practical, real transformation of life
[zhizneperestroenie] without the intermediacy of fictions or fables” (qtd in
Dadamian 205).
Because they were “aesthetic,” the objects of traditional art were not “real”
or “material” enough; they belonged to the order of “fictions or fables”; the
process of their production was understood as one of dematerialization or
derealization. Now all of this was due for reversal: having left the illusionistic
space of bourgeois aesthetics, creativity would rediscover itself in the open
“there,” where social life produced and reproduced itself. Malevich’s famous
Black Square and Rodchenko’s less well-known Pure Red Colour (1921)9 had
seemed to mark a turning point, or rather, an exit point; having reached the
utmost limit of dematerialization here, on the canvas, the object now had only
one way to go – it would have to pierce the surface of representation, move
outward, and take its place on the other side, among the material things of life. 10
Referring to Malevich’s painting, Lisitskii wrote: “If the slab of the square has
blocked up the narrow channel of painterly culture (perspective), its reverse
serves as the foundation for a new, volumetric growth of the concrete world”
(334). Representation “in reverse” was simply the fattening of the world’s
consumable materiality, the augmentation of “our living, material, carnal life.”
The cultural act that overcomes the dissimulation of the object – or, which is
the same thing, overcomes re-presentation – deals initially with something
called “material.” It imparts a form on this material en route to producing useful
things. Whatever the object is to be made from – stone, wood, linen – is to be
found “out there”: a prosaic fact that now acquires an additional significance.
The material for what Brik christened as the practice of “objectism” (veshchizm)
is found in such a state that it does not lend itself to arbitrary, voluntaristic
appropriations. It most certainly cannot be dragged “over here,” into the sphere
of subjective artistic invention, into the studio, that parlour of aesthetic
indulgences and idealistic levitations. It needs to be worked “there.” In other
words, the material is embedded in a determining context of social need and
cannot be extracted from it. Furthermore, the formative work performed on the
material is of a peculiar kind: in creating, this work does not really create; in
transforming, it merely brings out what is already “there” (as the material’s
immanent usevalue). This kind of work faithfully obeys the implicit demands
of the demanding objectivity it confronts and in so doing showcases its own
 The Organization of Things 95

disciplined, non-contingent character. Here we might recall the stone from

which Michelangelo made his famous statue, reportedly carving away
everything that was not David. Just as mysteriously as David had resided in the
formless slab about to be sculpted, social need inhabits the material about to be
made into a productivist veshch’.
Unlike the Formalists, who were also deliberating on the relationship of form
to material, the theorists of objectism – and, later, of Constructivism and
production art – saw material as the active agency and form as its subsidiary
function.11 As if soaked beforehand in potential social use, the material was
endowed with an immanent preliminary structure, a utilitarian tectonic. The
formative activity involved the bringing out (vyiavlenie) of this structure, its
actualization: “In ‘industrial craftsmanship,’ the ‘content’ is the utilitarianism
and expediency [tselesoobraznost’] of the thing [veshch’], its tectonism, which
determines its form and construction and justifies its social purpose and
function” (Tarabukin 18). The allusion to Bodganov can be gleaned not so
much in Tarabukin’s use of the word “tectonism”12 as in the symbiotic
encounter between organization as an act (the making or construction of the
object) and as a fact (the material’s inherent structure).
Arvatov, an associate of Bogdanov’s in the early years of the Proletkult
movement, believed he had identified the moment in history when the act began
to betray the fact, when the construction of material things departed from social
utility as preinvested in the material.13 Throughout the Middle Ages and the
Renaissance, art had existed as craft and the aesthetic quality of the object had
been a function of its technical perfection. The celebrated “artists” of those days
had been simply the most qualified artisans. “Giving form” to the material at
hand had meant realizing its social value in a competent manner, in accordance
with current technical knowledge. The seventeenth century saw a radical break
with this tradition.
Highly qualified artisans began founding workshops for the production of
luxury items. No longer part of the communal process of social construction,
these craftsmen saw their own work as somehow different from that of
“manufacturers.” Their craft became “art.” “Now artistic production was
guided not by socio-technical tasks, but by socio-ideological ones” (Arvatov,
Iskusstvo i klassy 12; emphasis in the original). The material was now
conceived as a means to an end, and this end (in itself) was “form”:

They started making the legs of chairs in the shape of paws, door handles – in the
shape of lilies, book covers – in the shape of grottoes, that is, they completely
perverted the essential meaning of every production: instead of turning the
elemental forms of nature into socially-utilitarian forms, they started modeling the
96 Automatic for the Masses

socio-technical forms after the forms of nature, began copying their external
appearance, forgetting that this appearance is the result of an organic
structure …that has nothing in common with the construction of the particular
objects. (13)

No longer the carrier of a social function, the material became a vehicle for
“representation.” In that it now served to represent a lily, the metal of the door
handle had been violated, its socio-technical struktura obscured.
If aesthetics had been the dissimulation of the thing’s utilitarian tectonic, the
negation of aesthetics was the laying bare of that same tectonic. In their early
days, the Formalists saw the purpose of artistic construction as “making stones
‘stony’” (Shklovskii, “Art” 12). For Arvatov, “construction” worked towards a
similar end: it was the act that demonstrated the useful properties of materials.
Veshch’, the thing, was simply the product of this demonstration. Yet it is not
enough to say that a Constructivist table, for example, is the result of making
wood “woody” (instead of “pawy”). Constructivism demonstrates not the
natural properties of the material, not its “organic structure” (see above), but
rather its socio-utilitarian tectonic. Marx’s table, which “stands on its head, and
evolves out of its wooden brain grotesque ideas,”14 is stood on its feet and
firmly supported by objective social demand. Yet in the hands of the Soviet
Constructivists, it continues to be a curious thing. While still a piece of wood,
it already possesses a brain of sorts, for it knows in advance that it will become
a table with a very determinate shape.
To show how another material, textile, can “know” its socio-utilitarian
structure, let us take an article on clothing design by Varvara Stepanova
(writing under the acronymic name “Varst”), published in the second issue of
the journal LEF. The article begins with a fairly typical declaration: in the
revolutionary present, design that hearkens to the whims of aesthetic taste and
market-dictated vogues must give way to “clothes [purposefully] organized for
specific social action” (65; emphasis added). Of course, taken by itself, the
textile from which these clothes are to be made does not “know” anything, it
does not dictate any specific cuts or stitches. But this is exactly the point: the
material does not come by itself; it comes with its own particular “there” – the
place where this or that costume is to be deployed – and it must be worked
“there.” The work required is not just the tailoring of the costume. Just as
important is its demonstration in “action,” at the workplace: “The most
important component [of workers’ clothing] becomes its faktura, i.e., execution.
It is not enough to offer a design for a comfortable, ingeniously conceived
costume – the costume must also be made and demonstrated at work; only then
we can see it and have a conception of it” (65; emphasis in the original). If in
 The Organization of Things 97

the experimental poetic practice of the Futurists the linguistic faktura is the
making visible of language’s function (predicated on demystifying poetic
language’s aesthetic properties),15 the faktura of the material in Constructivist
practice is the making visible of the material’s utility (similarly predicated on
demystifying its aesthetic appropriations). Because the act of laying bare is
definitive in the making of Constructivist things, Christina Kiaer speaks of
them as “transparent”: “The transparent thing demonstrates its expediency or
tselesoobraznost’ – the connection between its material form and its purpose –
by showing us how it was made” (90).
The Constructivists never work with plain raw matter (syr’e). Woven into the
textile for workers’ clothing is an objective social commission (zadanie; Varst
65). This commission should not be thought of as something separate,
detachable from the material at hand – an ideal moment that must be “consulted”
and “applied” in the process of making clothes. As Kiaer emphasizes (apropos
of Tatlin’s utilitarian objects), “the materiality of everyday life determines form
in a way that is not external to the material … but intrinsic to it” (52).16 As with
Michelangelo’s David, the social commission has somehow entered the
Constructivist material beforehand. Now it needs only to be made manifest,
that is, rendered as faktura: “The organization of the contemporary costume
must proceed from the commission to its material modeling; from the specifics
of the work for which the costume is intended – to the system of the cut” (Varst
65). Once again, the act of organization – the modelling of the costume, the
“system of the cut” – has met the fact – the specific organization of labour
within which the costume is to realize its function. Thus the act is no more than
the demonstration of the fact, a laying bare, a letting be. Nothing is added to
“this,” nothing is subtracted. In “making it,” “giving it form,” the executor is
simply letting the essential being of “this,” its being there (as an object within
a systematic organization of social forces and needs), emerge from latency.
The Constructivists were not always consistent in their terminology and not
always agreed with one another.17 Still, it seems fair to generalize that by
faktura most of them understood a certain optimal result of practice, a
normative state of “laying bare” fixed in the material,18 with konstruktsiia as
the organizational act that brought it about.19 We owe to Maria Gough the
insight that the state in question concerns not just the object but equally the
subject of practice. On the level of the act, faktura – from which Gan coined a
verb, fakturit’ (Konstruktivizm 62) – marks the “transfer of the will to form (or
the generative or ‘moving’ principle) to the material itself” (33–4). Gough
shows how the term’s evolution through the various phases of the avant-garde
movement followed an anti-subjectivist trajectory until, with Tatlin and
Rodchenko, it came to designate the maker’s submission to the otherness he
98 Automatic for the Masses

(ostensibly) was shaping, that is, to an objective, “materiological” volition.

Gough also explains, apropos of Tatlin, the ultimate rationale behind this
ritualistic surrender of authorship: “Once ‘liberated’ from the task of
representation, Tatlin sought ways in which to justify his artistic practice, to
prevent its slippage into the realm of a merely arbitrary manifestation of his
individual will or subjective choice. In taking up the principle of materiological
determination, Tatlin found a means by which to motivate his practice”
(“Faktura” 49). Motivation was, indeed, explicitly part of the Constructivist
program. In Gan’s manifesto, the bourgeois epoch was marked as much by the
reign of art as it was by the reign of accident (Konstruktivizm 60). Both were
to be erased in the era of conscious Constructivism now dawning. Gan quotes
with approval his colleague, Rodchenko, regarding the need “to bind [sviazat’]
the constructor by the law of the expediency of applied forms, their lawful
integration” (65). In the eye of a non-partisan observer, Constructivism’s
artefacts – whether clothes, furniture, or architectural models – may seem
thoroughly subjective, voluntaristic creations. Yet they are offered as tokens of
determinism at work, instances of necessary practice.
The principles of Constructivism laid out by Gan can be read as a chain of
motivation, one that begins with the character of the revolutionary age, passes
through the material, and ends by “binding the constructor.”20 Gan took as
absolutely primary the fact of ascendant communism. At the next step, he
imagined communism as something immanent to materialities, a kind of
dynamic that belonged to them and foreshadowed their optimal deployment. 21
This is what he termed “tectonics” (61). We can think of it as the communist
volition of the material itself, a volition that knots the ideological and the
formal together in the very flesh of the thing. 22 To look at something
“tectonically” is to look at it as harbouring a certain essence, an inner character
that is waiting to erupt and give the thing its proper shape: “Tectonics is
synonymous with organicity, with the irruption of an inner essence” (61). To
look at Soviet objects tectonically, then, is to see them in terms of a communist
character that is awaiting realization; it is to read material reality as a demand,
or commission. “Construction” is the next step in the progression;23 for Gan, it
is the moment of organizational activity through which the demand is taken up.
Here we are on the side of the human doer; but in his role as a “constructor,”
this doer merely hearkens to the will of the material; only insofar as he
synchronizes his doings with the implicit tectonic volition will they count as an
instance of “construction.” Faktura is the third, summative and evidential,
moment in the chain. It is not in any sense the “highest” one; rather, it is the
aspect in which the other two are brought together in a qualitative expression.
From Gan’s paratactic explanations, it seems that faktura characterizes the state
 The Organization of Things 99

of the material after it has been subjected to constructional activity in

accordance with its tectonic. Put differently, faktura is the point at which
evidence is rendered that the execution of the object has in fact obeyed the
material’s implicit demand: “The material, taken consciously and used
expediently, in a way that does not impede the movement of construction and
does not limit tectonics is faktura” (62).
Glancing back at Stepanova’s discussion of workers’ clothing, we can now
see that the moments of Gan’s program are all in evidence there. The social
commission that determines the “material modelling” and the “system of the
cut” is nothing other than Gan’s communist tectonic. The construction of the
prozodezhda, insofar as it fulfils this immanent imperative, returns the material
in a state both other and same: as faktura. Other, because now the utilitarian
character, previously latent, has been rendered manifest, or, as Stepanova has
it, “demonstrated.” Same, because when the material is fashioned into an
optimally functional piece of clothing it is made more true to itself than before.
It should also be obvious by now that Gan’s materiological paradigm of
tektonika–konstruktsiia–faktura is in every way analogous to Kruchenykh’s
poetological triad of struktura– rechetvorchestvo–faktura. In both, the initial
term is organization-as-fact; the second is organization-as-act; and the third is
the quality that comes to characterize the utilitarian object or the poetic text if
their production has been, indeed, fully determined by the demand implicit in
the material.
Earlier, I referred to the experimental poetics of the Russian Futurists as a
“practical analysis of language.” Constructivist practice can justifiably be
called the “practical analysis of things”;24 the end result of this analysis is the
same: faktura, which is to say, the becoming-manifest of their social character
cum social construction. These need not necessarily be material things: all
material or ideological values count as veshchi (Chuzhak, “Pod znakom” 15,
37–8).25 And so does the entity “man” – itself a complex of material and
ideological values. Just as the trans-sense verses of the budetliane analysed
language in order to lay bare its morphological and phonetic tectonic,
Meyerhold’s Constructivist theatre was to be the practical analytic of human
movement that lays bare its physical tectonic. Here the “material” was the
human body itself, a biomechanical ensemble whose economy – the efficient
generation, distribution, and application of force and motion – obeyed
determinate laws. These laws, hitherto neglected, mystified, repressed, fell
within the practical-analytical competence of biomechanics:26

[On] the basis of studying the human organism, biomechanics strives to create a
human being who knows the mechanism of his own construction, who is able,
100 Automatic for the Masses

ideally, to manage and perfect it. The contemporary person, living in the
conditions of mechanization, cannot not mechanize the kinetic elements of his
organism. Biomechanics establishes the principles for the measured analytical
execution of every motion, the differentiation of every motion en route to
achieving the greatest clarity, demonstrativeness, specular taylorism [zritel’nyi
teilorizm], of the motion … The contemporary actor must be shown from the stage
as a perfect auto-engine [avtomotor]. (Meyerhold, qtd in Rudnitskii 265)

It is difficult to imagine a more literal rendition of the Formalist injunction to

“lay bare the device.” Freed from randomness and sloth, from all the
impediments Tret’iakov bemoaned, the Taylorized body of Meyerhold’s actor
is an object of demonstration, or, rather, an object as demonstration.27 It does
not “represent” anything; it simply enacts its own analysis and in doing so
becomes a token of biomechanical efficiency. In the “measured, analytical
execution” of movements, the body abolishes representation and manifests
what it truly is: a device.
And because this body is not only a motion device but also the physical
vessel of consciousness, the act that demonstrates and the fact being
demonstrated coalesce, furnishing the already well-familiar duality of
organization:28
In art, we are always dealing with the organization of material … The art of the
actor consists in his organizing of his own material, that is, in the ability to use
correctly the expressive means of his body. Within the actor, the organizer and the
organized (that is, the artist and the material) are brought together. The formula of
the actor would be an equation like this: N = A1 + A2, where A1 is the constructor,
conceiving the task and ordering its execution, A2 is the body of the actor, the
executor who puts into action the directive given by the constructor (A1). The
actor must train his material – his body – in such a way as to make it capable of
executing immediately the directives it receives. This is necessary, because every
expression of force (including the living organism) obeys the solitary laws of
mechanics.29 (Meyerhold 10)

To all appearances, we are witnessing the traditional encounter between subject

and object within the human dyad, between soul and body, between the agency
of consciousness and its most immediate malleable otherness. But these
appearances are deceptive. The directives given to the body are certainly not
the imperatives of subjective interiority seeking expression. They are the
specific articulations of that same social commission, now injected into the
muscles and sinews of the human physique: “1. absence of superfluous, non-
 The Organization of Things 101

productive movements, 2. rhythmicity, 3. correct positioning of the center of

one’s body, 4. stability” (Meyerhold 10).
We saw that in Gan the “demanding” character of the material issued,
ultimately, from the socio-economic context, which is to say, from the dawning
age of communism. The same holds true for Meyerhold: the laws of the human
body and, hence, the techniques of acting, are for him not truly universal. They
are derived from the general physiognomy of the present-day world as it stares
at its imminent future:

In the past the actor has always conformed to the society for which his art was
intended. In the future the actor must go even further in relating his technique to
the conditions of production. For he will be working in a society where labor is no
longer felt as a curse but as a joyful necessity of life … The work of the actor in a
society of labor will be regarded as a [form of] production necessary for the correct
organization of all citizens’ work.30 (Meyerhold 10)

The movements of the actor are dictated by the properties of the

physiological material, but these properties are, in turn, dictated from “there,”
from the world of industry and the “conditions of production.” So that when it
executes the biomechanical movements “here,” on the theatrical stage, the body
of the actor demonstrates its being-there, that is, its socio-economic
conditioning, its belonging to an objective organization of labour, to the
imperative rhythms of industrial production, to the machine. Thereby, the
Meyerholdian actor also acts out the disappearance of the subject. Far from
being a reinstatement of the creative subject under a new name, the figure of
the “constructor” – not just in Meyerhold, but in the Soviet avant-garde in
general – should be seen as a figure of willing subjection, as “the material’s
assistant” (Gough, “Faktura” 52), which is to say, as a figuration of the
subject’s absence.
We should remember, however, that this was not a factual absence, but a
moment in a cultural performance, an acted-out disappearance. To emphasize
once more: the modernist death of the author is a symbolic act; and Russian
Constructivism shows us plainly why this is so. It is not enough for the
constructor to work upon and simply make the thing. He must do it in such a
way as to create the appearance that the thing has willed its form and worked
itself out by realizing its own immanent potentials. This is why the
constructor’s act is not just practical (the practical significance of the various
Constructivist designs tends towards zero), but also and primarily symbolic.
And the thing that comes out of it is not immediately a utilitarian object, but,
first of all, a token of social utility. It does not ask, simply, to be taken and used.
102 Automatic for the Masses

Rather, it asks to be appreciated as a model-example of communist utility, a

showpiece of how social usefulness has methodically and thoroughly
predetermined its final form. In simpler terms, the thing cannot be just useful;
it must also make a display of its objective usefulness. With the appropriate
modifications, the same can be said of the kind of poetry Kruchenykh
envisioned and practised. This was not immediately literature, but a token of
how literature is made, a display of literariness. And its production was a
symbolic act insofar as it was the conscious fashioning of such a token.
We can now give the enigmatic “here” and “there” their proper significance,
which so far I have illustrated rather than articulated. “Here” and “there” do
not stand for anything in particular; they are not specific, concrete places in
either the actual or the discursive geography of the Soviet 1920s. Rather, they
are the placeholders in the general relay between the false (dissimulative) being
of “this” and its genuine, demystified existence. For every particular practice,
these placeholders are “filled” with different realia, so that a specific opposition
is expressed on the level of cultural discourse. In Constructivist theatre, such is
the opposition between the artistic conventionality of the “stage” and the grand
stage of real life. In the anti-passéistic discourse of the Comfuturists
(komfuty),31 such is the opposition between the bourgeois art of representation
and the revolutionary art of life building. Finally, throughout the history of the
Soviet avantgarde, such is the opposition between the individual creative
personality (tvorcheskaia lichnost’) and the communal creativity of the
factories and the streets. As stated earlier, the project of the avant-garde was to
abolish the former and actualize the latter, it was a movement from “here” to
“there” that could be thematized differently and on various levels: “the
individual and the masses,” “conventions and facts,” “the studio and the factory”
(“representation and production”), “bourgeois past/present and revolutionary
present / future,” “subjective expression and objective s ocial commission” –
all of these were different figurations, articulations, of a basic condition that I
described a little earlier as the condition of re- presentation, hyphenating the
word so as to suggest its more general application, beyond the specialized
meanings of artistic, linguistic, or psychological representation.
The agency of the “constructor,” no less than the agency of the Formalist
literary critic, consists in a demonstrative analysis of how things essentially are.
And since their immediate appearance is a (systematic) betrayal of their true
nature, since their “here” is not their authentic “there,” the constructor’s task is
to free the object from dissimulation and demonstrate its being-there. In the
vacated place of the author, we now have a vehicle for demonstration/analysis
– a vehicle that can still be imagined in a human guise (as a constructor,
organizer, or engineer) but whose functioning has nothing particularly human
 The Organization of Things 103

about it. If we have to give it a name, we should call it a “conveyor,” retaining

both meanings of the word: a vehicle that both “conveys” objects, taking them
from here to there, and “conveys” them in the sense of demonstrating what they
truly are. With regard to the cultural act I have been analysing, these two
meanings are identical, they are one. For to convey what the object truly is
means to convey it “there,” that is, to demonstrate its belonging to a systemic
totality of things in the world. And while it might be flattering to imagine that
a person, a human being, could perform this function, it is hard not to see that
the “conveyor” is a mechanism, and thus is best represented by a mechanism:

I am a kino-eye. I am a mechanical eye.

I am a machine, I am showing you the world as only I can see it.
I am in ceaseless motion, I approach objects and move away from them, I get
underneath them, I get on top of them, I move apace with the horse’s muzzle, I
spear into the crowd at full speed, I run in front of the running soldiers, I fall on
my back, I rise together with the airplanes, I fall and soar together with the falling
and soaring bodies …
I decode in a new way the world unknown to you. (Vertov, “Kinoki” 141;
emphasis in the original)

This is Dziga Vertov speaking on behalf of the movie camera or, rather,
speaking as the movie camera. Vertov’s most powerful statement on screen
remains his Man with a Movie Camera (1929); yet the truest statement of his
conceptual position – indeed, of the conceptual position of Constructivist
cinema – is the metaphoric identification between man and the mechanized
medium of filmmaking: man as a movie camera, the human eye become a
cinematic apparatus (kino-glaz, kino-oko).32 In the figurative substitution of one
for another, “man” is the vanishing term, whose properties are displaced by
those of the vehicle.33 And the vehicle is the movie camera, also a vehicle in
the sense suggested above: a conveyor of things.
The camera is an intriguing piece of machinery. By its very construction and
functioning, it inhabits two places at once. It is here, sitting on a tripod or
handheld, attached to the eye of the cameraman. But it is also there, with the
things of the world, attached to them, spying on them, studying them. It is
simultaneously with the “seeing” and with the “seen.” This double habitation
is a source of tension, of conflict, which can be expressed in terms of a
schizophrenic denial: “Where I am is not where I am.” This dilemma offers two
ways of being for the movie camera, and, hence, two alternative modes of
existence for cinema: a here-being and a there-being. The camera can draw the
world to itself, to its own absolute position is space, it can arrange the world
104 Automatic for the Masses

around itself, stage it in front of the lens, invent a world of its own making. 34
Or it can surrender to the world, adapt itself to the world’s structure and
rhythms, become the eye of the world’s objectivities as they stare back at us.
These alternatives – one inauthentic, the other genuine – are not a matter of
abstract choice. Now, after the October Revolution, they could be seen as an
actual historical sequence, two moments in the biography of a still very young
medium.
Initially, like many other things, the movie camera led a false life, untrue to
its own nature. At the very dawn of cinema, it had been quite sufficient to show
the public such simple facts as a galloping horse or a train arriving at a station.
Very soon, however, the infantile delight in watching moving objects on a
screen was outgrown (Brik, “Fiksatsiia” 44–5). There appeared the need to
show more elaborate attractions. What could be easier?! All that was needed
was to enact some kind of dramatic performance and record it on film (45). It
was the age of theatre-become-cinema. The audiences were happy and were
quite willing to ignore the glaring distortion of theatre’s three-dimensional
space on the flat surface of the movie screen (45). But tastes do change, and
soon the cardboard sham and buffoonery of these early spectacles began to
offend the eye. The demand for “photogenic model life” (natura) was now to
be heard. It became clear that some objects and situations easily lend
themselves to the camera’s “naked eye,” while others need some preparatory
work (45). New contrivances had to be invented in order to capture the natura
inaccessible to the camera:

The studio appeared. The studio is a place where photogenic natura is prepared
through artificial means: from the entire system of lighting devices to the
complicated constructions with the help of which one could create anything, all
the way to earthquakes and naval battles; everything in the studio serves one
purpose: to create artificially that which the camera is incapable of creating in
living reality. In this way, the camera’s imperfections, instead of fostering efforts
to improve its mechanism, led filmmakers to begin from the other end: from the
artificial transformation of the life to be filmed. (45)

The studio circumscribes the disingenuous, here-being of the cinematic

apparatus. It is where objects are being re-presented.
The obverse of the concocted studio act is the arrested fact of real life: “life
caught unawares,”35 in Vertov’s sloganized expression. Instead of bringing the
world to the camera, the camera must go out into the world, “to flee – the sweet
embraces of romance, the poison of the psychological novel, the clutches of the
theater of adultery … to flee – out into the open, into four dimensions (three +
 The Organization of Things 105

time), in search of our own material, our meter and rhythm” (Vertov, “We” 7).
Although Vertov says “our material,” the warning is still in effect: the material
is not free to be appropriated in each and every way “we” choose.
Every object, every event, that captures the camera’s attention is not a free-
floating monad; rather, it belongs – less obviously – to the world’s determinate
totality and – more immediately – to the social infrastructure (Vertov, “Kino-
Eye” 66). Only there, as part of that totality, do objects and events become
“facts.” And since it is the kino-eye that shows them as such, being their
optimal conveyor, they are properly called “film facts.”36 From within the chaos
of visual phenomena, the camera must provide a “scientific illumination of
reality” (Vertov, “To the Kinoks” 51), placing each event within its effective
context. Vertov calls this practice the “decoding of life as it is” (“The Essence”
49, 50), or in another place, the “communist decoding of what actually exists”
(“To the Kinoks” 50), and in still another, the “documentary cinematic
decoding of both the visible world and that which is invisible to the naked eye”
(“From Kino-Eye” 87). Perhaps more explicitly than any other Constructivist
project,37 Vertov’s cinematic method – with its scouts (razvedchiki), informants,
hidden cameras, and sudden “attacks” – is a procedure of unmasking (Hicks
33–8).38 It is a practice of analysis,39 one that rescues the object from its
dissimulative existence and demonstrates it in its truth (i.e., as a “fact”): “Kino-
eye as the possibility of making the invisible visible, the unclear clear, the
hidden manifest, the disguised overt … making falsehood into truth. Kinoeye
as the union of science with newsreel to further the battle for the communist
decoding of the world, as an attempt to show the truth on the screen – Film-
truth” (“The Birth” 41–2).
Let us briefly observe how the camera does its work as a conveyor of things.
In this example, taken from another article by Brik, it is a photographic camera
– itself a rather sophisticated device – and the thing at which it is aimed is a
house. Of course, the house can be captured on film as just a house. But such a
perspective, Brik tells us, underlies the falsity of traditional representation: “It
is impermissible to present in isolation one house, one tree; this might be very
beautiful, but this would be art, it would be aesthetics, it would be an aesthetic
savoring of the particular object at the expense of its relation to the other
phenomena of nature or the phenomena of human labor” (“Ot kartiny” 33).
According to Brik, the vision that foregrounds an object, extracting it, as it were,
from its real-life context, is the artistic vision par excellence; it is somehow
inherent in the practice of painting (31). Photography offers the technical
possibility for overcoming this limited, distorting perspective: “Photography is
not forced to isolate a particular person in order to capture him; it has the ability
to capture him together with his surroundings, to capture him in a way that
106 Automatic for the Masses

would make obvious this person’s dependence on his environment; the

photographer has the ability to solve a task that an artist is unable to solve” (32).
In Brik’s estimation, photography is uniquely equipped to show the
interconnectedness-in-totality of worldly phenomena. And so our house is no
longer just a house: “this house is not interesting all by itself … It is interesting
as part of the overall structure of the street, of the city … Its value lies not in
its visual contours but in the function it fulfills within the social environment”
(33). Through the photographic lens, the house is “conveyed”: it is taken to
where it belongs – there, on that street and in that city, within the determinate
structure of urban life – and is thus enabled to show what it truly is – a
functional element of social existence. It is now a house-fact, a house-truth.
I noted earlier that in order to manifest its identity, to be what it latently and
truly is, “this” (in my earlier context, the literary work) must pass through a
special place in the topology of our plot: the analytical apparatus, the repository
of hermeneutic cognition.40 As re-enacted in the project of Constructivist
cinema, this same movement passes through the kino-eye. It is by way of the
kino-eye that the object – a house or anything else – is conveyed to its being-
there, that is, to the totality that holds its truth. The kino-eye is not just the
camera lens, nor is it the camera mechanism as a whole. Rather, it is a figuration
of the entire apparatus of analysis – before, during, and after the shooting – that
utilizes the camera’s revolutionary potential. The preliminary research, the
scouting of locations, the drafting of the shooting plan; the determination of
angles, distances, cadences; the actual recording of visual data; the cataloguing
of the recorded fragments; the process of the final editing – all of these
moments belong to the physiology of the kino-eye.41
In the end result, “if the material is correctly analyzed, i.e., if the work of its
passportization [pasportizatsiia] (the place and time of shooting, the content of
the filmed object) is completed, and the meaning of the separate fragments is
made clear – not only in regard to their source, but also in regard to the various
juxtapositions necessitated by the thematics – the [montage] gives facts their
true voice” (Pertsov 35). Although the auditory metaphor runs against the silent
nature of the medium, Viktor Pertsov’s point is clear: like the material of other
Constructivist practices, the material of cinema possesses authoritative and
binding dynamics of its own. And like all others, the practice of kinochestvo
must submit to this authority and abandon the claim to authorship. The
cinematic organization of the visual world is stringently determined by the
dynamic organization internal to objectivities: “Kinochestvo is the art of
organizing the necessary movements of objects in space as a rhythmical artistic
whole, in harmony with the properties of the material and the internal rhythm
of each object” (Vertov, “We” 8; emphasis added). It is the immanent logic of
 The Organization of Things 107

visible phenomena, not the will of the film director or cameraman, that governs
the analytical operations of the kino-eye. As another eminent representative of
the Soviet montage school insisted: “The newsreel must demonstrate events
truthfully, and the forms of newsreel montage are determined not by the author
but by the material” (Kuleshov 32; emphasis added). The world guides its own
“decoding.” This, undoubtedly, is the main “message” of Vertov’s manifesto-
film of 1929, replete with visual parallelisms between the motions of the
industry-driven urban world and the motions of the movie camera. The
operation of the former determines the operation of the latter, as if the
mechanism of filmmaking were connected by transmission belts to the
enormous Mechanism of industry. We can take this a step further and say that
Man with a Movie Camera projects not two mechanisms working in synchrony,
but only one, with the kino-eye representing that part through which the total
mechanism of industrial modernity is able to display visually its true character.
This is a crucial moment in the optics of the kino-eye, for it exemplifies the
turning inside out of representation in the visual field. Directed at the world,
the kino-eye is at the same time governed by the world. The world is its “socket,”
while being also its target. The subject of visual representation (in the
traditional sense) is situated behind the focusing point of impressions received
from the external world (anatomically, the retina). Directly opposite this point,
behind the socket that is the world itself, we can now begin to imagine a
different type of agency, a different kind of “subject.” This agency is exercised
in an act that is the obverse of “seeing”: that other subject does not watch; it
displays. And the organ responsible for this function is, in turn, the functional
inversion of the eye: it is an eye that shows, one that demonstrates through
images, an eye that is, really, a screen. Cinema, in its double nature as a
recording and projecting medium, is thus situated on a significant borderline.
Vertov’s method of the kino-eye must be understood as an attempt to traverse
the ontological split in the scopic field between seeing and manifesting, to
attain the point where “looking” vanishes to emerge on the other side and
become a pure “letting it show.” But this is none other than the movement we
have been following all along, the movement from “here” to “there.” It now
takes place between seeing and the seen, between the here-being of the visual
– my gazing, focusing, observing, and so on – and its there-being: the self-
display of things, their exhibitionism, the “showiness” of the world in its true
colours.
Vertov’s kinochestvo is just another example of a practice configured so as
to appear obedient to the demands of its object. The object is the modern socio-
economic world as a whole. It is a smart device but does not show itself as such.
To the unequipped, “all too human” eye, it presents the appearance of myriad
108 Automatic for the Masses

uncoordinated happenings. (One is tempted to surmise that in post-

revolutionary Russia, this appearance must have been particularly striking.)
Insofar as this is a semblance only, a dissimulative show, the world is also an
implicit demand. It calls for a new method of seeing. Kinochestvo is the
practical answer to the demand – a kind of practice that lets the object be what
it essentially is. It undertakes to lay bare that essential dimension of objectivity
that “is not absolutely unseen but missed by sight, subject to oversight,” that
“which is not given in appearance but from which things and processes have
nonetheless in turn derived” (Vertov, qtd in Michelson xix). But we should note,
once again, that we are dealing with a symbolic act. Vertov’s kino-eye does not
simply show the world. It also shows itself as adapted to the world, as
necessitated by its essential dynamic, and hence as the world’s optimal
conveyor. Like any Constructivist project, Vertov’s filmmaking is a symbolic
act because it must demonstrate, beyond any visual contents, its own non-
contingent character.
Chapter 5

The Organization of Minds

So far we have been following a cultural act of “organization” that deals with
people and things as things, a kind of praxis aimed at the revolutionary
transformation of the world’s objecthood. To the extent that “man” is
thematized at all in the (anti-)artistic doctrines of the avant-garde, he appears
as determined by his own “thingness” and by the thingness of the world. As he
labours, Gastev’s man is composed of muscular forces, expenditures of energy
strictly quantified in accordance with the task at hand, movements tailored
(Taylorized) to the operations of the machine. As he acts, Meyerhold’s man is,
similarly, an aggregate of biomechanical variables, vectors of motion and
exertions of strength, a device under a human guise.1 As he records visual
phenomena, Vertov’s man with a movie camera is an optical device
synchronized with the device he operates. Insofar as this generalized “man”
can still be conceived as a bearer of consciousness, the consciousness in
question has been so fully “instrumentalized” that it is indistinguishable from
the objective functioning of the device. And because he thus recedes into the
impersonal thingness of whatever it is he is working with, man no longer
represents. He is now one with the conveyor of objectivity – the vehicle that
allows things to be what they are, to demonstrate their true nature and function.
We now inquire into a different kind of praxis – still a project of organization,
but one that takes and deals with human beings in their subjecthood. The
transition we are making is analogous to an earlier one, when we passed from
 The Organization of Minds 111

the Formalist theory of the text to its sociological hermeneutic. What we saw
then was, first, the truth of “this” emerging in the mode of objecthood: initially
dissimulating as something subjective (the author’s “message,” an “expression”
of one’s views or moods), literature turned out to be, on the contrary, an object-
like entity, a device, a working mechanism. And just as convincingly,
afterwards, “this” traversed the same road, but in the opposite direction: from
an initial dissimulative being in the mode of objecthood (depicted world), the
literary text showed itself to be, really, a systematic thing possessed of
subjecthood (Character, Obraz). In the same way, we now pass from a form of
praxis where the reality of “what is to be done” is dictated by imperative
organization of things as things, to one whose coordinates are set by the
authoritative systematicity of consciousness.
If we remember that deluded house from Brik’s article – a yellow house to
be sure – standing apart from the rest of the world in a narcissistic display of
its picturesque singularity, we could follow a line of symmetry to the subjective
realm and observe an analogous deviancy. The false being of the object in the
world has as its correlate the false being of human consciousness. And the
whole movement of praxis that seeks to restore the object to its truth, to return
the house to its proper place, will now unfold as an exercise upon consciousness,
bringing it back to the native place from which it has been estranged.

It has become customary for us today to speak of “cultural politics” as an

inseparable component of culture itself. The production of cultural artefacts, of
any discourse or materiality that can be conceived as belonging to the domain
of culture, always takes place from a certain position, it serves a certain set of
interests, and so on. We can assert confidently that the cultural act is always a
political act. Yet this “always” has not always been “always.” The realization
that culture is unavoidably political is a rather recent one. Even more recent is
the praxis that puts this realization into action, the conscious act of “cultural
politics” itself. In this sense, it could be argued quite convincingly that nothing
like organized cultural politics existed before 7 December 1922.
On that day, a rather mundane event took place: a group of young literati
gathered in the headquarters of the journal Young Guard (Molodaia gvardiia)
in Moscow and formed the group October (Oktiabr’). This was the core of what
eventually became the Onguardist movement.2 Among the founders were
Semen Rodov, Aleksandr Bezymenskii, Iurii Libedinskii, Aleksei Sokolov, and
Grigorii Lelevich; the critics Illarion Vardin and Leopol’d Averbakh were to
join soon after. Most of the group’s members were also members of the
Communist Party or the League of Communist Youth; most of them had
belonged to VAPP, the All-Russian Association of Proletarian Writers
(Vserossiiskaia assotsiatsiia proletarskikh pisatelei). In retrospect, the
112 Automatic for the Masses

mundane gathering was a pioneering attempt to assert on a grand organizational

scale the identity of art and politics. Just a few years later, one Marxist critic
had this to say about the Onguardist movement: “History knows of no example
of a similar effort to build a literature, and in no other epoch was the demand
so loudly sounded that creative inspiration be included in the general plan, and
the enthusiasm of the poet subjected to a common task” (Kogan, qtd in Brown
17).3 What emerged from the Onguardist movement was not just one cultural
organization among others, but an organization that proclaimed Organization
as its supreme principle, a kind of secular sacrament. 4
This is enough of a hint that in the present chapter we will be moving again
in Bogdanov’s shadow. The formation of Oktiabr’ can be seen as a direct
consequence of the blow dealt to Proletkult in 1920–1, when that organization
was absorbed by NARKOMPROS and its state funding drastically reduced. 5
Proletkult would languish for the rest of the decade, while the Russian
Association of Proletarian Writers (RAPP) (and its many subsidiaries) assumed
its place as a mass mobilizer of proletarian cultural forces. 6 The latter
movement’s leaders were often compelled to fend off accusations of being
“neo-Bogdanovites.”7 Oktiabr’’s platform contained direct transpositions of
Bogdanov’s views on culture: “Before the proletariat now arises the foremost
task of building its own class culture and, consequently, it own literature, as a
mighty means for influencing the sense perceptions of the masses” (“Materialy”
193).8
The immediate enemy of the Octobrists, against which the group initially
defined its identity and purpose, was Kuznitsa (The Smithy) – an association
of proletarian poets who had seceded from Proletkult in 1919 and presently
supplied the leading cadres of VAPP.9 The split was between two generations
of cultural activists, but also between two very different conceptions of what
constituted genuine revolutionary culture. In its first pronouncements, Oktiabr’
accused VAPP’s leaders of failing to expand and unify the movement of
proletarian literature (“Iz materialov” 199). For the poets of Kuznitsa, literature
had become the work of self-proclaimed archpriests of art (“Oktiabr’” 206;
Averbakh, “Po etu” 83), who had forged a quasi-religion out of some mystical
union of class origin and truth. For them, the poet’s belonging to the proletariat
seemed a sufficient guarantee of his ability to see and convey the world
truthfully. Literature was not so much the product of reflection upon the world
as a direct emanation from the quasi-divine essence of industrial labour. The
working-class poet was the medium through whom the class character of the
proletariat was revealed in texts.
In opposition to this mystical creed, the Octobrists demanded the political
indoctrination of both proletarian and non-proletarian writers.10 Merely
belonging to the working class guaranteed nothing, “and often the proletarian
 The Organization of Minds 113

artist is very detrimental to the cause of the working class, just because he is so
little familiar with the dialectic-materialist method ... [because he] is
unacquainted with his class’s system of thought” (Libedinskii, “Temy” 124).
The act of artistic creation, Libedinskii continued, was not a seance, “and mere
intuition, the hope that the proletarian instinct will show the way, that ‘the poet
is a medium of his class’s … and truth is, thereby, revealed to him – all this is
a simple-minded and dangerous utopia” (124). The poets of Kuznitsa had failed
to realize that cultural acts are political acts and that “political” had nothing to
do with occupying a place in the socio-economic structure and everything to do
with assuming a conscious position. True proletarian literature was not
necessarily penned by working-class writers; rather, it was literature that
“organizes the psyche and consciousness of the working class and the broad
toiling masses in the direction of the ultimate tasks of the proletariat as a
transformer of the world and creator of a communist society” (“Materialy” 195).
Still, in its main thrust, the platform of the Octobrists did not call on writers
from other class backgrounds to adopt the position of the proletariat. The
proletarian writer himself still had to take the position proper to him. As
Libedinskii made clear, the proletariat was, on the whole, divorced from its
own “system of thought.”
In those days when proletarian culture in Russia was being institutionalized,
this seemingly paradoxical condition (the working class’s divorce from its own
system of thought) was subjected to a penetrating “psychoanalysis” – where
else but in Vienna? – by a thinker who was to play a significant role in Soviet
cultural politics during Stalinist times. In one of the earlier essays of what was
to become a major text of twentieth-century Marxism, History and Class
Consciousness, György Lukács wrote:

Now class consciousness consists in fact of the appropriate and rational reactions
“imputed” [zugerechnet] to a particular typical position in the process of
production. This consciousness is, therefore, neither the sum nor the average of
what is thought or felt by the single individuals who make up the class. And yet
the historically significant actions of the class as a whole are determined in the last
resort by this consciousness and not by the thought of the individual – and these
actions can be understood only by reference to this consciousness.11
This analysis establishes right from the start the distance that separates class
consciousness from the empirically given, and from the psychologically
describable and explicable ideas which men form about their situation in life …
Thus we must never overlook the distance that separates the consciousness of
even the most revolutionary worker from the authentic class consciousness of the
proletariat. (51, 80)
114 Automatic for the Masses

Without changing its constituent elements, its “situations,” “movements,”

and “acts,” the plot we have been following is now to be played out in the
domain of class consciousness. Like every other “this” we have encountered so
far, class consciousness is, “initially and for the most part,” displaced in relation
to its authentic being (witness Lukács’s repeated use of the word “distance”).
As such, it is “false consciousness.” Yet its “falsity” is not some idiosyncratic
aberration that could be somehow prevented or avoided. It is a determinately
necessary moment in the life of the demanding object, of “this.” The
displacement and falsity of class consciousness is systematic, and so is its
authentic being (the “imputed” cognition appropriate for a given class amounts
to a determinate “system of thought”).
With the appearance of the proletariat, there appears the unique possibility
for one class to overcome this discrepancy and actually be what it truly is. Near
the end of history, there is now a social identity that could be imminently equal
to the fact of its latent-authentic organization. But for this to happen, there must
be, first, an act of organization, a political praxis that treats class consciousness
as its field of operation. In its highest instantiation, this is none other than the
revolutionary political praxis of the Party, the vanguard of the working class.
But why shouldn’t there be also – as a subsidiary, a specialized extension, of
the Party’s function – a cultural or even just literary “vanguard” of the workers’
revolution? It was not a secret that, from its very first day, the Octobrists wanted
to play this very role. Their official platform, promulgated at the First Moscow
Conference of Proletarian Writers (May 1923) and published in the first issue
of the journal Na postu, stated:

§4
… with the commencement of planned socialist construction in all areas … and
with the movement of RKP (b) [Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks)] toward a
systematic and deep propaganda amongst the widest proletarian masses, there
appeared the need to introduce into proletarian literature some kind of system.
-----------------------------------------------------
§5
… the group of proletarian writers “October,” as a part of the proletarian
vanguard infused with the dialectic-materialist worldview, strives toward the
creation of such a system and regards the achievement of this possible only on the
basis of a unified artistic program, ideological as well as formal, which would
serve as a foundation for the further development of proletarian literature.
(“Materialy” 194; emphasis added)

The institutional framework through which this strong “system” of

proletarian literature was to be implemented was established and expanded
 The Organization of Minds 115

between 1923 and 1928.12 The Octobrists founded the Moscow Association of
Proletarian Writers (MAPP, Moskovskaia assotsiatsiia proletarskikh pisatelei),
which in 1925 was incorporated into a national organization, VAPP. When
VAPP in 1928 was itself brought within an even broader institutional
framework,13 it changed its name to RAPP, the Russian Association of
Proletarian Writers (Rossiiskaia assotsiatsiia proletarskikh pisatelei).14 The
prodigious growth of institutional structures and superstructures within the
movement of proletarian literature followed its own “natural” progression. The
expansion would continue until every single proletarian writer in the Soviet
Union was a member of the organization. There could be no “outside” to it, just
as there could be no “outside” to the position that afforded the objective
representation of reality.
Around this latter issue irrupted the main cultural polemic of the 1920s: the
struggle between RAPP and “Pereval,” between Na postu and Krasnaia nov’
(Red Virgin Soil), between Vardin, Averbakh, and company on one side and
Aleksandr Voronskii (1884–1937) on the other. In the early 1920s, Voronskii
was the undisputed kingpin of Soviet literature, the official representative of
the Bolshevik government entrusted with finding and nurturing fresh literary
talent. When the young Onguardists stepped onto the Soviet cultural scene, he
became their primary target.15 To these young cultural militants, who had
recently returned from the Civil War, Voronskii represented the distasteful
“grimace of NEP,”16 the threat of cultural restoration on the cultural front.17
Although the acronym RAPP would eventually become synonymous with
hegemonic ambitions and dictatorial tactics – not just in Western but in Soviet
criticism as well – Katerina Clark has argued that the movement was a response
to an already established hegemony of non-proletarian literary forces under
Voronskii’s patronage (“RAPP” 210). It started as a defensive reaction by the
proletarian left, which had suffered a major blow with the reorganization of
Proletkult, and then evolved into a permanent attack, partly because Voronskii
was so well entrenched. The activists of Oktiabr’, like so many left radicals
during the NEP, were only too eager to continue the class struggle in times of
peace.18 This was a struggle for dominance in the field of literature, for
privileged access to publishing houses and printing presses, for material
support by the government and political endorsement by the Party. 19 But it was
also a struggle over principles.
As director of the Krug publishing house and editor of Krasnaia nov’, the
first and foremost “thick” journal of the Soviet period,20 Voronskii surrounded
himself with a group of non-proletarian writers, the “fellow travelers,” whose
acceptance of the Revolution was at best personal and whose allegiance to the
Bolshevik regime was at best strategic. Justifying this liberal cultural coalition
were Voronskii’s views on the nature of artistic representation.21 In what was
116 Automatic for the Masses

to remain his principal conceptual exposition, the 1923 article “Art as the
Cognition of Life and the Present Day” (“Iskusstvo kak poznanie zhizni i
sovremennost’”), he advanced a rather traditionalist, gnoseological
understanding of artistic creativity. As the title suggested, art for Voronskii was
a means for knowing the world; this type of cognition could rival and
complement the objectivity of science (367, 378, 381). The “objective moment”
(ob”ektivnyi moment) was attained when the author’s subjective position was
assimilated to the objective content of the represented reality (368–9). In both
science and art, a cardinal act of will made possible this cognitive attunement,
which excluded subjective “interferences” and allowed the immanent
properties of the object to become manifest (368–9). The practical implications
of Voronskii’s “objective moment” were favourable for the old artistic
intelligentsia: one did not need to carry a Party card to gain admittance to the
spectacle of truth.22
The Onguardists understood Voronskii’s meditations to mean that there was
some felicitous state of cognition, a phenomenological encounter between
perceiver and perceived, that fell outside the lines of political engagement and
class struggle.23 In the following issue of Na postu, Vardin and Libedinskii led
the attack: “Well, of course, speaking generally, there exists in nature an
‘objective moment.’ But comrade Voronskii has lost sight of one trivial detail:
he has forgotten to point out precisely which class, which party, which ideology,
which social, political, and philosophical movements are the bearers of this
‘objective moment’ [and] which … stand as die-hard enemies of objective truth”
(Vardin, “Voronshchinu” 11). By this trivial omission, Voronskii had opened
the door to an illusory space where truth could be possessed solely through
abstract ethics, pure exertion of will, and feats of imaginative synthesis. 24 Even
to begin to conceive of such a space was a self-indictment. For only through an
atavistic mindset – a disposition characteristic of a previous age – could the
artist be seen as hovering above social life and representing it “from the outside”
(Libedinskii, “K voprosu” 56). Under capitalism, the artist’s (typically,
 The Organization of Minds 117

-
petit bourgeois) existence is reflected / distorted in consciousness as a dis
interested and unfettered pursuit of eternal truths (56). His intermediate class
position in society takes on the form of appearance of a messianic licence
beyond the bounds of particular “interests” and “agendas.” “[Such] a quality is
being ascribed also to the artist in our present time, a time of fundamental
destabilizing in capitalist society, when this ‘from the outside’ is laid bare
[obnazhaetsia] through particular actions in the clash of class forces” (57).
The relation whereby consciousness disavows its own class nature
constitutes the basis of its false existence. Truth is to be found in the obverse.
Consciousness must discover itself within the totality of which it is, latently
and inalienably, a part: a collection of people, events, and lives, to be sure, but
as reflected in consciousness. The essence of class – and, it follows, the true
home of consciousness – is where this collection of people, events, and lives is
raised into a system of thought. It is no longer an inert, “factual” aggregate, but
an integral whole held together by cognized relations and necessary prospects.
A consciousness engaged in artistic representation, if it is to offer us the world
as it really is, must see the world from there, from within that totality.
The proletarian writer’s road to that new and unique yet native point of view
is double: “intrinsically,” he is driven there by the momentum of socio-
historical change; “extrinsically,” he is taken there by a conscious practice of
political-cultural organization of which he is the object. Intrinsically, the
Revolution has “laid bare” the reality of class struggle and redefined the
proletarian writer’s relationship to his class (55, 57–9). By the same dynamic,
“a new reading public creates its own proletarian writer and establishes a new
type of connection with him through the writer’s consciousness of the social
significance of his work, [of his] responsibility toward the socialist revolution”
(58). Extrinsically, “this relationship … is established by the [working] class
through its vanguard in the plane of conscious directorship [soznatel’noe
rukovodstvo] over proletarian literature” (60). What is the essence of this
relationship, furthered by both history and organizational supervision? “This is,
first of all, a conscious relationship. The artist must stand equal to his own class’
worldview, he must clearly understand every turn in the class struggle and
participate in it through each of his actions; he must be a conscious participant
in the struggle for communism” (59).
As organizations, MAPP, (the new) VAPP, and RAPP were established
nowhere else but “in the plane of conscious directorship over proletarian
literature.” Their existence as structures (“organization” in the substantive) was
grounded in the need for that kind of cultural-political praxis (“orga nization”
in its other, “actional,” meaning). And we can see immediately that this praxis,
118 Automatic for the Masses

-
like the ones discussed earlier, purports to do nothing to its object – human
consciousness – that is not already in potentia contained therein. For the
consciousness in question – the proletarian – has this most essential content:
that it is not a consciousness (in the substantive), an individual self, but
consciousness (awareness) of others, of collectivity. So for this content to be
laid bare, for light to be shed on the writer’s responsibility towards his own
class, is really nothing more than for him to enter his one and only true
existence. In Hegelian terms, his consciousness is to be one whose being-for-
self is its being-for-others. In the more specific terms of post-revolutionary
cultural jargon, the consciousness of the proletarian writer is necessarily
consciousness of the “social commission.” As Georgii Gorbachev explained:
“The social [commission] is the pressure on a personality that the environment
makes its own mouthpiece of social or class demands. Everything that meets
with any kind of far-reaching social response is made by an individual
according to a realized or unrealized social [commission]” (qtd in Dobrenko,
Aesthetics 94).
Yes, indeed – the very same social commission that we encountered in the
writings of LEF. To recall, “their” social commission had found an ingenious
way into the material object, before that object was given form as a product, a
thing of use; and it had resided there in such a definitive and imperious way
that the subsequent process of form giving, or “making the thing,” had been
simply the laying bare of the thing’s dormant functionality. Because of this
peculiar arrangement, apparently soulless stuff like linen had seemed to “know”
its social purpose and the tailoring appropriate to it. So it is hardly surprising
that consciousness should resemble that linen in its capacity to possess the
social commission latently before displaying it manifestly.
From the inception of the RAPP movement, its leaders were suspected and
accused – with very good reason – of seeking to regiment proletarian literature,
to command its course in a quasi-military fashion, through political directives
and ideological strictures. While openly and proudly declaring that they were
a militant formation, mobilized to fight on the cultural front of class struggle,
the Onguardists rejected the charge of administrative authoritarianism. At the
1927 congress of MAPP, they set out to explain their “conscious directorship
over proletarian literature.”
Responding to an open letter from one of the fellow-travellers, the writer
Marietta Shaginian, in which she had raised in a new context the ageold
question of freedom and determination in artistic work, Averbakh expounded
the dialectic of the “social commission.” The social commis sion proceeds
intrinsically from the individual’s class-specific social experience. It seeps
 The Organization of Minds 119

-
through and informs his consciousness immanently, if latently. It is not some
sort of mandate, conceived at Party plenums and imposed “from above”
(Averbakh, “O sovremennykh” 11). Yet many writers (like Shaginian) perceive
the social commission as just this kind of extrinsic mandate, a political
imposition that limits one’s artistic freedom. That perception is normal, even
necessary. To a (false) consciousness that does not yet fully reflect its position
in the world, the social commission may well appear to be a form of compulsive
externality. Not so in the case of the “artist-Marxist, who understands the
mechanics of social relations” (11). He is aware that his freedom is determined
by the “socio-psychological task” of the current historical moment; hence, this
determination “does not appear to him in the form of a compulsively imposed
requisition for a literary work” (11).
In this manner, social subjecthood, no less than social objecthood, turns out
to be an internally segregated field. Its topology encompasses two moments, a
“here” and a “there,” that can also be grasped and articulated as a progressive
succession – a “before” and an “after.” The before-, or here-, being of social
consciousness is the inert existence of the social psyche (obshchestvennaia
psikhika). In its acts and representations, this psyche is objectively determined
by its belonging to a class; it objectively fulfils a social commission.
“Subjectively,” however, it remains opaque to this immanent relation. Only in
the after-, or there-, being of consciousness does the social commission
immanent to it also become manifest in it. In this second state, the social psyche
becomes an assumed ideological position. “Psyche” and “ideology” are not
qualitatively different conditions or phenomena. They belong to the same
ontological continuum: “Marxism does not find an impassable abyss between
[social psyche and social ideology]. On the contrary, [Marxism] views social
ideology as a definite form of reflected, organized, systematized social psyche”
(6).
The transition from false to genuine subjecthood, from unreflected class
existence to the position of true class ideology, occurs as a matter of course in
the progressive unfolding of the class struggle in history. Socio-economic
development itself makes manifest to consciousness the “mechanics of social
relations.” But an identical effect can be brought about in another way, through
a short cut, as it were: through a hermeneutic capable of explicating those very
same relations. Quite apart from any actual knowledge the proletariat may or
may not possess, there exists a kind of general knowledge – the dialectical-
materialist method – that makes visible what
120 Automatic for the Masses

is otherwise concealed. What interests us here is not how the method “works”
in representing the world, but rather how, anterior to the act of representation,
it allows the representing consciousness to attain the position of radical
objectivity. In other words, we are not yet asking about the mind’s relation to
what is to be represented, but instead about the mind’s own disposition.
Anterior to the actual production of specific artistic representations, (the
organization of) proletarian literature faces the task of producing the proletarian
writer himself. This product, as stressed earlier, cannot be a “natural” one. Just
as it was not the natural properties of the material that determined the utilitarian
fashioning of the thing in Constructivism,25 so it is not the natural class origin
that defines the writings of the proletarian writer as genuine proletarian
literature.26 A proletarian writer is he “who sees the world with the ‘eyes of the
proletariat,’ who is infused with the proletarian ideals, world view and world-
feeling [mirooshchushchenie] … It is clear that here the cornerstone cannot be
one’s profession or social origin, but the point of view, ideology” (Vardin,
“Revoliutsiia” 79; emphasis in the original).27 The cornerstone for the
proletarian organization of literature is the imperative movement from “here”
to “there,” which now occurs on the plane of subjecthood, in the field called
“consciousness.”
The distance separating the two positions of proletarian consciousness, the
immediately given and the immanently possible, is once again the distance
between a misguided singularity and a determinate totality. The first position,
the disingenuous here-being of the proletarian, is the “subjective” (in a bad
sense), particular, contingent, and unmediated absorption of class struggle into
the psyche (in Lenin’s terms, the position of “spontaneity”). Yet there is nothing
whatsoever contingent, arbitrary, or fortuitous about the fact that proletarian
consciousness should exist in this way. Its distortion, its being as a false
consciousness, is systematically induced; it is a lawful extension of its own true
being:

Regarded abstractly and formally, then, class consciousness implies a

classconditioned unconsciousness of one’s own socio-historical and economic
condition. This condition is given as a definite structural relation, a definite formal
nexus which appears to govern the whole of life. The “falseness,” the illusion
implicit in this situation is in no sense arbitrary; it is simply the intellectual reflex
of the objective economic structure. (Lukács 52)

Fortunately, to proletarian consciousness is given – by the same systematic

and lawful determination – the possibility of transcending this partial and
illusory perspective. By a transposition, it can get there, “at the heart of that
totality” (52), which is the socio-economic structure; it possesses the “ability
 The Organization of Minds 121

to see society from the centre, as a coherent whole” (69). That other place of
seeing (very similar to the centre of Vertov’s totalizing cine-vision)
circumscribes the genuine/predestined being of proletarian consciousness.
When the writer is asked to “see the world with the eyes of the proletariat,”
that is the vantage point to which he is pointed. En route, his “s ocial psyche”
(the here-being of consciousness) must be “organized, systematized.” The
procedure is non-invasive. It is an act of facilitation, a conveyance, really. The
organizational manipulation of the psyche – what Evgenii Dobrenko has called
the “fashioning of the Soviet writer” (formovka sovetskogo pisatelia) – is
conceived similarly to the manipulation of the material in Constructivist
practice. Now the “material” is consciousness itself, and its formovka is aimed
at the bringing-out or letting-be of a latent inner content. Dialectical
materialism serves as the conveyor that facilitates this process. In passing
through the conveyor, proletarian consciousness does not undergo any
transubstantiation. Remaining self-identical, it merely sheds its false being. The
method allows consciousness to become transparent to its own “situation,” its
“position,” to see itself as in fact determined by both a synchronic and a
diachronic totality of socio- economic facts and phenomena. When it is thus
conveyed to itself (in both meanings of the word), 28 proletarian consciousness
will possess as subject what it has always possessed objectively: its own
function and utility, its “present” and “future” – a social commission in the
shape of destiny.
As already noted, the term “social commission” originated with LEF, not
with RAPP.29 The latter adopted it, and its members were quick to declare that
only they understood its true significance (just as Pereverzev claimed that it
was the Sociological critics, not the Formalists, who truly grasped what “device”
means).30 As the ideologists of RAPP saw it, LEF had cast the creator in the
non-committal role of hired hand. As such, he bore no responsibility for the
final product, for he merely used his expertise to execute a task in accordance
with the customer’s bidding (the Big Customer was, of course, the Soviet state).
LEF, in other words, furnished the chief example of that inauthentic – purely
external, instrumental – understanding of the social commission for which
Averbakh upbraided Shaginian. The political diagnosis was easy to make:
Constructivists, Productivists, and tutti quanti were the surviving class enemy,
who under the propitious conditions of the NEP sought employment in cultural
production alongside all other “bourgeois specialists” working in industry,
finance, agriculture, and administration. Against this ideologically corrupt
interpretation of the social commission, RAPP brought to bear its own, organic
conception: “the proletarian writer [must] find within himself the social
commission of its class, not as something externally given ... but as a living fact
of his own inner world. Not for a minute should the artist stray from this
122 Automatic for the Masses

genuine social commission” (Gorbov, qtd in Dobrenko, Formovka 108). In

short, the social commission is immanent to the writer’s psyche; it is not some
political dictate to which he owes obedience. What the critics of RAPP failed
to notice is how much their own effort to imagine the social commission as
native to the individual psyche resembled the Constructivist effort to imagine
it as residing in the material. This was, structurally, one and the same
imagination, one and the same plot, played out in two different dimensions:
thinghood in one case, subjecthood in the other. In both cases, however, the
imagination served to “motivate” practice by investing its object with a
preliminary tectonic, an essential yet dissimulated organization, which a
demystifying revolutionary act would make manifest.
In the ranks of RAPP, there was an ongoing debate over whether proletarian
literature should have its own method, whether next to the general guidelines
provided by Marxism there was a need and a place for a doctrine specifically
suited to the purposes of artistic representation. Some considered the
distinction immaterial.31 Others thought it necessary to speak of “proletarian
realism,” mainly in order to distinguish a new way of artistically apprehending
reality from the approach implicit in the bourgeois realisms of the past. 32 Quite
often, under the rubric of “style,” the problem of artistic methodology was
conflated with the question of whether proletarian literature possessed a special
character that separated it from all other literary traditions. Nobody could
dispute the axiomatic assertion that, by virtue of working-class consciousness’s
unique perspective on the world, its artistic productions must indeed manifest
a unique quality, a distinct style.
Little could be said of this quality, short of restating in qualitative terms the
substantive advantages of being “at the heart of that totality,” of being able “to
see society from the centre, as a coherent whole.” The clarity, objectivity, and
comprehensiveness afforded by being there meant that the style of proletarian
literature was, necessarily, clear, objective, and comprehensive. Borrowing a
term once used by Marx, a certain B. Reich proposed that the new literary style
be called “sociographics.” He went on to explain:

It seems to me that that the term “sociographics” defines the “special style” of the
working class, its “special character” expressed in a “special form.”
The attributes of sociographics are: precision – each of its lines, each of its signs
is the exact equivalent expression of precisely quantified magnitudes;
unambiguous, unmediated, demonstrative reproduction – each of its lines, each of
its signs, conveys content in a form which excludes any approximation, any
digression into another content, and which demonstrates plainly the
interrelationships within the content. [Sociographics] is universally
comprehensible, concise, concentrated; each of its lines, each of its signs, is made
 The Organization of Minds 123

clear through universally comprehensible means. It brings together homogenous

entities and distills their most characteristic features. (21; emphasis added)

In not so many words, the envisioned style of proletarian literature is simply

the perfect analytic of every possible social content. In it, writing and reading
coalesce. “Each line, each sign” appears on the page only to dissolve into a pure
transparency vis-à-vis the object it delineates. To write is to render legible; to
apprehend is to demonstrate; to have seen is to have shown.
It is difficult not to see the conceptual symmetry between Reich’s vision and
Vertov’s: both anticipated a universally intelligible sociolect33 (one on the
screen, the other on the page); both emphasized precision and scientific
rigour;34 and both embraced a peculiar dialectic of perception operating in
seemingly heterogeneous experiences. Now, in the field of consciousness,
which lends itself so easily to analogies with sight and vision, we once again
approach that threshold between seeing and the seen, where the first promises
to cross over and merge with the second. The eye of consciousness, like the
mechanical eye of the movie camera, promises to void the distance separating
it from the object of observation and become the pure showing (demonstration)
of things as they are.
And just as the camera, once freed from its false existence in the studio,
discovers its true position to be literally in medias res, in the midst of things, in
those interstices of the world where its totality is being knit, so does the
proletarian artistic consciousness. It is the same road and the same destination.
On the iron rails of objective predestination, “this” accomplishes the trip back
from re-presentation, from its alienated, cast-away being. Unlike the theorists
of the left avant-garde, the “organizers” of proletarian literature did not aim to
abolish artistic representation. On the contrary, they remained strictly within
the framework of the traditional vis-à-vis of subject and object, author and
portrayed reality. And yet, within this old- fashioned framework, a novel
relation between the two terms is established. The author now bears that title
through a new kind of endowment. Not he is an author who, keeping reality at
the distance of artistic perspective, “depicts” it in writing, but he who
apprehends how the reality of which he is part has never ceased to write through
him and in spite of him. Aphoristically, we can call an author the individual
who maintains this line of determinism by consciously accepting the “through”
so that it is no longer “in spite of.” For the theorists of RAPP, genuine
authorship amounted to active awareness of lost authorial rights. “One can
definitely say that the RAPP’s theory of creativity, through all its changes,
remained a theory of impersonal creation. In this, the RAPPists remained
followers of Proletkultism … In this respect, they converged with the their
enemies from LEF” (Dobrenko, Formovka 47).
124 Automatic for the Masses

Having consciously assimilated his work’s inevitable dependence on the

historical existence of his class (the social commission), the writer enjoys
freedom in necessity.35 Try as he may, he cannot free himself from the social
commission. He can only accept it freely and freely employ his abilities in the
task of fulfilling it:

He is free in the choice of his theme. He is even freer in his use of methods for
shaping the material at hand. But we know that his freedom is a function of class
necessity … In the free choice of theme, the author is determined by the social-
psychological task of the present day. This is how we understand the social
commission. This is why we say that the artist-Marxist, who understands the
mechanics of social relations … does not need the illusory freedom of artistic work.
(Averbakh, “O sovremennykh” 11)

Averbakh’s words do not in the least dispel the ambiguity pertaining to the
author’s position in the world. Is the proletarian writer seizing upon something,
or is something seizing upon him? Is he really “choosing” his theme, or is the
theme “choosing” him? As conceived by Libedinskii – himself a proletarian
writer of some renown – the subject of a work, its “theme” (tema), documents
the author’s objective relation to the social world (“Problemy” 20). That
relation is, certainly, given, not chosen. Developing a theme by means of
writing is similar to solving a mathematical problem. The problem as given
contains in embryonic form its own solution (20). Hence, the author’s activity
is the activity of demonstration, of bringing out and making manifest this
initially concealed solution. But since he is himself an inextricable part of the
problem, since it is his objective relation to the social that will emerge at end
of the process, he is equally that which demonstrates and that which is being
demonstrated, the “subject” and the “object” of representation, the portraying
and the portrayed.
Let us turn back for a moment and recall that the theory of Constructivism
features two general types of object. One is a thing that does not “know” its
social tectonic, does not demonstrate it – that is, it is a thing that abides in a
state of dissimulation, or re-presentation. The other is a true sdelannaia veshch’,
which is to say, a thing in which the social tectonic is revealed (vyiavlena) in
the process of making it and that appears as faktura. We can think of it as a self-
conscious thing, an object whose composition and appearance bespeak the
social commission. The second type of object is nothing other than the
overcoming of the first. Analogously, the theories of RAPP present us with two
contrasting types of subjectivity. One is a consciousness that is oblivious to its
class nature and the imperatives issuing from it. The other is a consciousness
that has grasped its functionality within the living social whole. The
 The Organization of Minds 125

Constructivist dialectic of tektonika and faktura is restaged in the literary

criticism of RAPP as a dialectic of klassovost’ and partiinost’.36 Every art is,
by definition, a bearer of klassovost’, for it is objectively in the service of a
class. But this may be only a latent moment, just as the social tectonic can be.
When klassovost’ is rendered manifest, we are dealing with partiinost’: the
conscious taking of a political position in defence of a particular class interest.
Put differently, partiinost’ is the laying-bare of klassovost’, its fixation as the
determining quality of the text, as the ideological faktura of writing. The
overcoming of dissimulation is achieved in one case through the method of
Constructivism and in the other through RAPP’s method of dialectical
materialism.
Human interiority, consciousness, appears at first sight to be quite different
from, say, linen or stone. But just like linen and stone, consciousness emerges
from its dissimulative being to find itself as one “item” in a field of otherness
that is knowable and available to praxis. This field consists of things that are
coextensive with individual consciousness in such a way that their coexistence
forms a systematic and “working” ensemble, a totality. The agency that informs
the whole, whatever makes the totality “work” and “behave” in rationally
predictable ways, also “disposes” of each particular item in a lawful and
necessary manner. Consequently, it gives to consciousness, no less than to
stones and linen, a “disposition”: a tendency to which it conforms, a function
it cannot but fulfil, a shape it will eventually assume. So it is not surprising that
object-like and subject-like items alike should be immanently invested with
something called social commission and, through it, act as demanding objects.
This is the operative principle of the whole of which they are constitutive parts,
just as the dominanta and the socio-psychological tendency are the operative
principles of textual totalities.
As something separate from the totality and its operative principle, there
exists the general hermeneutic of “how it all works” and “what it all comes
down to.” This knowledge is neutral. It does not interfere with the analysed
phenomena but simply raises them into clarity. Under its grasp, “this,” the
cognized field, is conveyed to its own “unconscious”: the true if hitherto
concealed interrelations among its items. Similarly constituted is the cultural
praxis that calls itself now “construction,” now “organization,” now
“systematization.” Whatever this praxis approaches proves to be a thing with a
disposition and purpose, a thing already headed somewhere. In this way, a
cultural “making” becomes possible that is characterized by the
unobtrusiveness of pure analysis. To organize items, whether they are
possessed or deprived of consciousness, means to convey them to what has
always been “there,” behind them – to their “unconscious.” Human or not,
animate or not quite, they prove to be possessing and possessed of a certain
126 Automatic for the Masses

“structure,” “tectonic,” or “organization.” Here the ambiguity sets in, for this
property of items, whatever its designation, is neither fully within nor fully
outside them, it is neither solely their property nor entirely bestowed upon them
from without. The utilitarian tectonic of material things and the socio-
psychological tectonic of human subjects are what relates those things and
subjects to the background totality and assigns to them a function therein. It
constitutes their identity and, by the same token, refers them to where this
identity is no longer theirs to own. For human subjects, the issue of identity is
also an issue of agency. It is a matter of that very same “making” and “doing,”
whether it comes in the form of seeing, building, or writing. In all of these
forms, the act apparently issuing from the subject contains two vectors. To be
what he truly is, to enjoy identity, the individual must in the same act affirm
himself and showcase the operative principle of the systematic totality to which
he belongs. He must allow another agency to pass through him uninhibited;
another act, an imperious one issuing from the totality as a whole, must come
to inform his act.

In Western scholarly literature, it has been customary to see RAPP as a

forerunner of socialist realism, a grand rehearsal for the Stalinist cultural
orthodoxy. Correspondences are certainly easy to find: the pre-eminence of
ideology under the banner of partiinost’; the “massification” of literary activity;
the bureaucratization of the cultural sphere; RAPP’s Five-Year Plan for
literature; the insistence on a single correct line in artistic affairs; and so on.
Nor should one forget how instrumental were the militants of RAPP during
Stalin’s cultural revolution of 1928–31, which paved the way for socialist
realism. Yet, these facts could serve equally well to measure the radical
difference between the culture of the 1920s and the one that came to replace it.
Everything in RAPP’s theoretical and practical activity was based on the
assumption that the class struggle would continue. After all, the distance
between false and true artistic consciousness is, at bottom, simply the distance
between two positions in that very class struggle.
Socialist realism, by contrast, begins where the staging of a unified Soviet
society begins. So it is not surprising that the first act in the institutionalization
of socialist realism was the dissolution of RAPP: the organization was deemed
incompatible with the era just inaugurated. And so it was …
This incompatibility had conceptual consequences. Klassovost’ was central
to Onguardist theory, as was the dialectic between it and partiinost’. In socialist
realism, klassovost’ quickly lost its significance, with the concept of narodnost’
(popular character or spirit) gaining prominence at its expense. 37 Insofar as
partiinost’ was no longer interpreted as active partisanship on behalf of a class
interest, it came to mean obedience to the directives of the Party, since these
 The Organization of Minds 127

expressed perfectly the interests and will of the monolithic narod. All of this
adds up to one ultimate, summative difference. The project of RAPP, inherited
from Proletkult, was to (re)organize the writer’s psyche; it followed from the
gap postulated between dissimulated and true class consciousness. This was a
version of Bogdanov’s global imperative for the “gathering of man.” RAPP
was a zealous implementer of the cultural revolution in part because its leaders
assumed, as Bogdanov had, that socialism could not be achieved without such
a revolution. By contrast, the orthodoxy of socialist realism, whose founding
act was the Party resolution of 1932, was based on the assumption that a
cultural revolution was no longer needed. The rhetoric for “raising the cultural
level of the masses” remained. But with socialism supposedly “built in its
foundations,” this was the verbal form of an altogether different narrative: the
masses had to be made more “cultured”38 so as to fit better a stage set that had
already been erected. As I hope to show in the second part of this study, a
project for reorganizing the individual psyche in accordance with Marxism
could have no place in the Stalinist era. This may sound counterintuitive, yet
follows straightforwardly from the ontologizing perspective so characteristic
of Stalinist ideology. Because the teachings of Marx and Lenin had already
become the lived reality of millions, no “organizationalpractical interference”
was necessary. Instead, the writer was simply enjoined to “know” that reality,
which meant to live it fully, to become integrally “one of us,” one with the
socialist narod. (Now conjoined with narodnost’, the Stalinist principle of
partiinost censored not ideological deviations but aberrations in being.) Along
with hydroelectric plants and steel mills, the First Five-Year Plan was said to
have brought into existence the New Soviet Man (and Woman). Hence, there
could be no question of some activist and systematic “gathering of man.” This
was deemed a fait accompli.39 All that remained was to “show” the fact or,
rather, to let the fact show itself.
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PART TWO
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Chapter 6

The Anonymous Centre of Style

True art can issue only from a purely anonymous center.

Rainer Maria Rilke

Look where one will, can one find the great personalities that would justify the claim
that there is still an art of determinate necessity? Look where one will, can one find the
self-evidently necessary task that awaits such an artist?
Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West

In the first part of this study, I plotted out several episodes of culturaltheoretical
imagination. From the very outset, the assumption was that these imaginations
had something in common. And it is this commonality that has justified my
referring in the singular to a “plot,” a “cultural act,” a “symbolic performance,”
and, of course, the death of the author. The story I set out to (re)tell, in a specific
national context, was about the anonymous centre that Rilke proclaimed to be
the source of all genuine artistic activity. The theories discussed on the previous
pages interest me insofar as they seek to define this anonymous centre and
place artistic practice in relation (subordination) to it. In defining it, they name
it: “dominant,” “constructive principle,” “psycho-sociological complex,”
“social commission,” “true class ideology.” In all cases it is something faceless:
a law, a principle of organization, a paradigm for generating form or content. It
is something like the unconscious of the text, which a new type of practice
would be able to repossess and lay bare. To fix theoretically the anonymous
centre is already to anticipate a kind of activity – still within or already beyond
art, but revolutionary all the same – that would be its conscious activation,
mobilization, demonstration.
132 Automatic for the Masses

The story of the anonymous centre is much broader than the intended scope
of the preceding chapters. Although the discussion in them focuses largely on
the post-revolutionary decade in the Soviet Union, I have gestured – where
appropriate – to the broader context of modernity and modernism. I do not
presume that with incantations such as “anonymous centre” and “the death of
the author” one can unlock once and for all a phenomenon as complex as
modernism. I do believe, however, that if we properly grasp what these
incantations stand for, what their genuine content is, we may appreciate better
an important aspect of modernist culture.
When we inquire into the death of the author, we come to behold not a fact
or a state of affairs but an entire “production,” call it ritual, performance, act,
or plot. We are not simply registering the existence of an anonymous centre;
we are witnessing the positing of such a centre, and we are compelled to ask,
“What are the conditions under which someone like Rilke (or Mallarmé,
Cézanne, Joyce, Kruchenykh, Tatlin) would posit depersonalization as
normative for artistic practice?” Which is to say, we go from a putative fact to
an act performed by someone, an act whose significance is to be measured not
so much by its effectiveness (practical outcome) but by the larger drama within
which – or out of which – it is performed.
As I maintained earlier, what characterizes modernism, perhaps most of all,
is the problematic status of art itself, the radical uncertainty as to how and why
there should be anything like artistic labour at all.1 This labour in fact took place,
but it did so under a question mark: “What calls for this work? From where
does it issue? What necessitates it?”2 The individual artefacts were the practical
responses to this question, yet in them the question was often obliterated as
such. In the mere fact of their existence – that is, insofar as they are – they have
already left behind the doubt as to whether anything really calls for that
existence. But there is more: there is a certain muteness specific to modernist
works that prevents them from saying what it is that has brought them to life.
When we read a work like Lermontov’s Hero of Our Time, we do not feel the
need to ask: “What occasioned the telling of this story?” The story itself tells
us what makes it worth telling: a new psychological and social type can be
identified, a character who captures what “our time” is about. To delve into this
character’s deeds and psychology, to present the motives of his actions or
inactions, is to reveal the physiognomy of the present. In other words, the novel
draws its significance from its reference to a world of shared significance, in
which the intended audience is expected to recognize certain facts as “relevant,”
“typical,” or “essential,” but also a world in which an individual human
character can be seen as condensing the character of an entire age. Needless to
say, this is not the world in which modernist culture took shape.
 The Anonymous Centre of Style 133

When a writer works out a plot, he tacitly assumes that there is a rational structure
in human conduct, that this structure can be ascertained, and that doing so he is
enabled to provide his work with a sequence of order. But in modernist literature
these assumptions come into question. In a work written on the premise that there
is no secure meaning in the portrayed action, or that while the action can hold our
attention and rouse our feelings, we cannot be certain, indeed must remain
uncertain, as to the possibility of meaning. (Howe 144)

Irving Howe’s statement raises only one objection: it is not really a matter of a
rational structure of conduct, but rather of an implied social agreement that a
certain order of doings and experiences amounts to a meaningful event.
What the modernist work brings into the world no longer appears with this
kind of self-evident significance.3 Hence the need for motivation, for grounding
the act of creation, and, yes, for “theory.” What the artefact itself cannot say
must often be enunciated somewhere else, somewhere on the side, in a meta-
statement, a manifesto, a program, a theoretical essay. No other moment in
history had brought together so many artists who also engaged in theoretical
meditations on the prerequisites and essential nature of their trade. The names
of Apollinaire, Metzinger, Léger, Kandinsky, Eliot, Boccioni, Bely, Zamiatin,
Kuleshov, and Eisenstein are but the beginning of a very long list. And this is
not by chance. The programmatic pronouncements of modernist artists were
not something incidental to their practice, a commentary that might as well not
have been offered. They were the integral unsaid of that practice. They were
called for by a kind of work that, as it got under way, had to explain what called
for it. The problematic status of the text called for the appearance of a metatext
(Cherniakov 88).
From the early days of Russian Futurism – a movement that arguably had
nothing but early days – sarcastic observers pointed out the discrepancy
between poetic practice and programmatic activity. Vadim Shershenevich
quipped, “All that we have of Futurism is the program of the Futurists” (qtd in
Ivaniushina 32). And Gustav Shpet chimed in: “Futurism is the theory of art
without art itself. A Futurist is he for whom theory is the beginning, cause, and
foundation of art” (qtd in Ivaniushina 33).4 With even greater force, these
diagnoses would apply to the radical currents that made it their goal to dissolve
art into life. The work of the Russian Constructivists never really moved
beyond the stage of theorizing and experimental modelling, and the same can
be said of its offshoot, socalled production art. Yet we could do more with these
facts than use them to indict the said movements for being creatively futile or
brand them as “utopian” (with all the various political accents that word may
have under different scholarly pens). We could take them instead as an
invitation to think of “projecting” and “modelling” as constitutive of the
134 Automatic for the Masses

modernist project rather than as extraneous preliminaries. To do justice to

Russian Constructivism is to recognize that in some essential sense the model
is the work. And this is because the work is nothing other than the working out
of the question, “Since the end of culture is upon us ... what are artists to do?”
In this working out, it is a difficult and ultimately unrewarding task to fix the
border where “theory” ends and “primary text” begins.
I am suggesting that being “faithful to the text” may in fact mean not losing
sight of those conditions that enabled the text to come into being. Like any
other, a modernist text is a sign of a particular kind, with its own definite inner
organization. But this sign, since it is in fact a token, does not sign on its own,
solely from within itself. Its full significance can only be appreciated within the
plot of the symbolic performance to which it belongs. It is one of the great
ironies in the history of academic thought that modernist texts have become the
showpieces for formalist analysis, for they are the least capable of explicating
their own import. If it is true that modernism aims at “the wholly manifest, self-
sufficient object” (Fox, qtd in Sayre 9), then it is an error of critical thought to
treat its works as if they were in fact such objects. 5 In so doing, we fail to take
into account the aiming itself, that desire for the autonomous existence of the
work, which is itself part of the work. Differently put, the self-sufficient object
is not an accomplishment but a projection; it is a destination, not an arrival. 6 It
is worth insisting, with Barret Watten, that “modernism is not so much what it
is as what it does” (223; emphasis in the original), that the factuality of its works
cannot be separated from their actuality, that is, the projection of “a deferred or
missing horizon of comprehension that it is necessary for the percipient of
culture at large to fill in” (223).
For all of these reasons, it is pointless to ask whether any of the theoretical
projections discussed in the previous pages were fulfilled in practice. Who
would venture to say whether some “individual talent” ever made the wealth of
“tradition” fully present in a work of poetry, as Eliot counselled? And is it not
inane to ask whether the Productivist designs were truly faithful to the “social
commission,” or whether the budetliane did (or did not) attain that moment
when “the word as such” spoke in their verse? Eliot’s “tradition,” LEF’s “social
commission,” and the Futurists’ slovo kak takovoe mark the
enabling/legitimizing horizons of practice. As such, they should be thought as
one with that practice; yet they cannot simply be read from its finished product.
By the same token, the death of the author cannot be read from the text in which
it supposedly occurs. It is a symbolic performance whose effectiveness, or
reality, is the same as its intentionality. In simpler terms, we should make sure
to count the reaching and not just the getting.
This was the source of Barthes’s critical mistake. He took the death of the
author and the anonymous being of the “writerly” in terms of simple,
 The Anonymous Centre of Style 135

unmediated reality, as factual accomplishments of modernist writing. 7 He

answered in the affirmative the inquiry I just characterized as pointless: “Yes,
indeed, in modernism the text became the domain of pure language,
unencumbered by the author, his authority, intentions, etc.” Barthes took the
modernist manifestoes at their word and thus failed to count the reaching along
with the getting. When it seems that “only language speaks,” it is really the
desire to make language speak that speaks.
The concept of the cultural act presupposes the broader purview that allows
us to account for this horizonal nature of the modernist undertaking, for the
reaching that may not get its prize, for the projecting that gives full meaning to
the now worn-out phrase “modernist project.” It also allows theory to be seen
as belonging to modernist practice and the work, rather than being a
heterogeneous phenomenon located on another (meta-) level. Modernism is
inescapably, constitutively theoretical, if by theory one understands the
exigency of self-reflection, of justifying the very existence of art, of laying a
foundation for that existence. The finished product itself cannot accomplish
this. It can merely be, yet it cannot explain why this should be so. To quote the
famous opening of Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory: “It is self-evident that nothing
concerning art is self-evident anymore, not its inner life, not its relation to the
world, not even its right to exist” (1).
But does this broader scope of hermeneutic vision not open the floodgates
for all sorts of circumstantial information to bear upon the analysis of texts –
the very licence that the Russian Formalists rejected, thereby inaugurating
modern literary theory? Do we not face the danger of regressing to the type of
scholarship that Jakobson lampooned as causerie (“On Realism” 38), which
may well venture to relate “Lermontov’s poetry and grain exports in the 1830s”
(Eikhenbaum, Moi 54)? There is really no need to develop elaborate
methodologies in order to meet this objection.
It should be no more than an exercise of common sense to see that Lermontov’s
poetry does not raise the question of grain exports; neither does “The Overcoat”
thematize Gogol’s libidinal economy. Of course, one should feel free to use
Marxism (vulgar or not) or psychoanalytic theory to shed light on these texts,
and the cognitive crops may well be worth the effort. But such deployment of
theory has little to do with the hermeneutics that take Vertov’s writings on
cinema to be relevant for reading Man with a Movie Camera. Whether we call
the film a theoretical exercise or not, it most patently sets out to answer those
general questions about the nature of cinema, of vision, viewpoint, truth, and
so on, that Vertov’s writings spell out.8
Since the example of Vertov’s manifesto film may appear too obvious, too
“tendentious,” let me turn to a work that has nothing like the canonical status
and programmatic quality of Man with a Movie Camera: Aleksei Gastev’s
136 Automatic for the Masses

Pachka orderov (Pack of Orders). It appeared in 1921, at a time when its author
had already decided to abandon poetry and devote himself to the scientific
management of labour (the previous year he had founded TsIT, the Central
Institute of Labor). Gastev’s swansong is anything but a song, and to call it
poetry in prose says more about one’s passion for classification than about the
nature of this work.
Before we even get to what should be the “main text,” an introductory page
written in standard prose serves us Gastev’s proclamations on the thunderous
march of history, followed by something called “Technical Instruction”
(tekhnicheskaia instruktsiia):

“Pack of Orders” is to be read in measured pieces, as if these were fed into an

apparatus. In the reading there should be no expressiveness, pathos,
pseudoclassical aplomb and strong, pathos-laden accents.
Words and phrases follow each other at the same speed.
A massive action is under way, and the “pack” is offered to the listener as a
libretto of thingly events [veshchevykh sobytii]. (215)

The need to preface the text with a manual on how it is to be taken and
declaimed is itself a rather significant gesture. It suggests – at the very
minimum – that what follows is not self-evident, that it does not explicate its
own status or significance, the conditions of its production and reception.
What follows are indeed orders, the great majority of them quite extravagant,
“packed” in ten numbered clusters. The phrasing throughout is terse,
telegraphic. There are no subordinate clauses. As one would expect, the
imperative predominates; where it is not expressed grammatically, it is implied;
all other forms of the verb have been jettisoned, and so have the tenses. The
specialized lexicon of industry, science, and warfare outweighs everything else
and frequently morphs into strange nominal compounds and neologisms
(snariadopolet, agitkanonada, inzhenerit’, mozgomashiny, elektronervy,
arterionasosy). Action is everywhere urged or imposed, never simply narrated.
Verbs are often dropped and replaced by dashes, as if spelling out the action to
be performed would take away from its urgency. When declarative sentences
do appear, they register rather than describe, reading like entries in some
chillingly dispassionate cosmic bookkeeping: “Тридцать лбов слизано, –
люди в брак” (216).9 The orders are issued in the impersonal form of the
imperative, the infinitive (e.g., sdelat’), and not in the first-person singular
(sdelai) or plural (sdelaite). The implication is clear: the text posits no
addressee; the commands directly command being, and not some human agent,
individual or collective, whose task it would be to implement changes in being.
 The Anonymous Centre of Style 137

As the orders pile on, the scope of their jurisdiction expands hyperbolically
in every direction, across spaces and ontological spheres:

Supply with horses [oloshadit’] the inhabitants of Australia.

Rejuvenate the Canadians by 30 years.
Take a report in three minutes from half a billion sportsmen.
Make a summary of the reports in 10 minutes. Turn
on the sun for half an hour.
Write on the night sky 20 kilometres of words.
Dissolve consciousness into 30 parallels.10

At times, we are clearly confronted with technical instructions. At others, the

tone perceptibly changes and the items of some more familiar, even poetic
vocabulary are allowed to make an appearance:

Requiem in the cemetery of planets.

Roar in the catacombs of worlds.
Millions, to the hatchways of the future.
Billions, stronger than cannon. Slavery
of the mind.
Fetters of the heart.11

But this allowance is very much calculated. The mixing of registers – from
drily technical matters to items like human hearts and emotions – is meant to
make a point: all of these things now have been brought together, without
much distinction, under some total global management.
What, then, is this text “about”? I would say: it is about every thing but one.
It names a great many things indeed: equators and meridians, towns and
populations, cubes, colours, the sun, music, literature, lathes, molecules. Ideally,
at least, it should name everything. Within its scope falls every item, of
whatever kind, that is subject to command. But the point is, precisely, that the
whole of being, in all grades, magnitudes, and individuations, is now placed
under human control; all is orderable. Yet even if the text extended indefinitely,
until it imperatively named every existent, directing it towards this or that
practical end, it would still leave one thing unaccounted for: the whatever-it-is
that does the directing. The only thing that cannot be commanded is the
commanding itself. Here the text reaches its absolute, self-imposed limit. Since
only orders are to be given (i.e., naming can come only in the form of ordering,
and not as part of a description, narration, or explanation), and since that which
does the ordering cannot itself be ordered, it also cannot be named.
138 Automatic for the Masses

At this impassable limit, Gastev’s programmatic writings provide the

missing perspective, allowing us, in reading, to complete the work. Two years
before the publication of Pack of Orders, he wrote in an article on working-
class culture:

The mechanization, not only of gestures, not only of production methods, but of
everyday thinking, coupled with extreme rationality, normalizes to a striking
degree the psychology of the proletariat … It is this that lends proletarian
psychology such surprising anonymity, which permits the qualification of separate
proletarian units as A, B, C, or as 325, 075, or as 0 and the like. In this
normalization of psychology and its dynamism lies the key to the prodigious
elementariness of proletarian thinking … In this psychology, from one end of the
world to the other, flow potent massive streams, making for one world head in
place of millions of heads. This tendency will next imperceptibly render individual
thinking impossible, and thought will become the objective psychic process of a
whole class, with systems of psychological switches and locks. (“Kontury” 330–
1)

I do not think we are forcing extraneous matters onto Pack of Orders if we

assume that it seeks to reproduce something of this depersonalized global
consciousness, to make it into that anonymous centre from which the text issues.
Since this consciousness is proletarian, and thus organizational (“tektonic”) in
its very essence, for it thinking and discoursing are the same as doing, the
practical ordering of the world. Ideas and volitions are indistinguishable from
veshchevye sobytiia.
“What would it be to verbalize that state of the world in which there is one
head in place of millions? How could one render in language that objective
psychic process, with systems of switches and locks, that traverses myriads of
human minds and is immediately and practically organizational? Not to speak
about it, but to speak with it, as it.” These are the questions that open the
possibility for something like Pack of Orders. The text is the answer. It is, itself,
that speaking-as, a token of a voice never heard before. But in the practical
answer, the terms of the question disappear from view. Because we get the
speaking itself and nothing else, there is nothing to tell us who or what does the
speaking. Precisely as speaking, the text remains constitutively mute.
It could, and perhaps should, be muter still. With the 1919 “Contours of
Proletarian Culture” before us (and still keeping in mind the theorizations of
the principal ideologue of Proletkult, Bogdanov), we realize that to verbalize
the organizational interventions of the global proletarian consciousness is
already a betrayal of sorts. For Gastev envisions a state of being in which the
distance between “planning” or “conception,” on the one hand, and “execution,”
 The Anonymous Centre of Style 139

on the other, has been reduced to naught. The utopian horizon of the text is that
there shall be no text at all, nothing shall need to be said, for the exigency of
using speech already implies an imperfect automatism of transmission.
Language is used for communication between people, but in the singular and
universal proletarian mind projected by Gastev there is no such “between.”12
Here, although millions of people are in fact involved, the pure immediacy of
the selfsame reigns; hence we cannot say that “one” speaks to or orders to
“another.” The demiurgic/organizational process of the future will dispense
with words and operate solely by means of “switches and locks,” as an all-
pervasive current of impulses that pass immediately into executions. The severe
terseness of “Pack” can now be read as pointing towards that projected horizon.
We are dealing with a completely deindividualized, non-human tongue.13 This
speaking wants to cease speaking and enter into a different, non-verbal
dimension. Words no longer want to be human words, but unconditional signals
and discharges. Before us is a discourse that delegitimizes itself as such and in
discoursing indicts itself for doing so. For what it ultimately wants to be is pure
actuation of the transpersonal demiurgic will of the universal class.
Pack of Orders, then, is a work to the extent to which it participates in a
symbolic performance, a cultural act. It is the working out of a desire, which
the text enacts but does not address. The desire is its horizon, not its subject
matter; it is not spoken about, it is spoken with. We do justice to the text by
factoring in this horizon as we read. And as we contemplate the scene of the
cultural act, we see more than the words on the page, we go beyond the
speaking they transcribe. We become aware of a someone (Gastev) who will
only write on the condition that what comes from his pen not be taken as
“poetry,” an expression of one’s subjectivity or a crafted verbal condensation
of one’s experiences. Whether it should be called art or not, this exercise must
proceed under a more weighty authority. And so this someone begins to speak
as the superhuman, machine-like agency of ordering and execution that
proletarian consciousness should be. Or rather, he steps aside, surrendering his
authorial position, so that the agency in question can take the stage. This is the
symbolic gesture of letting-be, which in the particular case of Pack of Orders
is enacted as a gesture of letting-It-speak.
If we call “text” that which confronts us directly as speaking in Pack of
Orders, then the work is the text plus the pretence of an unauthored,
deindividualized text. In other words, the work comprises not just the speaking
but also the implied yielding, the letting-It-speak. And the perspective of the
cultural act is attained when we relate this entire symbolic performance (text-
as-produced-in-a-gesture-of-yielding) to a situation, when we understand it as
a re-act-ion to that situation. This allows us to see the work as a working
through of a specific, historically determined problem. We thus move,
140 Automatic for the Masses

hermeneutically, from poetics to history, from signs to their ultimate

significance.
The yielding is, at the same time, an anchoring. As it gives itself over to an
impersonal authority, the act of writing – or painting, or composing – is bound
by a law of conduct (Greenberg’s “worthy constraint”). It is “methodical,” it
operates as an autonomous device. This disciplined, “lawabiding” character is
immediately obvious in Gastev’s text in the strict lexical choices, the curtailing
of syntax, and the ascetic regime of expressive means. The “orders” are such
not only in name; we are acutely aware that they have been composed
“orderingly,” as if the writer were trying to transcribe the very essence of
commanding volition. Reviewing Pack for the first issue of LEF, Arvatov
applauded what he recognized as the “systematic implementation of a unitary
and conscious method” (“Aleksei Gastev” 244). And indeed, the text can be
seen as a universe of discourse organized in accordance with a principle of
linguistic economy immanent to it. But it would be wrong to stop at this
formalist stage of reading (Arvatov certainly did not). If the text can be closed
in this way within the limits of an immanent dynamic, the work cannot.
Reading should go on until it tells us not just how the method works, but also
what it projects. In short, the analysis should lead us to the content of form. In
Gastev’s case this is not so difficult: behind the law of form there opens a
desired and anticipated world of perfected social organization, in which a unity
of human practice translates into psychological unanimity and makes every
willing authoritative, non-contingent, and immediately effective. The act of
depersonalization, that is, the death of the author, amounts to the summoning
or evocation of that world, a yielding for the sake of letting it speak. The text
we have before us is, ultimately, a token of that world.

The fundamental question, “What – if anything – calls for art?”, generated

diverse theoretical and practical responses within the culture of modernism.
This goes some way towards explaining the latter’s heterogeneous landscape.
Still, in this diversity there are two responses that may serve as boundary
markers. One may be termed “activist” or “constructivist”: “Nothing calls for
art anymore. The entire enterprise, as it has been bequeathed to us from the
nineteenth century, should be abandoned. Our practice should flow back into
life, into the making of things that are actually called for: ‘rye bread to chew …
/ living woman to live with.’” At the other end of the spectrum would be the
“aestheticist” or “formalist” response: “Art answers for itself only from within
itself. It needs no external support, and least of all from the pragmatics of a
world debased beyond reprieve. The artistic object stands apart from life’s
sordid practicalities, subsisting through nothing other than the necessary
interrelationship of the elements of which it is composed.” One could, then,
 The Anonymous Centre of Style 141

proceed to distribute the currents and texts of modernism in accordance with

this opposition, with the radical avant-gardes at one end, the socially unengaged
exponents of pure art at the other, and everything else somewhere in between.
A map of this sort would have the additional benefit of orienting us on the
scholarly battlefield, where the main point of contest has always been whether
the true character of modernism is to be found near the subversive-activist or
the reflexive-aestheticist pole.14
Yet the very fact that I frame these positions as responses to the same
question already suggests that I do not see them as true opposites. It is not, of
course, a matter of reconciling politically Kafka’s reclusiveness with
Marinetti’s militarism or Pound’s anti-Semitism, but of seeing how activist and
aestheticist platforms could be alternative ways of imagining something like a
necessary practice. Because in the course of the nineteenth century art lost its
moorings – a system of patronage; affiliation with a leisure class; betrothal to
a select, privileged audience; a place of moral and political authority in the eyes
of that same audience – it had to see itself, eventually, as socially unnecessary
labour. And the two ways of dealing with this fact – glorifying the predicament
and seeking to eschew it by hearkening to forces and imperatives deemed
“essential” – fall within the same symptomatology. And if we need a study case
for the compatibility of aestheticist and activist impulses in modernism, we
should look no further than the history of the Soviet avant-garde, in whose
ranks yesterday’s Futurists and today’s Constructivists rubbed shoulders with
Formalist critics like Shklovskii and Brik. What I wanted to show in the first
part of this study was that seeing the text as an autonomous organism and seeing
the pragmatic thing as prefigured through general utility are cognate
imaginations. The “constructive principle” of Tynianov and the “social
commission” of Arvatov, Brik, and Chuzhak play a similar role in the symbolic
performance: they provide for the non-contingent character of the practice in
question. Bound in one case by the immanent demands of the literary tradition,
in the other by the utilitarian demands of a new society, the product is in both
cases a non-fortuitous thing, a called-for construction.
In the framework of modernism, envisioning a world of non-contingent
practice (whether the practice should be called “artistic” or not depended on
the specific ideological vision) was often a matter of imagining what it would
be to inhabit a world (re)possessed by style. Throughout the previous,
nineteenth, century one could hear the recurrent lament that modern civilization
had lost a quality that all previous periods in history had enjoyed – a definite
unity of artistic form grounded in a social being of a definite and stable shape.
Compared to the civilizations of the past,15 the modern epoch seemed
disconcertingly formless. In the words of a twentieth-century thinker:
142 Automatic for the Masses

Undoubtedly people have always had to be fed, clothed, housed and have had to
produce and then re-produce that which has been consumed; but until the
nineteenth century, until the advent of competitive capitalism and the expansion
of the world of trade the quotidian as such did not exist ... In the heart of poverty
and (direct) oppression there was style … Style gave significance to the slightest
object, to actions and activities, to gestures; it was a concrete significance, not an
abstraction taken piecemeal from a system of symbols. There was a style of cruelty,
a style of power, a style of wisdom; cruelty and power (the Aztecs, Rome)
produced great styles and great civilizations, but so did the aristocratic wisdom of
Egypt and India. With the rise of the masses (who were none the less still exploited)
and democracy (the masses still being exploited) great styles, symbols and myths
have disappeared together with collective works such as cathedrals, monuments
and festivals. Modern man (the man who praises modernity) is the man of
transition, standing between the death of style and its rebirth. (Lefebvre 38;
emphasis in the original)
“Culture,” then, is what you get when there is no more style. The use of the
latter term to designate the unique “signature” this or that individual artist
places on a body of work16 became current exactly in the period in which that
other “style” – the epochal unity Henri Lefebvre had in mind – was seen as
extinct. From that point on, there could only be personal styles as the
component parts of something called culture, whose defining trait is its divorce
from the realm of work and everyday life. It was the end of this culture, no
doubt, that Arvatov was announcing when he admonished artists to find
something better to do with their lives and skills: the culture of individualism
and subjective idealism; of sclerotic academicism, with its impotent rehashing
of dead historical styles;17 of the affirmative mimesis of what is; of beautiful
words and assonances oblivious to mute misery; of painstaking dissections of
the inner blind to the swelling tumours of the outer; of tight-corseted moralizing,
forgetful of lives that had only prostitution as means to survive; of everything
that “elevated” the enjoyment of material comforts denied to most; of
everything that served to prettify profitability; of humanism that did not mind
imperialism; of vacuous spirituality, intimate confessions, and high-minded
philosophizing, all made meaningless against the backdrop of mass movements,
the global depredations of capital, and the carnages of modern warfare.
Whether or not we countenance nostalgia for civilizations in which even
cruelty came with style, the fact remains that in modernism this nostalgia was
active and potent (which accounts for the powerful attraction that primitive
cultures exercised on modernist imaginations). Georg Simmel identified that
nostalgia as a symptom of painfully dilated modern subjectivity, which sought
to hide itself, to fold itself, to give itself “an addition of calm breath and typical
lawfulness” (70).18 The perception that style had died some time in the
 The Anonymous Centre of Style 143

preceding century, and been replaced by fragmented and formatively anemic

individualism, was shared by many. Wrote Franz Marc in the Blaue Reiter
Almanac (1912):

But the artistic style that was the inalienable possession of an earlier era collapsed
catastrophically in the middle of the nineteenth century. There has been no style
since. It is perishing all over the world as if seized by an epidemic. Since then,
serious art has been the work of individual artists whose art has had nothing to do
with “style” because they were not in the least connected with the style or the
needs of the masses …
Nothing occurs accidentally and without organic reason – not even the loss of
artistic style in the nineteenth century. This fact leads us to the idea that we are
standing today at the turning point of two long epochs. (“Two Pictures” 94–5)
Modernists who saw themselves as standing at such a turning point, a moment
“between a society that does not need us and a society that does not exist,”19
could just as easily describe this condition as one of “standing between the
death of style and its rebirth.”
“The people itself (and I do not mean the ‘masses’) has always given art its
essential style. The artist merely clarifies and fulfills the will of the people. But
when the people does not know what it wants, or worst of all, wants nothing …
then its artists, driven to seeking their own forms, remain isolated, and become
martyrs” (“Aphorisms” 275–6). These lines, again by Marc, focus the main
premises of my account so far. First, they register the lack that I take as
definitive of the modernist moment: the absence of genuine social demand for
art (“the people does not know what it wants, or worst of all, wants nothing”).
Where such collective calling is silenced, there can be no great style. When it
is no longer called for, artistic practice becomes the individualistic pursuit of
“expression,” of form. And this is nothing other than the elaboration of a “style,”
but now narrowly understood as the stamp of one person’s creative originality.
(With the decline of modernism, style will become simply the trademark of a
product that no longer resists the exchange, the packaging of a commodity.) As
suggested earlier, when artists were “driven to seek their own forms,” they were
also driven to imagine surrogates for the absent social demand. And the end
result was the positing (implicit or theoretically explicit) of demanding
objectivities that would supply laws of form and specify terms of constraint –
a “disciplined,” non-contingent conduct for the human agent in the execution
of the work. Along with this went the positing of something akin to Rilke’s
anonymous centre. The definite unity of form that art could not get from a
worthy collective endeavour could only be derived surreptitiously, from a
symbolic performance of discipline and depersonalization: “What we demand
of art is UNITY, a demand which will never be fulfilled as long as artists use
144 Automatic for the Masses

individualistic means. Unity can only result from disciplining the means, for it
is this discipline which produces more generalized means. The objectification
of the means will lead towards elementary, monumental plastic expression”
(Theo van Doesburg; qtd in Baljeu 141; capitalization in the original).
Artists and intellectuals in Russia did not have to wait for the proletarian
revolution in order to draw that horizon of compelling creativity grounded in
an immanent collective will. From the turn of the century, as elsewhere in
Europe, the fatigue, often disgust, with what was then called culture was being
expressed in no uncertain terms.20 Its real, historically effective negation
seemed inevitable. In the 1902 History of Russian Art in the Nineteenth Century,
Aleksandr Benois insisted: “Historical necessity ... requires that an age that
would absorb man’s individuality in the name of public benefit ... would again
come to replace the refined epicureanism of our time, the extreme refinement
of man’s individuality, his effeminacy, morbidity, and solitude” (qtd in Bowlt
5). In his earliest articles, from 1904, Viacheslav Ivanov also prophesied the
end of individualism, which would “reconcile the Poet and the Crowd in one
great all-people’s art” (“Poet” 714). Needless to say, the revolution of 1917
made the dissolution of individualism and the resurgence of style seem that
much closer and more inevitable. The historical necessity of this epochal event
now seemed fully confirmed. In Russia of the 1920s, it was a rare artistic
current that did not undertake, at one point or another, to announce the
imminence of a great style, speculate on its character, and attempt its
implementation. Below I quote three from among countless pronouncements
on the subject.
Writing at the third anniversary of the Revolution, the Commissar of the
Enlightenment, Anatolii Lunacharskii, gave a diagnosis very similar to Marc’s:

The last epoch of the bourgeoisie was unable to advance any style at all – including
a life style or a style of architecture – and advanced merely a whimsical and absurd
eclecticism. Formal searches degenerated into eccentricities and tricks or into a
peculiar, rather elementary pedantry tinged with various, puzzling sophistications,
because true perfection of form is determined, obviously, not by pure formal
search, but by the presence of an appropriate form common to the whole age, to
all the masses, by a characteristic sensation, and by ideas. (“Revolution” 191)

He went on to say, of course, that the Revolution would save both life and art
from this formlessness.21
In the same year, 1920, the “Realistic Manifesto” by Naum Gabo and
Antoine Pevsner, which accompanied their open-air exhibition in Moscow,
began with these words:
 The Anonymous Centre of Style 145

The blossoming of a new culture and new civilization, with their unprecedented-
in-history surge of the masses toward the possession of the riches of Nature, a
surge that binds people into one union, and last, not least, the war and the
revolution (those purifying torrents of the coming epoch), have made us face the
fact of new forms of life, already born and active.
What does Art carry into this unfolding epoch of human history?
Does it possess the means necessary for the construction of the new Great Style?
Or does it suppose that the new epoch may not have a style? (7)

These questions were rhetorical, of course: the answers were beyond doubt.
The Association of Artists of Revolutionary Russia (AKhRR) had an artistic
platform very different from that of Gabo and Pevsner, but the declaration of
1922 that announced its first exhibition began from the same assumption:

The day of revolution, the moment of revolution, is the day of heroism, the
moment of heroism – and now we must reveal our artistic experiences in the
monumental forms of the style of heroic realism.
By acknowledging continuity in art and by basing ourselves on the
contemporary world view, we create this style of heroic realism and lay the
foundation of the universal building of future art, the art of a classless society.
(“AKhRR” 267)

From everything said so far, it should be clear that I share the views of
Comrade Lunacharskii (as well as Marc), in that I have treated the modernist
pursuit of necessary (self-necessitating) form as a symbolic performance
conditioned by the absence of true social demand, which in turn accounts for
the absence of that “form common to the whole age, to all the masses.” In other
words, I see the modernist desire for form (which, after Russian Formalism and
the American New Criticism, was to be thoroughly misunderstood) as,
ultimately, a desire for the formative. And by “the formative” I mean that
organic relation, through belonging, to a greater social project that would brace
the practice of art from the outside, would give it place and “calling,” and, by
thus supplying it with essential content, would impart to it a non-contingent
form. In this sense, it could be argued that what the modernist project ultimately
projects, the farthest horizon to which it points, is the great epochal style.

In Russia after the Revolution, this horizon seemed very near, until one day it
was proclaimed to have been reached. The epoch of socialist realism began.
The death of the author was to have yet another historical enactment. What
started, with modernism, as a drama, was to end as a farce. And it did so not
just in Stalin’s Russia but also in Mussolini’s Italy and Hitler’s Germany. The
146 Automatic for the Masses

act of depersonalization, which had been a summoning of the impossible, was

now to be performed as an affirmation of the immanent. Stalinist cultural policy,
summed in a phrase, was the staged return of the great historical style.
Because of this, one might be tempted to say, à la Groys, that Stalinism was
the completion or consummation of the modernist project. But if we wish to
maintain credibility in our commerce with words and concepts, we should give
proper consideration to the following dialectic. To have a horizon is not to have
it. In reaching, one does not yet possess what one reaches for. 22 A horizon is
what it is by staying always ahead of one, beyond one’s reach, even as it orients
one’s movement. “The phantom that runneth on before thee, my brother, is
fairer than thou” (Nietzsche 69). The value of a horizon is in supplying
direction, not harbour, impetus, not domus. The same dialectic can be expressed
in terms of desire. A desire is what it is when it does not have its object or, even,
when it does not have an object. It is the going-after such an object, the
projecting/imagining of what and where it might be. 23 To talk of a satisfied
desire is to not talk of desire at all. And so it is that when we speak of the
completion of the modernist project, the words we use create the impression
that modernism includes its completion. But this is wrong. We must think,
instead, of a kind of fulfilment that, insofar as it pretends to have resolved an
intrinsically irresolvable drama, no longer belongs to that drama’s dynamic.
The fundamental question of modernism, “What – if anything – calls for
art?”, was not supposed to have a real answer – not at the beginning of the
twentieth century, to be sure. There were no historical forces then, just as there
are not now, that could overcome in a short time the displacements,
fragmentations, and alienations of modernity. The social movements of those
days were powerful enough to promise a new world order and a new culture
(in a way no movements today can). But this was only a promise, and as such
it was ambiguous, as the range of political articulations, from anarchism to
fascism, demonstrates. As long as it was a promise with a necessarily indefinite
horizon, it was true to the historical moment. When it became a celebration of
a redeemed world and attained cultural renaissance,24 it became false and
obscene.
By the same reasoning, it should be said that style as a horizon of possibility
and style as a blooming immanence are two very different things that speak of
two very different cultures. We should recognize the impulses that socialist
realism inherited from modernism and give due attention to that commonality.
But at the same time, we must be wary of drawing hasty and schematic lines of
descent from one to the other. The notion of unconditional, anonymous
creativity was common to modernism and Stalinist culture. But to understand
this fact is also to see how differently the act of depersonalization played out in
the two cultural frames. To state the most evident: artistic modernism was
 The Anonymous Centre of Style 147

always the work of isolated individuals, who, even as they huddled together in
groupings of dozen or so (trumpeting these cliques as advanced detachments
of the future), only gave further evidence of just how cut off from the rest of
society they were. And as they allied themselves, here and there, with radical
political movements, what they projected on the coarse faces of those
movements were still imaginations nurtured in isolation and political
irrelevance. The death of the author, as treated so far, was the symbolic act of
such individuals. It was their doing insofar as it symbolized the true
predicament they lived as the performers of a labour no longer called for.
Depersonalization was ultimately a subjective ritual that symptomatized this
predicament even while mystifying it, even while turning it into the vicarious
satisfaction of formal mastery. Under Stalin, as I hope to show further,
depersonalization was part of a pre-scripted official plot. Instead of projecting
and summoning, it verified. It issued not from subjective reason but from
raison d’État. It was still individuals who acted in the performance, but the
roles were set in advance; it was only a matter of filling those roles and
speaking the words the script prescribed.
I will be insisting that we view socialist realism within the framework of
style, in the meaning underscored so far. Those who cultivated it referred to it
also as a “method.” I will not be using the latter term, for it might lead to
misunderstanding. A method implies the elaboration and deployment of a
determinate set of procedures on a given material – something we do not find
in socialist realism. Repeated calls to “learn from the classics” and the technical
competence urged upon Soviet artists, composers, and writers are surely
insufficient as parameters of a distinct artistic methodology. If, by contrast, we
see socialist realism as the staging of an epochal style, we may be able to
explain why it never developed the kind of theoretical apparatus that would
have qualified it as a method.
Style is an enemy of premeditation. For its existence, it draws from a pre-
reflective unity of experience that stamps cultural artefacts with an organic
character.25 It is from life, not from method, that such a character issues.
Conversely, the need to follow procedures may be taken as testifying to the
drying up of those vital springs that nurture style. As he diagnosed the course
of Western civilization, Oswald Spengler described the art of the present as
obsessed with method, “meticulous, cold, diseased – an art of over-developed
nerves, but scientific to the last degree, energetic in everything that relates to
the conquest of technical obstacles, acutely assertive of programme” (I, 289).
For Spengler, to create by means of method was the lamentable but also
unavoidable consequence of culture’s decline. It was the surest evidence that
art responded to no deep need and that its shape was no longer imparted by the
weight of a common destiny. “The weaker the feeling for the necessity and self-
148 Automatic for the Masses

evidence of Being, the more the habit of ‘elucidation’ grows, the more the fear
in the waking- consciousness comes to be stilled by causal methods. Hence the
assimilation of knowledge with demonstrability, and the substitution of
scientific theory, the causal myth, for the religious” (II, 103). The opposite of
the modern methodological consciousness is what Spengler calls simply the
“feeling of life” (Lebensgefühl; I, 119).26 Where this feeling is vigorous, where
“the necessity and self-evidence of Being” hold sway, there is style:

It is not the personality or will or brain of the artists that makes the style, but the
style that makes the type of the artist. The style, like the Culture, is a prime
phenomenon in the strictest Goethian sense, be it the style of art or religion or
thought, or the style of life itself. It is, as “Nature” is, an ever-new experience of
waking man, his alter ego and mirror image in the world around. And therefore in
the general historical picture of a Culture there can be but one style, the style of
the Culture. (I, 206; emphasis in the original)

When we follow Spengler’s logic, we have to recognize fascism and Stalinism

as two grand ventures to simulate a new historical and cultural cycle, one in
which the self-evidence of Being is once again virginally strong, one in which
there is a binding destiny for one and all. The unmediated aesthetic imprint of
this destiny – Style.
The last quotation replays the leitmotif of all previous chapters. Here again
is a vision of some objectivity that transcends the individual, leaving him to
will only what “it” wills, “for it is not ‘I’ who actualize the possible, but ‘it’
actualizes itself through me” (I, 164). What I then produce – a text, an artefact
– is necessarily an instance of such actualization. When I act, “it” acts, and
when I speak, “it” speaks. I have argued that modernist artistic practice was
often grounded in some such scenario: from an anonymous centre, an “it,” the
work works itself out through me, and when complete, it stands as the
objectivation or demonstration of “it,” its extant token.27 What I read in this
common scenario is the desire of modern subjects for whom individual
subjectivity has become a form of imprisonment (the same condition Simmel
diagnosed more than a century ago). As an imaginary escape from it, they often
regarded themselves as subjective “extensions” or attributes of objective
happenings that are autonomous and unconditional (but that still somehow need
these creative individuals in order to fully manifest themselves). The thesis I
will be developing from here onwards is that Stalinism perpetuated this
scenario while radically changing its meaning. The desire I have just referred
to became institutionalized as its opposite – unconditional fulfilment. Socialist
realism, as the staging of style’s resurrection, was also the staging of how the
 The Anonymous Centre of Style 149

subject was overwhelmed by “it,” that is, by a truth so powerful that artistic
creation meant simply letting go and allowing oneself to be taken by it.
The original German edition of Spengler’s wildly popular treatise was one
of the volumes that Nikolai Bukharin had at his disposal in the Lubianka prison
while he was writing Socialism and Its Culture. In the penultimate chapter of
that manuscript, “The Style of Socialist Culture,” he engaged with Spengler on
the issue of “form in relation to society” (The Prison Manuscripts 183).28 He
charged that Spengler and other bourgeois ideologists29 had stolen and
disfigured the authentically Marxist understanding of this issue, in which the
mode of production stands as the ultimate formative factor and endows the
products of intellect and imagination with the commonality of style (184–5).
By style, Bukharin understood a unitary “mode of representation”
corresponding to a historically specific mode of production (185, 196). He, too,
glanced back at the era just past and sketched the same landscape of exhaustion,
fragmentation, and formlessness that we have already encountered in Marc and
Lunacharskii:

The bourgeois art of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, reflecting
fragmented specialization, the impoverishment of life, the anarchic nature of
capitalism, the growing pessimism of its agents, etc. – all this broke art itself into
fragments, separated form from content, reduced the latter to the minimum,
splintering form itself into its component parts and turning them into separate,
distinct “substances” of art … The wholeness and unity of rich form with diverse
content disappeared along with the vitality of fullness and completeness. (192–
3)30

The bourgeois epoch, with its distinct mode of production, possessed also a
distinct culture; but its style was the negation of style, the form of formlessness.
Its positive antipode was the style of socialism, a mode of representation arising
from the new mode of production installed in the Soviet Union. Bukharin spoke
of this style as something already existing.31 Having begun with a critical jab
at Spengler, he ended with a distinctly Spenglerian vision of human beings once
again enjoying the sway of destiny. Under the reign of socialism, which is, at
the same time, the reign of Style, “the ‘individual’ knows perfectly well what
he has to do and what road he has to follow … Thus no great role is played by
the ‘why’ questions referred to earlier. This is not a sign of insufficient culture,
but a sign that these questions have been … taken off the agenda by life itself”
(199). Bukharin did not elaborate on how this era of manifest destiny affected
the role of the artist; yet the answer is implicit in his meditations: once everyone
knows what road to follow, once all the accursed “why” questions have been
150 Automatic for the Masses

resolved by “life itself,” the only possible problem of artistic representation that
remains is whether the artist truly belongs to this life or not.
During the 1920s, the campaign for style was still largely a guessing game
as to what could or should be the shape of the new Soviet culture. In the 1930s,
it became an exercise in axiomatics, of which Bukharin’s chapter was but one
sample. It was an ideological axiom that socialism had arrived 32 and that a new
epoch of human history had thus been inaugurated, with its distinct character
already in evidence; now it was only a matter of getting hold of and displaying
the evidence. It was no less axiomatic that this epoch had already given birth
to a new human specimen, the Soviet Man, and along with it a new style of life.
Following this chain of deduction, which Bukharin did, one finally reached the
axiom that socialist realism was the artistic dimension of that greater
phenomenon, the allembracing style of life in socialist Russia. To be a socialist-
realist author (and a good Stalinist subject), then, implied inserting oneself in
the chain of axiomatic reasoning and furnishing evidence that this was not some
abstract logic but matter-of-fact reality. One had to demonstrate that one’s
artistic work was, in fact, the work of the Formative, that is, of life as an
overwhelming plastic force. This demonstration took place not in the text but
by means of the text (among other means). That is to say, it was not just a matter
of portraying the Soviet style of life (say, in a novel) but of demonstrating by
means of the novel that he who wrote it had been guided by a deep “feeling of
life” while writing it.
I am suggesting, in other words, that with socialist realism we are again
compelled to look beyond the text so as to embed it in the symbolic act to which
it pertains. The socialist-realist text was produced as a token, just as the
modernist one was. As such, it does not wear its value on its sleeve. To
appreciate what this value is, to know what the token betokens, it is necessary
to consider the situation out of which it is presented. In the first instance, it had
to present itself as a token of Style, and as such it had to give evidence of a
form common to an entire age. But this is tantamount to saying that the
socialist-realist text had to demonstrate its author’s belonging to “our reality”
(nasha deistvitel’nost’), his rootedness in an “unproblematic general
foundation for life.”33 Indeed, the products of Stalinist culture were always read
in this light – as certificates of their author’s belonging – by well- or ill-
meaning official critics and Party overseers of culture. Because the text was
assumed to issue straight from life, it became a standard procedure to use it for
diagnosing a wholesome or a sick life, as the case might be.34 The categories of
partiinost’, narodnost’, ideinost’ (ideational/ideological content), and
tipichnost’ (typicality) provided the basic terms for formulating the diagnosis.35
It is not enough, though, to point out that the texts of socialist realism were read
in this manner. They were also produced as to-be tokens of style and to-be
 The Anonymous Centre of Style 151

ontological certificates. This was the proper horizon of artistic practice in

Stalinist culture: that my work, once completed, should betoken the existence
of socialism as a formative force, which has also formed me, my thoughts and
imaginations, insofar as I truly belong to our great age.
In a sense, then, socialist realism is modernism in reverse. The modernist text
is a token in the symbolic exchange with the possible; the socialist- realist text
is a token in the symbolic exchange with the (ideologically) given. The former
looks ahead, to a state of the world that will render my practice necessary and
endow it with genuine significance. The latter looks backwards to a pre-
existing state of being that not only has made artistic work meaningful by
default but has also supplied it with an essential form, so that it is now my task
to furnish proof, by means of my work, that such is the case. By proposing a
new verbal idiom, a work like Pack of Orders also proposes a new way of
speaking, thinking, willing, and thus projects a new epoch in which these would
be the norm. Clearly, they are not the norm at present; this age is not yet here,
it is latent at best; so the work, as a symbolic act, is to be read as a summoning.
In a similar way, the constructions of Le Corbusier, “which ride like so many
gigantic steamships upon the urban scenery of an older fallen earth” (Jameson,
Postmodernism 36), project out of themselves the conditions that would justify
their existence, conditions (infrastructural but ultimately social) presently
missing on the fallen earth upon which the buildings stand. A socialist-realist
work operates in reverse perspective: it has to bear witness to the axiomatic
fact that the earth has been redeemed, that already-present conditions have
precipitated a unitary and binding form of creativity, that is, a Style.
It may first seem strange that I am placing Stalinist art in the same context
as the modernist pursuit of necessary form. Was socialist realism not wholly
about content, the political commitment, the ideological message? Did not
Stalinist cultural orthodoxy proscribe formal experimentation? Yes to both
questions, of course, but that does not contradict my argument. After all, form
and content are not discontinuous dimensions, but interact dialectically. At its
extreme, each tends towards and passes into the other. The abstractions of
Malevich and Rodchenko illustrate well that, at a certain point, pure form is
indistinguishable from pure content (in Malevich, the point was supposed to be
a breakthrough to the Absolute; for Rodchenko, it was to be the entrance to the
factory). By this dialectical logic, absolutely necessary form is to be found not
in deliberate attention to form, in its conscious manipulation (Doesburg’s
“disciplining [of] the means”), but in its opposite: the spontaneous, self-
propelled, coming-intorelief of content. Form is truly non-contingent when a
certain “material” does not need to be shaped willfully from the outside but is
so internally active that its existence amounts to its own shape giving. This is
the highest instance of what I referred to as the Formative; Spengler called it
152 Automatic for the Masses

the “selfevidence of Being.” The ideological fantasy that structured official

Stalinist culture – that Being shapes itself and lays itself bare – is the theme of
the next chapter.
University of Toronto Press

Chapter 7

The Unbearable Light of Being

“And your painting, comrade Arnol’dov, is remarkable for being a reflection of the
life created by our creators.”
Panferov, Bruski

A certain straightforwardness of life, an uncontainable power of saturation, was

staring at him from everywhere …
Nikolai Zarudin, “The Sleeping Beauty”

The first epigraph, taken from Panferov’s epic of collectivization, is meant to

give us a first taste of a distinctly new mode of cultural creation. The taste has
something of bland pleonasm to it. Comrade Arnol’dov’s painting, his creation,
reflects what is created by “our creators.” This is its value and distinguishing
quality. Some of those creators are seated around him: a tractor driver, a kolkhoz
worker, an aviator, a party activist – a miniature model of the new social world.
The person speaking is an old Bolshevik, Bogdanov. He is announcing the
arrival of a present in which the ranks of comrade Arnol’dov’s profession have
expanded enormously. From Lenin and Stalin to common folk like Pavel and
Stesha over here – are these not also artists, creators? In all of them, from the
first to the last, some new energy pulsates, a “dynamic force,” as Bogdanov
puts it (980). Let us begin by asking about this force, about its nature, as well
as about its pertinence to artistic representation – to the kind of work someone
like Arnol’dov performs.
 The Unbearable Light of Being 155

What is so distinct about the situation Panferov describes, other than the
pomp of Party rhetoric? After all, people have worked since time immemorial,
and inasmuch as they produce something that was not there before, they could
be called “creators.” And the artist – what has he done, other than depict an
episode of socialist construction, a world being made? There does not seem to
be any novelty here either. Many of his profession, many times before, have
sought to provide a truthful picture of the world, and more often than not that
world had borne the traces of an earlier activity, of a making that precedes the
artist’s. How could any representational art avoid encountering the world as a
pre-existing creation, that is, as a cultural, man-made reality? If this is all there
is to comrade Arnol’dov’s creation, why make such a fuss about it?
The scene we are considering seems rather mundane insofar as we are aware
of only one picture in it – the picture Arnol’dov has just completed. But there
is one other – the picture the old Bolshevik is drawing for his listeners and for
us as he speaks. This outer frame encompasses the “creators,” their creations
and their creativity, as it wells up from the very foundations of socialist reality.
In this second picture, Fenia, Kirillov, Pavel, and Stesha, their labour and their
lives, are the immediate outlet and expression of socialism’s “dynamic force.”
If they are artists, they are artists in a sense quite different from what is meant
in Arnol’dov’s case. Whatever Bogdanov says, our painter occupies an
altogether different position from that of the other creators. From all we know
about realism – and this is, no doubt, Arnol’dov’s method – he has presented
on another surface what his eye has captured on the surface that is reality; while
those around him are part and parcel of that original surface, their doings
blending seamlessly with it. His painting did not emerge in the same way that
a tractor station emerges somewhere in the Soviet countryside. In that sense, it
is not the immediate blossoming forth of the force generated by socialism, but
only a reflection of its manifestations.
The people in whose midst Arnol’dov now stands are representatives of
socialist construction; he is no more than their representor. His work is a
Darstellung of the world now emerging; theirs is a Vertretung – not a
symbolization, but a direct embodiment, an exemplification.1 They are not only
the creators of the new world under socialism but also its native creatures.
Could it be that the artist, with his age-old craft, is excluded from this
immediacy? If so, the praise he receives might be read as a concealed reproach,
and his success, as success in failure. Or could it be that there is a way to
represent that surmounts this dilemma – a kind of representation that is not a
reflection upon life, but a reflection out of it, so that the artistic vision is
generated not with the subject but with the object of representation? What if
the vital force evoked by the old Bolshevik is so fecund that, besides directly
reproducing itself in the labour of people like Fenia, Kirillov, and Stesha, it is
156 Automatic for the Masses

able also to “perceive” and “think” its own workings in the labour of someone
like Arnol’dov? What sorts of thoughts and perceptions would those be, and
how would they relate to the thoughts and perceptions of those who still call
themselves creative authors?
In a speech at a Moscow Party conference on the eve of the Seventeenth
Congress of the CPSU,2 Maksim Gor’kii identified a very similar type of
dynamic force: “This energy, which is being embodied in the grandiose
construction of a new culture, is at the same time raising new forces, creating
conditions and atmosphere that quickly transform the great quantity into a
superb quality” (“Moshchnaia energiia” 1). Even before his permanent return
to the Soviet Union (in 1932), Gor’kii had become an avid collector of what
might be called “tokens of living socialism”: facts showing that the new socio-
economic order was not an ideological abstraction but rather a potent and life-
shaping force. The collection of such tokens was greatly facilitated by Gor’kii’s
busy program of officially sponsored trips and public meetings. At the Moscow
Party Conference, the eminent speaker shared with his audience one
remarkable fact he had come across during a recent meeting with the staff of
the All-Union Institute for Experimental Medicine. A dozen or so of the
institute’s employees had been until recently factory workers, farmhands, or
disinterested, apolitical intellectuals. “But lo, it turned out that, infused with the
energy of the working class, which fertilizes people’s feelings and thoughts,
[these] dozen workers of the Institute, while researching the organism of
animals, came to the dialectic of development that constitutes the foundation of
revolutionary thought” (1; emphasis added). Gor’kii’s telling of the story does
not allow us to reconstruct all of its specifics. (What did he mean by “it turned
out”? When did it turn out? How? What sort of revelation had come to these
people?) Still, its general significance is sufficiently clear: truth had dawned on
the institute’s employees as a (predictable?) consequence of their work. We are
supposed to infer that not just any work will “turn out” this way: only work that
is carried out in the atmosphere and conditions created by the victorious class
struggle of the proletariat.
Whatever we may want to call the medium in which these people are
immersed, we should see that they come to a state of cognition with no agent
of enlightenment present on the scene other than the immersion itself. From
what we can gather, the “dialectics of development” they finally attained were
not precisely the fruit of their efforts or of scientific rigour. Gor’kii’s words
lead us to suspect that scientists working with equal diligence and passion for
objectivity, but working, say, in London, would be presented with a rather
different picture of how living organisms evolve.
Unlike “their” scientists, ours – even if they were the dregs of a former world
or the bystanders of the Revolution – had been delivered unto knowledge/truth
 The Unbearable Light of Being 157

by a power that was, at least initially, outside their awareness. It matters little
that prior to possessing this power, they had been blind to or had even blindly
resisted the teachings of dialectical materialism. If anything, this fact makes
their deliverance that much more wondrous. Wondrously they arrived at the
“foundation of revolutionary thought” – a thought that, as something distinct
from their own thoughts, had been confidently awaiting them in the depths of
their object of study. It is as if, placed in the atmosphere and conditions of
socialism, the object had arrived at the thought proper to itself, and the human
subject was the site of this happy arrival.3
The culture of socialist realism dates from the moment when “miraculous”
stories like the one told by Gor’kii became commonplace. The proclamation of
a unitary artistic style was a straightforward consequence of the proclaimed
immanence of a unitary style of Soviet life. By its very existence, socialist
realism served as a token of a formative force reaching far beyond the domain
of art. In other words, the affirmation of a single aesthetic was a correlate of
the kinds of facts Gor’kii was publicizing, facts that showed socialism to be an
immanent force, definitively shaping psychologies, cognitions, and behaviours.
As one Stalinist critic explained:

Socialist realism was born when the first “facts of socialist character” emerged,
first in the form of mass proletarian revolutionary struggle, then in the form of the
first in history proletarian Soviet state. But when the question “Who will win?”
[kto kogo?] was finally decided, when “NEP Russia” became “socialist Russia,”
and when socialism entered the everyday life of Soviet people – a foundation was
laid for a new rise of Soviet art, for a new, deeper fusion of realism and
revolutionary romantics. And only after this could the concept of socialist realism
be promoted as a slogan for all our literature, for all our art. (Bialik 188) 4

It is not surprising that the official founding act of the new culture, the
Resolution of the Party’s Central Committee of 23 April 1932, told a story
analogous to Gor’kii’s. His was about apolitical researches that had
miraculously “arrived” at dialectical materialism. The Party’s official narrative
was about the apolitical artistic intelligentsia, which, under the conditions
created by the First Five-Year Plan, had arrived at socialist realism. The
resolution decreed a radical reform in all spheres of cultural production, citing
as the basis for the decree the “significant successes of socialist construction,”
which had resulted in a “qualitative as well as quantitative growth of literature
and art” (“On the Reformation” 124).
On the same basis, the resolution ordered the liquidation of RAPP and its
sister organizations, which by that time had become a hegemonic presence in
Soviet culture. According to the Central Committee, RAPP’s leaders had fallen
158 Automatic for the Masses

out of step with the times. After an initial run (during the NEP period, but
especially from 1928 to 1931) during which the organization played a positive
role, it had missed a crucial change in the socio- political situation. The
antagonistic treatment to which RAPP continued to subject the Revolution’s
cultural fellow-travellers could no longer be tolerated. According to the
resolution, in the new conditions created by the progress of socialist
construction, the psychology of the fellow-travellers had undergone significant
transformation (124). As an editorial in Literaturnaia gazeta explained, these
new conditions “had not been understood in a timely way and in their depth by
RAPP” (“Budem” 1). Its leaders had failed to see how these conditions “had
ensured [obespechili] the active participation of the main mass of the
intelligentsia in solving the tasks of [socialist] construction” (1). As a
consequence, the organization’s recent activity had been riddled with “grave
political errors”; and this, despite the clarity of the said conditions and the
Party’s repeated instructions (1). According to the Party press, all needed
clarifications were contained in Stalin’s speech at the Convention of Economic
Cadres (23 June 1931), in which the Leader had called for a new approach to
the old technical intelligentsia and indicated their changing attitude towards
Soviet power. As it turns out, something other than overt political
indoctrination – RAPP’s approach par excellence – had brought the broad
masses of previously apolitical writers to the acceptance of socialism.
So, what was this “something” – which, despite its blinding obviousness, had
been ignored by RAPP’s leaders, and which, almost against the grain of their
efforts, had ensured the intelligentsia’s participation in the building of
socialism? The answer is again somewhat tautological, for this “something”
was nothing other than socialism itself. The resolution says, more or less, the
following: “The process of building socialism, creates, apart from socialism
itself, also the conditions that secure the participation of previously indifferent
subjects in the building of socialism.” The tautology arises from the fact that
socialism is inscribed twice: once as an empirical world in the making, and a
second time as pure and practical self-evidence that takes possession of human
consciousness and instrumentalizes it towards a predetermined purpose.
Without the need for propaganda, socialism’s own growth and ontological
plentitude had recruited subjects to the cause of socialism. 5
In the Central Committee’s resolution, we find these subjects in two places.
First, there are the poor functionaries of RAPP, who were supposed to see but
who had failed to do so because of a deeply ingrained “coterie mentality”
(grupovshchina), which had isolated them from crucial developments in the
life of their country. Second, there are the “broad masses” of the previously
non-committal intelligentsia, who can indeed see. It seems useless to ask
whether this official characterization correctly describes the actual position of
 The Unbearable Light of Being 159

writers in either of these groups (how can we ever be sure?). What matters for
us here is that both groups set out immediately to show that they were indeed
the subjects of socialism. They began acting as if they could see. While RAPP’s
leaders (Averbakh, Libedinskii, Ermilov, Selivanovskii, Kirshon, Chumardin)
engaged in cathartic exercises of self-criticism (samokritika), former fellow-
travellers strove to depict themselves as possessed by the transformative power
of the new epoch.
One such newly “possessed” subject was Shaginian – the same Shaginian
who, in the mid-1920s, had difficulty reconciling traditional notions of creative
freedom with the requirements of the social commission. 6 Speaking in 1932 to
a group of young writers, she saw these difficulties as a thing of the past:

Much has happened since then. Since those days, socialism has become reality. It
exists on one sixth of the world map, and we exist in it. And from all sides, from
the depths, as well as from the surface, of our new phenomena, of our new practice,
socialism gushes at us, surrounds us, infuses us, and not only changes our attitude
toward things and phenomena, but also opens our eyes to the essence and meaning
of the transformations taking place within us. (205; emphasis in the original)

Note that the socialism Shaginian inhabits with her passionate discourse is not
equal to the sum of its own “things and phenomena.” Over and above them,
socialism produces cognitive clarity as a kind of para-phenomenon. The things
and phenomena that compose the empirical existence of socialism do not lie in
quiet repose, as a world that is merely and inertly there. They gush, surround,
infuse. Through this restless ebullience they are able to possess the subject,
opening her eyes and giving her the ability to see clearly not only outside
herself but also within. In short, they make sense.
When we say, in casual parlance, that “things make sense,” we of course
mean that they do so for someone present at the scene, a person who has
reached an understanding of a certain state of affairs. And we believe that
ultimately it is this person who – despite not being the grammatical subject of
the expression – is the one actually “making” the sense. The case I am trying
to argue here runs counter to this “pedestrian” logic. In the state of affairs
Shaginian describes, it is, literally, the things that make the sense. “Oh, well,”
someone may object, “but what about our speaker and the ‘we’ to which she
belongs and appeals? Obviously, it is to them that socialism makes sense, and,
hence, their activity as subjects is implied. Is not Shaginian saying simply, ‘We
have come to understand the society we live in, its mechanisms, advantages,
etc.’?” This would be true only up to the point where we notice that the “we”
in which the clarity of understanding and self-awareness is born is itself a
product of what it comes to understand. Socialism manifests itself to
160 Automatic for the Masses

consciousness in such a way that it transforms this consciousness into

something new. The subject who comes to understand was not there prior to
the object of understanding (socialist life). The people included in Shaginian’s
“we” are what they are in the present moment because they were made by
socialism. Quite literally, they were made to understand, made to see – made
in order to be the site where true vision occurs. In Stalinist socialism –
considered as a cultural-ideological phenomenon and not as a factual state of
affairs – we have a sort of reality that not only unfurls the inner wealth of its
content into a manifest externality but also, by means of this luxuriance, secures
its own representation. That is, it creates, as one of its phenomena, the subject
for whom this wealth is appreciably real. What is more, the transformation of
the individual into a subject of socialism may take place outside the
individual’s conscious grasp: “The socialist tendency, as the general law of
development of our reality, influences consciousness objectively, radically
transforming the character of people’s actions, remaking their social nature,
even when they themselves are not fully conscious of this” (Korabel’nikov 98;
emphasis added). As strange as it may sound, one can come into possession of
socialist consciousness … unconsciously.
Let us now consider another fellow-traveller who, in the early 1930s,
embraced the cause of socialism. During the previous decade, the name of Il’ia
Ehrenburg (1891–1967), a poet, prose writer, and journalist, had been closely
associated with modernist tendencies in Soviet culture. His scepticism towards
social utopias and his original writing style, which wove satire, playfulness,
picaresque adventure, and philosophical gravity into a loose narrative fabric,
had made him a favourite target for the zealots of proletarian culture. For
vigilant RAPP critics, the fact that he was living abroad (first in Berlin, then in
Paris) served only to confirm that he was an “alien” element. But in 1932
Ehrenburg made a long sojourn in his home country, during which he toured
some of the major sites of socialist construction. Having gathered impressions
and inspiration, he returned to Paris, where he wrote Den’ vtoroi (The Second
Day; 1932–3). Despite mild criticism of the author’s lingering penchant for
fragmentary narration,7 that novel was welcomed by the Soviet press as
Ehrenburg’s greatest achievement, his first truly Soviet work.
In 1933, following the publication of Den’ vtoroi in France, an article
appeared in Literaturnaia gazeta in which a well-meaning critic set out to
explain the recent changes in Ehrenburg’s world view. The article is titled “In
Search of the Truth” (“V poiskakh pravdy”).8 It begins by presenting to us the
Ehrenburg of old, “a disillusioned, cynical skeptic” (4).9 Under his pen, the
Western world (as recently as 1931, in his novella Spain) had appeared in
scenes of chaos, misery, and moral destitution. A resident of that world,
Ehrenburg had failed to see it. In the working people of Western Europe,
 The Unbearable Light of Being 161

Ehrenburg had failed to see the harbingers of a brighter future; instead, he had
focused on the “monotony, doom, and boredom” of their everyday existence
(4). Divorced from the contemporary life of Soviet society, “he did not believe
that … a new world is truly being built, that socialist relations are being created,
that new, happy people, the genuine people of the future, are being raised” (4).
After these introductory statements, there is a page break in the article,
intended to alert us to a meaningful break in Ehrenburg’s career. Below the
break, we learn that at the present moment (1933), the capitalist world has
entered the fourth year of acute economic crisis. It turns out that the economic
depression in the West has had much to do with Ehrenburg’s transformation as
a writer and person, “for it laid bare [obnazhil] so deeply the essence of
capitalist society, revealed [obnaruzhil] with such clarity the rotting foundation
of capitalist economy, so distinctly defined [opredelil] the real interrelations
between classes, that even for a person not equipped with the method of
Marxism-Leninism, there appears the possibility of understanding the deep
foundations of events” (4). Faced with a reality that aggressively bares itself,
“flashes” the subject, the latter stands defenselessly receptive. How could he
help seeing?! “Naturally, in depicting the crisis, Ehrenburg could not but see
the exposed [obnazhivshiesia] lines of class struggle and understand the deep
foundations of events” (4; emphasis added). The conviction that Ehrenburg had
no choice but to see is restated several paragraphs later and clearly constitutes
the conceptual backbone of this short critical biography.
An interesting picture emerges: the artist is confronted with a vision he
cannot escape. In the liminal moment at the onset of perception, the moment
to which the statement “he could not but see” applies, this vision is not his. It
comes from without, already explicated, almost as an assault on him. If we
had to describe the activity of our hero in this moment, we could only do it in
the passive: the subject is being beamed.
Under the word “beam” in the Collins Cobuild English Dictionary we find,
among others, the following definitions:

1. If you say that someone is beaming, you mean that they have a big smile
on their face because they are happy, pleased, or proud about something.
2. A beam is a line of energy, radiation, or particles sent in a particular
direction.
3. If something such as radio signals or television pictures are beamed
somewhere, or beam somewhere, they are sent there by means of
electronic equipment. (emphasis in the original)

Let us try to think about these three meanings as one, so as to bring together
into a single conceptual knot (1) the triumphant faces of those new happy
162 Automatic for the Masses

people, the true people of the future, which Ehrenburg had failed to see, but
which now, we must assume, have become apparent to him (we shall return to
these “shiny, happy people” in chapter 9); (2) the energy evoked by Panferov,
Gor’kii, and Shaginian through which socialism “gushes at us, surrounds us,
infuses us”; and (3) a concept of representation in which the representing
subject, the author, seems not unlike a television set in that the “picture” he
presents does not come, strictly speaking, “from inside” (only small children
believe that the people and things they see on the television screen live in the
boxed space behind it) but rather from someplace else.
Ehrenburg’s case tells us that it matters little whether the picture is that of
advancing socialism or rotting capitalism, whether the show that cannot but be
seen is that of the happy faces of Soviet citizens or that of desperate capitalist
enterpreneurs ruined by the Great Depression.10 These phenomena, seemingly
so disparate in character, constitute one kind of reality by virtue of an attribute
they share: the ability to “glare” (the contradictions of capitalism, just as the
successes of socialist construction, can be “glaring”). How do phenomena
acquire such an ability? It is from the fact that the blossoming of life under
socialism and its degradation under capitalism were both meant to be.They are
equally part of a history whose unfolding brings only the confident inscription
of its own systematic presuppositions.11 The events and phenomena that
comprise this history are events and phenomena that could not but occur.12 As
such, they dictate the position-comportment of the subject confronted with
them: he becomes the subject who cannot but see.
“Observer,” then, would not be a good way to describe this subject, if by
“observing” we imply any sort of analytical exertion. When something meant
to be takes place, it leaves no room for the analytical attitude. It flies in the face
of the observer and disarms him. It says to him, “You see!” (in the sense of,
“You see! I told you so!”). This kind of encounter between human subject and
objective reality precludes the possibility of original perception. “You see!”
does not mean “Begin to observe the situation.” It is too late, and there is no
need to observe or analyse anything at this point: whatever the situation the
subject was supposed to see (but did not), it has now turned into one stark
exposure; it beams, robbing the subject of the opportunity to not see.
In the article chronicling Ehrenburg’s transformation, the place of the meant-
to-be(-seen) is marked carefully. Right after the statement that the capitalist
world has entered the fourth year of crisis, there follows, without a special
transition, a quotation from Lenin in which the leader of the Proletarian
Revolution explains the inevitable and fatal exacerbation of class struggle in
the late stages of industrial capitalism (4). But apart from this explicit indication,
the meant-to-be persists tacitly as a backdrop to our author’s creative pursuits.
 The Unbearable Light of Being 163

Clearly, it is from this backdrop that socialism stares triumphantly at Ehrenburg

as the inevitability in which he had not been able to believe.
Before it is actually built, Stalinist socialism is, in a sense, pre-built. Its
empirical existence is erected on the ground of unconditional certainty
regarding the ways of history and the mechanisms of social life. Thus no
collection of empirical facts and observations can give an adequate presentation
of this world. For what any conscientiously empirical picture of Soviet life in
the 1930s will surely miss is one feature that underlies all “hard facts” and
endows them with a surplus quality. This additional feature, which only a
cultural investigation can adequately address, is brought out in Shaginian’s
words quoted earlier. She speaks not simply of socialism but of
socialismbecome-reality, which is not the same thing. It is a thing whose
content is overridden by, folded into, the purely formal feature of fulfilment.
Over and above any number of descriptive features that may be proper to it (a
particular organization of productive forces, a certain standard of living, a
determinate structure of government and political institutions, etc.), Stalinist
socialism is that which was meant to be, that which was fore-seen.
It would be quite pedestrian of us to mistake the voice that says “You see!”
for the voice of actual people (say, that of loyal adherents to the Party line
speaking to previously disheartened non-believers). We should think of it as the
voice of the world itself addressing – or rather, beaming – the subject with its
manifest truth. The whole point of Ehrenburg’s biography is that he needed no
people to tell him which way the Western world was headed. What is more, he
did not even need the “armament” of MarxismLeninism. We are, clearly, in a
new cultural frame if the “equipped” eye of the observer is rendered obsolete.
The otherness confronting the subject has lost the aspect of systematic
subterfuge (which can only be overcome by the systematic application of
method). It bears no decoding; in its presence, hermeneutical exertions are
inappropriate. For it freely emits whatever there is to know and see in the
direction of the subject.
While discussing the cinematic theory of Vertov and the kinoks, I pointed to
a certain place in the objective world that stands in inverse symmetry to the eye
of the human subject. Recall that our subject was not happy with his inherited
position, he did not want to see the world “subjectively.” He therefore strove to
attain a position in the world from which the objective interrelations of
phenomena would be visible, from which life could be “caught unawares.” For
the purpose, the subject became the vanishing tenor of a cultural metaphor:
camera (mechanism)(human) eye , expressionmethod , and so on. At the same time, it was
abundantly clear that the sought-after fulcrum of the visible world, the space
where things make (objective) sense, does not exist as such; it is not an actual
place – some sort of “display” or “exhibition” of phenomena that one can attend.
164 Automatic for the Masses

Rather, it is the virtual space of the hermeneutic operation itself, the point of
the application of method. The same turned out to be the case with the world
of the literary text: its fulcrum is not an actual place in the fabric of writing,
either a formal property or a semantic element, in which the organization of the
whole comes together as a formal or semantic “principle,” “tendency,” or
similar.
Yet in all these instances, I suggested, as a sort of unfulfilled fantasy, a what-
if, the possible appearance of a world that, through some device of its own,
would “see,” “know,” “read” itself in our stead. Here, “stead” is to be
understood quite literally, in accordance with that word’s etymology, as
referring to the place where the subject is (supposed to be) standing, that is, in
the place where seeing, understanding, and knowing have been known to occur.
I submit that Stalinist ideological culture is the fulfilment of this fantasy. Here
we encounter a primary cultural substance, which may be called “socialism,”
“our reality” (nasha deistvitel nost ), or simply “life” (zhizn ), which requires
no mediation in the ordinary sense of the word. It produces knowledge of itself
without the prerequisites of “method,” “system of thought,” or “position.”
Rather than being the starting point of consciousness, these are now the end
results of a new type of cognition. Let us recall those employees from Gor’kii’s
speech who “arrived” at dialectical materialism at the conclusion of their
empirical research. There we have matter (the living organisms being studied)
that, by being subjected to socialist praxis, “knows” itself in the space provided
by the individual minds of our researchers. We may say: in the “stead” of their
individual views, opinions, prejudices, and so on, dialectical materialism takes
place, taking possession of their consciousness.
I am suggesting that socialist realism, as the simulation of Style, begins with
the staging of such a quasi-automatic generation of knowledge by social praxis.
It is a Marxist insight that the historical forms of consciousness are dependent
on conditions of socio-economic existence. But it is Stalinist ideological theatre
to demonstrate – as all the examples cited in this chapter endeavour to – that a
socialist consciousness and Lebensgefühl are generated as a matter of course in
the building of socialism. Stalin’s postulate that theory lags behind practice
(advanced at the very end of 1929 and instrumental in subsequent campaigns
to cleanse the cultural field)13 canonized the following logic: practice
configures knowledge in advance; it presupposes definite ways of seeing and
understanding the world. Even if these are not yet in evidence (because of the
lag), they have been pre-programmed; a space has been reserved for them, an
empty “stead” is waiting. In the first instance, it is always the “stead” that “sees”
and “knows.” The empirical individual partakes of truth only when, and insofar
as, he comes to occupy this reserved place.14 For this to happen, the individual
 The Unbearable Light of Being 165

in question must ensure that he resides in the depths of “our life,” “our
reality.”15
With the completion of the First Five-Year Plan, the orchestrated euphoria
about socialism’s miraculous effects reached new heights. A whole rhetoric
developed to celebrate the immensely rich material being thrown up from the
depths of socialist construction and to attest to this material’s blinding power.16
Ideologists began speaking of the compulsive character of the new order, which
left artists and intellectuals no choice but to o ccupy the “stead” and behold the
truth. This was the irresistible, eye- opening, radiance of a “beaming” reality:
socialism as an epistemic fate. Some imagined this fate as an almost predatory
force: “You cannot hide from the all-embracing socialist life of the Soviet land,
this life will overtake you wherever you go, and if you do not respond to its
‘summoning call,’ ‘then you will be deprived of creative life and grow numb’”
(Korabel’nikov 95). Taking a glance back from the middle of the year 1935, an
editorial in Literaturnyi kritik explained why the ideological conversion of
writers could not but have taken place: “Yet in our very reality [v samoi nashei
deistvitel’nosti], in the practically developing socialist construction, were
contained such mighty ‘powers of persuasion,’ that it was not to be doubted
that the true essence of Bolshevism, of the proletarian revolution, would be
fully understood by the writers” (“Sotsialisticheskii” 11).17
Mark Rozental’, editor of Literaturnyi kritik and a major authority on
aesthetics during the Stalinist period,18 elaborated on how these “powers of
persuasion” did their work:

Every writer who deeply studies and observes real objects may come into conflict
with his own views on the world; life itself [sama zhizn ] suggests to him entirely
different methods than those dictated to him by his limited worldview. … Reality
[deistvitel nost ] bursts into [vryvaetsia] the writer’s work with tremendous force,
and under its pressure the writer’s ideological positions weaken and often give in.
(qtd in Rozhkov 178; emphasis added)

If we are to believe Rozental’, it is not even for the writer to decide whether he
will man the “stead” or not. This is because, without waiting for him, life
“bursts” into his private room and sweeps him along. This is the same invasion
of which Shaginian had spoken (“it gushes at us, surrounds us, infuses us”).
Once again, as in Gor’kii’s story, the empirical individual begins by studying
objects and phenomena through the distortive prism of his parochial mindset.
The distortion is nothing to worry about, for whatever in Stalinist culture goes
by the name of “reality” can generate a thrust that eliminates the false
perspective and installs, in its stead, the proper view of things. What is this
aspect or property of objects that makes a (Soviet) person see? Rozental’ tells
166 Automatic for the Masses

us that these objects are “real,” but the triteness of this description obscures
more than it reveals. How are we to name the quality of things, the quality
bestowed on them by socialist “life itself,” through which they assault the eye
studying them and pry it open?
For the purpose, we may borrow a felicitous expression used at that time by
Sergei Eisenstein (1898–1948), the celebrated avant-garde film director. In an
article that appeared exactly a year after the Central Committee’s resolution,
Eisenstein – who had himself become part of the establishment (albeit not the
most reliable part)19 – called on Soviet writers to provide better texts for the
script-starved film industry. He asked them to convey a certain property of
contemporary life, which he designated as sotsial naia uvidennost (2). The first
part of the expression is clear: sotsial naia means “social.” The noun that
follows is a neologism, derived from the verb uvidet (“to see”). Uvidennost
operates in opposition to vidimost and vidimoe, both of which pertain to what
can be seen, the visible, the apparent, and connote phenomenal superficiality.
Uvidennost , by contrast, is that which has been seen and has, as it were,
sedimented inside visible phenomena: the “seen-ness” or (even better, but more
awkwardly) the “havingbeen-seen-ness” of reality. Eisenstein leaves it at that,
not caring to further explicate the meaning of the phrase or the implications of
his injunction. Still, it is not much of a stretch to include his pronouncement in
the line of the present argument.
The social seen-ness of the world must be a property that pre-exists the eye
of the individual subject. It must be there before he comes along, or Eisenstein’s
counsel makes no sense (how could writers capture this property if it were not
independent of and prior to their artistic seeing?). That being so, the question
then becomes, how does one relate to seen-ness, and what does it mean to
“convey” it? Is it a property that one is supposed to see? I suggest that seen-
ness pre-exists the subject’s eye genetically as well. It is the world’s way of
being, its demeanour or “disposition,” through which it makes the subject see.
It refers to the world’s ability to beam and be, as the colloquial expression has
it, an “eye-opener.” This suggestion is in keeping with the two instances of
psychological transformation we have just considered: to both Shaginian and
Ehrenburg, the capacity to perceive truthfully comes from the laying bare of
the world’s historical inevitabilities. Seen-ness is the correlate of the empty
“stead.” It is a way of thinking about the automatic generation of vision, or
knowledge, as a quality rather than a place. In the next few pages I will attempt
to bring these two themes – the topographic and the qualitative – into a single
model.
If we had to discover the primary source from which the sexual excitation of
the exhibitionist springs up, our search for a properly corporal point would be
– pun intended – pointless. His pleasure does not issue from any part or
 The Unbearable Light of Being 167

property of the body itself. Still, an erotogenic zone exists, even if it is not,
strictly speaking, somatic. To name this surface, we can redeploy Eisenstein’s
neologism: the exhibitionist’s source of pleasure is his “seen-ness.” We can
imagine it as an extension of his physical being (since it borders, ultimately, on
a climactic sensation that is purely physical), an ineffable flesh woven into his
natural flesh. Of what does it consist? Everyone knows that it has nothing to do
with the person being simply naked. It consists in appearing naked in front of
someone, for that someone. If we wish to give a more physiological flavour to
our description, we can say that the erotogenic zone of “seen-ness” is made
from the same tissue as the enlarged pupils of the other’s eye. That eye, with
the perplexity and shame that keep it open, is prefigured at the source of
excitation. The dilator pupilae, those tiny muscles of the other’s iris, are
somehow also included in the exhibitionist’s sexual apparatus. Their
stimulation in the other is strictly co-lateral with the exhibitionist’s erotic
stimulation. It is as if we are dealing with a single sexual organ that begins with
what is shown (by itself, quite insubstantial), arches across the way, and
incorporates, as its most vital function, the arrest of the other’s attention, the
capture of her vision, her could-not-but-see. Speaking figuratively, we may
conclude that the exhibitionist’s real organ of pleasure is not his penis, but his
eye-opener.
To say that the other’s eye is prefigured in the exhibitionist’s libido is to say
that its place in the coordinate system of the sexual encounter is set much before
an actual encounter occurs. When a real person comes along, she is simply
slotted into a position that awaits her. What for her is a moment of highly
unpleasant surprise, is, from the standpoint of the libidinal plot, a moment of
confident fulfilment. In that plot, her eye becomes the concrete instantiation of
the pre-scripted glance-from-there. In the assault to which she is subjected –
the aggressive laying bare that surprises her – her eye turns into an effective
continuation of the exhibitionist’s sexual organ. Her individual-particular
seeing, as the fulfilment of a general condition that disregards individual
characteristics, is subsumed within the function of seen-ness. In her, in the
place her eye has come to occupy, his penis sees itself.
These are, then, the constitutive elements in the anatomy of exhibitionistic
pleasure: at the beginning, as no more than a “pathological” prerequisite, there
is the actual piece of flesh, the carnal member itself; added to it, as the true
measure by which it is not merely a penis but an exhibitionistic phallus, is the
ineffable flesh of the meant-to-be-seen. To be sure, it is made from the stuff of
(sexual) fantasy, but that does not make it any less real. There, in that place, the
penis is, so to speak, fore-seen, meaning that the libido knows ahead of time
what makes our hero go. It is this part, i.e., the fore-seen (we can imagine it as
an intangible foreskin), that the libido casts out into the world as a net in which
168 Automatic for the Masses

its fulfilment will eventually be caught. The catch arrives in the form of a pair
of “eyes wide open.” When they appear on the scene, they do no more than “fill
out” the place that was left waiting for them: the place of the meant-to-be- …
In short, they ful-fill the fore-seen.
This reflection in (the stead of) the other is the whole point of the act. In that
sense, “exhibitionism” is not a very accurate name for it. The gesture of
showing, taken by itself, accomplishes nothing. The dialectic of the act unfolds
between these two moments: the fore-seen, which is there as pure potential
waiting to be activated; and the moment of “capture,” when an unsuspecting
subject saunters into the charted libidinal field and arouses what had lain pre-
inscribed within it. It is, obviously, difficult to speak of her seeing as an “act,”
not only because at this particular time, she is helpless and cannot but see, but
more importantly because another act has swallowed up and negated hers. This
second act, which frames her seeing, is of an entirely different nature. It is not
to be understood by analogy with “action.” Here we must appeal once again to
the other meaning of the word: “act” as a series of scripted actions – more a
“scene” or “performance” than a single execution. In this sense, her seeing
becomes “part of the act,” part of the whole “production” that is the
exhibitionistic scene.
For the dialectic of seen-ness to be complete, something in the nature of a
raincoat proves necessary. We are mistaken if we think of the raincoat as a mere
accoutrement of convenience, something that allows the exhibitionist to remain
unnoticed before the “right moment” comes. The drapery is very much part of
the right moment itself. It affects the entire meaning of the performance.
Without it, we may understand the exhibitionist as saying, “Look at my penis,”
which is not at all the case. What he really says is, “You see!? I have nothing
on!” The distinction is crucial. In the first instance, one is showing something
(supposedly, an object worth showing, something substantial); in the second,
one is showing the nothing of obstruction, the very absence of concealment.
The actual item on display is not the exhibitionist’s body but its non-hiddenness,
unconcealment. To the other, he is showing exposure as such.
Only when we pass from “Look at it!” to “You see!? Nothing covers it!” do
we understand the raincoat’s true significance. Such is the dialectical logic of
the moment that the obstruction, or veiling, must be present in some form for
its negation to be effective. The possibility of covering the exposed part must
be present on the scene in a sublated form. The Russian verb that translates “to
sublate” is sniat’, which also means “to take off,” “to remove.” “In sublated
form” would then be “v sniatom vide,” which tells us with charming literality
about the unsuspected meaning of the raincoat: not only is it there in order to
be taken off, but also, in being taken off (i.e., when it is there v sniatom vide),
it represents the possibility of not seeing as denied – the veritable fulcrum of
 The Unbearable Light of Being 169

the exhibitionistic act. When its flaps fly open, the raincoat stays on as material
support for the little but that turns the formula of concealment – “(she) cannot
see” – into a preserving negation: “(she) cannot but see.”
My excuse for devoting this much attention to the exhibitionistic
performance is that it may help us understand the position assigned to the
subject in Stalinist cultural ideology. The parallel should not be taken too far –
only so far as to clarify the relationship between consciousness and the general
domain of what is called Stalinist “life” or “reality.” At first go, we must reverse
Vertov’s slogan: now it is not life that is “caught unawares” but the subject.
Caught by/in what? Caught by and in life’s disposition, which is that of seen-
ness. I again intend in simultaneity the two meanings of the word “disposition,”
which makes it possible to both be captivated by it and be captured in it:
disposition as “demeanour,” a way of being, and as “arrangement,” assignment
of positions (if someone possesses, say, a melancholic disposition, this fact has
a bearing on how we approach the person, what position we take vis-à-vis him
or her).
In speaking of Stalinist reality’s disposition, I mean to say, in the first place,
that we are dealing with something more than an object-like entity, just as the
phallus on which the exhibitionistic encounter centres is more than a body part.
By the same measure by which the phallus exceeds any physiological definition,
this reality exceeds the lifeless abstractions of those diligent historians,
economists, and political scientists who seek to establish a factual state of
affairs segregated from ideological illusions and mystifications. Against such
dissections, I am arguing for an understanding of the object that would include
– as with the phallus – the fantasy that permeates it and constitutes flesh of its
flesh. Only when we count in one entity Stalinist reality together with the
ideological fantasy thrust upon it can we begin to ask how reality can captivate
the subject so that she becomes its subject, the subject of Stalinism. We must
reach the point where we grasp the constitution of reality as inseparable from
and dependent upon the constitution of identity. When someone like Shaginian,
for example, identifies herself as one who has been made to see, we witness
the birth of a “subject,” which in this instance does not mean the centre of
sovereign action. As used so far in this chapter, “subject” refers to the “one”
who is “part of the act” and who, in this act, is subjected to the glaring visibility
of “life itself.” It is the position, or “comportment,” necessary to bring about
the erection of the True-Real. Where this “one” appears is also where the order
of things called Stalinist socialism celebrates its certainty at its firmest. The
victory amounts to this: to have caught this “one” unawares and to have made
her see. She is the “one,” that is, the one in whom the act attains its satisfaction,
not because of what she sees but by virtue of the fact that she sees. The content,
the “what,” of her seeing is, as noted apropos of the exhibitionistic scene, the
170 Automatic for the Masses

unessential and contingent prerequisite of the act. The thing that really counts
is this purely external characteristic: that her eyes are now in fact wide open.
“But wait,” someone may interject. “Why is the act of the perceiving
consciousness formal? Haven’t those employees of the Institute for
Experimental Medicine seen the dialectical evolution of living beings? Hasn’t
Ehrenburg seen how the West declines? How does this not constitute
determinate content?” Such an objection would miss an all-important
component of what happens in both cases – namely, the presence of the fore-
seen, of the empty “stead” in which a certain vision “presupposed” by objective
conditions awaits the subject whose vision it will be. When we take this
component into account, we are obliged to say: the workers of the institute have
seen that indeed living beings evolve dialectically, just as Ehrenburg has seen
that indeed the West declines. The difference between “what” and “that” is the
difference between two types of reflection. The first is the kind we are readily
familiar with: the active reflection that takes hold of something outside itself,
bringing something new out of it, and which, in doing this, feels itself
internally,20 thus constituting itself as an “ego.” By contrast with this seeing,
whose possession of “object” is correlative with its selfpossession, the second
kind, with which we have been concerned throughout this chapter, is not self-
generative and self-constituting but reactive. We might say that here, it is the
object that “feels itself” and firms up into certainty by being reflected in me. “I
see” here is tantamount to “I display.” I display, externally, the awareness
through which the artifice called Stalinist socialism is aware of itself, of its own
reality.
To bring this chapter to a conclusion, we can translate the terms of the
exhibitionistic scene back into plain ideological matters. For the Stalinist
regime, proving the success of socialist construction depended on proving the
latter’s symbolic efficacy. To wit, showing that “socialism has become reality”
meant showing that it had begun producing on a mass scale cognitive,
psychological, and ethical “equivalents.” But this show could not be realized
without the cooperation of the many “ones” in whom those very equivalents
were supposed to have been incarnated. What I referred to as the “erection” of
Stalinist socialism is nothing other than the moment when the symbolic
efficacy of the infrastructure is con-firmed in the words or behaviours of people
intent on demonstrating that their “seeing” (i.e., their way of knowing and
feeling) has come to them as a gift, quasi-automatically. In sum, the actuality
of “actually existing socialism” is best ascertained in its ability to produce its
own creatures (subjects). The following chapter will develop these reflections
further, towards a fuller conceptual grasp of Stalinist ideology. With the help of
Louis Althusser, I will propose to see it as an ideology whose distinguishing
character lies not in substantive claims about the world but in the ongoing
 The Unbearable Light of Being 171

display (“show”) of its unconditional hold on subjects. Socialist realism will

remain in the background, yet the discussion will have direct bearing on it. For,
as the present chapter has suggested, the road by which subjects arrive at
correct ideology is of a kind with the road by which writers and artists arrive at
true artistic vision.
Chapter 8

Ideology as Authentication

Disappeared: the term ideas.

Louis Althusser

There is a well-known painting by Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid,

hanging in the Zimmerli Art Museum, titled The Origin of Socialist Realism. It
belongs to the Nostalgic Socialist Realism series of the early 1980s. Stalin, clad
in the white parade uniform of a generalissimo, is seated, expressionless, on a
settee. The Muse, a half-undressed figure with long, lustrous hair, holds him
gently under the chin. Stalin is the model, the Muse the artist. The palatial
neoclassical interior is illuminated by a single oil lamp. The light from it casts
an almost perfectly opaque shadow of Stalin’s figure onto the plinth at his left.
With a stencil in her other hand, the Muse traces the shadow’s outline. This,
then, is the origin of socialist realism. Like many of Komar and Melamid’s
paintings, this one offers a pseudomyth. It doubles the official mythology of
Stalinism with a whimsical one of its own. Executed in the style of glossy
academicism, the painting seeks, as it were, to install itself in the place of its
socialist-realist predecessor and subvert the doctrine from within. The realistic
manner and classical pomp of the depiction yield a hyper-reproduction of
socialist-realist conventions, a sort of a death mask whose verisimilitude to the
original turns the latter into a mummy. Behind the tongue-in-cheek glorification
174 Automatic for the Masses

of the Leader, we have no trouble reading the true (and trite) message of the
painting: socialist realism was hardly more than the cultural tracing and
retracing of the overshadowing figure of Totalitarian Power. The original on
which Komar and Melamid superimpose their fauxmythography is, of course,
the widely publicized story of socialist realism as a slogan that came directly
from Stalin himself, as yet another manifestation of his inimitable genius. 1
In the previous chapter, I began sketching a different myth of origin, one that
developed immediately after the Party resolution of 1932. This myth is about
the subject, not the Master; it is the projection of a blinding light, not the tracing
of a shadow. Socialist realism was decreed into existence by a sort of
ideological axiom: since socialism was already a fact on the level of the
economic base (after the campaigns of industrialization and collectivization),
it must also be the case that a corresponding cultural superstructure was
likewise already there, at least implicitly.2 All that remained to be done was to
give it a name, remove the survivals of the past that stood in its way, and
provide the organizational structure for its manifestation and further flourishing.
All of this the Party soon accomplished. The axiom that socialism was an
effective force, demonstrably operative everywhere among the masses,
presupposed that a distinct style of life had become dominant in the land of the
Soviets. This, in turn, presupposed that its cultural manifestation – an art
defined and unified by a distinct way of experiencing the world – was also in
evidence, definitely if not yet fully or perfectly. In this sense, socialist realism
was not a program for something to be attained later and gradually; rather, it
was the baptism of something that was already there and that had been for some
time. So it was not a paradox that at the time of its formal birth, socialist realism
in literature could boast a list of works in which it had already been incarnated. 3
On this axiomatic logic, being a socialist-realist author meant being told –
implicitly or explicitly – that a place had been prepared for you, a place of
cannot-but, that needed only be manned.4 This implied participating in the
theatre of perfect visibility (discussed above) in which one was to show oneself
as possessed, as overwhelmed by the coming-true of socialism. And definitive
of socialist realism, I contend, was the kind of artistic practice that unfolded as
the symbolic act of filling out – through writing, painting, composing – this
axiomatically predefined spot. The Stalinist version of the immaculate
conception was the myth of a social content that dictated its own intellectual
and artistic articulations, a life that spontaneously produced its own authentic
representations. The conception was immaculate, for it was as if the world
conceived itself, thought itself, and this was somehow an objective process to
which the subject was urged to surrender. By letting go (of his personal
opinions, homegrown world views, studied convictions), he would become one
 Ideology as Authentication 175

with the process so that the world would know itself in him. This was an
ideological myth, to be sure, but of a rather peculiar kind.
When we concern ourselves with ideology, we have as our primary object of
interest – what else? – ideas. If we belong to the critical, predominantly Marxist
tradition, we interrogate these ideas in order to show how they misrepresent the
actual order of things in the world and how this misrepresentation serves to
promote the interests of a dominant social group. Alternatively, if we subscribe
to the sociological approach to ideology, we want to show how a body of
authoritative notions enables social integration by mapping in broad strokes a
terrain of infinitely complex (and divisive) experience. In both cases, however,
we attend to the content of ideas, and it is through this content that we
distinguish one ideology from another. For instance, we identify a racist stance
with the content of statements like: “People of the race n are naturally
predisposed toward a life of indolence.” On the same logic, many have
identified Stalinist ideology with a set of dominant theses: the possibility of
building socialism in one country; the necessity for the continued existence,
even strengthening, of the state; the inevitable decline of capitalism; the
intensification of class struggle in the Soviet Union after the suppression of
antagonistic social groups; and so on. Continuing with this line of thinking, one
would not fail to describe socialist realism as an ideological art, inasmuch as it
unfailingly reproduces these and other official postulates. Stalinist novels, for
example, would be called ideological because the stories they tell give an
expanded fictional presentation of well-familiar Party slogans such as:
“Heroism is becoming an everyday occurrence”; “The capitalist world is
handicapped by the very existence of the Soviet Union”; “Collectivism has
become a habitual way of life for millions”; “The enthusiasm and initiative of
the masses redefine the limits of the possible”; and so on.
This thinking is valid as far as it goes; unfortunately, it does not go very far.
The fact that socialist realism was ideological, in this sense, is too obvious to
belabour. One is easily convinced of this by picking up just about any novel of
the Stalinist era and reading it alongside the Pravda headlines from the time it
was written. Nor is there a chance that we might confound Soviet writers by
pointing out to them that their productions were ideological. The writers were
abundantly aware of the fact. On every opportune public occasion they were
reminded that their works must reflect the “burning issues of the day” and stay
in step with the “leading ideas of the time.” This was called ideinost’, and it
was a fully intentional aspect of creative practice under socialist realism. To
remain at this level of understanding would be to forfeit critical work proper,
for the latter cannot be satisfied with knowledge already explicit in the object
of study. Socialist realism was explicitly and self-consciously ideological. Just
176 Automatic for the Masses

because we repeat this with a tone of approbation does not make our
pronouncement any less of a platitude.
Stalinist ideology was a phenomenon that went beyond specific ideas,
beyond the content of slogans, speeches, and resolutions. And it is this fact that
makes it, and socialist realism, worthy of discerning critical inquiry. For anyone
familiar with Soviet culture, it should be intuitively obvious that a statement
like Shaginian’s “Socialism has become reality …” (itself a rehashing of
Stalin’s triumphalism) holds no epistemological interest whatsoever. Nothing
impels us to inquire whether its content is true or false. If it holds our interest
at all, it is not as an idea that it does so. We understand that the statement’s
significance, if any, resides not in its asserted meaning but in the general
“setting” from which it comes to us. That is to say, we take it not as a
proposition that may or may not stand the test of verity, but as a gesture, a
performance that enters into a larger “production.” As soon as we adopt this
perspective, we should realize that we are no longer dealing with ideology in
the sense suggested above. We are not attending to a set of ideas (whose content
we could expect to betray illicit agendas or instruct us as to the functioning of
a social mechanism), but to the organization and staging of performances. In
this chapter, I propose a view of Stalinist ideology that takes this perspective
into account. I argue that the peculiar character of this ideology is to be found
not in any substantive claims delivered by way of representations but rather in
the attempt to stage the functionality of representations. The case I have been
making for socialist realism is analogous to the case for ideology: in socialist
realism as well, we are dealing with representations (Darstellungen) whose
significance is not reducible to what they say or show on the level of content,
but derives from a general symbolic performance whose aim is to demonstrate
how knowledge and vision take hold of the subject.

I will begin with a preliminary illustration in the form of a heuristic scenario.

Let us imagine ourselves as the conscientious observers of an activity
previously unknown to us. It involves several people and takes place outdoors.
We chance upon it and try to make sense of it. After observing it for some time,
we notice the following:

1. The activity has no practical significance. The participants derive obvious

pleasure from it, yet it does not in any way connect with the lives these
people lead when not engaged in it.
2. The activity involves discrete roles for the participants and unfolds
according to rules. Both the roles and the rules can be grasped and
described by an attentive outside observer.
 Ideology as Authentication 177

3. During the activity, the participants seem to forget about the lives they lead
when not engaged in it and take on the roles required by the activity. What
they do engrosses them completely; they become what they are doing so
that it does not seem at all that they have taken on “roles.”
4. Even though their motions over time exhibit, to an observing eye, the
regularities of rule-governed behaviour, the participants do not appear to
be “following rules.” Their actions flow with great ease and without any
special effort of compliance with prescripts.

As time passes and we come across many occurrences exhibiting the same
characteristics, we realize that we are dealing with instances of a general kind.
To this general kind of activity we decide to give a name: “play.” From that
point on, to everyone who asks, we explain what “play” is by summarizing our
four principal observations: it is a pleasurable activity that draws you in and
away from your real life, so that you partake of it obliviously, and although it
does have rules, it is truly “play” when the rules fade away to become a
spontaneous way of being. For even greater brevity, we decide to capture this
characterizing description in a single adjective: “ludic.” We agree that from
now on, we will call “play” only that which exhibits the traits definitive of the
“ludic.” Conversely, if an activity does not give evidence of the “ludic,” it
should not qualify as “play.”
One day we chance upon a group of people engaged in something that very
much resembles “play.” All of the roles and motions are the same. But in
addition to all the rules we previously extrapolated, we now become aware of
another condition: the participants must act in a way that visibly demonstrates
that the activity has drawn them in and has a hold upon them. In their behaviour,
they must not only follow the usual course of the game but also show
“involvement,” even “abandon.” Previously, the sole object of play was “to
win.” Now there is an additional object – play itself, or rather, the “ludic.” In
playing, the players must create the objective appearance that the activity of
play plays them. By showing themselves to be drawn in, involved,
spontaneously living the rules and roles of the game, they are, essentially,
demonstrating the presence of the “ludic.” This strange arrangement does not
exclude the possibility that some of them may be genuinely drawn in by the
activity and actually possessed by the ludic. Such may very well be the case,
since the earlier parameters of the game have been preserved and winning is
still an object. Yet as we take a look at the entire set-up, we must ask ourselves:
Is this still “play”? We remember our decision to apply the term only to that
which exhibits the “ludic.” What we now have in front of us certainly does
exhibit this general quality. Formally, and by this standard alone, we must
concede that we are indeed observing “play.” At the same time, it is abundantly
178 Automatic for the Masses

clear that the situation now is nothing like before. Now the “ludic” is not
something we first produce, on a conceptual level, in order to describe the
qualitative distinctiveness of the activity in question. Rather, the activity has
changed in such a way that the “ludic” is now produced by it, in a premeditated
and controlled manner. The in-itself, that is, the essence, has become for-itself:
a conscious performance, or staging, of the essence. What we have before us is
“play” as the process of its own authentication.
When we contemplate Stalinist ideology, we are in a situation analogous to
the one just described. We are contemplating an activity whose object has
shifted in a peculiar, self-referential way. While we are still confronted with
statements that could be termed “ideological,” that is, with claims about states
of affairs in the world (existing, potential, desirable, normative), the activity we
have before us goes well beyond the making of such claims. More than the
generation and dissemination of meaning, Stalinist ideology encompasses the
regulation and self-regulation of behaviours through which the essence of
ideology itself is authenticated. Much like “play” in my hypothetical scenario,
ideology is at its most authentic when it is experienced not as a convention, a
construction, a set of norms, but as a way of life; and when it has a hold upon
the subject so that ideological meanings and the social roles they assign are
lived not as prescripts, artificial impositions, or ideals, but as the dynamic of
reality itself. Stalinism, in my view, should be understood as an attempt to
replicate just this kind of positive experience of the ideological.
When we take a Stalinist ideological thesis such as “the triumph of socialism
in the Soviet Union leads to the exacerbation of class struggle, while altering
its traditional forms,”5 we notice right away that as political discourse, this
thesis functions on two levels. One is the purely semantic or epistemic: the
statement accomplishes the assertion of a determinate meaning, it describes a
purported state of affairs in the world. On this level, we might be tempted to
judge whether the description accurately reflects the reality at which it aims. At
the same time, we are aware that the statement had a very concrete life in Soviet
society. An entire campaign followed whose goal was to demonstrate that what
the thesis asserted was indeed the case. At this second level, we must take into
account all the mechanisms by which the ideologeme was transmitted from the
political apex to the lowest levels of the Party apparatus and the general
population: the meetings convened to discuss the latest pronouncement by the
Leader; the directives from the centre urging vigilance and a new optics for
viewing what had previously seemed innocuous occurrences; the work of Party
activists in all spheres of social life in unmasking concealed class enemies; and
the hundreds of reports published in local and central newspapers that testified
to the continued, and now more insidious, resistance of socially alien elements. 6
In other words, after registering what the ideologeme means, we have to also
 Ideology as Authentication 179

take into account the campaign whose end result was to provide factual backing
for the asserted meaning. This second aspect, which we might call validation,
is by no means unique to Stalinist ideology. Every ideological system must
have at its disposal some means for demonstrating the truth of its propositions.
Just as a doctrine of revelation must be able to produce miracles, a political
ideology must be able to exhibit facts that validate the claims it advances.
Validation, however, is something different from what I called, just a while
ago, authentication. The latter is not about the factual content of this or that
particular postulate but about the experience of ideology as such. The
procedure of authentication does not aim to convince that suchand-such is in
fact the case, but rather to show that knowledge itself – whatever its content,
whatever the claims it makes – derives from a genuine source. In the case of
“play,” authentication referred to the process of staging the essential element
of play – the ludic. Analogously, an ideology that functions as its own
authentication would be one that stages, or produces, the essential (positive)
characteristic of the general kind “ideology”: its hold upon the subject, its
existence as a second nature.
The distinction between the two modes of operation of ideology may become
clearer if we consider the following two pronouncements:

1. “I believe that x is the case” (where x is an ideological proposition).

2. “When I believe, it is socialism that believes in my stead.”

At first, it may seem that the second of these could very well be an ideological
proposition. If so, we should be able to substitute it for the x in the syntax of
the first pronouncement. But when we do this, we end up with an anomaly that
is not merely verbal:

3. “I believe that, when I believe, it is socialism that believes in my stead.”

The more evident reason for the anomaly is that we are used to having the
object of ideological belief be a certain state of affairs in the world, not the
status of belief itself. This is why something like “I was falsely led to believe
she was pregnant” cannot itself be an object of belief. The less evident reason
for the anomaly has to do with the logical conundrum presented by
(3). If all of my beliefs are believed for me, then my belief that this is the case
should fall under the same rule. But (3) fails to express this fact. The phrase “I
believe” in statement (1) asserts my agency as someone who is free to adopt or
reject this or that belief. But statement (2) abrogates this very agency (I am not
free in my believing, since this is the work of socialism). Thus, when (1) and
(2) are combined to form (3), the result is a contradiction: the two parts of the
180 Automatic for the Masses

statement speak at cross-purposes. Because (2) cannot be an object of belief, it

also cannot be the object of verification. But it can be the object of
authentication. That is to say, I can act and speak in a way that makes it apparent
that my views are dictated to me by the irresistible immanence of socialism.

To unfold further these reflections on the character of Stalinist ideology, I will

presently turn to Louis Althusser’s well-known essay “Ideology and
Ideological State Apparatuses.” Embraced as a revelation by some, harshly
criticized by others, this text of 1970, along with other writings by Althusser,
remains a major contribution to the conceptualization of ideology in the
twentieth century. It does not address Stalinism at all, nor can the argument
found in it be applied to Stalinism in a straightforward way. It offers a
theorization of ideology in a universal sense, which aims to extract the
scientific kernel of Marx’s legacy with the tools of psychoanalysis and
structuralism. It is not my intention to “apply” Althusser’s insights into
ideology to the case of Stalinism, as if the latter could prove to be a privileged
or at least a very intriguing species of the former. Stalinist ideology is
decisively not what Althusser claims the universal kind “ideology” to be. But,
in a peculiar sense, it wishes to be that and stages the kind of symbiosis with
the subject Althusser has been the first to theorize.
The first part of the article, stretched over some thirty pages, is devoted to
rethinking the old Marxist duality of base and superstructure. Althusser insists
that their relationship is most adequately understood in terms of reproduction
(136). Just as the economy encompasses the reproduction of the existing forces
of production, so the superstructure is largely responsible for the reproduction
of the relations of production (which are also constitutive of the base; 148). In
a practical sense, this is accomplished through the legal-political sphere and a
number of ideological state apparatuses (ISAs: the church, family, schools, etc.),
which Althusser contrasts with repressive apparatuses such as the army and the
police (149–56). Although this lengthy discussion has been to a great extent
about ideology, it is only midway through the text that Althusser takes a closer
look at what ideology is: “When I put forward the concept of an Ideological
State Apparatus, when I said that the ISAs ‘function by ideology,’ I invoked a
reality that needs a little discussion: ideology” (158). This “little discussion”
takes up the rest of the article. Here, Althusser advances a universal theory, not
of ideologies (which have had documented existence in determinate historical
settings) but of ideology as such (161). The latter has no history: it is one and
the same always and everywhere (161–2), which is to say, it has an immutable
structural role in the social totality. It is this general theory that interests me
most, and I will follow the discussion closely, as I find even Althusser’s
phraseology quite revealing.
 Ideology as Authentication 181

Let us pick up the argument from the subsection that has as its heading the
assertion, “Ideology Is a ‘Representation’ of the Imaginary Relationship of
Individuals to Their Real Conditions of Existence” (162). The assertion itself
we leave aside for the moment. In this section, Althusser asks, without actually
spelling it out, a disarmingly simple question: Why does ideology need to lie?
He then proceeds to argue against two common answers to this question. The
first answer points us to a company of “a few bad men.” That is, ideology needs
to lie because a few bad men need to lie to the “people” and thus keep them in
submission (163).7 In dismissing the “few bad men” thesis, Althusser does not
wish to say that bad men in power do not fabricate deceptive ideas. Even less
is he saying that they do not use such ideas to maintain their domination over
the people. He simply dismisses the thesis, for even though bad men in power
fabricate lies to keep the rest of the people in their power, this is not what
ideology is about.
From there, Althusser moves on to a second erroneous thesis. This one comes
from Feuerbach via the early Marx. The thesis answers the question, Why does
ideology need to lie? by pointing not to tyrants and priests but to the people
themselves: the people (i.e., not just the “common folk,” but men in general)
create ideal representations that they superimpose onto the less-than-ideal
conditions of their existence (163–4). In other words, ideology needs to lie
because men need to escape, even if just in their imagination, the alienating
social world they inhabit from day to day. Once again, Althusser denies neither
that people construct imaginary worlds for themselves nor that they inhabit
these so that they do not have to face straight-on the harsh reality of their daily
lives. He simply dismisses the thesis altogether, for even though people may in
fact do that, this is not what ideology is about.
Having dismissed in this fashion the two wrong answers to the question,
Althusser moves on to dismiss the question as well: It cannot be at all a question
of anyone “needing” the lies of ideology.8 Expressed differently, the “need”
through which ideology “needs” to lie is not the need of anyone. But a need
that is not the need of anyone is not a need at all: it is a necessity. Henceforth,
the question of ideology becomes a question of necessity. And here is how
Althusser formulates this new question: “Why is the representation given to
individuals of their (individual) relation to the social relations which govern
their conditions of existence and their collective and individual life necessarily
an imaginary relation?” (165; emphasis added).
In the last three words we find, I believe, the key to the thesis that opens this
section of the article: it is pressingly important for Althusser to distinguish
between this formulation and “men represent their real conditions to
themselves in an imaginary form” (163). For those who are reading the article
for the first time, the distinction may seem little more than a confusing
182 Automatic for the Masses

scholastic exercise, and the confusion is only increased by the use of the verb
“represent” in the two formulas: in the latter, it has a subject (the people, who
“represent … to themselves,” etc.), while in the former it is subjectless (“it is
their relation to [the real conditions of existence] that is represented to them [in
ideology]” [164; emphasis added]).9 But the confusion is dispelled once we
have the key: ideology rests on a “necessarily … imaginary relation.” This
should be read along the lines of the preceding argument: just as it is not a
matter of anyone “needing” the lies of ideology, so it cannot be a matter of
anyone “representing” what is represented in ideology.
And thus we come by short and quiet steps to what otherwise has the power
of a bombshell – the assertion I highlighted in the epigraph to this chapter:
ideology is not a matter of ideas. How are we to understand this sudden
inversion of the content that “ideology” carries and announces in its very name?
Caution is again in order: Althusser does not dispute that people have distorted
ideas about the world, ideas of which they are conscious and in which they
believe. He simply writes: “Disappeared: the term ideas” (169; emphasis in the
original). Disappeared from where? – From consideration. Although people
have “ideological” representations of which they are conscious and in which
they believe, this is not what ideology is about.
Ideology is a Representation that nobody has conceived. We should be
perfectly clear on this: although people can think this representation, they do
not give it to themselves, in the essential sense of the word. This is why
Althusser is very careful to write “representation given to individuals” (la
représentation donnée aux individus). Nor should we be curious to know by
whom it is given to them: it is simply given, without a “who”; we left the clique
of priests and tyrants far behind, and no new “givers” have appeared since.
Now we should take the next step, which is strictly consistent with our previous
formula: “A need that is not the need of anyone is not a need at all, but a
necessity.” In a similar way, a representation that nobody can “give” is not a
representation at all, but an immanent relation. This, then, is what has remained
of ideology, after we put aside all the things it is not about: an immanent
imaginary relation, that is, a relation whose “imaginariness” (imaginaire) is not
imagined by anyone (supposedly, standing in the real world). If we wish to
retain the word “representation,” as Althusser does, we need to say: ideology is
a kind of representation that cannot be given, only inhabited. We cannot be with
it, only in it. This is the fundamental meaning of the since then sloganized
assertion that we all are “in ideology” (166).
Those well acquainted with the article have noticed that my gloss so far has
not followed faithfully the order of Althusser’s exposition, but instead has
jumped ahead and, from there, interpreted what comes earlier. In my defence,
I can say that in order to follow the spirit, one must often go against the letter.
 Ideology as Authentication 183

“By the letter,” the exposition is as follows: after Althusser has reformulated
the question of ideology (“why is the representation given to individuals …
necessarily an imaginary relation”), he suddenly stops and drops the question,
promising to return to it later; for the time being, he advances a whole new
thesis: “Ideology has a material existence” (165). For those who follow the
letter, the transition may appear quite sudden: “Didn’t we just say that ideology
is not only an imaginary, but necessarily imaginary relation? How do we get
from there to the thesis that ideology has a material existence? Since when are
imaginations something material?”
Those who follow the spirit should not be baffled. We should try to
understand Althusser’s statement by approaching it from a subsequent point –
that is, from the thesis advanced only later in the article: ideology is not a matter
of ideas (representations, in the sense discussed above). If not, then what is it a
matter of? The answer: it is a matter of… matter, of something material. In the
article, the order of argument is: “ideology is material, and hence, ideas drop
out of consideration.” Our way of proceeding here, which is just the reverse of
this order, allows us a better grasp of what Althusser means by “material”
existence, that is, the real matter of ideology.
The examples he gives of the material life of ideology are curious at best:
kneeling, praying, confessing, signing petitions, protesting (167). Supposedly
to illustrate the precedence of the material with regard to the ideational, he even
quotes Pascal: “Kneel down, move your lips in prayer, and you will believe”
(168). Now, these actions can be called “material” only in a very approximate
and idiosyncratic sense. Althusser had sought to forestall the problem earlier
by asserting that “[of] course, the material existence of ideology … does not
have the same modality as the material existence of a paving stone” (166); and
then, with a wink to Aristotle, “I shall say that ‘matter is discussed in many
senses,’ or rather that it exists in different modalities, all rooted in the last
instance in ‘physical matter’” (166). This is coy at best, and self-servingly
evasive at worst, but it does make clear the direction in which Althusser wishes
to go. He very much wants to show that ideology is hard-wired to the economic
infrastructure, so he is doing his best to convince us that it too has a material
existence of sorts. And what he means by this is that ideology consists in the
performance of concrete actions in concrete institutional settings (those of the
ISAs).
In the same way that people do not give themselves ideological ideas, they
also do not give themselves (generate) the actions in question. Of course, they
are the ones de facto performing these actions, just as they were the ones de
facto thinking those ideas. But like the ideas, the actions are given to them by
the institutionalized practices in which the people find themselves embedded:
184 Automatic for the Masses

I shall talk of actions inserted into practices. And I shall point out that these
practices are governed by the rituals in which these practices are inscribed, within
the material existence of an ideological apparatus, be it a small part of that
apparatus: a small mass in a church, a funeral, a minor match at a sports’ club, a
school day, a political party meeting, etc. (168; emphasis in the original)

When all is said and done, we have the following enchainment: ideas count
only to the extent that they are “performed” in (individual) actions, which are,
in each case, the instantiations of practices, which, for their part, take place
within institutionalized rituals, the last constituting the concrete life of various
ideological apparatuses. Following the logic of the chain, we can say that the
individual’s ideas are “thought” by his actions, which are “acted” by social
practices, and so on. In the ultimate instance, the individual’s actions are “acted”
by ideology, in the new sense that the concept has acquired by now (i.e., as a
Representation in which people live their lives).
As always already inserted in an array of such practices, the individual is
everywhere and for all practical purposes the subject. Being a subject, for
Althusser, means just this – to be acted in one’s (supposedly free) actions and
thought in one’s (supposedly personal) thoughts: “It therefore appears that the
subject acts insofar as he is acted by the following system (set out in the order
of its real determination): ideology existing in a material ideological apparatus,
prescribing material practices governed by material ritual, which practices exist
in the material actions of a subject acting in all consciousness according to his
belief” (170). Should we entertain the hope that we could somehow forestall
the moment when, as individuals, we are “interpellated” by ideology, Althusser
would inform us that our hope is in vain. Even before we come into this world,
a pre- appointment is waiting for us,10 by which we are slotted into roles we
will be playing: “man,” “son of …,” “citizen of …” (176). Hence: “ideology
has always-already interpellated individuals as subjects, which amounts to
making it clear that individuals are always-already interpellated by ideology as
subjects, which leads us to the last proposition: individuals are always-already
subjects” (175–6; emphasis in the original). If so, “individual” stands for the
never truly available (as an actuality) yet necessary presupposition of the
existence of the subject.11 The meaning of “subject” is determined exclusively
by its relation to ideology, and vice versa: ideology cannot be thought outside
of the necessary imaginary relation in which individuals are constituted as
subjects. In fact, ideology is nothing but this relation: “The existence of
ideology and the hailing or interpellation of individuals as subjects are one and
the same thing” (175). Earlier it was said that, in his ultimate instance, the
individual is what has been produced by ideology, namely, the subject; the
individual is not, except as a subject. In reciprocation, we must now say:
 Ideology as Authentication 185

ideology, in its ultimate instance, is what produces subjects; it does not exist
except as this production (171). The theory of subjectification conjugates with
the earlier thesis of ideology-cum-imaginary-relation as follows: individuals
are necessarily subjects insofar as they are in a Representation (imaginary
relation) that they have not given to themselves; it is given to them by necessity,
so that the Representation “acts” them in determinate and necessary ways,
while also producing a set of requisite beliefs.
Althusser’s principal intervention in Marxist theory is his endeavor to drive
a wedge between the early Marx (prior to 1845) and the – supposedly much
more scientific – author of Capital.12 The issue of ideology is no exception.
Althusser deems unsatisfactory the view advanced in The German Ideology
(1845–6),13 where thought unhinged from material life is pilloried as self-
glorified vacuity. Such thought is ideological inasmuch as men’s practical lives
are absent from it; it is a “phantom,” a “chimera,” as Marx and Engels put it
(The German Ideology 37), “a pure illusion, a pure dream,” as Althusser
rewords it (“Ideology” 159). The problem with such a conception is that it lets
ideology and reality go their separate ways, leaving us with no means to think
one in terms of the other. Thankfully, what the early Marx had put asunder, the
mature Marx joined together, or so Althusser believes. His main source of
inspiration for a genuine, scientific theory of ideology is the famous section in
Volume I of Capital (chapter 1) devoted to the fetishism of commodities. 14 In
it Marx does not address ideology explicitly, but he does describe a mechanism
of illusion very different from the one we find in The German Ideology. The
commodity form that all products of human labour assume in a capitalist
economy can be called a false appearance, insofar as the social character of this
labour masquerades as an objective property of the thing (its exchange value
expressed in monetary signs). The falsity in question, however, does not come
by way of anyone’s deluded views. The appearance of people’s creations as
commodities is not caused by “phantoms of their brains” (The German
Ideology 37). On the contrary, people come to view products in terms of
objective values because this is how products actually appear in the myriad
quotidian acts of buying and selling. Marx, in other words, is asking us to think
of an illusion that exists necessarily and practically, 15 a chimera full of reality,
and this is also how Althusser wants us to think of ideology.
Just like the commodity form for Marx, ideology for Althusser is not a
representation that people give themselves. Just like exchange value, it exists
in acts more than it does in beliefs (we usually do not go to the local
supermarket with a creed on political economy). If ideology is an illusion, it is
an objective one imparted by the mode of economic life in which people find
themselves inserted. It is easy to see now the true source for that inverted order
of things in which, for Althusser, actions come before beliefs. If a worker,
186 Automatic for the Masses

yesterday’s peasant, hires himself for pay in a factory, he does this out of
necessity and not out of conviction that labour should be exchanged for money.
In the very act of hire, he practically performs the idea that human labour is a
commodity like any other. He does not need to believe that this is so (most
likely, he never gave a moment of thought to the issue). His actions do the
believing for him.16 It is with similar realities in mind that Althusser is able to
write, apropos of ideology, that “ideas drop out of consideration.”
If people live “appearances” that are not, strictly speaking, imagined by
themselves, yet have a hold upon them, the stage is set for a wedding of
Marxism and psychoanalysis. In comes Freud, chaperoned by Claude Lévi-
Strauss and Jacques Lacan.17 In this intellectual company, Althusser is able to
cast Marx’s scheme of an objective process that assumes a necessary form of
appearance in terms of a very familiar intra-psychic dynamic. The ISA essay
draws an explicit analogy between ideology, as Althusser wants it, and the
dream, as Freud has it. Ideology is not a pure illusion, as young Marx supposed,
just as the dream is not a random exercise of an imagination let loose during
sleep (Althusser, “Ideology” 160–1). Both are structured and meaningful
insofar as a concealed reality is transmitted through them in an organized way.
With the dream, we have yet another example of a representation that people
do not give to themselves. It is from their own lives that the dream
representation issues, but since the true and full content of these lives is not
directly accessible to the individuals, it is as if the representation comes to them
from somewhere else, from “another scene.” Continuing with this analogy, one
can think of ideology as a production in a sense similar to the production of
dreams and symptoms by the unconscious.
The Freudian unconscious, constituted by instincts and their “vicissitudes,”
became in Lacan a system of pure relations modelled on linguistic signification.
In Althusser, a kind of social unconscious is analogously structured by the
relations of production. The point Althusser wishes to get across is that the
relations of production are effective in a twofold manner: they not only secure
the production of goods and the generation of wealth, but also – just like the
unconscious – generate a surrogate reality for the human subject whose
existence is determined by those same relations.18 With hardly any mediation
at all, we pass from economic conditions of existence, through the forms of
social intercourse they impose, to the patterns of thought and behaviour these
forms in turn activate. The transmission between the heterogeneous realms is,
to all appearances, unconditional, quasi-automatic. It is as if social existence
were an enormous dream machine in which the infrastructure does the
dreaming, ideology is the dream itself, while human subjects are nothing but
the roles that the machine has dreamt up for them. 19 (Remembering the earlier
heuristic exercise, I should add: they live them not as “roles” but as life itself.)20
 Ideology as Authentication 187

The domain of ideology, and even of culture as a whole, is viewed as a field of

practices programmed in advance and in toto by their functionality in
reproducing an existing order of things. Lévi-Strauss had already provided the
model (indebted to Freud in its own right) by analysing elementary social
formations in which an unconscious symbolic logic, a coding automaton of
sorts, is at work in configuring the community’s mythical plots and
corresponding (ritual) practices. Althusser seems to believe that ideology, even
in advanced capitalist societies, functions similarly: as an unconscious
symbolic combinatory hard-wired to economic reality and configuring most
varied and mundane rituals of public life. Because the logic is unconscious, yet
practically effective in setting the terms for what people do and believe, a
structuralist like Lévi-Strauss, or Althusser, might as well go ahead and declare
that the logic “acts” people, “thinks” them, even “lives” them.21
This talk was rather fashionable in the 1960s and 1970s, but as E.P.
Thompson reminds us, it is far from politically innocuous:

In the old days, vulgar Political Economy saw men’s economic behavior as being
lawed … but allowed to the autonomous individual an area of freedom in his
intellectual, aesthetic or moral choices. Today, structuralisms engross this area
from every side; we are structured by social relations, spoken by pregiven
linguistic structures, thought by ideologies, dreamed by myths, gendered by
patriarchal sexual norms, bonded by effective obligations, cultured by mentalities,
and acted by history’s script. None of these ideas is, in origin, absurd, and some
rest on substantial additions to knowledge. But all slip, at a certain point, from
sense to absurdity, and, in their sum, all arrive at a common terminus of unfreedom.
(206; emphasis in the original)

It cannot be my goal here to detail the numerous conceptual and political issues
with which Althusser’s theory is riddled.22 Instead, I wish to focus the
unexpected light this theory throws on a topic it never treats explicitly: official
Stalinist culture. After all, that “terminus of unfreedom” to which Thompson
draws our attention was not just a theoretical faux pas of French academics; it
had a very real historical instantiation in Soviet Russia.
The vision of ideology as the “bad dream of the infrastructure” (Eagleton 73,
117),23 in which people get assigned roles, acted, and thought, is questionable
psychoanalysis24 and even more questionable Marxism, but it does come very
close to being a perfectly good Stalinism. All one needs to do is remove the
negative marks that ideology bears in Althusser (as inadequate knowledge,
alienated form of existence, and dissimulation of the real) so that the bad dream
could have the potential to become wholesome and bright. 25 This would leave
intact the general sociological thesis that forms the backbone of Althusser’s
188 Automatic for the Masses

theory:26 the mechanism by which social-economic being reproduces itself as

culture by recruiting subjects and giving them representations to live in. This,
I would argue, is ideology in its own right, a meta-ideology (since it concerns
itself with the generation of ideology) with distinctly Stalinist overtones. It is
most certainly a Marxist idea that we can learn much about men’s intellectual
productions by considering the socio-economic conditions in which they
emerge. But it was Stalinist state policy to build socialism by forcing the
installation of an economic infrastructure and disregarding, in the process, all
the cultural conditions that must be in place beforehand if a socialist
community is to be more than a mockery of its name. The ideology implicit in
this policy is easy to spell out: the infrastructure is symbolically and
psychologically productive; once installed, its cultural extension – the practices,
behaviours, and mentalities presupposed by socialism – will follow as a matter
of course; it is enough to place people (by force, if need be) in socialist relations
of production for the dream of freedom, equality, and brotherhood to become
their lived reality. It is also easy to see how very close this is to Althusser’s
conception. Thompson has pointed out the affinity in terms as blunt as can be:

If we wished to translate [Stalinism’s] practices into a consistent theoretical system,

then we would design a Theory … in which a structuralist reductionism both
guaranteed the fundamental health of the Soviet system in its supposedly socialist
economic “basis” (thereby displacing all political, legal, and cultural questions
into secondary or tertiary status) and disallowed any materialist historical analysis
of this system …; in which men and women were seen as the bearers of ineluctable
structural determinations, in which their responsibility and historical agency was
denied … and in which it was, hence, more easy to view them as “rotten elements”
or things … In short, Althusserianism is Stalinism reduced to the paradigm of
theory. It is Stalinism at last, theorized as ideology.
Thus there is a sense in which we failed fully to identify Stalinism as Theory,
because we were waiting upon Althusser for this theory to be invented. (245–6)

This is unmercifully harsh,27 but the reason I have chosen to dwell for so long
on Althusser’s concept of ideology is that I believe Thompson’s basic intuition
to be correct. I am not interested in incriminating Althusser but in
understanding, with his unwitting help, the character of Stalinist cultural
politics. I do believe that the ISA essay succeeds, indirectly, in theorizing
Stalinism in a way that Stalinism could never theorize itself.
I stated earlier that Stalinist ideology is not what Althusser claims ideology
to be, just as the organized simulation of the ludic is not really play. Stalinist
ideology did not “secrete” from the pores of an established social order, as
Althusser believed to be the case for all ideology;28 it did not function
 Ideology as Authentication 189

organically and unconsciously; it did not generate a compulsory symbolic logic

spontaneously; it did not recruit subjects automatically; it did not hold these
subjects fast within some compelling imaginary relation; and no, it did not act
their deeds and think their thoughts in their stead. But – and this has been my
main point throughout – such is the image it
190 Automatic for the Masses

projected of itself; such is the plot of the spectacle it administered. Stalinist

ideology was more than the body of dogmas that the ideas of Marx and Lenin
had become once their original meaning had been falsified by instrumental
raison d’État or desiccated through endless ritualistic incantations. It was also
the staging of ideology’s positive essence, more or less as Althusser envisioned
it. It was not merely a matter of propagating and inculcating particular
meanings, but of showing how meaning itself, any meaning, is a product of a
supposedly immanent social process, of “our life,” of “practice” (whether it be
the reality of class struggle or the victorious work of building socialism), and
of demonstrating how it gets hold of people and acts them even before they are
able to consciously apprehend it. Beyond any ideational content, it was this
“show” that constituted the essential dimension of Stalinist ideology – a state-
wide, perpetually renewed production in which people were expected to act not
only as if they believed in Marxism-Leninism but also as if their belief was
taking place within them by virtue of an objective dynamic operating beyond
them.
I will leave this show’s sinister enactments for the beginning of the next
chapter, and offer here a glimpse of its brighter, affirmative version. My
example is a speech by Stalin to a gathering of women shock workers on 10
November 1935.29 The women, some forty beet farmers from kolkhozes in
Russia and Ukraine, have gathered in the Kremlin on this “festive day, when
the successes and potentials of liberated women’s labor are being demonstrated”
(Stalin, “Priem kolkhoznits-udarnits” 77). The visit, in other words, is framed
from the outset as a moment of demonstration, a show. Stalin begins his short
speech by stating what it is that has been shown today to the members of the
Politbiuro: “Comrades, what we saw here today is a piece of the new life, the
one we call kolkhoz life, socialist life” (76). The beet farmers are very much
like the characters of Panferov with which I opened the previous chapter – the
Vertretung of socialism, its creatures. No such women have ever existed before,
declares Stalin, only kolkhoz life could have begotten their kind. At the
gathering, the women have spoken words, and these words have expressed their
ideas and beliefs. Now Stalin’s speech will frame their words and beliefs as
tokens. That is, he will take them not for what they have said – their denotative
content – but for what they have manifested – their indexical or evidential
significance. “We listened to the simple words of simple working people” (76).
It does not matter what those words are about. It matters that they evidence a
new state of being, free labour under socialism; and the views these words
express count insofar as they can be shown to be “thought” by an objective set
of circumstances. The Leader proceeds as follows: these women are the
 Ideology as Authentication 191

products of the kolkhoz system (kolkhoznyi stroi); the kolkhoz system comprises
the practice of remunerating labour on the basis of workday norms (trudodni);30
hence it can be said that women have been liberated by the lived reality of the
workday norm.

The kolkhoz gave [kolkhoz dal] the workday norm. And what is a workday norm?
The workday norm makes everyone equal – women and men …
By means of the workday norm, the kolkhoz liberated the woman and made her
independent. Now she no longer works for her father, before marriage, and for her
husband, after she is married, but works for herself, first and foremost. This is what
the liberation of the peasant woman means, this is what the kolkhoz system means,
which makes the working woman equal to any working man. Such splendid
women could appear only on this base [na etoi baze],31 in these conditions. (76–7)

The first observation I offer concerns Stalin’s use of the verb “means”
(oznachaet). Clearly, he is not treating his listeners to a semantic analysis of the
phrases “liberation of the peasant woman” and “kolkhoz system.” These are
items whose semantic content is only too familiar to the people in the hall today
and the readers of Pravda tomorrow.32 The Leader’s goal is not to herald or
clarify an ideological meaning but to authenticate it, and that entails showing
us that “kolkhoz system” is a meaning operative in life, one that has produced
real-life effects, has taken possession of people, beings of flesh and blood, so
that when these people come forth, one can point to them and say triumphantly:
“This is what a kolkhoz system means!” It is a meaning that speaks not in
propositions but in tokens, not through Darstellung but through Vertretung.
And this brings me to the second point: the women, with their words and views,
are those very tokens. In simple terms, they are shown in the Kremlin as
examples of what socialism makes of people. In terms more reminiscent of
Althusser, the beet farmers are exhibits of what happens when individuals are
inserted into practices (trudoden’) constitutive of certain relations of
production (collectivized agriculture): they become the faithful subjects of
socialism, possessed of the views and beliefs appropriate to their position.
Lastly, in the terms of Thompson’s critique, the women shock workers are
presented in Stalin’s speech as nothing other than “the bearers of ineluctable
structural determinations,”33 only now in the positive sense of determinations
that bestow freedom as a destiny.
Stalin, then, is rehearsing his own version of Pascal’s and Althusser’s “Kneel
down, move your lips in prayer, and you will believe.” During the ceremonial
meeting, the shock workers have shown that they believe in socialism. 34 Stalin
takes the rostrum after them and points out that they believe it because they live
it, or rather, because they are “lived” by the practices of socialized agriculture.
This is the most striking aspect of the picture presented by the Leader: that
freedom, hope, belief, pride, all of these are effects that accrue to people by
192 Automatic for the Masses

virtue of the place they have been given in the new socio-economic
organization (the state gave the kolkhoz system; the kolkhoz system gave the
workday norm; the workday norm gave freedom, hope, belief, etc.). It is as if
these are the attainments not of people struggling for a better life, but rather of
the place itself, of the “stead” they happen to be manning.35 Socialism appears
not as their work but as an objective set of circumstances (Stalin’s “base” and
“conditions”) that works them en route to its self-realization.
Because socialism was to be built by first constructing the “base” and then
installing, in a purely formal way, the corresponding relations of production, it
became a question of legitimacy for the regime to demonstrate that the base
had been unconditionally effective in producing its necessary supplement – the
consciousness, psychological make-up, and patterns of conduct appropriate for
a liberated humanity.36 The Stalinist thesis that (theoretical) consciousness
trails behind practice37 did not contradict this fact. It simply indicated that
people had not yet come to awareness of a truth implicit in their own lives and
work. This truth thought them, even if they did not yet think it. Recall that
literary critic who avowed that the “socialist tendency” was transforming the
lives and minds of people even if they were not fully aware of the fact.38 On the
same assumption, Stalin was able to declare in a speech of 1937: “Our people,
unfortunately, do not always realize the height to which history has elevated
them under the conditions of the Soviet system” (“Rabotnikov” 236). It was
not a great calamity that the “software” of individual consciousness had fallen
behind the “hardware” of infrastructural accomplishments, since it was
understood that the former was preconfigured by the latter. This did, however,
allow the Party to speak on behalf of “practice” and explain to ordinary minds
the objective tendencies to which they had to own up. Thus in April 1932, the
resolution on literature informed the leaders of RAPP that their consciousness
was not in step with the current stage of socialist construction. And thus the
institution of socialist realism, from its very first day, was premised on the
symbolic act of demonstrating that truth inheres in practice, that it emanates
(beams) straight from life and gets a hold of me even before I can consciously
get hold of it.
This may be an opportune moment to draw once again the distinction
between the ideology found in texts of socialist realism and the ideology of
socialist realism as an institutionalized practice. The former has to do with the
reproduction of specific ideologemes in artistic discourse; it is not this aspect
that interests me in the present study. The latter is about staging the functioning
of ideology itself, in its positive aspect as culture; it is about demonstrating that
culture – that is, socialist realism itself – is the necessary form of (artistic)
appearance assumed by an objective and symbolically effective social process.
Like the words of the women shock workers during the Kremlin reception, the
texts of socialist realism are framed by this greater show, or exhibition. They
convey meanings discursively, but this is only the trite sense in which they can
 Ideology as Authentication 193

be said to be ideological. In the first place, they are ideological because they
participate in a regime of symbolic behaviour that authenticates the essence of
ideology. These are representations that are produced and received – at least in
official contexts – as tokens. Tokens of what? – Of the fact that their authors
are truly subjects, creatures of socialism, which means that representations are
given to them by the immanent symbolic logic of Soviet life. And if they are
obedient subjects, the authors will play their part in this performance, they will
act and speak not as if it was they who painted socialism, but rather as if
socialism painted itself in their work. In short, they will act as if in their artistic
practice they were acted by the socio-economic organism to which they belong.
This is what I called authentication. It too is a symbolic performance, like the
modernist death of the author; and it too transcends the limits of the text; finally,
it too aims to show artistic practice as “operated” by some objective agency
beyond the individual subject. Unlike its modernist counterpart, however, this
performance obeys the script of an ideology in power, an ideology of ideology,
which requires that ideas be shown to spring from a necessary “lived relation.”
Ideological Stalinism shared with intellectual modernism the conviction that
individual subjectivity is shaped by forces – heredity, race, environment,
unconscious drives, economic conditions – beyond subjectivity’s jurisdiction.
But only for Stalinism was it a matter of political exigency to stage over and
over again rituals affirming that this was the case. To one extended ritual of this
kind I will turn my attention in the next chapter.
Chapter 9

The Blind, the Seeing, and the Shiny

We need to fantasize, we need to study reality in such a way that, on the basis of its
laws, our fantasy could create actually possible events, which we do not always see.
K. Chornyi, speech at the
First Congress of Soviet Writers

In our country there are no events that occur by accident.

Vladimir Kirshon, speech at the
First Congress of Soviet Writers

The theoretical credo of Althusser and Žižek – the objectivity of ideological

belief – was the practical modus operandi of the Stalinist ideological regime.
As E.P. Thompson remarked, the latter did not develop its own original theory
of ideology. In practice, however, this regime consistently sought to
demonstrate that personal convictions are merely the comingto-consciousness
of objective circumstances that shape the lives of individuals. Insofar as
consciousness did not always keep up with its objective determinants, it was
possible for people not to realize just how happy they were, just as those leading
cadres Stalin was addressing in 1937 did not realize what a privileged place
history had given them. By the same token, it was possible for individuals to
be anti-Soviet elements without ever harbouring anti-Soviet sentiments, let
alone having a coherent ideological world view. For after all, they were
perceived as occupants of determinate positions in the society’s class structure;
even if they did not believe – say, in the restoration of capitalism – it was
assumed that their class position “does the believing for them.” Kulaks and
wreckers, Trotskyists and right opportunists, imperialists spies and “rootless
cosmopolitans” – these were all variations of the “objective enemy,” a peculiar
 The Blind, the Seeing, and the Shiny 195

breed of human beings, extant only since the early twentieth century and
distinguished by the fact that their character and subsequent fate was decided
regardless of whether they actually harboured feelings or intentions inimical to
the regime.1 Their classification as so many alien elements proceeded not from
what they actually thought but from what they supposedly were. The alien
political character imputed to them did not concern in any essential sense the
ideas they might or might not have. If they did in fact have harmful ideas, this
was seen as a consequence and as a further – but by no means necessary –
demonstration of their being objective enemies, not as a prerequisite for being
considered such. By confessing their criminal actions and intentions, they
simply inhabited, with their consciousness, the position to which they had been
assigned in advance. With the ideas they voiced, they declared to the world the
“tendency” whose carriers they were known to be.2
Stalin’s rise to power in 1928–9 was due in large part to his ability to present
his political opponents as people who were objectively undermining the Soviet
order, even if, subjectively, they were unaware of that fact. He reasoned by
axiom: the petty bourgeoisie continued to exist, and so did the class struggle;
this fact could not but be manifested within the Party (which had remained the
only forum of political representation in the country); 3 deviations from the
General Line, both to the left and to the right, were the forms assumed by the
class struggle in society at large and the pressures exerted on the Soviet Union
from the “capitalist encirclement.”4 In this picture, individuals were no more
than supports for objective relations, which is why Stalin could brush them
aside: “Those comrades who focus the problem of the right deviation on the
persons [litsa] representing the right deviation make a mistake. This is an
incorrect way to pose the question. Persons, of course, play a certain role.
However, it is a question not of persons, but of those conditions and
circumstances that engender the right danger in the party” (“O pravoi” 223–4;
emphasis added). As carriers of a tendency defined by objective “conditions
and circumstances,” the persons in question might not be fully aware of how
the tendency acted them and towards what end: “The right deviation in
communism, under the conditions of Soviet development, where capitalism has
been abolished, but where its roots have not yet been torn out, is the tendency
on the part of some communists, an unformed and not yet conscious proclivity,
but a proclivity nevertheless, to stray from the general line of our party in the
direction of bourgeois ideology” (“O pravoi” 225; emphasis added).5
When, in the following years, the proclivity was alleged to have became
conscious and to have formed itself into a series of monstrous plots against the
Soviet Union and its leadership, the general ideological set-up did not change.
The enemies of the people pilloried in the Moscow show trials of 1936–8 were
still treated as persons whose thoughts and deeds were a function of an
196 Automatic for the Masses

impersonal and inexorable logic. With their testimonies, Kamenev, Zinov’ev,

Bukharin, and their associates were expected to show themselves before the
court and the Soviet public as being precisely that: the Träger of necessary
determinations. The accused cooperated only to a point. Most of them recited
what they were supposed to say.6 But they, obviously, could not always recite
it with authentic passion; not many could show convincingly that they had
indeed been compulsively driven to the crimes with which they had been
charged. The Prosecutor-General, Andrei Vyshinskii, did his best to remedy the
spectacle:

Is it by accident that Trotskyism became the vanguard of capitalist restoration?

No, not by accident, because everything was leading to this from the very
beginning. Not by accident, because even before the October Revolution Trotsky
and his friends were fighting against Lenin and the Leninist party, just as they are
now fighting against Stalin and the party of Lenin-Stalin.
Comrade Stalin’s predictions have been fully realized. Trotskyism indeed
turned into the central meeting point of all powers inimical to socialism, into a
gang of mere bandits, spies, and murderers, who put themselves fully at the
disposal of foreign intelligence services, into lackeys of capitalism, into restorers
of capitalism in our country.
And here, at the trial, with extraordinary fullness and clarity was revealed just
this vile essence of Trotskyism. They came to their disgraceful end because for
decades they followed this road, glorifying capitalism, refusing to believe in the
successes of socialist construction, in the victory of socialism. This is why they
finally arrived at a broad program for capitalist restoration, this is why they
decided to begin betraying and selling our motherland. (Protsess 172; emphasis
added)

This passage merely reproduces the logic of Stalin’s thinking about the class
struggle in the Soviet Union: for as long as that struggle continued, it could not
but be manifested within the Party. Similarly, for as long as there existed a
capitalist encirclement, and for as long as the antagonism between socialism
and the bourgeois world escalated, there could not but be agents of reaction
within the Soviet Union. The history of Trotskyism, reaching back to the years
before the Revolution, was given (i.e., concocted) not in order to strengthen the
case against the accused, to give their recent crimes a credible background. The
goal, rather, was to chart a vector of ineluctable necessity (which I have
punctuated by italicizing the emblematic phrases in the quoted passage). 7
Nothing occurred by accident,8 everything happened just as it was supposed to
happen, just as it was predicted by comrade Stalin and inscribed in the logic of
history. It could not but happen. The show trial was the show of this could not
 The Blind, the Seeing, and the Shiny 197

but.9 No ideological conviction, no matter how firm, no matter how resolutely

pursued and implemented in action, could travel a road as straightforward and
precipitously inevitable as the one Vyshinskii drew for his audience. This could
only be the trajectory of a tendency, principle, or function, of a devilish
automaton that had nothing subjective about it. We are referred to it when the
Prosecutor-General speaks of the “vile essence of Trotskyism.” From this
essence proceeded the acts that the accused could not but commit; from there,
they had been irresistibly compelled to ever greater crimes against the Soviet
Union.
We should take care when examining the logic of Vyshinskii’s harangue, for
it follows a course directly opposite of what we might expect. The indictment
does not move from a consideration of the deeds, intentions, and beliefs of the
Trotskyists to the characterization of these people as antiSoviet elements (“they
did this, intended that, hence they should be condemned as anti-Soviet”). It is
just the other way around: these people are Trotskyists – that is, carriers of an
objective anti-Soviet tendency – and therefore they could not but do what they
did and intend what they intended. In a traditional legal procedure, the
criminal’s motives are considered in order to substantiate the attribution of the
crime. In the Moscow trials, by contrast, crimes were attributed to the members
of the anti-Soviet centres and blocs in order to demonstrate to the public the
general motive force that had acted these people in their criminal acts. To prove
they were criminally culpable was a subordinate task. The primary objective of
the macabre spectacle was to show that down to their smallest deeds, the
enemies of the people were marionettes controlled by the inevitable workings
of history. In a traditional legal procedure, the court begins by collecting
evidence and hearing testimonies in the hope that these will coalesce into a
clear and consistent picture of the crime. The Moscow trials followed the
opposite course: from a picture of historical forces and political subject
positions that was known in advance, to making this picture “come alive” in
the courtroom.
And here is how the tableau came to life. First, there is the general
ideological vision of victorious socialism, implying, inevitably, the reciprocal
decline of capitalism, the rising hostility towards the Soviet Union, and so on.
But since that vision is merely the scheme of historical necessity at its most
schematic, it has to draw material into itself in order to be completed. From the
second, darker part of the picture, an “essence” emerges, a concretization of the
very inevitability of the tendency. The essence is the antiSoviet pure and simple
– degradation as such. Next, the essence needs a “character” (not unlike
Althusser’s Charaktermask)10 in order to show itself in human-psychological
form. This character is none other than the “Trotskyist,” the paramount
exemplification of the anti-Soviet person. It contains just what was contained
198 Automatic for the Masses

in the essence: subterfuge, undying hostility towards socialism, escalating

moral degradation passing into unprincipled bestiality, and so on. For its part,
the “character” needs concrete actions, beliefs, and words, through which it
will make its appearance on the stage of the world; it needs the components
constitutive of a “role.” Once all of this is put in place (i.e., fabricated), one last
thing remains: the role needs to be manned, an actual human being has to
appear in it – a person through whom the actions will be acted, the beliefs
believed, and the words spoken – in short, through whom the picture will
become complete so that everything that is will be shown to be indeed just what
was meant to be.
This is how the spectacle was actually composed. But the effect it sought to
produce was something quite different. The accused had to show that their
downfall was nothing other than the inevitable downfall of the tendency whose
carriers they were.11 It was not just a matter of delivering self-incriminating
evidence. They were also expected to dramatize their own political bankruptcy
and ideological insubstantiality. It was not enough to confess to the crimes. It
was also necessary to act out and speak out the logic that led to the crimes, as
the last resort of creatures crushed by history. Under questioning, Kamenev
delivered the following “confession”:

I must admit that we really did not, and could not have had, any positive political
program with which to oppose the policy of the VKP(b).
In the very beginning of our negotiations with the Trotskyists there were still
some faint attempts to discuss the possibility of composing some positive platform.
However, we soon realized that this work is in vain, that we do not have any
ideological-political platform.
We banked on the insurmountable nature of the difficulties our country was
experiencing, on the crisis of the national economy, on the collapse of the
economic policies implemented by the Party leadership; by the second half of 1932,
this card was clearly beaten.
The country, under the leadership of VKP(b), was overcoming the difficulties
and moving successfully on the path of economic growth. We could not but see
that.
It might seem that we should have abandoned the struggle. However, the logic
of counter-revolutionary struggle, the base pursuit of power, devoid of any ideas
[bezideinoe], led us in a different direction.
The overcoming of difficulties, the victory of the policies implemented by the
Central Committee of VKP(b), infused us with more resentment and hatred toward
the party leadership and, in the first place, toward Stalin. (“Zakrytoe” 305–6;
emphasis added)
 The Blind, the Seeing, and the Shiny 199

As paradoxical as it may sound, the oppositionists’ bezideinost’ was only a

further – nay, the ultimate – demonstration of the objectivity of ideological
belief. That the Trotskyist–Zinov’evist bloc lacked an ideology does not
contradict the fact that ideology is a lived relation; indeed, it confirms it. The
essence of ideology in general was being authenticated here by a negative
example. One can have substantial ideas and a positive political platform only
if one occupies a meaningful place in the social (super)structure, if one
represents (vertret) some viable forces in society. By 1932 the oppositionists
had been left without any “base” and thus without a place in socialist Russia (a
fact foreshadowed in concrete terms by the expulsion of their alleged leader,
Trotsky). As such, they could only attract other uprooted elements – the pitiful
remnants of the vanquished exploiters – and, of course, the forces of reaction
outside the Soviet Union. The former politicians automatically become
unprincipled terrorists once socialism has become the sole effective base of
Soviet society;12 since all ideas and beliefs are produced by the base, these
former people have been reduced to instinctual resentment and brute force. As
another of them recapitulated: “The circle has closed. It is over with the
political masquerade, it is over with the shams of oppositions, discussions and
platforms. Opposition was superseded by conspiracy against the state;
discussions and platforms were superseded by bullets and bombs” (“Last
Pleas… Mrachkovsky”).
This is what happens when one represents (vertret) bankrupt historical
tendencies: one is eventually left without ideological representations
(Vorstellungen). By the same logic, but in reverse, we get the following axiom:
if one is part of a viable social whole, truly belongs to it, and is thus a Träger
of a progressive historical tendency, then one will live ideology as second
nature, will be possessed by substantial ideas, energizing beliefs, and so on.
This axiom underlay the institution and practice of socialist realism. The staged
revival of Style presupposed the spectacle of creative individuals in the grip of
a transpersonal plastic force. The spectacle was staged in various forms and on
various occasions. One occasion, however, is pre-eminent among all others, for
it marked the institutional birth of Stalin’s homegrown socialist culture: the
First All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers. The House of Trade Unions on
Bol’shaia Dmitrovka Street in Moscow, where in March 1938 the last of the
show trials took place,13 was also the venue for the congress – a spectacle in
which the members of the literary intelligentsia had to show themselves to be
the Träger of the opposite, victorious, historical tendency. To this spectacle I
now turn.

The congress had been decreed by the Party resolution of April 1932 and was
set in motion almost immediately. From the outset, this assembly of writers was
200 Automatic for the Masses

seen as a symbolic event of epochal significance. By enthroning the style of

socialist realism, the congress was to signal the advent of a socialist renaissance
and mark the Soviet Union as the new centre of world culture.14 Partly because
these ambitions were so extravagant, the preparations took longer than
expected, and the opening date needed to be moved back on several occasions.
The delegates were carefully selected, and selected foreign guests were invited.
The order of presentation was set in advance. The key speeches and reports had
to be approved beforehand by the Organizational Committee; those texts were
made available to all the delegates. Excursions, concerts, and public festivities
accompanied the main event. On the street outside the House of Trade Unions,
large crowds gathered every day to greet the writers as they entered or left the
building.
This festive, effervescent life was not confined to the outside. It made its way
inside. At intervals throughout the writers’ debates, organized groups of
common folk from various walks of life proceeded down the aisle of the
magnificent Hall of Columns and ascended the podium. These were the
“delegates without membership cards,” as Boris Pasternak referred to them:
industrial workers, representatives of kolkhoz collectives, Young Pioneers,
soldiers, scientists – “shiny, happy people.” All of them had come to greet the
unprecedented assembly, voice their enthusiasm for the epochal event, and
testify to the eager attention with which all Soviet people followed the
congress’s proceedings. Their entrances were more than colourful intermezzos,
ceremonial exclamation points in a prosaic text that was otherwise about
different matters: artistic literature, the parameters of socialist realism, the
organization of the Writers’ Union, and so on. They were very much part of
that text – the frame without which the text could not be properly understood.
Their attendance was constitutive of the act whereby socialist realism was
being produced, not a sideshow to the deliberations through which, supposedly,
the Stalinist cultural program was being formulated. In a sense on which I will
elaborate in the following discussion, this was the show.
Each such appearance was introduced by the session chair with the words:
“Comrades, we have been visited by …” (Tovarishchi, k nam prishli/
priekhali …). Usually, after saluting the delegates and providing a short
biography of the collective he or she had been chosen to represent, the speaker
presented a zakaz, a particular social commission. All of them made, essentially,
the same demand: “Show us.”15 In different voices, the people’s representatives
were demanding that they be represented (darstellt). In the voice of comrade
Bratanovskii, speaking on behalf of proletarian authors of technical literature:
“Our collective order to you, comrade writers, is: get closer to the industry
worker, depicting him not only at the machine, but also showing his fight for
acquiring high technical qualification, for absorbing all achievements of world
 The Blind, the Seeing, and the Shiny 201

culture” (Pervyi 554); as expressed by comrade Nemtsova, a representative of

a factory-university (zavodvtuz) named after Stalin: “Give us a woman-hero,
not just a shock-worker, but a woman who raises our next generation … who
combines this exacting, complicated task with the struggle for socialist
construction” (366); and as sung by a choir of pioneers from Moscow:

To the writers – an order from the children of the capital:

In your stories we want to be merry,
As we are in camps, gardens, and courtyards.
[………………………………………………………….]
We want to dream of stars and planets,
To invent machines in our fearless minds (179).

This was the social commission speaking, commissioning itself. It did not need
to be ordered from somewhere else, from “up high.” To all appearances, it was
life itself, “our reality,” that was entering the Hall of Columns and demanding
its own artistic rendition.
The assembly was genuinely moved. When a kolkhoz farmer carrying a
heavy tool on her shoulders took to the podium, Pasternak was so flustered that
he lunged at her, seized the tool, and tried to carry it for her. When the Pioneer
choir marched through the hall and began singing, Gor’kii could not suppress
his tears; many in the audience sobbed along with him. Throughout the
proceedings, speakers kept reminding the gathering of this or that memorable
appearance: “When, yesterday, those children entered the hall, when all those
colors, gestures, applause, the sounds of the orchestra, of the trumpets, the flood
of light …” (206); “Take for example the speech of the kolkhoz worker who
greeted us. This absolutely fearless, valiant woman …” (232); “Comrades, Otto
Iul’evich Schmidt spoke here.16 He said something seemingly simple, but quite
significant …” (616); “Comrades, one of the most remarkable moments of this
congress was the speech, during the first session, of the Donbas shock-worker
Nikita Izotov …” (654).17
The writers understood and agreed that the business for which they had
convened, the business of Soviet literature, of artistic representation in general,
had to do, in the first place, with showing the builders of socialism. Nikolai
Pogodin even equated socialist realism with the task of presenting the
biographies of these people (388). The call to depict the new heroes was heard
from all sides. The Party emissary, Andrei Zhdanov: “Soviet literature must be
able to show our heroes …” (4); Gor’kii: “The main hero of our books should
be labor, that is, the human being organized by the processes of labor …” (13);
comrade Nemtsova: “Give us a hero who lives a full life, give us the kind of
hero who is to be found in our socialist construction …” (367); Aleksandr
202 Automatic for the Masses

Fadeev: “Indubitably, our literature lacks the images of monumental, intelligent,

integral characters, the likes of which are promoted in ever greater numbers
from the ranks of the working class and the peasantry …” (234).
Yet even as they were urging one another in this way and vowing to fulfil the
main social commission, to show in their works the new people of socialism,
the writers could not ignore the fact that the social commission itself had “made
a showing.” Had the people not appeared in front of the congress? Had they not
come from the factories and fields, walked down the aisle, and stood before the
assembly? Those who had come had done so not just to speak to the writers
about the building of socialism. They had also come to exemplify it. They had
taken to the stage in the Hall of Columns and stood there as living tokens of
Soviet reality. This too was a
“showing” – one that did not wait to be shown through the agency of the
“delegates with membership cards,” but was showing itself on its own, from
within itself. Once again we come upon the duality hidden behind the word
“representation,” the duality between Darstellung and Vertretung, between
“depicting” and “standing for,” “embodying,” “bodying forth.” On the one
hand, we have a showing that shows something: the depicted object. It is
transitive. The second is showing as pure self-exhibition. It is intransitive, for
it does not take us somewhere outside of itself, to a thing we should see. It is
itself the thing we should see, the thing we cannot help but see. The first type
of showing is satisfied and extinguished when it gets to the object. The second
is satisfied when it “gets” to the viewer. Its “object” – for it is not as intransitive
as it seems – is to possess its audience. Nowhere exceept in this possession
does it succeed as a show.
Not nearly everyone in the audience at the First Congress of Soviet Writers
understood what was required of them. What were they supposed to do? What
was their part in the production that was already under way, the cultural
production of socialist realism? And, as a first order of business, how were they
to react to the demands being made by the new people? What were they
supposed to do in order to show these beings? Because the assembled were
writers, members of the intelligentsia, living lives quite different from those of
their potential heroes, many thought it was a matter of getting closer to the new
people, getting to know them more intimately, and depicting them from that
point of intimacy. As in the years prior to the congress, there were reproaches
that echoed the old Russian theme of the intelligentsia’s separation from the
life of the masses.18 In response, voices – some of them quite authoritative –
prescribed a more involved and diligent study of the living subject matter.
In his official report on the Statute of the Union of Soviet Writers, Pavel
Iudin mandated:
 The Blind, the Seeing, and the Shiny 203

The artist must study reality intently, carefully, and persistently, he must know the
new man in detail, in all the particulars, his work, everyday life, soul, personal
qualities, how he thinks, how he converses with his comrades, what he thinks
about himself, what he sees in his dreams, how he loves and hates, how he cries
and rejoices. Without this, the writer cannot become an “engineer of human souls.”
(665)

For a brief initial moment this statement sounds like an invitation to a diligent
empirical study. That moment passes once we realize that we are in the Soviet
Union of the 1930s, the last place in the world where the writer could be advised
to be a mere observer of life (and certainly not by Iudin, a Party philosopher
and one of the leading interpreters of Marxism during the Stalinist period).19
We may also notice that no empirical acquaintance could possibly get to the
depths of intimacy Iudin envisions (“what he sees in his dreams”).
How, then, is one to attain this intimacy? How deeply into the thick of reality
must one reach before reality shows its true face? What is that optimal
proximity at which the knowledge of reality becomes authentic and lends itself
to truthful artistic synthesis? At what point in the asymptotic approach to the
presence of “life itself” does one begin to see that presence truthfully, “in detail,
in all the particulars”?
One thing is certain and bears repeating: the desired point is not, as it had
been earlier, the point of application of method. Since the first part of this study,
since the culture of the 1920s, we have moved beyond this point. The first
indication that the attainment of the “real” was no longer the provenance of
(professedly) scientific hermeneutic was the controversy, at the beginning of
the 1930s, centred on the literary theory of RAPP. Even as their organization
was being dismantled, RAPP’s leaders had continued to insist that the essential
characteristic of Soviet literature was its ideologically superior vantage point
upon the world: the so-called dialectical-materialist method. In preliminary
meetings between writers and representatives of the Party’s Central Committee,
this platform was rejected and the slogan of socialist realism took its place. This
was more than just a scholastic squabble over words. It suggested a momentous
cultural shift. From now on, there was not going to be a mediatory instance
(“conveyor”) through which truth would emerge from latency and manifest
itself. Truth would do so on its own, out of itself. 20 In the Hall of Columns, it
did so every time the delegates without membership cards walked down the
isle, spoke, or sang.
The shift between the two paradigms of truth was implied in the first
published mention of socialist realism, the statement by Ivan Gronskii of May
1932: “The basic demand that we make on the writer is: write the truth, portray
truthfully our reality, which is in itself dialectic” (qtd in Robin 39; emphasis
204 Automatic for the Masses

added). This gives us to understand that no special apparatus is needed to

extract the truth of life, for “our reality” itself makes this truth legible.21 All that
is needed is to “write” what has thus been rendered manifest. The sentence
following the one just quoted comes as an inference: “Therefore, the basic
method of Soviet literature is the method of socialist realism” (39). In other
words, socialist realism is the generalization of this kind of artistic practice for
which no method is needed, insofar as it records a truth that has been made
explicit already by the movement of life itself. Gronskii’s words echo those of
Stalin, supposedly spoken two weeks earlier, at a meeting with writers in
Gor’kii’s residence: “If an artist truthfully depicts our life, he cannot but notice
and depict in it that which leads it to socialism. This exactly will be socialist
art. This exactly will be socialist realism” (qtd in Ermolaev 145; emphasis
added).22 First comes the world, with its immanent truth; then the writer’s
contact with it; and only in the last instance, following a line of inevitability
(“cannot but”), as a consequence or a point of arrival – the so-called method of
socialist realism. This, of course, is none other than the concatenation discussed
in chapter 7, on the example of a moving story told by Gor’kii, through which
the object arrives at the cognition proper to itself in the “stead” of its researchers.
In that earlier instance, we were considering the general mechanism through
which the truth of socialism “works.” We are now considering the very same
mechanism, but with a view to the obligations this truth places on the author.
It indeed appears that the author’s “burden is light” (Matt. 11.30), for no
special knowledge or intuition is required of him prior to his encounter with
the world. As the words of the Leader suggest, all that is needed is sincerity.
The person mirroring Stalin’s role within the writers’ community, Gor’kii,
voiced the same imperative in his keynote address to the congress: “Only one
thing is required of the person [in our country]: to be honest in his attitude
toward the heroic work of creating a classless society” (14; emphasis added).
In ordinary circumstances, we would have no cause to pause and ponder the
meaning of such common phrases as “being honest” or “being sincere.” But we
are now in quite extraordinary circumstances that give us reason to doubt
whether the sincerity intended by Stalin and Gor’kii is exactly what we have
have always understood by this word.
Sincerity, as we know it, presupposes something contained within (feelings,
intentions, thoughts, etc.) that is not held in concealment but freely released
into the open.23 It is a motion of letting out. But this is not at all what Stalin and
Gor’kii had in mind. The sincerity they were preaching was a letting-in or, even
better, a letting-through, more akin to the eighteenth-century notion of
sensibility as susceptibility: one’s capacity to be affected by life in its various
manifestations, to “resonate” with the meaning/emotion intrinsic to life’s
events, to be moved.24 With regard to Stalinist culture, we may say, in a
 The Blind, the Seeing, and the Shiny 205

preliminary way, that it was a matter of one’s capacity to be “moved” (acted)

by the truth – or, which is the same thing, the tendency – of “life itself.” Rather
than letting out a truth held concealed, it was a matter of being affected by a
truth breaking through and manifesting itself. As we now see, the optimal
proximity to reality that Iudin and many others urged, the proximity of clear
artistic vision, was not to be measured with the yardstick of some expert
knowledge or systematic observation but by degrees of “sincerity.”
When, in the same speech, Gor’kii complained that “we still poorly see
reality” (14), he was blaming the predicament precisely on the dearth of such
sincerity. The injunction he directed at his audience pivoted on a verbal usage
I find quite revealing:

For the success of our common work, we must understand, feel through
[prochuvstvovat’], the fact that organized socialist labour in our country, the labour
of half-literate workers and the primitive peasantry, has created, in a short period
of time, a decade, colossal values … The right evaluation of this fact would show
us the cultural-revolutionary force of the teaching that unites the proletariat of the
world. (13)25

“To feel,” whose proper Russian equivalent is pochuvstvovat’ (perf.), falls a

bit short of translating prochuvstvovat’. The latter denotes a different kind of
relation to the object of sentiment. Pochuvstvovat’ refers us to the moment a
feeling is born, when an emotion emerges out of nothingness or ephemerality.
It takes as a direct object this very emotion, whatever its name may be (“love,”
“resentment,” “sadness,” etc.). By contrast, prochuvstvovat’, used in Russian
much less frequently, directs us to an object that has nothing ephemeral about
it. On the contrary, it is something that predates the exertion of feeling, a solid,
pre-existent reality, an antecedent fact. To feel, in the sense of prochuvstvovat’,
is not so much to experience the birth of a particular emotion as to inhabit with
emotion such a preexistent reality.
In the passage just quoted, Gor’kii is spelling out clearly for those in
attendance the reality that needs to be infused with feeling: it is the “fact” of
socialist construction. Given that the fact is already a fact, we may ask: What
is to be gained from this additional sentimental operation? Can the fact be made
more real, more present? Indeed it can. When one opens up, “sincerely,” to the
fact of socialism, a new level is reached. We already know what the
qualitatively new moment is, and Gor’kii’s words confirm this knowledge:
through sincerity, one begins to see “the force of the teaching” on which the
entire edifice stands; that is to say, one appreciates the power of this teaching
to become reality; one sees that what was meant to be could not but come to be
and so is indeed coming to be, amen!
206 Automatic for the Masses

This, of course, is none other than the dialectic of seen-ness discussed in

chapter 7. The coming-true of socialism lays bare the logic of history. For those
who are on the wrong side of history – oppositionists of various stripes – it
spells doom and the absence of (political) vision. For those on the right side of
history, the laying-bare is the very source of vision:

The Soviet dramatist possesses one small advantage, he is relieved of one small
worry: he does not need to look for a hero. There is no need for him to light his
torch and search in the secret nooks of life for man, the new man – the hero of our
epoch.
The epoch came to his rescue. The secret of life stands revealed,
grandiloquently clear. The hero is everywhere. (Pervyi 459; emphasis added)
These are remarkable words. In them, the “epoch” is presented as an agent
independent of the writer, a force that comes to his rescue and relieves him of
traditional duties. The Soviet author does not need to light his torch and
illuminate reality because the reality of the Stalinist socialist epoch is now itself
the light of revelation: it is beaming. Projecting this light more powerfully than
anything else are the shiny, happy people, the heroes of socialism. Some of the
writers speaking from the congress’s rostrum testified to having been nearly
blinded. Bruno Iasenskii: “To be a Soviet writer means to be in possession of
such blinding [oslepitel’nyi] material, the likes of which was not available to
any writer, in any country or historical period” (278; emphasis added).
Aleksandr Zharov: “[We] proved to be unprepared for a full-bloodied poetic
perception of the grandiose complexity and blinding simplicity of the reality
that has come to be [nastupivshei deistvitel’nosti]” (537; emphasis added).
Leonid Pervomaiskii: “I want to look in the eyes of Soviet poetry’s tomorrow.
I want to look into the eyes of truth. This is very difficult. This is how great our
time is, this is how vivid and fierce [iarka i iarostna] this truth is. This is the
truth that gave birth to us” (540; emphasis added).
Because the light is already here, upon us, all one needs to do is throw one’s
torch away and “let the light shine through.” The imperative of sincerity,
translated into the scopic register, implies that one should open one’s being to
the point where it becomes translucent, porous, in relation to the light, so that
it can transmit it without distortion or attenuation. The verb best suited to
describe this unusual relay between world and subject is a near-synonym of
prochuvstvovat’, only in the reflexive: proniknut’sia. It is one of those instances
that showcase the wonderful subtleties of expression possible in Russian. The
root verb proniknut’ translates easily and quite accurately as “penetrate.” But
after it comes the reflexive particle, which changes everything. The semantic
result is not “penetrating oneself,” or “letting oneself be penetrated,” or just
“being penetrated”; it is: through one’s own activity to render oneself
 The Blind, the Seeing, and the Shiny 207

penetrable, to bring about the permeation of one’s own being by something

initially external (an emotion, the consciousness of something; respectively,
proniknut’sia chuvstvom … proniknut’sia soznaniem o …).
In this single word, I believe, we have a succinct answer to the question
posed earlier: How is the Soviet author to achieve the intimate knowledge
required for a proper representation of socialist reality and its exemplary
inhabitants? The key to such intimacy lies in a particular position that the two
partners – the author and raw, unprocessed reality – must assume. The roles are
reversed from the relation implied in the very name “author”: his role of
actively manipulating the material, shaping it into a creation onto which he may
place the seal of master and originator. In socialist realism, by ideological
default, the artist is confronted with “blinding material” that already possesses
a proto-aesthetic form. The primal beauty of this self-shaping stuff need only
be channelled by the subject. He who by virtue of a cultural anachronism still
calls himself author must assume a position vis-à-vis the material such that he
opens himself to the powerful thrust of “life-itself” – a surrender in which his
being will be possessed to the core. What we saw, in the previous cultural frame,
as an immanent organization, principle, tectonic, and so on, acquires in Stalinist
ideology the prowess of an invasive force, one that manifests itself precisely
where it takes possession of the human subject. In that it produces and “acts”
the subject, this force proves to be real, enjoys presence.
One is able to see clearly insofar as one is truly possessed by this force.
Conversely, the inability to see should be attributed to a certain obdurateness
of being and, ultimately, to “foreignness.” (When Stalin launched his offensive
against the right opposition, a consistent motif in his speeches was Bukharin
and Tomskii’s failure to see the changes in Soviet society;26 we saw the same
reproach directed at the leadership of RAPP.) At the congress, the distance
between these two states of being, between blindness and clear vision, was
addressed in an emotional speech by the young writer Aleksandr Avdeenko. An
abandoned child, he had had a difficult early life beset with violence, crime,
and imprisonment. He was speaking of this past when he admitted: “My life
was such that I looked at people and did not see them” (243; emphasis added).
He interrupted the story about his past by recalling the moment when the
Pioneer choir ascended the podium; it was as if his former, low life had
continued all the way to that memorable entrance and had been terminated only
by it: “We lived by the day, by the hour. But in that moment when the pioneers
appeared on the congress’ podium, I felt a tremendous desire to live. And my
thoughts ran not by decades, but by centuries …. Then, in front of me, the future
flashed, revealed itself [blesnulo, raskrylos’]” (243; emphasis added). In the
lobby, however, during the intermission, as Avdeenko was looking to share his
enthusiasm with his colleagues, he was taken aback: “But many of the writers
208 Automatic for the Masses

were not shaken by the pioneers’ demonstration. That was an offensive

indifference. Indifference is the most terrifying thing” (243).
Avdeenko recalled an earlier occasion on which he had been offended by the
indifference of his colleagues. His mentor, Gor’kii, had told him of a new kind
of blade that a Soviet technician had invented: a blade that could not be blunted,
only sharpened. “He [Gor’kii] drew an entire picture of what lays in store for
our economy and our life as a consequence of this invention. He became
impassioned. I do not know whether he had ever been as happy or excited as in
that moment” (243). When, afterwards, Avdeenko asked other writers about the
blade, it turned out that no one had heard of it; not only that, but they were not
even interested in learning about it (243). Gor’kii was the antipode of this
obtuseness:

Aleksei Maksimovich harbors a special hatred toward indifference. He has the

ability to feel life [umeet chuvstvovat’ zhizn’]. Once he was telling me that in our
country labour is beginning to turn into art. He proved it with facts, examples. I
left Gor’kii’s house shaken by his passionate attitude towards life. It was
uncomfortable for me to walk down the street: I thought that people would stop
me and start asking me questions.
I felt that I had become smarter, as if I had read a dozen good books. I wanted
to speak, live, dream just as wisely and profoundly, as he, Aleksei Maksimovich.
No other writer has shaken me in such a way, from others I have not heard such
speeches.
We lack this voracity toward life. We are either unwilling or unable to be
voracious toward life’s manifestations. (243)

What reads as a sickeningly syrupy profession of feelings, passing into a plea

for sensitivity, is, in essence, really about something else. The ability to be
moved by life, which Gor’kii exemplifies and which his protégé is happy to
evidence as well as eulogize, is a matter of emotion only because it is, first and
foremost, a matter of belonging. Gor’kii sees better and farther because he feels
more deeply; but he feels more deeply because he is organically rooted in
Soviet reality (despite his long absence from the country). He does not even
need to do what other writers are being urged to do: proniknut’sia. His being is
already saturated with the tendency characteristic of socialist life. He is moved
emotionally by life’s “manifestations” because, in a deeper sense, he is driven
by the driving force of that very life: driven to see.
What is it that Gor’kii sees from his privileged position? According to his
disciple, Avdeenko, Aleksei Maksimovich is able to “dream wisely and
profoundly.” He sees, for example, what will happen as a result of the new
invention; he sees a future in which labour will become a creative endeavour.
 The Blind, the Seeing, and the Shiny 209

This dream-like futurist vision had a well-known designation in Soviet culture:

revolutionary romanticism. It was only fitting that Gor’kii possessed the
capacity for it to the extreme, for he was also its foremost exponent. In his
keynote address at the First Congress of Soviet Writers – which, along with
Zhdanov’s speech, remains a locus classicus for the doctrine of revolutionary
romanticism – he envisioned an epic style that would be supremely realistic
precisely because it was also mythical. Myth, Gor’kii reasoned, is something
imagined, invented. But if the invention provides a genuine synthesis and
expression of what is actually present, then it is realistic (10). Revolutionary
romanticism was just this paradoxical coalescence of the mythical and the
realistic, which began with available experience and, “following the logic of
hypothesis,” arrived at the portrayal of the “desired and the possible” (10).
However maligned it has been in Western and post-Soviet Russian
scholarship for having sanctioned an illusionist “varnishing of reality,”
revolutionary romanticism certainly cannot be accused of this one “sin”: that it
appealed to the power of the writer’s imagination. It was, primarily, an appeal
to belonging. About it we should say what has already been said about socialist
realism: that it was not a certain method of “approaching reality,” of
manipulating the raw data of experience. After all, as one speaker at the
congress assured his colleagues, “the style of artistic work cannot be anything
other than the style of life [stil’ zhizni]” (382). To be a “revolutionary romantic,”
then, did not mean to fantasize about the bright future after diligently studying
Marx and Lenin, but to be organically one with the Soviet style of life – a life
that was itself a sort of a oneiric machine, inasmuch as in it the dreams of
historical humanity were being fulfilled.27 Since Gor’kii was one with this
device, he was naturally “acted” by it, and hence, just as naturally, the visions
of the future appeared before him.
Those writers for whom such natural belonging could not be assumed were
in danger of succumbing to “naturalism” – the lifeless registration of what is
merely there. Along with the second deadly sin of Stalinist culture, “formalism,”
the naturalistic copying of reality was viewed as a sure sign of the artist’s
severed connection to the fullness of Soviet life. Opposed to the lifeless
exactitude of the copy was the full-blooded truth of the “invention”: “Our work
is not a mere imitation, an exact registration, but an invention that emerges
from the closest and most intense connection to reality, a reality that gives rise
to the possibility of being that could endow dramatic works with the character
of a prediction, a foretelling, a prospective plan” (Pervyi 460; emphasis added).
Decoding playwright Aleksei Faiko’s awkwardly phrased pronouncement, we
come to realize, first, that for him “invention” does not mean some
unencumbered flight of the imagination. The flight is very much restrained in
210 Automatic for the Masses

that it aims, optimally, at an objective prognosis – an advance knowledge of

what cannot but take place.
Second, we see that the act of prognostication does not begin with the subject,
the author; rather, it begins with the “reality” that engenders a unique
“possibility of being.” The (socio-historical) being in question possesses the
unique ability to lay bare and render manifest. Only to the degree to which the
writer is part of this being can he believe objectively. More precisely, the being
would do the believing in his stead. We find ourselves once again on the
territory of what Žižek calls the objectivity of belief.
Criticizing the inability of some writers to provide powerful artistic
expressions of the world in which they lived, Faiko’s colleague, Vladimir
Kirshon, attributed the problem to a disorientation characteristic of the present
day. Life was changing swiftly and dramatically; what had been current just
yesterday was already obsolete today; new phenomena were springing up
incessantly from the fabric of Soviet reality. For many writers, the impression
was overwhelming; “they wander through [life’s] events like blind people”
(405). As a defence against the onrush of this rich and powerful life, which
struck them as chaotic, they had taken the path of naturalism: “photographing
the present reality, they want to hide behind the photographic depiction their
attitude toward this reality” (405). To these people, who covered up their
blindness with the exactitude of the copy, Kirshon gave the following assurance:

What takes place in our country is not chaos, not an accumulation of random
occurrences, no – this is an expression of the internal laws of historical
development, which lie at the foundation of events, the laws of scientific Marxism,
which are embodied in tactics and strategy – our Party’s general plan.
As it is being implemented, this plan itself becomes a historical factor. On the
basis of the Party line in the execution of this extraordinary historical plan, there
take place not just foreseen processes of the socialist transformation of life, but
also ones that have been elicited and organized by our Party.
In our country there are no events that occur by accident. There is diversity in
the unity of a single line.
The task of the writer is, first and foremost, to feel this line organically.
(405; emphasis added)

This is an opportune moment to recall the words of Trotsky quoted earlier in

this study, which, similarly, sought to dispel the seeming chaos of historical
happening with an assurance that pointed confidently to the “iron formulas” of
the “revolutionary algebra.”28 At first glance, the two statements seem to be
conveying the same meaning. In fact, they are saying paradigmatically different
things, thus marking the distinction between two different cultural moments.
 The Blind, the Seeing, and the Shiny 211

Trotsky is saying, essentially, “We are through what we know”: the method of
historical materialism gives us knowledge of the intractable laws of historical
development, turning the apparent chaos into an ordered picture; as convinced
revolutionaries, we are guided by this picture; and so on. Official Stalinist
culture speaks differently, indeed in reverse: “We know through what we are.”
Such is the logic underlying the last quoted passage: if you were truly Soviet,
you would feel organically the immanent tendency of our life29 and, hence, be
able to behold the picture of perfect order and unswerving direction through
the apparent chaos of events and phenomena.
But this means that the theatrical stage, the page, and the canvas must
somehow become isotopic with the podium in the Hall of Columns, which for
its part is isotopic with the stage on which life does its selfshowing. Expressed
differently, the motion of painting or writing must become absolutely
unassertive, ephemeral, so that it can easily be “moved” by the grand
movement of self-revelatory life. Is this not the implication we should read into
statements like the following, made by Gronskii a couple of months before the
Congress: “The direction of historical development, the outcome of the
struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, is now drawing itself out
[vyrisovyvaetsia] sufficiently clearly before the artist” (212)? The “drawing”
mentioned here is not an artistic activity proper. It is, rather, the drawing of that
absolutely straightforward and determinate line to which Kirshon also referred,
the line that lets no event fall out of line with necessity and inevitability. It takes
place on a surface that we, usually, do not consider contiguous with the surface
on which the artist draws. Yet the peculiarity of socialist realism, as a cultural
practice, consists precisely in the attempt to splice these two surfaces together,
as if they were one. The first kind of drawing, the drawing that depicts, is made
a function of the second – the drawing that gives direct embodiment, manifests,
and thus manifestly fulfils. Any line of depiction must issue forth from that
other line, which the author is enjoined to feel organically. 30
This is the extent to which, with socialist realism, we find ourselves beyond
the traditional understanding of artistic representation. This is also the extent to
which we find ourselves outside the notion of authorship proper. We now see
that to be a Soviet author – changing only slightly Stalin’s previously quoted
definition – means to have depicted truthfully; but this means to have seen,
which in turn implies – and here the contradiction is already apparent – to have
been permeated and possessed by the force of socialism and thus to have been
made to see. This force counts as real – or as I previously phrased it, enjoys
erection – to the extent to which any given “one” (in our case, a Soviet writer)
proves amenable to it. I am choosing both words, “proves” and “amenable,”
quite deliberately. The former is meant to resonate with the peculiar logic of
proof operative at the Moscow show trials. As noted, the court sought not so
212 Automatic for the Masses

much to prove the guilt of the accused as to demonstrate the workings of a

“tendency” (in fact, the former proof was subsumed by the latter). Ideally, the
accused would have been able to show themselves, in their words and
behaviour, as being irresistibly driven by this inexorable tendency. Similarly,
at the Writer’s Congress, the writers had to show that they were indeed those
they were supposed to be – beings exhibiting the effects of socialism,
irresistibly driven to clarity by a force that possessed them to the core but that
was, nevertheless, distinct from them, not truly theirs.
In the concrete setting of the Hall of Columns, this force was acting
concretely as the force of exhibition. On the podium, right before the writers,
it was demonstrating in concrete human form that socialism had indeed become
reality, since it was indeed producing a new breed of man, a new attitude
towards labour, new forms of ethics, and so on. To wit, in this performance,
everything happened just as Gronskii’s words had described it: “drawing itself
out sufficiently clearly before the artist” was the “direction of historical
development.” In saying that writers had to prove “amenable” to this force of
exhibition, I mean, quite literally, that they had to be able to adopt a disposition
of elated resignation analogous to an “Amen!” Since it was the force, and not
the artist, that did the essential showing, there was little left for the latter to do
but show that his being was not opaque to the show that showed. Verbalized,
his attitude had to be something like this: “Yes, now I see! Indeed, it has come
to pass before me! And so, I let it be just as it was meant to be; I let it draw
itself out and present itself just as it has been drawn up in heaven. Amen!”31
This disposition was captured effectively in Pasternak’s words that serve as
an epigraph to this study: “Proletarian dictatorship is not enough to influence
culture. For this, a true plastic hegemony [plasticheskoe gospodstvo] is needed:
a hegemony that would speak through me without my knowing it and even
against my will. I do not feel this” (qtd in Pervyi 175). There is no doubt that
the hegemony to which Pasternak wished to be subjected was homologous with
the force of socialism as a force of concrete and true showing. In the realm of
art, this hegemony was tantamount to the manifestation of a great style. The
yearning for a “ventriloquized” expression, unconscious and unwilled, was yet
another expression of the modernist desire for the Formative discussed in
chapter 6. We are reminded here of the psalm refrain, “Into your hands … I
commend my spirit” (Ps. 31.5), in which redemption blends seamlessly with
surrender.
The “Amen!” implied in both utterances could be imagined as a certain letting-
go whereby one’s ontological density decreases: a self-induced
ephemeralization of one’s being, so it can be “moved” more easily by the force
of truth (“For You shall redeem me, Lord of truth”).
 The Blind, the Seeing, and the Shiny 213

Pasternak made the pronouncement in 1925, during the NEP period, but he
was reminded of it a decade later, during the congress, by one of the speakers,
Abram Lezhnev. The main theme of Lezhnev’s speech was the theme discussed
in chapter 7: the radical conversion of the old intelligentsia in the years of
Stalin’s cultural revolution. The transformation, he argued, consisted not in the
writers’ mere acceptance of the new social order, but, much more substantially,
in their changed world view (177). The latter he attributed precisely to the
realization of Pasternak’s “real plastic hegemony” (176). When it came time
for him to speak, Pasternak confirmed Lezhnev’s conviction. The power for
which he had been waiting in vain ten years ago, the one that bypasses the
consciousness and will of the author on its way to artistic expression, was
finally making itself felt; its effects were palpable even within the official
enclosures of the Hall of Columns. Pasternak expounded on one such
remarkable effect – the birth of a new poetic language:

For twelve days we have been united by the dizzying bliss of the fact that this high
poetic language was being born on its own in our conversation with our present
day, with the present day of people who had cut off the anchor of private property
and were freely soaring, floating, whirling, in the space of the biographically
conceivable ….
The poetic language of which I reminded you sounded the loudest in the
speeches of the people with the most decisive vote: the delegates without
membership cards, the members of the delegations that had come to visit us. In all
these cases, the poetic language reached such power, that it forced apart the bounds
of reality and transported us to that realm of the possible, which in the socialist
world is also the realm of the necessary. (549)

This realm is, of course, the provenance of the aforementioned revolutionary

romanticism. We need to emphasize here again the way in which it is reached:
by a “transport” that begins not with an interior ecstasy that extends into a
poetic presentation of an external world (as in Romanticism proper); but rather
with the self-presentation of an objectively existing world, which through the
pure power of this suddenly manifest presence takes possession of the poet and
transports him into an eye-opening vision
“of the possible, which is also … the necessary.”
Pasternak went on to sketch, briefly but passionately, a new understanding
of poetry and poetic practice:

What is poetry, comrades, if such is its birth before our eyes? Poetry is prose: prose
not in the sense of someone’s collected prose works, but prose itself, the voice of
prose, prose in action, not in paraphrase. Poetry is the language of the organic fact,
214 Automatic for the Masses

i.e., the fact that has living consequences …. Poetry is nothing but this: pure prose
in its transferable intensity [v perevodnoi napriazhennosti]. (549)

Modifying Pasternak’s vision with the insights gained so far, we reach the
following ideal picture of how socialist-realist writing should proceed: socialist
reality shows or expresses itself in “organic facts”; as long as the writer is “ours,”
that is, as long as he is made from the same substance as the rest of Soviet
reality, he is subjected to and penetrated by the “transferable intensity” of that
reality (if he is not quite yet, then he should make himself penetrable,
proniknut’sia); through him, bypassing his consciousness and his will, the
organic fact reaches the page and speaks; only what is spoken in this wise
counts as an authentic artistic presentation and, thus, as genuinely “true”; this
is socialist realism, which is to say, the return of the grand organic Style.
Inspired by the organic facts being demonstrated before the congress, Viktor
Gusev wrote verses that could serve as a poetic illustration of the mechanism
just described:32

Interrupting our speeches,

Blinding us with the shine of unimaginable deeds,
They were offering to us their victories,
Bread, airplanes, metal –
themselves.
They were presenting themselves as a theme,

Their work, love, life … And

each of them
sounded like a poem,
Because in each of them
Bolshevism thundered. (675; emphasis added)

I can now state explicitly what has been obvious throughout: that the “shine”
(blesk) of the shiny, happy people is the same kind of radiation I designated
earlier as “beaming” – the one through which there is “vision” (in the
impersonal). And the mechanism by which, ideally, socialist-realist texts will
be produced follows the dialectic of seen-ness, which I rehearsed by analogy
with the exhibitionistic scene. The analogy can now be extended so that it
comes full circle: the moment in which the penis is reflected in the “eyes wide
open,” the moment enabling its erection, is analogous to the moment in which
the “prose” of reality turns into poetry. It seems that this is a “natural,”
immanent process, one that does not need the presence of the writer. It seems
that the words that “sound like a poem” do so out of themselves and by
 The Blind, the Seeing, and the Shiny 215

themselves and that the writers sitting in the audience are merely bystanders.
What good could they possibly do when faced with a life that spontaneously
turns into poetry?33
But even a life that spontaneously turns into poetry still needs an external
“turning point.” In the exhibitionistic act, this external point of reflection is the
passer-by. In the cultural act of socialist realism, this external point of reflection
is the artist. Expressed more accurately, in the proper order of realization: he
shall be a considered a Soviet artist who comes to the point in front of which
the organic fact of life shall bare itself. In other words, first comes the open
“stead,” where the laying-bare awaits its satisfaction, and only then, the “one”
who comes and actually stands there. The subject is the effect of manning the
stead. At the congress, this topological arrangement was realized as follows:
there was, on one side, the procession of triumphant and radiant life; across
from it, corresponding generally to the place from which the audience was
watching this show, was the place where the Soviet writer was supposed to
appear and stand as just such a “one.” This moment would come – speaking
here conceptually and figuratively, rather than referentially and literally – when
someone stood up and, from that spot, said something along the lines of “Yes,
now I see, indeed.” As we saw, Avdeenko made this proclamation almost
literally. This was also the essence of Pasternak’s speech and the overarching
thesis of Lezhnev’s, as the latter chronicled the short biography of the Soviet
writer. This is also what we should read in the following words of Isaac Babel:
“The first scaffolding is being removed from the edifice of socialism. Even the
most shortsighted can now see the outlines of this edifice, its beauty. And we
are all witnesses of the fact that our entire country has been enraptured by a
powerful feeling of sheer physical happiness” (279; emphasis added). But
nowhere was this onset of vision expressed more engagingly than in Iurii
Olesha’s highly crafted oratory, which, in the general agreement of those
present, provided the dramatic climax of the congress’s proceedings.
Olesha narrated the story of his personal transformation, which sounded
more like a story of religious conversion, cast in terms of blindness and sight.
He began by recalling the publication, in 1927, of his novella Envy (Zavist’),
which the vocal proletarian wing had met with harsh criticism, mostly on
account of the main protagonist, Nikolai Kavalerov. Unmistakably a
descendant of Dostoevsky’s underground man, Kavalerov exemplified the
bystander of the revolution, resentful of the ethical vigour, robust practicality,
and bristling vivacity of the new social world. In him, the proletarian critics
saw a reactionary creation, a reflection of Olesha’s own personality; Kavalerov
looked at the world with the eyes of his creator. Fully conscious of the
autobiographical connection, Olesha was that much more hurt to hear his hero
being called “a lowlife and a nonentity” (235). In his mind, Envy was where his
216 Automatic for the Masses

artistic vision had been at its clearest and richest; but lo, what he considered to
be clarity and richness had turned out to be blindness and misery. At this point,
Olesha’s speech takes on the character of a parable, as he retells the plot of a
novella he intended to write. The writer imagines himself as a beggar: “There
I am, superfluous, vulgar, and insignificant … I am standing on the steps of a
drug store, I beg for handouts, and my name is ‘writer’” (235). The beggar-
writer roams the countryside for years, until one day he finds himself in an open
field on a bright, crisp morning. At the edge of the field, near a forest, stands
an old, crumbling wall. In it, there is an opening, an arched doorway: “I look
through it and see unusual greenery … Maybe goats walk here. I step over the
threshold and enter; then I look at myself and see that this is youth: youth has
returned” (235).
What is the meaning of this miracle? Whence youth, all of a sudden? And
what is this magic threshold that the beggar crosses? The speaker himself
provided the clues for deciphering the allegory. Hearkening to the words of his
critics, Olesha had “taken it personally”; he had thought that the distorted vision
was his, that it was somehow innate in his being. Hence, the self-image of a
worthless lowlife, which tormented him for years. The miraculous
transformation corresponded to the moment when the writer finally understood
that the problem was not in him: “I understood that it is not about me, but about
the world around me” (235). Everything changed when he realized that he was
not the one who generated the image of the world; he was just the site of seeing.
Representations, images, came from the “world around” and entered him.
Kavalerov had been one such image, a visitor from the former, “distorted”
social world, who had taken possession of his author’s self. But a new world
was already in the making: “All this time the country was getting younger.
There are already youths of seventeen in whose minds there is nothing of the
old world” (236). All the writer had to do was proniknut’sia – that is, open
himself up to these new beings and to the Being that had engendered them:

I was peeking through the magic arc, but could not understand the most important
thing: I could not understand that I believe in the youth of the country, that it is
not my youth I want to bring back, but to see the youth of the country, i.e., of the
new people. Now I see them … This is how the miracle happened of which I had
dreamt while looking through the magic arc. This is how youth came back to me.
(236; emphasis added)

The magic arc of Olesha’s allegory, then, is not unlike the line separating the
audience from the podium in the Hall of Columns. It is the imaginary
membrane of the world through which one must pass in order to cease
“representing” (in the sense of Darstellen) and begin the movement of showing.
 The Blind, the Seeing, and the Shiny 217

On this side of the arc, the writer sees from within himself, “subjectively.” On
the other side, he sees, so to speak, “from without”; he sees because he partakes
of seen-ness – the general quality of a world whose objective logic has laid
itself bare. The symbolic moment of going through the doorway is none other
than the moment of this partaking: the writer takes on the part allotted to him
in the production of clarity, which, in a broader sense, is the cultural production
called “socialist realism.”
We can only guess, and never know for sure, how much personal investment
went into the kind of verbal performances Olesha, Pasternak, and their
colleagues made at the congress, how much authentic belief fuelled these
public enactments. The subjective side of the spectacle will always remain
beyond our confident grasp. All we have been left with are the words that have
been spoken. It is understandable that we should wish to know what was there
behind the words: resigned acceptance of an imposed role, pragmatic
calculation, sincere engagement? But this we can never know with any degree
of certainty, let alone with certainty in each individual case. The desire to
unlock the inner worlds of people no longer alive ends in frustration sooner or
later. All that remains for us to do is describe the official spectacle and the roles
it prescribed. If, on occasion, these roles were played “in earnest,” this does not
at all invalidate the fact that they were prefigured by an official script. It is
beyond doubt that many Soviet subjects, not just writers, felt that socialism was
immanent and imminent in the 1930s, that its already palpable force was
transforming not only the landscape of their country but also their own
character and consciousness. Still, none of this could change the fact that their
sincere personal belief was framed by an ideology in power. Earlier, I called it
a meta-ideology, an ideology of ideology, in that it scripted and staged the very
production of consciousness; in that it demonstrated, in public rituals, that
individuals are possessed by the symbolic power of the socio-economic
structure they populate; in that it aimed to prove by live exhibition that people
are in ideology simply by virtue of being in a particular social formation (and,
conversely – outside of ideology if they are the rejects of society). Thus, the
symbolic act of surrender to the overwhelming visibility of socialism, to its
“plastic” formative power, should be defined not by the subjective investment
of this or that individual who performed it, but by the ideological and
institutional settings that made such acts a prerequisite for social acceptance,
professional success, and, often, physical survival.
Chapter 10

Life Happens

The steps of a good man are ordered by God, and He delighteth in his way.
Psalms 37: 23

In the previous chapter, I presented the First All-Union Congress of Soviet

Writers as a complex performance in which the agents of representation –
Soviet writers – were not really agents but rather pieces in a larger show, during
which they were required to show themselves as “moved” by the force of self-
revelatory immanence. I hope I have made it clear that the case of the socialist-
realist author under Stalinism was, in fact, an instance in the broader
problematic of subjecthood, and that the motion of being moved to vision was
an instance of a more general movement reaching beyond the sphere of artistic
work. In this final chapter, I extend the argument, however tentatively, towards
this broader problematic.
I will advance my thesis through a discussion of one of the most remarkable
epic narratives of Stalinism: the 1946 film The Vow (Kliatva), directed by
Mikhail Chiaureli (1894–1974), who co-authored the script with writer Petr
Pavlenko (1899–1951). I contend that the film shows, on the movie screen, the
same thing the Congress showed: that agency does not issue forth from the
actions of subjects but only registers in them. The stage on which The Vow
makes this apparent is the grand stage of Soviet history; and the cultural act,
which has appeared so far in this study from the partial perspective of “seeing”
and writing, is featured in Chiaureli and Pavlenko’s story in the generalized
form of any human “doing.” If the Congress staged the “making of the Soviet
writer,” The Vow stages the making of the Soviet subject in a cinematic fantasy
whose generic territory encompasses both the modern historical epic and the
 Life Happens 221

fairy tale. Stalin’s central and functionally unique role in the plot will allow me
to address briefly the phenomenon often referred to as the “cult of personality.”
The Vow is one of four films by Chiaureli chronicling the life and heroic
deeds of the Leader. The other three are The Great Dawn (Velikoe Zarevo;
1938), The Fall of Berlin (Padenie Berlina; 1949), and The Unforgettable 1919
(Nezabyvaemyi 1919; 1951). All four belong to the uniquely Soviet genre of
the “historico-revolutionary film” (istoriko-revoliutsionnyi fil’m), whose
Stalinist variation is characterized by the decisive participation of the country’s
political and military leaders in the epic events unfolding on the screen. The
four films also share a principal narrative device: an ordinary hero’s life
journey joins and follows Stalin’s biographical path during a pivotal moment
in history.1 But it is in The Vow and to some extent in The Fall of Berlin, the
two scripts written by Chiaureli and Pavlenko,2 that this device is radicalized,
attaining a new structural quality and introducing a new level of meaning. This
new structural and semantic aspect will be the focus of my analysis.
The Vow opens on a stormy winter day in early January 1924, just days before
Lenin’s death (21 January 1924). As the story begins, we are far from Moscow
and from the grand stage of political history, on the banks of the Volga in the
little provincial town of Tsaritsyn, among the “little,” common people. Stepan,
an old Bolshevik, is returning home from a trip to the countryside, where he
has been investigating the crimes committed by kulaks sabotaging the
organization of kolkhoz farmsteads. As he is walking through the snowy fields
outside Tsaritsyn with his daughter, Ol’ga, Stepan tells her that it was on this
very field that in 1918 he and Comrade Stalin fought against the Whites. His
reminiscences are interrupted by an ambush: the kulak “elements” that Stepan
has been prosecuting have come to take their revenge. He falls on the very field
where in 1918 he and Comrade Stalin… It is a desolate spot, snow and wind
swept – a blank spot, seemingly.
Back in town, Stepan’s family home is the scene of a heated debate about
the country’s current political situation. His younger son, Sergei, a student and
devout follower of Lenin and Stalin, is arguing with his friend, Anatolii, whose
stereotypically Jewish features betray his alien nature even before he begins
praising Trotsky and Bukharin; moderating the shouting match that soon ensues
is the older son, Aleksandr, an unemployed and politically uncommitted
engineer, who devotes his ample free time to drawing blueprints of buildings
that will never be built. At this point, having just witnessed Stepan’s tragic end,
we might expect the younger, more “conscious” son to take over the main role
in the film by assuming the symbolic place vacated by his father. In that case,
our expectations would be deceived. One of the biggest surprises the film has
in store for us concerns precisely the category of “hero” and the qualifications
222 Automatic for the Masses

it presupposes. As we will learn in the further course of the narrative, being

conscious, having adopted an “ideology,” is not among those qualifications.
While Sergei’s role in the story will be little more than episodic, the central
character will become his mother, Varvara. When she first appears on the screen,
she is a cipher: a simple housewife, completely absorbed in the prose of her
quotidian life, oblivious to any concern beyond this parochial realm. While the
young men are arguing about politics, their mother is – where else? – in the
kitchen, fretting about her husband’s return and paying not the least attention
to the discussion. In the next scene, however, her status suddenly begins to
change. Ol’ga rushes in and delivers the tragic news. The family rushes out to
find Stepan expiring on the sled that has brought him home for the last time. In
a last, dying effort, he hands Varvara a letter and instructs her to deliver it
personally to Lenin. Chiaureli does not tell us what is in the letter, not yet. At
the moment, it is a white sheet of paper, a blank spot.
We find out what is in the letter only when, having reached Gorki – Lenin’s
residence during his final illness – Varvara joins up with a group of modern-
day pilgrims, representatives of various Soviet nationalities, who, like herself,
have come to visit Lenin and tell him their grievances.3 As she reads to them
Stepan’s letter, we discover that it is a description of the various kulak crimes
that Stepan recorded during his last trip. At the same time, we begin to discover
something different, something unexpected and quite miraculous: as Varvara
reads, the people who have gathered around her begin to recognize in her words
the stories each of them has come to tell. The events described in the letter she
carries are identical to the events the pilgrims carry indelibly in their minds.
This is the first of several instances in the film when miracles spring from
(seemingly) blank spots.
The pilgrims soon learn grim news: Lenin is dead. As they make their way
to Moscow, we are introduced to Lenin’s potential successors. While Kamenev
and Bukharin are scheming, Stalin is taking a pensive stroll through the park in
Gorki. In an almost unbearable moment of sublime sentimentality, he comes to
a lonely park bench, the mere sight of which brings back to his mind the haloed
image of Lenin. This – as every Soviet viewer is supposed to know – is the
same bench on which Lenin and Stalin are shown seated in a much-publicized
photograph of 1922.4 We now see it covered thickly with white snow. It is
another desolate place, a blank spot.
Several scenes later, this private sublimity has its public and no less sublime
outpouring: on Red Square, Stalin pronounces the Vow. He swears to fulfil
Lenin’s symbolic will. The multitude gathered in the square instantly
recognizes the man speaking in the distance, just as they instinctively sense the
sacred charge of the moment. Thousands of hands holding Party membership
cards go up, and thousands of voices second Stalin’s each time he pronounces
 Life Happens 223

solemnly, “We swear!” As if the sacramental public spectacle were not enough
to convince us that Stalin has the mandate of the people as Lenin’s true heir,
the scene is capped off by a final, blatantly tautological gesture: the enormous
crowd parts, giving way to Varvara, who approaches Stalin and hands him the
letter from her husband. Intended for Lenin, it reaches, quite “naturally,” his
rightful successor. By the time it does, it is no longer the letter of a single person
from a single locality: miraculously collected on this white sheet of paper are
the voices of all Soviet people and places.
Participants in the public ritual, along with all the rest, have been our pilgrims:
Varvara (who has made it an explicit point to swear on behalf of her entire
family, as if knowing in advance the beneficial effects this will produce in the
future); the Ukrainian, Baklan; the Georgian, Georgii; the Uzbek, Turgunbaev.
As the authoritative voice of Pravda remarked soon after the film’s release, this
miniature model of Soviet society5 is bound together by the binding power of
the vow (“Kliatva” 3). By that same power they are elevated in status: within a
few short years, which the film traverses almost instantaneously, we see them
promoted to the ranks of znatnye liudi, the aristocracy of Stalinist socialism –
those very beings I referred to earlier as “shiny, happy people.” Of course, by
these credentials, they also figure as the main characters in the film narrative.
There is no motivating transition between these two states of existence.
Varvara and her children, as well as Baklan, Georgii, and Turgunbaev, each
move from zero to hero without really accomplishing anything special. The
transformation is really not their doing. Indeed, the doing comes later. First
comes being, in this case, being there. Our heroes’ “elevation” happens not
through their knowledge or abilities, and even less through their
accomplishments; it happens through the mere fact that they all were there on
Red Square at the time of Stalin’s vow.
That this is indeed the case is shown to us in a brief but remarkable exchange
within the larger scene of the vow. The camera cuts into the crowd to find
Turgunbaev, who is visibly disconcerted. While all the hands around him go up,
his stays down. To the puzzled Baklan, he explains: “I don’t know what it is. I
feel strength, and then it’s gone.” He, an illiterate peasant without a Party card,
feels unworthy of the great scene at which he is present. To this, his companion
responds by drawing a striking verbal image: “Take the vow! Let us all take it:
you, and I, and everybody else. You have nowhere to fall [Tebe i upast’ nekuda].”
Turgunbaev knows what makes him weak but does not know what makes
him strong. This latter “something” is some mysterious, invigorating force that
supports and uplifts him so that there is nowhere for him to fall; this is strangely
reminiscent of the angelic hands that would not allow the Son to fall and dash
His foot against a stone (Luke 4.11). Just as miraculously, the illiterate
Turgunbaev will be uplifted to a place of distinction in Soviet society. But for
224 Automatic for the Masses

this to happen, he must first raise his hand. He must do so not out of his
convictions and knowledge, that is, not out of his consciousness. All his
consciousness can tell him at this moment is that he is an insignificant, illiterate
peasant with little or no awareness of even the basic tenets of Marxism-
Leninism. But, as we ascertained already – first with the example of the
institute employees, then with the example of ideologically misguided writers 6
– this fact matters very little in Stalinist culture. Consciousness is subsequent.
It belongs to the dimension of the effect. First comes the gesture of partaking,
or belonging. So Turgunbaev raises his hand and pronounces, together with the
rest, “We swear.” This gesture can be called “somnambulic” because it is not
guided by prior knowledge and will. Quite the reverse: knowledge and will
spring from the gesture. Only after he takes the vow, and as a direct result of
doing so, will Turgunbaev become a conscious builder of socialism. All takes
place within the paradoxical sequence of Pascal’s prescription: “Kneel down,
move your lips in prayer, and you will believe.”
We continue to watch how belief is born out of somnambulic motions in the
extended episode showing the construction of the Stalingrad tractor plant –
itself part of the epic saga of Stalin’s Five-Year Plans. Initially, the central
figure here is Varvara’s older son, Aleksandr. And, let it be said in advance, his
centrality is in proportion to his un-consciousness. The grandiose project
furnishes him with a long-awaited opportunity to transfer his engineering
visions from the walls of his room, where they have been hanging as mere
drawings on paper, to the world outside. But at first, like Turgunbaev,
Aleksandr is a man of little faith. When he hears of the plans to build the
enormous plant on the bank of the Volga, he gasps: “Where?! On these
marshes?!” The film cuts promptly to a shot of Stalin standing on the very same
bank, pointing to these very same marshes and confidently instructing the
architects and engineers in his entourage that construction should indeed
commence on this spot. Himself part of the entourage, Aleksandr listens
carefully to the Leader’s words but continues not to understand: “Still, why on
this spot?!” The enigma the cerebral engineer finds so impenetrable is solved
quickly and effortlessly in the simple words of a simple man. Varvara’s brother,
Ermilov, the film’s figure of comic relief, spells out what every more or less
attentive viewer has realized already: this empty spot, seemingly unfit for any
construction project, is the same spot where Stalin defeated the Whites in 1918;
moreover, it is a place marked with the historical presence of Ivan IV, Stepan
Razin, and Emelian Pugachev; in short, it is a sacred place.
We see Aleksandr next when construction is under way. He does not yet seem
fully possessed by faith, but by now this has ceased to matter. What is important
is that he is there, he is standing in that spot. His motto now is: “We must work,
not wonder!” (Rabotat’ nado, a ne udivliat’sia!). The meaning of his words can
 Life Happens 225

be translated as: “We must work instead of analysing.” The only one who still
analyses is Anatolii. Rational analysis is the metaposition, which here means:
the position of those who do not belong. Because they do not belong, they can
never believe. So even as he halfheartedly participates in the construction work,
Anatolii continues to mumble that the project is nothing but a crazy fantasy and
that the Party leaders have lost touch with reality. When the plant is nearly
completed, we will see him setting fire to one of the blocs; driven by his alien
nature, he has found himself, quite naturally, in the ranks of the Trotskyist
“wreckers.”
If we agree that human labour consists of more than the menial operations
performed – that it is not only physical but always also symbolic, permeated
with meaning (whether consciously accessible or not to those who labour) – let
us consider the labour through which the Stalingrad tractor plant is erected in
the film. What does this work involve? Beyond the film plot, the question aims,
of course, at the general plot in which the cultural act of Stalinism unfolds,
giving rise to the erection called “socialism.” Taking Aleksandr as our model
(but remembering also the episode with Turgunbaev), we would describe this
work as follows: to happen to be in the right spot and, while there, to let go; to
labour in such a way that the effort produces material results just as it induces
a self-forgetfulness of sorts, an abandon. In this effort, one abandons the
possibility of grasping things in advance as well as the possibility that one’s
actions will be guided by such a preliminary grasp. Having let go, one can now
be “moved,” “acted,” by the power that dormantly subtends the empty spot,
which is also the “right” spot. Through this power, the seemingly fantastic
project is fulfilled and the erection happens.
Through the same power, human life also “happens.” If The Vow shows one
thing clearly and absolutely consciously, it is this: that one cannot author one’s
own deeds and consequently one’s being. They happen to the individual and
may even surprise him at times. From the point of view of Stalinist ideology,
there is nothing surprising about this; after all, socialism is supposed to bring
out what is best in being human – that is, previously untapped, slumbering
potentials. Thus, it is possible that any Soviet person could be caught unawares
by the deeds that socialism elicits from the depths of his own humanity (just as
the writers discussed in chapter 7 were caught unawares by a wholly new way
of seeing things). Like Varvara, like Turgunbaev, and really, like all the other
“heroes” in the film, Aleksandr begins as a nobody and becomes “somebody”
through achievements that are not really his. Since this mechanism is already
familiar to us, we can reiterate the earlier formula: in his stead, the heroic work
of socialist construction is being done. The stark appeal of Pavlenko and
Chiaureli’s cinematic narrative comes from the fact that in it we see plainly
what I previously elaborated only as an abstract, theoretical proposition: we see
226 Automatic for the Masses

the “stead,” the place where one is supposed to be standing, being

demonstratively empty as well as separate from and antecedent to anyone who
might actually come to stand there. In this particular episode of The Vow, it is
a construction site. More broadly, it is the entire area of Stalingrad, the former
Tsaritsyn. Most broadly yet, it is the place where socialism is being built: the
land of the Soviets.
After the tractor plant is completed (and survives the diabolical schemes of
the saboteurs), we leave Stalingrad for a time, with the utter certainty, by now
instilled in us, that we will be returning to it. By now the film has established
the pattern of “eternal return” to this spot. And sure enough, the Great Patriotic
War begins, both in order to fulfil Stalin’s prediction that the Soviet Union will
one day have to be defended against the enemy and in order for us to witness
one last time the power of the sacred place. We return to Stalingrad and see it
once more as a desolate spot, this time because months of ferocious fighting
have turned it into a ghost town. We find here, once again, Varvara (she is now
in charge of an orphanage), Aleksandr, and his wife, Kseniia. Aleksandr is
captured and executed by the Germans, but as everyone knows, the empty spot
is once again victorious in the battle that effectively decides the fate of Hitler’s
Eastern campaign. Varvara takes one final walk before the ranks of jubilant Red
Army soldiers shouting “Hurrah!” Through a cinematic cut, the walk takes her
to the very heart of the Kremlin, where the Father of all Soviet people greets
her as his symbolic mate.
The agency that brings Varvara to this symbolic apex is – with a nod in the
direction of Lacan – the agency of the letter.7 She comes onto the stage of the
narrative because she carries a letter. But if we consider the situation more
carefully, it is better to say that the letter carries her. It is a sheet of paper of
whose contents she is initially unaware. More importantly, even when she
becomes aware of those contents, their significance remains outside her grasp.
How could she know that the letter will mysteriously absorb and express in a
single voice the grievances of the whole Soviet Union of the NEP years?
Varvara knows that she and the letter come from Tsaritsyn, but how could she
possibly know that Tsaritsyn will turn out to be the right place and that the word
hailing from there will turn out to be the fullest and most meaningful Word?
How could she anticipate that this Word, swollen by the unanimous recognition
of all Soviet people, will exceed its intended function of a report and take on
the function of a popular mandate legitimizing the political succession in the
Kremlin? Of all this, Varvara remains unaware. These unfoldings outrun her
consciousness. They unfold before her, that is, ahead of her cognizance and will;
and as they do, they direct her (subsequent) steps – they carry her.
Varvara’s personal story is underpinned by another, greater story. The former
is “hitched” to the latter; as the latter advances, it “moves” the former along.
 Life Happens 227

This mechanism accounts for the fact that Varvara’s life “happens” – that is, it
comes to her from somewhere else. At first, she happens to be the wife of
Stepan, who happens to have fought alongside Stalin during the Civil War; as
Stepan happens to die on the very site of Stalin’s past exploits, Varvara happens
to be chosen as a messenger (although her younger son would have been a more
understandable choice); Lenin dies just when Varvara happens to be in Moscow;
and so on. This logic is carried out with impeccable consistency in the film, not
just in relation to Varvara but in relation to all the shiny, happy people. With
reference to all of them and to the ideology of Stalinist culture as a whole, we
can advance the following semantic equivalence: “to be” means “to happen to
be.”
As far as narrative art is concerned, this logic reminds us of times long past.
Similarly structured plots are to be found in the tragedies and mythic tales of
classical antiquity. There as well, the hero’s life is often hitched to a larger,
more essential story, which he either knows not at all or, as with Oedipus,
fatefully misconstrues. Archaic but indelible familial memory has marked the
landscape of the hero’s journey and specified its precipitous course, visibly for
us but unbeknownst to him. It is his “fate.” In significantly modified form, this
type of narrative persisted in the hagiographic literature of the Middle Ages,
where fate was to be found in the predetermined path that led the righteous to
their true Father. The modern period begins precisely where this circuitous
route – from the preinscription of a mythic proto-story to its reinscription and
reaffirmation through the fate of a particular “one” – is no longer capable of
delineating the meaning of human experience. The first great narrative of the
new era, the biography of a lunatic knight errant, presents us with a desperate
desire for the signs of predestination and a pathetic effort to tease these signs
out of the barren landscape of a decidedly post-mythic land. Precisely because
of its failure, Don Quixote’s quest shows the only road the hero can take from
now on: because destiny is not predestined (in either scriptures of faith or books
of chivalry), it must be constructed out of the hero’s own inner nature.
The possibility of providing a destiny for oneself has been, from the
beginning of this new beginning, coextensive with the power of giving oneself
representations. In Cervantes this power is equated with madness, since it offers
only misleading apparitions, but since then that power has become normative.
In Hamlet, madness springs not from the wanton selfgiving of (illusory)
representations but precisely from the impossibility of such self-giving. The
ghost that appears at the beginning is an apparition that Hamlet has not given
to himself from within himself; and as much as he would like to believe that
this is all an illusion, he cannot: like the sacred Father of medieval Christianity,
the royal Danish father has bestowed absolutely binding destiny upon his son.
228 Automatic for the Masses

But this is now an unnatural, unexpected, and unwanted gift. Since it cannot be
refused, its acceptance brings derangement.
The Vow returns us to that earlier time when the hero’s steps were still
“ordered by God,” who “delighteth in his way” (Ps. 37.23). What makes God
so happy? Certainly, it is the fact that the hero is a good man, that is, a good
subject, who walks the way pointed out by his Master. We can easily relate to
a divinity that rejoices for subjects who have chosen freely to follow the steps
to the True. But in our context, which is Stalinist culture, there is pleasure to be
had precisely insofar as subjects do not choose their steps but rather execute
them in a somnambulic fashion. This modern-day authority enjoys the
unconditional hegemony whereby those subjects are driven to do what they do
and be what they are. It delights in their “creaturely” nature. For the more
unconsciously their life narrative unfolds, the more emphatically it manifests
and affirms the creation whose creatures they are, the order by which their steps
have been preordered. Precisely in the spot where it catches the subject
unawares, this order shows itself as most actual.
We have an accessible reference point for understanding such a libido:
Oedipus Rex. The deities presiding over Oedipus’s fate are satisfied to see the
prophecy fulfilled, but the real crux of the play is the hero’s hopeless effort to
evade destiny – an effort whose every motion only strengthens destiny’s grip.
With every conscious step towards escape, Oedipus unconsciously realizes
what was meant to be. The same extended act through which he shows himself
to be a pathetic plaything of predestination exposes, at each stage and ultimately,
the ancient story of familial sin. By the same token, the act awakens the power
through which this sin is being punished, reconfirming it as the Power that be.
Keeping this famous archetype in mind, let us ask what is being aroused in
the act we watch unfold in the narrative space of The Vow. Enough has been
said so far to make the terms of the question less flippant than they might appear.
The sexual rhetoric is there to suggest that, even on the grand scale of socio-
cultural formations, we are dealing with the workings of desire, even if this
desire has congealed into an impersonal, alienated form. But, as I am seeking
to co-articulate this problematic with the theme of creation, of building, giving
shape, institutionalizing, terms like “arousal” and “erection” acquire a two-
dimensional significance (which, hopefully, absolves me from the charge of
frivolity). So: what is being aroused in The Vow? The easy answer is: “Stalin.”8
And if we understand what “Stalin” stands for, this is the correct answer.
In The Vow, unlike in the other Chiaureli films in the cinematic tetralogy
devoted to the Leader, Stalin appears in two distinct hypostases. On the one
hand, he is there “in the flesh,” as an actual living person, although by no means
an ordinary person. He is just as Nikita Khrushchev would later describe him
in his secret speech to the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party: “a
 Life Happens 229

superman possessing supernatural characteristics, akin to those of a god. Such

a man … knows everything, sees everything, thinks for everyone, can do
anything, is infallible in his behavior.” This image is familiar. We find it,
essentially, in every film or text of the period in which the Leader makes an
appearance.
But on the other hand – and this is where Pavlenko and Chiaureli’s
mythography becomes truly radical – the Leader exists as a trace, that is, as a
proto-story that has been inscribed on the diegetic landscape, creating in it
patches of sacred space, of which Stalingrad is the largest and most significant.
The whole point of there being a trace is that it should be retraced: ordinary
characters are made to retread the ground once trodden by Stalin. And as they
do, they draw the sacred charge suffusing the seemingly empty spot and
experience its miraculous effects.9 Having become “conductors” of this charge,
our heroes begin to “shine.” Put another way, through the agency of the sacred
trace, their lives “happen.”
The Vow is a postwar Stalinist creation, which explains why in its ideological
narrative it is not just the freshly built infrastructure of socialism that acts
individuals-cum-subjects. Rather, the entire history of Russia, at least since
Ivan Grozny, has been turned into a mythic infrastructure that preconfigures
the course of events as well as the fates of people. Stalin, of course, is aware of
this history and consciously secures its reinscription in every new present. He
knows what traces have been left by the (glorious) Russian past, and he
confidently retraces them. As for the other, more ordinary characters, such
knowledge proves to be superfluous. They tread upon the sacred ground, and
while they might not see the trace that makes it sacred, they experience its
effects all the same. They, the people, are those effects.
Given that “Stalin” is the name for two quite different things – a living person
(even if a superman), and a trace circumscribing an empty spot – it behooves
us to ask which deserves priority. Which of the two is the essential, authentic
referent of “Stalin,” the one we need to foreground in order to understand the
phenomenon called “Stalinism”?
If we go by a straightforward logic, we must conclude: first comes the person
who leaves the trace, then comes the trace left by him (Stalin comes along and
defeats the Whites, and after that, the place of his exploits is marked as
“sacred”). Following the same logic, only this time in the direction of
opprobrium rather than adulation, subsequent Soviet historiography was to
script the historical and cultural trauma of Stalinism as the trace (scar!) left by
a particular human being named “Stalin.” The term “cult of personality,” first
used in Khrushchev’s secret speech of 1956, sloganizes this type of
understanding, in which much of Cold War Western historiography has been
complicit. Without disputing that the Leader’s personality left a significant
230 Automatic for the Masses

imprint on policies in virtually every sphere of Soviet life, including the artistic
(one thinks first of the film industry, which produced Stalin’s favourite art and
was, to that extent, most consistently influenced by his tastes), I see this fact as
belonging to a secondary, derivative dimension. We must turn Stalin’s own
words against him: It is not a matter of persons. Persons, of course, play a
certain role. But we must first understand the power that the person in power
has come to embody. If we approach this question from the perspective of
culture, we must ask what sort of imagination was projected onto the real-life
figure of the short, swarthy Georgian with a moustache.
We are familiar with the imagination in question. It is the ideological dream
of the cannot-but, of the meant-to-be, of pure fulfilment. And there is probably
no text from the Stalinist period that showcases this more vividly than The Vow.
After all, it is the story of a vow, and a vow, as we know, is something that must
be fulfilled. This, really, is the main movement of the narrative: from the word
given to making it happen, from the course charted to its execution, from the
delineation of an empty space to the erection that comes to stand there. For all
these ful-fill-ments, “Stalin” is just as much the name of the heroic leader
whom we watch in action on the grand stage of history, the personage through
whose wisdom and will everything is accomplished, as it is the name of a
mysterious agency guaranteeing that everything will be so indeed.
With its stark schematicism, Chiaureli’s film demonstrates in plain view the
reduction of the Leader’s figure to this bare function. The human figure shows
itself to be figurative of a strictly non-human automaton of reinscription. The
mechanism produces one thing only: “More of the same.” Stalin is the same as
Ivan Grozny, Emelian Pugachev, and Sten’ka Razin. Stalin’s greatness repeats
the greatness of Lenin, for the worthy successor follows the same path. The
Stalingrad of the Great Patriotic War is the same as the Stalingrad of the First
Five-Year Plan, and the same as the Tsaritsyn of the Civil War and of Ivan
Grozny’s campaign against the Tatars several centuries earlier. Tatars, Whites,
“wreckers,” and Nazis are all enemies, all doomed to defeat, all the same.
Kulaks all over the Soviet land are the same; likewise identical are the crimes
they perpetrate. The hopes and dreams of people all over this same land are the
same (which is why the letters they write echo one another). Everything is part
of a cyclicity that spans time as well as space. The Same replicates itself over
the space of the Soviet Union and thereby homogenizes it. The Same replicates
itself over time and constitutes history as the never-ending materialization of
predetermined outcomes. Everywhere – only the eternal return of the Same.
The seemingly empty spot that features so prominently in The Vow visualizes
the moment of suspense before the same triumphantly returns to the same.
Simultaneously, the blank space corresponds to the state of subjective
(un-)consciousness: the ordinary subject does not see the preinscription, cannot
 Life Happens 231

fathom the pattern of eternal return and reinscription, and is unaware of its
miraculous effects, including those that she is about to experience. All of this
constitutes itself for the most part behind her back, forming a transcendental
reserve, a “beyond” that springs suddenly upon the subject in a terminal
moment of “happy recognition.” This is precisely the “miracle” of Stalinism –
how the emptiness dissipates to reveal the previously hidden inscription: “S”
as in “Same,” but also as in “Stalin.” The ruling ideology triumphs with the
arousal of the inscription from the state of dormancy, the dawning of the
beyond, which lays bare the coupling of the same with the same. The miracle
“miraculates” the subject: her life turns out to be driven by the unerring
mechanism of reinscription.10
The scene of the vow provides a revealing illustration. The coupling has just
taken place: Stalin stands in the place vacated by Lenin, Stalin is the same as
Lenin – a fact confirmed by the admiration of the multitude as well as by
Stepan’s letter, which accomplishes a symbolic identification between original
addressee and actual recipient. (In other words, the place is not actually vacated;
the slate is wiped clean only to reveal the “miraculous” appearance of the same
character.) The vow is obviously superfluous. There is no need for Stalin to
promise that Lenin’s will shall be followed and his dreams fulfilled. This has
already been guaranteed by the manifest act of the coupling. The ambiguous
state in which Turgunbaev finds himself can now be properly diagnosed: the
weakness he feels arises from the mistaken perception that the vow is an actual
promise that looks onto an open-ended future and requires personal credentials
and exertions; the mysterious strength he feels comes from what is actually the
case: the vow is fulfilled before being given. Baklan’s words confirm this: there
is “nowhere to fall” because nothing is left to chance, the future is anything but
open, everything is decided in advance. The movement of the narrative has only
one modulation; it is not a development but rather an oscillation, a pendulum
swing: from subjective uncertainty to objective confirmation that the same does
indeed return as the same.
The name of the Leader is the name of the automaton that produces this
single oscillating motion. What we must recognize is that a very real desire is
caught in the automaton’s cogs. From the suspense of seeming emptiness to the
fulfilment that fills that emptiness, the relay connects a historically determinate
anxiety to its wishful ideological deflection. It is not difficult to see through the
windswept fields and desolate places of Chiaureli and Pavlenko’s film a vision
of Soviet socialism as a tantalizingly blank slate, an open-ended project without
guarantees, which sets out towards its highly uncertain future across the
disheartening expanses of yesterday’s semifeudal, overwhelmingly rural
empire. In The Vow this anxiety-laden vision is invoked – in images rather than
statements – only to be immediately dispelled. The subject is subliminally
232 Automatic for the Masses

teased by it before being reassured that there, in the blind (blank) spot of her
consciousness, a constellation of objective historical forces has inscribed the
success of the state project with the hard lines of ineluctable destiny.
It could be shown that all narratives of socialist realism, in one way or
another, treat history as destiny. But the creation of Chiaureli and Pavlenko is
exceptional in its insistence that history is an unconscious destiny for the
ordinary Soviet subject. In the language of cinematic fiction, it addresses to the
viewer a message very similar to Althusser’s theoretical thesis: places come
before acts; acts come before beliefs; the beliefs are believed in the acts; the
acts are acted by the places. Each subsequent level is but a reinscription of the
previous, more fundamental dimension. Consciousness is the reinscription of
practice; living practice is the reinscription of past practices that have
congealed into an objective structure of “places.” It is this objective structure
that counts most; practices and beliefs merely mediate its reproduction. The
human individual, as subject, is but a supporting player in the process of
reproduction/reinscription. Her life is an effect of the relay; it is lived for her
by the automaton that produces the reproduction of the same. She indeed lives
it as if it were life. But we, the viewers, can see the all-important fact that eludes
her: the individual mans a stead whereby and wherein she is “lived.”

I am offering Chiaureli’s The Vow not as a sample of socialist-realist art but as

a meta-commentary on it. The premise of my account throughout has been that
socialist realism is an artistic practice embedded in a plot, an ideologically
sanctioned performance that prescribes a certain type of symbolic behaviour on
the part of the author. The Vow allows us to see this plot as it plays itself out in
epic hyperbole on the screen. It is the story of people whose deeds are theirs
and not really theirs. The authors of those deeds are not really authors, for in
their actions they are acted all along by a tendency whose carriers they are. The
tendency is the real author; it works by means of people; the people’s deeds are
the tokens of the tendency’s objective presence and power; the tokens furnish
proof that history obeys an iron logic, which is not abstract but runs through
the veins of life, and, as such, equals destiny. Socialist realism is part of this
plot. As an institution, it stages the rebirth of culture as the work of the
Formative, the imprint of a common destiny. As a form of representation, it
assumes that representations are “given” to individuals insofar as they are
subjects of socialism. The purported realism of these representations lies not in
their mimetic reproduction of an empirically accessible world but rather in their
status as “objective dream” (analogous to the concept of objective belief)
produced by the unconscious called History. Being a socialist-realist artist
meant practising one’s trade within this plot. It required showing oneself,
through one’s artistic production, as capable of having objective dreams
 Life Happens 233

(displaying “revolutionary romanticism”). It was not a matter of depicting

(darstellend) socialism but of showing, by means of the depiction, that the real-
life force of socialism had taken hold of the depicter, acted him in the practice
of creation, and thought itself out in the finished work.
In practice, the business of socialist realism was much more prosaic, of
course. Since no one could be certain that one’s creative imagination was in
line with the objective imaginary of history, it was always wise to find out in
advance what the Party considered to be the dreams befitting the epoch. This
involved emulating works that had already received official recognition. In
those paragons, which were already on hand when socialist realism was
proclaimed, and whose number increased over time, the epoch had already
spoken in its authentic voice, its grand Style had already shown itself as an
aesthetic phenomenon. Hence, if one wanted to show oneself as a good Soviet
subject, a true son of the epoch, one had to create in light of the existing canon,
to produce tokens of belonging by reproducing those already in circulation.
Ideologically, the symbolic act of socialist realism was that of a pen or a brush
moved along by the compelling force of destiny-laid-bare. Practically, in the
great majority of cases, it was the act of reinscribing conventions that had been
canonized as the genuine marks of the Formative.
Notes

Introduction

1 I take artistic modernism in a deliberately broad sense that encompasses not only
the now-canonized figures and masterpieces of the early twentieth century
(Proust and Kafka, Eliot and Pound, Faulkner and Joyce; in Russia, Khlebnikov
and Bely, Zamiatin and Pilniak) but also those more radical impulses of
experimentation traditionally grouped under the term “avantgarde.” I am wary of
drawing a sharp line of separation between “modernism” and “avant-gardism,” for
such a separation – quite common in scholarship – has served as the means for
enshrining a new cultural canon and for keeping this canon clean of all radical
politics. On this issue, see Eysteinsson (143–78). Russia of the 1910s and 1920s is
certainly the national context in which such a separation is least likely to hold.
Another understanding of modernism, both broader and more specialized, will
become apparent in the course of this introduction. It relates, specifically, to the
metaphor of the death of the author or subject. I identify modernism as the
(historically extended) moment in which the decentring of the subject was still
experienced as an imperative – as a call for a new kind of cultural practice in
which art would be either radically redefined or abolished altogether.
2 It is difficult to disagree with the following characterization of modernism offered
by Raymond Williams: “Although modernism can be clearly identified as a
distinctive movement, in its deliberate distance from and challenge to more
traditional forms of art and thought, it is also strongly characterized by its internal
diversity of methods and emphases; a restless and often directly competitive
sequence of innovations and experiments, always more immediately recognized
by what they are breaking from than by what, in any simple way, they are
breaking towards” (89).
Notes to pages 4–12
236

3 For an early critical assessment of Groys’s position, see Ivanov, Review.

4 Cf. Solov’ev’s well-known pronouncement: “The most perfect art, in its ultimate
task, must embody the absolute ideal not just in the imagination, but in reality as
well, it must spiritualize, trans-substantiate [presushchestvat’], our actual life. And
if someone says that this task goes beyond the limits of art, then we should ask:
who has established these limits?” (“Obshchii” 22). For Ivanov’s explicit
endorsement of this statement, see “Vzgliad” 182. The theme of life creation in
the younger generation of Russian symbolists is treated at length in Sarychev 46–
139.
5 In an article by Blok’s closest friend and poetic associate, Andrei Bely, we find a
similar imperative: “Art takes wing where the call to creation is, at the same time,
a call to the creation of life” (154; emphasis in the original).
6 Whenever a Russian source is cited, the translation is mine (PP). Where I quote an
existing English translation of a Russian original, the citation in parentheses
refers to the former. In such cases, the entry in Works Cited gives the English
translation first, followed by the source in Russian.
7 T.J. Clark has described the practice of UNOVIS in similar terms: “They believed
in working together on all forms of visual imagery, putting their individual
interests and styles on hold for the moment; and even this degree of collectivity,
which at times seems to have been real and productive, was conceived as a kind
of way-station on the road to a more comprehensive dissolution of the self” (226).
8 For a meticulously documented account of these debates, see KhanMagomedov.
See also pp. 94–9 in the present study.
9 For further discussion of Constructivism, see chapter 4 of this book.
10 According to Michel Foucault, the assault on the author is ultimately “a matter of
depriving the subject (or its substitute) of its role as originator, and of analyzing
the subject as a variable and complex function of discourse” (“What Is an
Author?” 158).
11 In similar spirit are the observations in Burke (xxv–xxvi), where, among others,
we find this assertion: “Following Nietzsche, the most radical alternatives to
transcendental subjectivity [once again, Marx and Freud are the other two] have
sought to situate rather than detach the subject from its work and world” (xxv).
12 The slogan “slovo kak takovoe” figures as the title of an important Futurist
manifesto by Velimir Khlebnikov and Aleksei Kruchenykh, which appeared in
1913.
13 The pursuit of an essential language that would reinstantiate the lost sacrality of
the word, even at the price of jettisoning commonly used human language, is no
less characteristic of Dada’s radicalizations of poetry’s medium. Thus
Hugo Ball boasted in his diary: “We have charged the word with forces and
Notes to pages 13–20
 237

energies that make it possible for us to rediscover the Evangelical concept of the
‘word’ (logos) as a magical complex image” (68).
14 Ricoeur argues that not only in the demystifying hermeneutics of Marx,
Nietzsche, and Freud, but also in the hermeneutics of faith and revelation, the
dispossession of consciousness is carried out en route to its subsequent
reappropriation in another “home of meaning,” which “is not consciousness but
something other than consciousness” (55).
15 Ekaterina Bobrinskaia has cautioned against attempts to confine the significance
of modernist artefacts to their internal dynamics: “The radical gestures of the
avant-garde have meaning only in the context of history. They operate with
massive contexts, and not with some meaning locked within the work itself”
(117). To my mind, this statement applies fully also to the dynamics of
depersonalization.
16 “The avant-garde poet or artist tries in effect to imitate God by creating something
valid solely on its own terms, in the way nature itself is valid solely on its own
terms, in the way a landscape – not its picture – is aesthetically valid; something
given, increate, independent of meanings, similars or originals” (Greenberg,
“Avant-Garde” 6). These words of modernism’s most acclaimed art critic appear
to support Groys’s demiurgic thesis. In the next paragraph, however, Greenberg
goes on to state that the analogy with divine creation is in fact spurious.
17 “The ‘obsolescence’ or even irrelevance of art for the ‘spirit of contemporaneity’
is for the avant-garde more than just an occasion for nostalgic experiences. Artists
and literary authors insistently seek different methods for the reconstruction of
what has been lost or the creation of a new mode for the existence of art. The need
to justify art, the pursuit of new coordinates and new meanings for its existence, is
a component part of many experiments in art after the First World War”
(Bobrinskaia 9).
18 Jameson’s theorization of modernism owes much to the insights of Perry
Anderson’s “Modernity and Revolution,” especially to his understanding of
“uneven development” in relation to culture. In Anderson’s analysis, the cultural
situation in early-twentieth-century Europe was determined, above all, by the fact
that capitalism had not yet succeeded in absorbing modes of economic production
and ways of life belonging to earlier stages of development. The resulting tensions
generated revolutionary energy in both politics and culture. Anderson’s socio-
historical vision could serve as an illuminating background to the Formalists’
theorizations of literature. It seems fitting that a theory based on the perceptual
tensions between old forms and new was born in world in which striking
juxtapositions of phenomena from different epochs were ubiquitous.
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Notes to pages 21–6

19 “Let the picture imitate nothing and let it present nakedly its raison d’etre!”
(Gleizes and Metzinger 6).
20 The problem of grounding the artistic act is the same one that Yve-Alain Bois
addresses under the rubric of “motivation.” For him, this is one of the cardinal
dilemmas confronting the modernist author: “what is the mode of existence of the
work of art once its expressive function has been discarded” (136). Drawing upon
Bois’s work, Gough has discussed the “discourse on motivation” in the context of
Russian Constructivism. See Gough, The Artist 11–14, 27; “Faktura” 48–52. See
also pp. 98–9, 133 in the present study.
21 For one example, see n24; for another, see Theo van Doesburg’s pronouncement,
quoted on p. 144.
22 “The more closely the norms of a discipline become defined, the less freedom
they are apt to permit … The essential norms or conventions of painting are also
the limiting conditions with which a marked-up surface must comply in order to
be experienced as a picture” (Greenberg, “Modernist” 8).
23 This general approach, which takes the medium’s defining properties as the
generative principles for the artistic work, is what Władysław Strzemiński has
called the “law of organicity.” In Painting as a Model, Bois summarizes
Strzemiński’s thesis: “[The] work of art must be engendered from its ‘primary
given,’ according to its ‘first principles,’ which means that this law functions
differently for different media. As far as painting is concerned, these ‘first
principles’ belong to three different orders, all of which are indissolubly linked to
the fact that ‘a picture is, or rather ought to be, something designed for looking at
only’: flatness, deduction of forms from the shape of the frame, abolition of the
figure/ground opposition” (136; emphasis in the original).
24 For the fullest treatment of medieval conceptions of authorship, see Minnis.
25 For the cultural policies of the NEP, see Kemp-Welch; Fitzpatrick, The Cultural
Front 1–15, 91–114.
26 As Evgenii Dobrenko has demonstrated, the dethroning of the “creative
personality” was the dominant theme in the cultural-theoretical discourse of those
years (Formovka 16–133). With this I fully agree, as it is also the guiding
assumption of the account I offer in Part I of this book. But I cannot follow
Dobrenko in his evaluative approach, which has led him to conclude that all of
those theories of impersonality were a symptom of creative impotence, a clever
ploy on the part of the uncultured plebeians to whom the Revolution had opened
the shrine of art. Dobrenko does not acknowledge that the Soviet post-
revolutionary episode – for all its uniqueness – was still part of a broader
transnational crisis of culture. Nor does he pay sufficient attention to the fact that
 239

gestures of impersonality had currency far beyond the territory of Soviet Russia,
with its lumpenproletarian parvenus. As I have been arguing so far, such gestures
were common across the landscape of European modernism.
Notes to pages 26–37

Some of those who performed them – Flaubert, Mallarmé, Rilke, Eliot, Joyce –
easily meet Dobrenko’s lofty standards for artistic talent.
27 The phrase “the victory of socialism … in one separately taken country,” from a
1915 article by Lenin (“O lozunge” 354), later encapsulated Stalin’s position in
the Party debates of 1926–7 regarding the possibility of building socialism in the
Soviet Union. Against Trotsky – whose stance was likewise identified with a
slogan, “permanent revolution” – Stalin maintained that socialism (but not
communism) could be achieved without assistance from victorious proletarian
revolutions in other countries.
28 The following humorous observation made by Maksim Gor’kii captures the
atmosphere of that period: “If A belongs to a group B, then all other letters of the
alphabet are for him either inimical or nonexistent” (“O pol’ze” 323).

1. The Imperative of Form

1 The designation was not chosen by the members of Opoiaz and the Moscow
Linguistic Circle. It was foisted upon them by largely unsympathetic
commentators.
2 For prominent examples of the type of literary criticism the Formalists rejected,
see Erlich 51–5, 71.
3 For these lines of influence, see Erlich 23–32, 59–60. For a detailed discussion of
Heinrich Wöfflin’s influence, see Dmitrieva.
4 “The deeper justification for the use of the linguistic model or metaphor must, I
think, be sought elsewhere, outside the claims and counterclaims for scientific
validity or technological progress” (Jameson, The Prison-House viii). Jameson
goes on to claim, predictably, that the reign of the linguistic model and the
scientificity to which it laid claim are rooted, ultimately, in the socioeconomic
system of Western capitalism, whose functioning becomes ever more
dematerialized: “There is therefore a profound consonance between linguistics as
a method and the systematized and disembodied nightmare which is our culture
today” (ix).
5 Jameson describes in just these terms the revolutionary significance of Saussure’s
linguistic theory. Saussure’s dissatisfaction with diachrony, according to Jameson,
240

is an intellectual unease with the kinds of objects whose dynamics are to be

explained by causes external to them. By contrast, Saussure’s turn to synchrony
and “system” is a turn to a new matter of knowledge, a matter determined fully by
factors and relationships internal to it. See Jameson, Prison-House 7–8. For the
Formalists’ own unease with explaining literary phenomena by reference to a
different “order” (riad) of facts, see Eikhenbaum’s polemic with Trotsky in
Eikhenbaum, “Vokrug voprosa.”
Notes to page 39

6 We have Shklovskii’s clearly stated admission: “In its essence, the Formal method
is simple: a return to craftsmanship” (qtd in Steiner, “Three Metaphors” 63).
Artisanal production as an implicit model for Shklovskii’s conception of art has
been noted by Jameson, who has commented also on the Aristotelian descent of
the notion of art as craft or skill (Prison-House 81–3). The reduction of art to
skill, technical competence, would be a central idea of productivism – an avant-
garde current closely associated with the Formalist school. The main theoretical
explication of this idea is to be found in Arvatov, Iskusstvo i proizvodstvo.
7 On Shklovskii’s personal fondness for machines and machine metaphors, and on
the general mechanistic tendency of the Formalist method, see Steiner, “Three
Metaphors” 63–71. Steiner’s account suffers from the facile subsumption of
techne under “technology.” His characterization of Shklovskii as an “arch-
mechanist” (72) fails to take into account the powerful strain in Shklovskii’s
writings that points, nostalgically, away from the alienating and benumbing
effects of modernity towards a pre-industrial mode of production and perception.
“It is at the same time part of a general feeling in the modern world that life has
become abstract, that reason and theoretical knowledge have come to separate us
from a genuine existential contact with things and the world” (Jameson, Prison-
House 55).
8 For the most thorough treatment of the term “defamiliarization” and its uses, see
Stacy. For its connection with psychological conceptions current during the early
twentieth century, see Svetlikova 72–98.
9 Shklovskii’s pronouncements were not always consistent with such a dynamic
definition of artistic creation. In The Knight’s Move (Khod konia; from which the
quoted passage is taken) we also read: “Faktura is the principal characteristic of
this peculiar world of deliberately constructed objects, the totality of which we
call art” (102). Here it seems that the aesthetic is not the evanescent, contextually
conditioned and, hence, contextually bound blossoming reached in a particular
moment in the renewal of form, but rather a more or less identifiable property
(faktura) that clings to the object and ascertains its belonging to art (which is,
thus, also a supposedly stable “world … of objects”). Erlich has pointed out the
 241

same ambiguity in Shklovskii’s understanding of form: “The Russian Formalist

leader seemed to fluctuate between two differing interpretations of the term: he
could not make up his mind as to whether he meant by ‘form’ a quality inherent in
an esthetic whole or an esthetic whole endowed with a certain quality” (187). The
concept of faktura will be discussed on several occasions in this book. See pp. 74,
83–4, 97–100. For the meaning of the term and the history of its use in Russian
modernism, see Gough, “Faktura.” Following Gough’s suggestion (33), I have
opted not to
Notes to pages 40–2

translate faktura as “texture,” for this rendition proves inaccurate or misleading in

some contexts.
10 This translates the German Differenzqualitaat, a term borrowed from Broder
Christiansen’s Philosophie der Kunst. The treatise appeared in Russian before the
Revolution, and evidence of familiarity with it is there already in Shklovskii’s
early “Sviaz’ priemov” (1916). Another major borrowing from Christiansen is the
concept of the “dominant” (Dominante). See Davydov.
11 Barthes has proposed a provocative distinction between diachrony and history, the
former encompassing the systematic generation of oppositions and differences,
the latter functioning as an unsystematic principle of inertia and contingency that
disturbs the smooth operation of the diachronic automaton (“Literature” 265).
12 In another place, Shklovskii compares the laws of artistic tradition with those of
Brownian motion: “The artist, whether he be the inventor of the
internalcombustion engine or a poet, plays the role of just such particles, which
make manifest [vyiavliaiut] motions that are, in themselves, invisible to the naked
eye” (Khod 70).
13 The term the Formalists used was “constructive principle.” See the quotation from
Tynianov, “Literatyrnyi fakt” 108, above.
14 The Formalists delighted in showing how the personality projected by literary
works or oeuvres had little to do with the biographical persona of the author. This
personality was merely the enabling condition for the effects the text set out to
realize: the extraliterary self dissolved into the literary device. Outstanding
examples of Formalist demystifications of the self are Eikhenbaum’s studies of
the young Tolstoy and Anna Akhmatova. In the latter, Eikhenbaum argues that the
contradictory lyrical “I” of Akhmatova is a little more than a projection on the
plane of human psychology of a specific stylistic figure, the oxymoron. What
appeared to be (the poet’s) dramatic personality is revealed to be the literary
device of dramatism.
242

15 Here is how Jakobson describes the workings of this automaton in the history of
painting: “It is necessary to learn the conventional language of painting in order to
‘see’ the picture … This conventional, traditional aspect of painting to a great
extent conditions the very act of our visual perception. As tradition accumulates,
the painted image becomes an ideogram, a formula, to which the object portrayed
is linked by contiguity. Recognition becomes instantaneous. We no longer see [the
painting]. The ideogram needs to be deformed. The artist-innovator must impose a
new form upon our perception, if we are to detect in a given thing those traits
which went unnoticed the day before. He may present the object in an unusual
perspective; he may violate the rules of composition canonized by his
predecessors” (“On Realism” 39–40). The
Notes to pages 42–3

imperative “must” (dolzhen), which Jakobson uses repeatedly, issues, of course,

from the automaton-like logic underlying the history of art.
16 The insistence on separating poetic from practical language – a mainstay of early
Formalism – appears already in Lev Iakubinskii’s “O zvukakh stikhotvornogo
iazyka” of 1916 (37). This definition was criticized by Medvedev 96–7. The
Formalists themselves soon recognized its limitations. In 1925, Boris Eikhenbaum
reminisced: “But these general acknowledgements that there are differences
between poetic and practical language and that the specific quality of art was
shown in its use of the material were not adequate when we tried to deal with
specific works. We had to find more specific formulations of the principle of
perceptible form so that they could make possible the analysis of form itself – the
analysis of form understood as content. We had to show that the perception of
form results from special artistic [devices] which force the reader to experience
the form” (“The Theory” 113).
17 This early position of Jakobson’s remained virtually unchanged until 1960, when
it received a much more systematic treatment in his seminal lecture “Linguistics
and Poetics.” There, the poetic function was defined as an “orientation”
(ustanovka) toward the “message”; this time it was framed not simply in
opposition to pragmatic communication but in a paradigmatic distinction from all
possible types of verbal performance: “referential,” “phatic,” “metalingual,”
“emotive,” “conative” (“Closing Statement” 53–8).
18 “The existence of a fact as literary depends on its differential quality (i.e., on its
relation to either the literary or the extra-literary series), or in other words – on its
function” (Tynianov, “O literaturnoi” 273; emphasis in the original).
19 “We apprehend every fact of poetic language in an inevitable juxtaposition with
the following three moments: the current poetic tradition, the practical language
 243

of the present, and the poetic tendency preceding the emergence of the given fact”
(Jakobson, “Noveishaia” 19–20).
20 “Of course, the deformation can be noticed only against the background of literary
and social history. Therefore Tynianov states that it is unwise to speak of aesthetic
qualities in general, as aesthetic qualities are the result of a concrete act of
perception within a particular historical context” (Fokkema and Ibsch 23).
21 “If we are dealing with poets of the past, these three moments must be recreated –
a difficult work, which can only be partially successful” (Jakobson, “Noveishaia”
20).
22 See Zhirmunskii 20–2.
23 For a nuanced discussion of Shklovskii’s, Tomashevskii’s, and Tynianov’s views
on the dichotomy fabula–siuzhet, see Todorov, “Some Approaches” 12 –19.
Jameson suggests that Shklovskii’s work in cinema, which routinely Notes to
pages 43–6

required the assembling of filmed pieces en route to the finished narrative

product, made him particularly sensitive to this dichotomy (Prison-House 61).
24 “[The] fable is not a phenomenon which is logically prior to the subject; rather it
follows after it. The fable is a pure construction thought up by the reader … When
we read a novel, we see its events in an (eventually) inverted order, which is
sometimes presented by a special character in the story, or in a distorting version,
and so on. During the course of our reading, we begin to assemble our own
personal impression of the real events portrayed by the text. This personal image
of the story will only be definitely fixed when we finish reading the last page of
the book … Throughout our reading of the story we only grasp the subject; we are
incapable of reconstructing a complete version of its fable” (Todorov, “Some
Approaches” 18). “Subject” here fails to convey the meaning of the French sujet
(in the original of Todorov’s article) and the Russian Formalist siuzhet.
25 Here, Shklovskii quotes Tolstoy on the conception of Andrei Bolkonskii’s
character in War and Peace: “In the battle of Austerlitz, which will be described,
but with which I began the novel, I needed a brilliant young man to be killed; in
the further course of the novel, I needed only the old Bolkonskii with his
daughter, but since it was awkward to describe a person who was in no way
related to the rest of the novel, I decided to make the brilliant young man a son of
the old Bolkonskii. Then I got interested in him, a role turned up for him in the
further course of the novel, so I spared his life, severely wounding, instead of
killing him” (“Sviaz′” 55). As we can see, what spares the life of Andrei and
allows him to grow into a major literary character is, really, the formal need for
244

cohesion in the character scheme of the novel. 26 “A new form engenders new
content” (Shklovskii, Khod konia 38). Here Shklovskii is only rephrasing one of
the slogans of the Russian Futurists (Kruchenykh, “New Ways” 77). See n41.
27 Instead of the earlier talk of art being that which allows us to experience the thing
as made, Tynianov now spoke of literature as a “dynamic verbal construction,”
which is to say, a “linguistic contruction which is experienced as construction”
(“Literaturnyi fakt” 261).
28 For a classic account, see Abrams 156–225.
29 “Thus, the plot in Gogol has only a superficial significance and is, therefore, quite
static … The true dynamic, and, hence, the composition of his works, consists in
the construction of the skaz, in the play of language” (Eikhenbaum, “Kak sdelana”
50; see also 46).
30 For more on the Romantic echoes in Formalist criticism, see Todorov, “Three
Conceptions” 135–8. On the Hegelian connection in Russian Formalism, see
Paramonov.
Notes to pages 48–53

31 For the representative status of dreams in psychoanalysis, see Freud’s own

statements in The Interpretation 483; New Introductory Lectures 8. For an
illuminating discussion of dreams’ privileged role in the psychoanalytic approach
to culture, see Ricoeur 159–63. In Book II, Part II, of Freud and Philosophy (159-
254), Ricoeur proceeds to show how Freud’s analysis of cultural and religious
phenomena consists in the “gradual extension of the model of dreams and the
neuroses to all cultural representations” (258).
32 See Freud’s discussion in Jokes 14–105, which shows these same principles at
work in the generative poetics of witticism.
33 See pp. 42–3 in this book.
34 It was Paul de Man who captured most memorably this modern being of the
textual, when he asserted that “literature exists at the same time in the modes of
error and truth; it both betrays and obeys its own mode of being” (163–4). For
him too, the “error,” the “blindness,” the “betrayal” – all of them referring to what
I have called dissimulation – are not pathological or accidental moments,
introduced from some detachable outside, but are constitutive of the text as such.
35 “Three masters, seemingly mutually exclusive, dominate the school of suspicion:
Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud” (Ricoeur 32).
36 Tsvetan Todorov has commented on how the Formalists ended up losing the very
object on which their science of the literary was to be based (“Three Conceptions”
142–4).
 245

37 In the words of Shklovskii: “The violation of the canon is possible only while the
canon exists, and sacrilege presupposes a religion that is still alive” (Khod konia
73).
38 For the idea of fabula as corollary of the reader’s presence within the text, see
Todorov, “Some Approaches” 18.
39 Consider, for instance, Viktor Zhirmunskii’s characterization of the movement:
“The fact is that Russian Formalism … took shape not as a school of literary
studies, but as a working theory of creative practice. Our Formalism was begun by
poets” (qtd in Dobrenko, Aesthetics 68). Dobrenko’s Aesthetics of Alienation is
largely a translation of the Foreword to his Formovka sovetskogo pisatelia. I cite
the former volume in those cases where a quotation from the text is given.
40 The following statement by Teodor de Wyzewa (1862–1914) conjoins – very
much like Shklovskii’s program later will – the rhapsody of habitualization with
the imperative for an art of renewal: “We have been the slaves of the world, and
the sight of this world, where we engaged our interests, has since ceased to give
us pleasure. And the Life which we had created – created in order to give us the
joy of creating – has lost its original character. It is
Notes to pages 53–6

necessary therefore to recreate it; one must build, over and above this world of
defiled, habitual appearances, the holy world of a better life: better, because we
can make it intentionally, and know how to make it. This is the very business of
Art” (17). Here, too, Romantic precedents are to be found. Shelley’s description
of the (artistic) imagination is particularly pertinent: “It creates anew the
universe after it has been annihilated in our minds by the recurrence of
impressions blunted by repetition” (qtd in Burke, The Death and Return xx).
41 Here is Kruchenykh, in 1913: “A new content becomes manifest only when new
expressive devices are achieved, a new form. Once there is new form, a new
content follows; form thus conditions content” (“New Ways” 77; emphasis in the
original). And here is his Futurist associate, Mayakovsky, writing in the following
year: “It is not the idea that gives birth to the word, but the word to the idea” (qtd
in Garzonio and Zalambani 8).
42 See Kruchenykh, Sdvigologiia; Kruchenykh, Faktura. For a discussion of the
continuities between Futurist and Formalist theorizing, see Cherniakov.
43 Kruchenykh, “New Ways” 73–5.
44 Kruchenykh, “New Ways” 72.
45 I borrow this expression from Cherniakov.
46 For this widespread perception, see Khodasevich 320; Lunacharskii,
246

“Formalizm”; Trotsky, Literature 138–53. It is a rather telling fact that Trotsky’s

first salvo in the direction of Formalism, his 1923 article in Pravda, was titled “The
Formalist School of Poetry and Marxism” (this became the fifth chapter in his
Literature and Revolution). See also ch. 1 n39, ch. 2 n4, ch. 3 n2.
47 Jameson’s statement to this effect is even stronger: “Thus an ultimate evaluation
of Formalism as a concrete literary phenomenon will bring it much closer to
genuine creative movements such as German Romanticism or Surrealism than to a
purely critical doctrine like that of the American New Criticism” (48). 2. The
Imperative of Content

1 See n4 in this chapter.

2 The chief statement of this antagonism was, of course, Trotsky’s polemic in
Literature and the Revolution (138–3). For other representative critiques of
Formalism from Marxist positions in the 1920s, see Bukharin, “O formal’nom”;
Lunacharskii, “Formalizm”; Medvedev 54–174. Lunacharskii’s text appeared as
an entry in the debate on Formalism published in a special section of the journal
Pechat’ i revoliutsiia (No. 5, 1924).
3 For the particular fate of the term pereverzevshchina, see Lenhert 320–1, 327–36.
Notes to pages 56–8

4 This was true at least until 1936, when a diatribe in Pravda against
Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk set off a massive campaign against
“formalism,” thus giving the latter the pre-eminent place among the cardinal sins
of artistic practice in the Soviet Union. But “formalism” was no longer associated
exclusively, or even principally, with the critical-theoretical school of the 1920s.
It had become synonymous with all of the perceived evils of modernist aesthetics.
5 “Sociological school” is the more ambiguous of the two designations, as it has
also been used to refer to the group around Vladimir Friche, while also serving as
a blanket reference for the various sociological trends in the literary criticism of
the 1920s. For a detailed review of these trends, see Novozhilova. Pereverzev
himself objected when the label “sociological” was applied to his Marxist
approach to literature (“Essential Premises”; qtd in Poliakov 14).
6 This volume was projected as the first in a series of publications on literary
methodology and criticism; it remained the only one.
7 During a discussion at the Communist Academy in 1930, whose outcome was the
de facto elimination of the Sociological school, one of the speakers, N.I. Efimov,
remarked: “Methodological unity was represented in their works with such
exclusive consistency that the ‘Pereverzevtsy,’ or members of the Pereverzev
 247

school, like the Formalists, were always identifiable by their style and by the
methodological orientation of their works” (qtd in Scott 7).
8 As Poliakov points out, opposition between the sociological and Formalist
methodologies was the defining dynamic in the literary criticism of the 1920s
(12–13). The polemic between the two schools did not prevent the Pereverzevians
from admitting, on occasion, the methodological superiority of their opponents.
Thus Ul’rikh Fokht wrote in 1927: “Marxist literary scholarship cannot yet meet
the Formalists on their own grounds; it lacks a well worked out system of literary
concepts; it does not yet have its own poetics” (qtd in Erlich 114).
9 In Anatolii Lunacharskii’s colourful characterization: “Before October, Formalism
was a vegetable in season. Today it is a stubborn relic of the status quo, the last
refuge of the unreconstructed intelligentsia, looking furtively toward bourgeois
Europe” (qtd in Erlich 107).
10 This aversion to causal explanations was stated by Eikhenbaum in no uncertain
terms: “To seek out the prime causes of literary forms or literary evolution is sheer
metaphysics” (qtd in Erlich 125).
11 Pereverzev finds support for this monistic view in Marx’s critique of earlier
materialist philosophies: “The main defect of materialism up to and including
Feuerbach consisted in the fact that it regarded reality, the objective world
perceived through the external senses, as only an object of contemplation,
Notes to pages 59–61

not as concrete human activity, not as practical activity, not subjectively”

(“Essential Premises” 58).
12 “[The] main contradiction [of materialist critical thought of the 1860s] consisted
in the fact that having advanced the strictly materialist proposition that art
reproduces reality and having denied the idealistic view of art as the fruit of free
thought unencumbered by objective conditions, the mechanists immediately
began talking about art as engendered by thought, and very often thought that
diverged from reality. This contradiction was inescapable for those who, in
speaking of the reproduction of reality, meant not subjective reality with its
inherent consciousness but the objective world opposed to consciousness, for
those who did not include the consciousness peculiar to reality in the reality
reproduced by art. Under such circumstances, art was the result not of a single
actual reality but of the interaction between two essences – reflected reality and
reflecting consciousness, the objective world and subjective thought, i.e., a fact of
both real and ideal order” (Pereverzev, “Theoretical Premises” 42–3).
13 See p. 43 in the present study.
248

14 In this context, it is instructive to recall the passage in Marx’s “Introduction to a

Critique of Political Economy” in which he criticizes the “Robinsonades” of
eighteenth-century economists – their attempts to derive the principles of socio-
economic development from fictional scenarios in which the human individual
appears as a fully independent agent in confrontation with “nature.” Marx
proceeds to expose these scenarios as misrepresentations characteristic of a
specific phase in the historical life of bourgeois society. The human individual in
question, “the joint product of the dissolution of the feudal form of production and
of the new forces of production which have developed since the sixteenth
century” (267) is represented as most independent precisely when, in actuality,
“the inter-relations of society … have reached the highest state of development”
(268). Yet this misrepresentation is due neither to accidental blindness, nor to
some inborn defect of human reason; it is itself a product – and a necessary
product, at that – of the very actuality it obscures, the actuality of social existence
under capitalism, in which “the different forms of social union confront the
individual as a mere means to his private ends, as an outward necessity” (267).
15 “The non-coincidence between reality and its depiction is inherent in the historical
process itself. The convergences between reality and representation are always
relative; they are limited in respect to both history and class” (Bespalov,
“Problema” 25).
16 “We should judge about style neither from the author’s pronouncements, nor from
his belonging to this or that literary group, neither from manifestoes,
Notes to pages 61–2

nor from the author’s plans and intentions. Historical scholarship studies not the
wills and desires of people, but the facts that emerge, at times, despite the will of
people, behind their back. The formation and individuation of a given style
occurs not on people’s will, but, sometimes, regardless of their will, albeit
through them” (Bespalov, “Problema” 32; emphasis added). Bespalov’s thesis,
while replaying the main theme of the present investigation, recalls this classical
passage from Marx’s The Eighteenth Brumaire: “Upon the different forms of
property, upon the social conditions of existence, rises an entire superstructure of
distinct and peculiarly formed sentiments, illusions, modes of thought and views
of life. The entire class creates and forms them out of its material foundations and
out of the corresponding social relations. The single individual, who derives them
through tradition and upbringing, may imagine that they form the real motives
and the starting point of his activity” (47).
17 Cf. Marx and Engels’s The German Ideology: “First the productive forces appear
as a world for themselves, quite independent of and divorced from the individuals,
alongside the individuals: the reason for this is that the individuals, whose forces
 249

they are, exist split up and in opposition to one another, whilst, on the other hand,
these forces are only real forces in the intercourse and associations of individuals.
Thus, on the one hand, we have a totality of productive forces, which have, as it
were, taken on a material form and are for the individuals no longer the forces of
the individuals but of private property, and hence of the individuals only insofar
as they are owners of private property themselves. Never, in any earlier period,
have the productive forces taken on a form so indifferent to the intercourse of
individuals as individuals, because their intercourse was formerly a restricted one.
On the other hand, standing over against these productive forces, we have the
majority of the individuals from whom these forces have been wrestled away, and
who, robbed thus of all real life-content, have become abstract individuals, but
who are, however, only by this fact put into position to enter into relation with one
another as individuals” (91–2; emphasis in the original).
18 In most other cases, “tendency” would be an inadequate translation of the Russian
ustremlenie, which is traditionally rendered as “striving” or “aspiration.” For
translating Bespalov’s usage, however, the teleological connotations of “striving”
and “aspiration” seem out of place. The notion has some affinity with what the
Formalists termed ustanovka (“orientation,” “set”). In both cases, it is a matter of
of seeing the literary text as organized in accordance with a definite principle; the
plurality of artistic signs composing the text is functionally unified, “directed,” so
to speak. For the Formalists, the normative instance of such unifying directedness
is the focus on the verbal medium’s own properties (Jakobson’s ustanovka na
vyrazhenie). By contrast, the
Notes to pages 62–4

Pereverzevian ustremlenie is a definite orientation or configuration of

consciousness that endows the literary whole with something akin to personality. 19
At this point, Bespalov’s reading echoes Pereverzev’s early study of
Dostoevsky, in which the position of the petty bourgeoisie is described in the
following terms: “Over the petty bourgeoisie a curse hangs, as over the biblical
fig tree: it is sociologically fruitless, incapable of a historically constructive role.
The tragedy of this class lies in the fact that its revolutionary impulse neutralizes
its reactionary impulse, and its reactionary impulse neutralizes its revolutionary
impulse; the stormiest tensions of revolutionary energy are resolved in reaction,
and the most intense reaction must be resolved in revolution” (qtd Jackson 48).
20 “Being immanent in relation to the socio-historical conditions which have brought
it into existence, the [socio-psychological] complex is also immanent in relation
250

to the structure of the [text]. The latter is a result of this complex’s realization”
(Pospelov, “Stil’” 162).
21 Hans-Jürgen Lehnert emphasizes this immanentist or, as he calls it,
“poetological,” perspective, after which he quotes the following statement by
Pereverzev: “The social nature of the literary fact can and must be uncovered with
the means of purely literary analysis and minimal reliance on the data of
sociology, because the social nature of the literary work is manifested in its very
structure, in the peculiarities of the elements that compose it” (321).
22 For Eikhenbaum’s insistence that the Formalists were, above everything else,
specifiers, see “Vokrug voprosa” 3.
23 See, for example, “Problems” 161–3, where Pereverzev speaks of the text as a
“complex organic structure” constituted by the interaction of “living images.”
24 It should be said that Pereverzev himself has not been fully consistent in the
separation of the (higher-order) obraz from the (particular) kharakter. On this
point, see Poliakov 27–8.
25 See Fokht’s reading of the character of Lermontov’s Demon, Pospelov’s analysis
of Lavretskii’s character in A Nest of Gentlefolk (“Stil’”), and Pereverzev’s
discussion of character types in the novels of Goncharov (“K voprosu”).
26 Poliakov elaborates on this point: “The genesis and existence of the work are
intimately bound. The intermediary link between these two sets of problems is the
concept of the work’s structure. It is precisely the structural organization of the
work that creates the unity of the two levels on which literature functions as a
social phenomenon: as a pronouncement about reality and as an image of that
reality” (7; emphasis in the original).
27 “Style is a phenomenon relative to class. The psychology of this or that class is
imprinted in the whole aggregate of elements in the literary work, which
represents a unity. In each historical period, the psychology of a given class Notes
to pages 64–6

possesses certain basic features that define the psychological character of that
class. These basic features are, so to speak, the foundation, the kernel, around
which the other elements of class psychology are concentrated; they serve as the
organizing principles of the given psychology, giving it a definite form …
“These organizing psychological elements are reflected in the formative
principles of the artistic work, in general, and of literature, in particular; they are
realized, materialized, so to speak, in the laws of literary construction.
“We must emphasize that the basic elements of [class] psychology are not, by
themselves, [identical with] style; style is the product of class consciousness
objectivated in the literary work; being objectivated, its basic elements serve as
 251

the principles of organization of [literary] images” (Khrapchenko 27; emphasis in

the original).
28 Pospelov explains the relation between particular character-images in the text and
the overall “image” of the text in the following terms: “Within the limits of the
poetic work, an order of social group experiences manifests itself as a concrete
system of motifs. When speaking about poetic structures, we will refer to this
system as a complex of psychological motifs – a socio-psychological complex, by
which we understand that very same subjective aspect of social relations between
people, which has been poetically canonized” (“K metodike” 67; emphasis in the
original).
“If we call [this] entire complex, in all of its aspects, an ‘image,’ it is because
the distinctive being of the socio-psychological complex becomes particularly
visible and intelligible for us exactly in the plane of poetic imagery, within the
well-defined logical confines of the ‘image.’ The images of the ‘dramatis
personae,’ of the agents in the work of fiction, are its main constituents.” (“K
metodike” 78; emphasis in the original).
29 Robert Louis Jackson has used the compound in its reversed form
(“imagecharacter”) to render Pereverzev’s use of obraz.
30 See also Pereverzev, “Theoretical Premises” 16 and Pospelov, “K metodike” 59.
31 In Northrop Frye’s system, the anagogic is the last level of figural representation,
the furthest possibility for a figural embodiment of meaning. See Frye 151–8.
32 Thus, from Bespalov’s analysis of Gor’kii’s early stories (see p. 62 in the present
study), it becomes clear that the “character” reproduced in the text is not to be
confused with either of the two central character-types; it emerges from their
structural opposition, which articulates the vacillating social position of the urban
petit bourgeoisie.
33 “The order of experiences of a given social group, fixed in a verbal structure,
creates through its features the characteristics that permeate all aspects of this
Notes to pages 67–73

verbal structure, thus forging a distinctive poetic style” (Pospelov, “K metodike”

66).
34 See pp. 44–5 in the present study.
35 The same ambiguity emerges also in the Formalist dialectic of “device,” where, in
relation to the governing constructive principle (dominanta), a given formal
element or group of them can stand as privileged carriers of the said principle.
Thus, for instance, in Sterne’s Tristram Shandy the device of narrative digression
is clearly in privileged relation to the operative dynamic of the whole. But this is
252

so because, to remember, the dynamic in question consists simply in the fact that a
given creative gesture (in the case of Tristram, the idiosyncratic meandering of
fictional narration) is promoted at the expense of others (namely, those associated
with the habitual unfolding of an autobiographical story). Although the latter are
equally “form,” they necessarily appear as less “formal,” or not “formal” at all
(which makes Tynianov’s reminder – that the subjugated elements, i.e., the so-
called material, are also formal – a necessary one).
36 Lehnert declares that “Pereverzev understood the sociological nature
[sotsiologichnost’] of literature to be tantamount to the determined character
[determinirovannost’] of the writer’s work. In this sense, his point of departure
was the unfreedom of the writer’s work” (329).
37 Deviation from the proper course (of reasoning, action), distortion.

3. Knowledge Become Practice

1 “A commodity appears at first sight an extremely obvious, trivial thing. But its
analysis brings out that it is a very strange thing, abounding in metaphysical
subtleties and theological niceties. So far as it is a use-value, there is nothing
mysterious about it, whether we consider it from the point of view that by its
properties it satisfies human needs, or that it first takes on these properties as the
product of human labour. It is absolutely clear that, by his activity, man changes
the forms of the materials of nature in such a way as to make them useful to him.
The form of wood, for instance, is altered if a table is made out of it. Nevertheless
the table continues to be wood, an ordinary, sensuous thing. But as soon as it
emerges as a commodity, it changes into a thing which transcends sensuousness. It
not only stands with its feet on the ground, but, in relation to all other
commodities, it stands on its head, and evolves out of its wooden brain grotesque
ideas, far more wonderful than if it were to begin dancing of its own free will”
(Marx, Capital 163–4).
2 Cf. Vladislav Khodasevich: “In art, theory almost always comes after practice. As
the spiritual child of futurism, there arose the formal method of critical Notes to
pages 74–8

scholarship, which is now if not dominant, then extremely fashionable and vocal,
which makes it seem ‘advanced’” (320; emphasis added).
3 This prototypical zaum piece appeared first in the booklet Pomada, handwritten
by Kruchenykh and illustrated by Mikhail Larionov. There the verse is to be found
sandwiched between an explanatory note by its author and a rayonist sketch by
Larionov. On the significance of this juxtaposition, see Perloff, Futurist Moment
123.
 253

4 For the political and ideological contest between Lenin and Bogdanov, see
Ballestrem; Joravsky 24–44; Sochor, esp. 3–20.
5 See also Bogdanov, “Taina” 404–5.
6 For the ambition of supplementing Marx with Mach, see Bogdanov,
Empiriokrtitsizm 10. For Bogdanov’s objections to the empiriocriticism of Mach
and Avenarius, see Filosofiia 152–79. The principal of these objections is that
empiriocriticism is a reflective philosophy, that is, a form of systematic
knowledge that has not abandoned the contemplative stance in favour of the
active, transformative engagement with reality (Filosofiia 200–3). In the same
text, Bogdanov also criticizes Marx and Engels’s dialectical materialism (201– 11,
219–21).
7 The relationship between philosophy and tektology is the exclusive subject of
Bogdanov, “Ot filosofii.”
8 As Bogdanov explained in an earlier treatise, the human world and the collective
doings of mankind are only the highest level of the organizational continuum that
is universal being (Filosofiia 255–6).
9 On Bogdanov’s understanding of matter as resistance, see Filosofiia 48–9, 58–9,
83. The notion has a long historical pedigree, reaching back to the early modern
philosophy of nature. Cf. Definition III of Newton’s Principia, which speaks of
vis insita, the force innate to matter, as the power of resisting change (The
Mathematical Principles 2). At a shorter historical distance, Bogdanov’s position
can be traced – via Mach – to Herbert Spencer’s conception of matter as the
abstraction through which we represent to ourselves everything in our world that
opposes our muscular exertions (Spencer 136–45).
10 Bogdanov’s tektological elements are a slightly refashioned version of Mach’s
elements-sensations, which comprise the entirety of the universe, traversing the
duality between psychical and physical, human interiority and the exteriority of
nature. See Mach 12–18; 20–2. On the difference between Bogdanov’s and
Mach’s understanding of experience and its analytical units, see Jensen 124–6.
11 See Bogdanov, Tektologiia 57.
12 See ch. 2 n11.
Notes to pages 78–81

13 The reference is to Marx, “Theses” 243. Bogdanov’s own narrative of

philosophy’s divorce from life and plea for their integration can be found in
Filosofiia 3–17.
14 See the quotation from Arvatov above.
15 See also Bogdanov, “Taina” 407–8.
254

16 “The problem is that specialization … undermines the homogeneity of the [class]

collective, it engenders disunity, mutual misunderstanding, and thence also
contradictions between its differentiated elements; then [the class collective] is no
longer one in its life and constructive work, and is incapable of producing a
unified and whole structure for the entire society. Such was the case with the
bourgeoisie: it never became a true collective, it could not devise any form of
organization other than the anarchic. And to the extent to which the proletariat is
ruled by the specializing powers of bourgeois culture, it too manifests disunity,
which turns into direct contradictions” (Bogdanov, Tektologiia 50).
17 This (productive) ambiguity has been noted in Jensen 113.
18 Purportedly, such was not the case for prehistoric man. In the earliest human
communities, Bogdanov tells us, the span and depth of accumulated experience
was extremely limited. This made it possible for each individual’s organizational
know-how to be equal to that which the community, as a whole, commanded.
Another way of stating the same is to say that there was, at this earliest stage, still
no true “I” as separate from the primitive collective identity (“Sobiranie” 31–2).
19 See also Bogdanov, Filosofiia 60–9, where the failure to recognize the social
character of every human activity is viewed both as a principal feature of
bourgeois consciousness and, thus, as the source of all fetishism of bourgeois
philosophical thought.
20 See ch. 2 nn14, 16.
21 Bogdanov develops this idea at length in “Sobiranie.”
22 See also Bogdanov, “Sotsialisticheskoe obshchestvo” 91–4; “Kollektivisticheskii
stroi” 296–9.
23 “Machine production transforms the proletariat … into a class infused with
working consciousness, infused with positive attitude toward labor, a class that
realizes the meaning and value of labor … In the worker’s thinking, the idea of
labor occupies a central position: it serves as a starting point for him. In his inner
world … there develops, firstly, the love of labor and, secondly, the pride in labor,
because he sees constantly … how labor overcomes nature, overcomes the
elemental forces. All this is done by the machine, which carries the self-
consciousness of labor” (Bogdanov, Elementy 38–9).
Notes to pages 82–8

24 For Bogdanov, the prehistoric stage of primitive communal life showed no signs
of systematic knowledge, and thus also no distinct notion of causality (Filosofiia
226–7).
25 On this view, a cause is something active in itself, although not necessarily
anthropomorphic. The effect is something the cause itself “does” in its sovereign
 255

agency. See, for example, Bogdanov’s discussion of Thales’s arche in Filosofiia

76.
26 By contrast with the authoritarian model, the paradigm of abstract necessity treats
“cause” not as an existent but as a general principle definable by a cognitive
scheme, a law. Newton’s gravity, for instance, is not thought as an entity to be
found in the physical world; only physical bodies can be found existing in it;
gravity is simply the law that generalizes their interactions. See Bogdanov’s
summary of Francis Bacon’s method in Filosofiia 141.
27 There is an unmistakable affinity between Bogdanov’s schema of human
cognitive history and Vladimir Solov’ev’s plotting of history as a progression of
forms of social organization. In The Philosophical Principles 32–56, Solov’ev
distinguishes three dialectically related phases of such organization. The earliest,
as in Bogdanov, is the authoritarian, characterized by a primitive unity imposed
from the outside. The second is a stage on which external compulsion falls away,
but unity is lost as well, as the elements composing the social whole strive for
independence. The third and final stage is one of synthesis and reconciliation
between totalizing rule and pulverizing freedom: the “free theocracy,” as a
voluntarily undertaken and realized unity of mankind and the divine. In Solov’ev,
too, the gradations of social life are found to correspond to different
configurations of knowledge. His integral knowledge arrives on the scene – just as
it does in Bogdanov – with the appearance of an integral form of communality.
28 Bogdanov referred to this as the principle of “sociomorphism”; see Filosofiia
241–3. See also pp. 86–7 in the present study.
29 See p. 70 in the present study.
30 “Ideas of universal significance are not thought up by individual consciousness,
but are formed by social practice” (94). It is worth noting that Bogdanov’s
determinism is stringent only when it comes to the most basic structures of
knowledge, the fundamental ideological premises of social consciousness.
31 On Althusser, see chapter 8 of this book.
32 See pp. 7–9.
33 “Such is the objective meaning of labor, which exists for the collective, but
usually eludes the consciousness of the person, the narrow, fragmented thinking of
the contemporary individual” (Filosofiia 48).
Notes to pages 90–3

4. The Organization of Things

256

1 In 1922, young Andrei Platonov, a follower of Bodganov and member of the

Voronezh Proletkult, wrote about this return of art to its essential dimension: “After
the proletarian epoch, poetry will be not the organization of symbols, the ghosts of
matter, but the organization of matter itself, the transformation of reality itself.
Proletarian poetry is the transfiguration of matter, a struggle with reality, a fight with
the universe for its alteration in accordance with the inner requirement of man” (31).
That same year, Platonov abandoned his literary pursuits to devote himself to the
direct “transformation of reality itself”; he took up work as an engineer on irrigation
and electrification projects. 2 For a book-length study of Proletkult, see Mally. Other
useful sources are Brown 6–20; Fitzpatrick, The Commisssariat 89–109; Sochor 125–
60. On the formation of the proletarian self and its expression in poetry, see Steinberg.
For the poetry of Proletkult, see also Dobrenko, Formovka 176–234; Levchenko.
3 A member of the “Objectivist” group at INKhUK, Nataliia Udal’tsova
summarized the group’s program for new art in this one sentence: “We regard art
not as a representation of reality, but as its organization” (qtd in KhanMagomedov
86; emphasis in the original).
4 See pp. 21–2, 29–30 in this book.
5 For the early-Soviet cult of the machine, see Stites 145–64.
6 As the director of the Central Institute of Labor, Gastev’s most nagging
preoccupation was that of reducing the gap between the “human, all too human”
nature of physical labour and the inexorable functioning of the machine: “The
contemporary machine, especially the machine complexes, have their laws of
calibrations, executions, and rests, which are not in correspondence with the
rhythmics of the human organism … We must introduce some corrective
coefficients in [the machine’s] iron, disciplined oppression; but history insistently
demands that we address not these small problems of individual safety, but the
bold engineering of human psychology in accordance with such a decisive factor
as machinism” (Gastev, Nashi zadachi 10).
7 The minute and seemingly trite mechanics of daily life were also of concern to
Arvatov, who expressed himself in terms strikingly similar to Tretiakov’s: “The
ability to pick up a cigarette-case, to smoke a cigarette, to put on an overcoat, to
wear a cap, to open a door, all these ‘trivialities’ acquire their qualification, their
not unimportant ‘culture’” (qtd in Kiaer 34).
8 “Rejection of the ‘creative personality,’ the idée fixe of all the revolutionary
theories of creativity, found among the LEFists the most radical and logical
supporters” (Dobrenko, Aesthetics 75).
Notes to pages 94–8

9 To the latter, Tarabukin devoted in the same year a lecture emphatically titled
“The Last Picture Has Been Painted.”
 257

10 Mikhail Matiushin imaged this moving-outward from the traditional surface of

representation in the following allusion to the new art of material assemblage:
“The artist was jumping out from the canvas by means of boxes, sticks, a rag,
glass, metal, endeavoring to force his own and his neighbor’s eye to understand
depth” (qtd in Bobrinskaia 101). But the turning inside out (or hereto-there) of the
traditional space of representation was perhaps most clearly demonstrated in
theatre. In the projects of Vsevolod Meyerhold and Liubov’ Popova (as in those of
Berthold Brecht in Germany), the stage was to encroach on the space formerly
reserved for the audience and become the site of political demonstration, or the
training ground for the rhythmics of movement and the efficiency of labour
(Meyerhold’s school of “biomechanics”; see further in this chapter, pp. 100–2.
11 Gough coins for this the term “materiological determination” (“Faktura” 41–2).
See further in this study, pp. 98–9.
12 The more immediate and relevant reference is to Aleksei Gan’s programmatic
pamphlet, Constructivism, where “tectonics” figures as one of the three definitive
elements of the new practice, along with faktura and “construction” (40).
For a discussion of this conceptual triad, see pp. 98–9 in this book.
13 In the rest of the paragraph, I gloss Arvatov’s narrative in Iskusstvo i klassy 3–13.
14 See ch. 3 n1.
15 See above, p. 74.
16 Kiaer sees Tatlin’s creation of everyday objects of use as a variation on the
“materiological determination” exemplified by his corner reliefs (52). She
distinguishes Tatlin’s procedure (and ideology) from the functionalist direction
followed by the constructivists of INKhUK. She believes, along with Gough, that
the latter leads to an imposition of form dictated by extrinsic factors rather than by
the material itself (50–2). As the current discussion should make clear, I do not
subscribe to this view, as I find the distinction between “intrinsic” and “extrinsic”
factors much too neat to do justice to the Constructivist program. As will be
argued further in this chapter, one of the most intriguing features of this program
is how it manages to present ostensibly extrinsic factors (e.g., communist
ideology) as something pertaining to the material; see pp. 98–9.
17 Regarding the widely divergent interpretations of the concept of konstruktsiia
among the early Constructivists, see Khan-Magomedov 45–6.
18 Thus Rodchenko spoke of contemporary expediency (tselesoobraznost’) as
“construction laid bare [obnazhennaia konstruktsiia]” (qtd in KhanMagomedov
39).
Notes to pages 98–100
258

19 For Rodchenko, the leader of the initial group of Constructivists, construction was
the very principle of utilitarian organization; it amounted to the expedient use of
the properties of materials (Khan-Magomedov 44, 61). In other words, he saw it
as a certain general approach to materiality. It should be said, however, that
konstruktsiia, too, permits the dual meaning of act and fact. It can refer to what
one does or how one does it (a method or approach); but it can also refer to the
objectivated outcome of practice. In fact, the members of INKhUK invested the
term with one or the other of these meanings without signalling – and often
without being conscious of – the difference. This often made the distinction
between konstruktsiia and faktura appear tenuous and uncertain. This was one
reason why some Constructivists found the latter term redundant.
20 I do not believe that Gan intended to arrange the parts of his program as a
progression, but I do think it is possible to interpret them as I have done here.
21 Gan’s manifesto, Constructivism, opens with the bold-faced cheer “Long Live the
Communist Expression of Material Constructions!” (5).
22 Gan stressed repeatedly Constructivism’s task of uniting the ideological aspects of
production with the formal-technological (54, 60, 61).
23 In Gan’s text, the order of exposition is different: faktura is discussed after
tektonika and before konstruktsiia.
24 Those members of INKhUK who would later call themselves
“Constructivists” first came together in a tellingly named “Working Group for
Objective Analysis,” which distanced itself from the leadership of Vasilii
Kandinskii. As the very first items on the agenda for its inaugural meeting (23
November 1920), the group proposed: “a) objective analysis of artistic works in
order to uncover [their] elements (basic and peripheral) and the laws of their
organization; 2) analysis of elements and the laws of their organization in
individual works” (qtd in Khan-Magomedov 37; emphasis added). One would be
hard-pressed to find any differences between this proposal and an agenda for an
Opoiaz meeting.
25 In another place, Chuzhak states: “It would be a huge absurdity to understand the
‘thing’ only as an externally perceptible materiality – an error committed by the
first productionists, who relied on vulgar-fetishistic, metaphysical materialism;
the ‘idea’ should not be excluded from the concept of the thing, inasmuch as the
idea is the necessary prerequisite of any real construction – a model for
tomorrow” (Chuzhak, “K zadacham” 145–6).
26 On the development of biomechanics, as a theoretical platform and as a training
program for actors, see Law and Gordon 33–59. Important original documents
pertaining to biomechanics can be found in the same volume, 93–253. 27 On the
Taylorist inspirations of Meyerhold’s biomechanics, see Law and
 259

Gordon 34–6; Pozdnev. Arkadii Pozdnev, a student of Meyerhold, concludes Notes

to pages 100–5

his article by proclaiming: “The Taylor of the theater is Vsevolod Meyerhold”

(151).
28 Meyerhold admitted that his dualistic formula of acting was inspired by Constant
Benoît Coquelin’s conception of the actor as an aggregate of two distinct selves.
See Braun, Meyerhold 202.
29 These laws extend to and encompass the entire space of theatrical performance:
“The stage and the theater are to be an enormous machine with very complex
construction, which works with mathematic precision according to the laws of
mechanics” (Sokolov 21).
30 Compare this pronouncement with Gan’s programmatic postulate: “The
sociopolitical system conditioned by the new economic structure gives rise to new
forms and means of expression. The emergent culture of labor and intellect will be
expressed by intellectual-material production” (21).
31 Komfut is the acronym of the “Communist-Futurist collective” founded by
Mayakovsky and Brik in Petrograd in late 1918. The short-lived association
(dissolved in 1921) aimed at integrating Futurism with the organization and
ideology of the Communist Party. See “Organizatsiia,” “Partiia.”
32 Kino-glaz (“kino eye” or “cinema eye”) was to provide the title of Vertov’s film
project of 1924. From the compound kino-oko (cine-eye) was derived kinoki – the
name adopted by a group of documentary filmmakers who gathered around
Vertov in the early 1920s.
33 “The cinema eye lives and moves in time and space; it perceives and records
impressions in a manner entirely different from that of the human eye. The
position of our body during observation, the amount of features of this or that
sensory event that we are able to apprehend, is not at all obligatory for the camera,
which perceives more and better the more perfect it is.
“We cannot make our eyes better than they already are, but we can perfect the
camera endlessly” (Vertov, “Kinoki” 138).
On the superiority of the cinema-eye over the human, “naked” eye, see also
Vertov “Kino-Eye” 67 and “From Kino-Eye to Radio-Eye” 87. In “We: Variant of
a Manifesto,” Vertov echoes Tretiakov’s dissatisfaction with man’s imperfect
motions: “The machine makes us ashamed of man’s inability to control himself,
but what are we to do if electricity’s unerring ways are more exciting to us than
the disorderly haste of active men and the corrupting inertia of passive ones” (7).
34 See Rodchenko’s critique of traditional (artistic) photography in “Puti,” esp. 36.
260

35 Life Caught Unawares (Zhizn’ vrasplokh) is also the alternative title of Vertov’s
1924 film Cinema Eye (Kinoglaz).
36 On the dialectic of “life facts” and “film facts” in Vertov, see Petric 38–9.
Notes to pages 106–12

37 On the conceptual relation of Vertov’s method to the theoretical Constructivism of

Gan and the practical Constructivism of Tatlin, see Michelson xxviii–xxxv.
38 “Cine-Eye is not the end. Cine-Eye is a means. To show without masks” (qtd in
Hicks 32).
39 On the top of the list in Vertov’s various definitions of the kino-eye stands “kino-
eye as cinema analysis” (“The Birth” 41).
40 See pp. 47–51 of this book.
41 See Vertov, “From Kino-Eye” 88–90.

5. The Organization of Minds

1 To be sure, Meyerhold’s actor possesses emotions and moods, but these are in
strict subordination to the physiological-kinetic aspect of human being – what
Meyerhold calls the “physical prerequisite” (fizicheskaia predposylka; “Akter”
11).
2 So named after the journal On Guard (Na postu), which the group published
between 1923 and 1925. From 1926 to 1931, the journal On Literary Guard (Na
literaturnom postu) took its place. In the first half of the 1920s, napostovstvo
(onguardism) became the name of a recognizable literary-critical platform and a
very distinct type of cultural activism. After 1925, when the Party resolution on
literature caused a split in the movement, napostovstvo was often associated with
the left wing of VAPP (Rodov, Lelevich, Vardin, Bezymenskii).
3 This description is hardly more than an echo of RAPP proclamations like the
following: “The power and meaning of RAPP now consists in this: that its literary
production is thought through and programmed, that there is a five-year plan,
[that] signposts are marking the point of departure and the point of arrival, [that]
the strategic map is plain to see” (Berkovskii 123).
4 See Rodov’s passionate proselytizing of this principle in “Organizatsionnye” and
“O kruzhkovshchine.”
5 Lenin, an old foe of Bogdanov’s, personally directed the coup. See Lenin,
“On Proletarian Culture”; “On the Proletkults.”
6 In noting the continuity between Proletkult and the Onguardist movement, two
essential divergences should be kept in mind. First, whereas Proletkult had sought
complete independence from the Party and the structures of Soviet government (in
the first place, from NARKOMPROS), the Onguardists wished nothing more than
 261

to function as a representative of the Party in the literary sphere. Second, the

Proletkult program for proletarian culture presumed that this culture would be the
work of the proletarians themselves. As Notes to pages 112–15

will be discussed further in this chapter, the Onguardists fought for a literature
that would represent the (ideological) point of view of the newly victorious class.
7 See Lelevich, “O marksizme”; Vardin, “Revoliutsiia” 77–80.
8 These formulations remained unchanged throughout the decade. We find them in
the resolution adopted by the First Congress of Proletarian Writers in 1928:
“Being one of the means for the cognition of social life and of the whole world
which surrounds man, art organizes the feelings and thoughts by means of images
influencing the psyche of the reader, listener, etc., through ‘emotional infection’”
(qtd in Brown 62).
9 On the concatenation Proletkult–“Smithy”–“October,” see Dobrenko, Formovka
41–8. Dobrenko argues that the most essential continuity between Proletkult and
RAPP is to be sought in the “act of overcoming the personality of the creator”
(35).
10 On this issue, see Brown 62–3.
11 Cf. the following passage from Marx and Engels’s Holy Family, which serves as
the epigraph to Lukács’s chapter “Class Consciousness”: “It is not a question of
what this or that proletarian, or even the whole proletariat, at the moment regards
as its aim. It is a question of what the proletariat is, and what, in accord with this
being, it will historically be compelled to do” (53; emphasis in the original).
12 I offer here only a minimal gloss on the tangled organizational history of the
movement. For a more comprehensive account, see Brown 12–20, 46–57;
K. Clark, “RAPP.”
13 The All-Union Organization of Proletarian Writers’ Associations
(Vsesoiuznoe ob”edinenie assotsiatsii proletarskikh pisatelei, VOAPP)
coordinated the activities of the separate national organizations.
14 In subsequent Soviet history, RAPP became – through a sort of retroactive
genealogy – the blanket reference for the entire movement of proletarian literature
initiated by the Octobrists. For a detailed historical account of the “proletarian
episode” in Soviet literature, see Brown.
15 On the conflict between the Onguardists and Voronskii, see Brown 21–45;
Maguire 156–87; McLean.
16 “Grimasa NEPa” is the title of a 1927 short story by Mikhail Zoshchenko.
17 On the notion of “restoration of the superstructure,” see Lelevich,
“Otkazyvaemsia” 100–1. Without mentioning NEP, Lelevich writes about
262

moments in history in which the superstructure of earlier epochs can make a

return, provided that some of the socio-economic conditions associated with the
said superstructure have been restored as well.
Notes to pages 115–22

18 As Voronskii himself was a card-carrying Communist, the confrontation with

RAPP could be viewed as a fractional battle within the Party (K. Clark, “RAPP”
213).
19 On the position of the Party on cultural and literary affairs during NEP, see Kemp-
Welch.
20 For the distinguished history of Krasnaia nov’, see the classic study by Maguire.
21 For comprehensive accounts of Voronskii’s ideas and positions in the cultural
debates of the 1920s, see Belaia; Maguire 188–311.
22 For the Onguardist credo that writers should carry Party cards, see Vardin,
“O politgramote” 94. Paraphrasing Nekrasov, the leading Onguardist poet,
Bezymenskii, mandated: “A poet you need not be / but a communist you must be”
(Poetom mozhesh’ ty ne byt’ / no kommunistom byt’ obiazan; qtd in Libedinskii,
“K voprosu” 59–60).
23 Voronskii’s position was certainly more nuanced than that; it was also less remote
from the position of his opponents. He insisted that all cognition proceeds from a
class-determined point of view. But when a class gains strength, when it is the
“progressive” class of its day, objective cognition becomes both necessary and
possible for it (“Iskusstvo” 378). It is the objective historical being of a social
group that opens to it the possibility for objective knowledge of reality.
24 When RAPP’s main theoretician, Libedinskii, put to paper his views on the
writer’s relationship to reality, they turned out to be embarrassingly similar to
those of Voronskii. In the “The Artistic Platform of RAPP,” Libedinskii ascribes to
the writer the ability to raise himself, by an act of will, above the prevailing
interpretation of reality (Libedinskii, “Khudozhestvennaia” 16).
25 See pp. 96–7.
26 Confusing the actual consciousness of the proletariat with the class’s imputed
system of cognition became, during the 1920s, the distinguishing mark (and
stigma) of political “opportunism.”
27 As has been noted, this emphasis on ideological position, at the expense of class
origin, suited quite well the social profile of RAPP. Although all of its leaders
were Party members, none of them were from a working-class background (K.
Clark, “RAPP” 212; Brown 62–63).
28 See above, p. 103.
29 On the different “interpretations” of the social commission during the 1920s, see
Dobrenko, Formovka 97–116.
 263

30 See above, p. 60.

31 Since the organization of proletarian literature, Averbakh reasoned, rested on
ideological rather than formal principles, the problem of artistic method was
Notes to pages 122–7

overridden by considerations of the author’s ideological position: “The writer’s

artistic method cannot be torn away from ideology, from his worldview as a
whole. Moreover, the writer’s artistic method is fully subordinate to … his
ideological stance” (Averbakh, “Tvorcheskie” 9).
32 See, for example, Zonin 14–15.
33 The term “sociolect” (sotsiolekt) was coined by Mikhail Bakhtin, in whose theory
of culture and novelistic discourse it designates a modulation of the common
language, marked stylistically and ideologically as issuing from a particular social
position. In the present context, Reich’s sociographics claims to be an exclusive
discourse in which the heterogeneity of the various conflicting sociolects has been
resolved. This type of discourse, which belongs to the proletariat by objective
entitlement, cannot be identified with any particular position within society, but
only with the objective existence of the social as a whole (the universal).
34 For example, in Vertov: “Cinema’s unstrung nerves need a rigorous system of
precise movement. The meter, tempo, and type of movement, as well as its precise
location with respect to the axes of a shot’s coordinates and perhaps to the axes of
universal coordinates (the three dimensions + the fourth – time), should be studied
and taken into account by each creator in the field of cinema. Radical necessity,
precision, and speed are three components of movement worth filming and
screening. The geometrical extract of movement through an exciting succession of
images is what is required of montage” (“We” 8; emphasis added).
35 See Dobrenko, Formovka 54.
36 On the history and significance of these notions, which were to become mainstays
of the doctrine of socialist realism, see Balina, esp. 368–75; James 8–14.
37 On the concept of narodnost’, see Günther; James 1–11.
38 For the passage from cultural revolution to Stalinist kul’turnost’ (a difficultto-
translate term that implies the veneer of civilization more than the spiritual depth
of culture), see Boym 120–1; Durham 22–3; Fitzpatrick, The Cultural Front 218;
Volkov.
39 Just a few months before his execution, still hoping to prove himself to Stalin,
Bukharin wrote in prison: “[Socialism] gathers people together and creates a
human type that is truly an integrated individual [tselostnyi chelovek], one who
has a multitude of functions and a fullness of life and a richness of life that is
264

developing historically more and more” (Socialism 41). Bukharin was not
describing a hypothetical situation, but something he asserted to be the
contemporary reality in the Soviet Union: “for almost twenty years socialism has
been living a real existence in the form of the USSR” (3).
Notes to pages 132–7

6. The Anonymous Centre of Style

1 “The avant-garde exists in a situation of constant reflection upon the nature of art,
in constant questioning ‘what is art?’, and also in a situation of constant doubt, a
maniacal search for arguments to justify art’s existence. A sense of art’s
dubiousness and irrelevance is one of the principal ingredients of avant-garde
culture” (Bobrinskaia 20).
2 Ludwig Kirchner made it clear that answering these questions was a prerequisite
for membership in Der Blaue Reiter: “Everyone who with directness and
authenticity conveys that which drives him to creation, belongs to us” (qtd in
Perloff, “Violence” 69).
3 Thus Christopher Butler has identified modernism with “the disruption of the very
idea that the arts should have a socially agreed reflective content” (20).
4 See also Berdiaev 32.
5 Eysteinsson has made a very similar point: “It is true that many modernists have
extolled the autonomy of art. But nothing obliges us to take such views as
adequately representative of their own work or of modernism in general” (12).
6 This, I believe, is what the following lines by Giorgio de Chirico seek to
communicate: “A work of art must narrate something that does not appear within
its outline. The objects and figures represented in it must likewise poetically tell
you of something that is far away from them and also of what their shapes
materially hide from us” (439).
7 See pp. 9–14 in this book.
8 This fact is also clearly spelled out by the intertitles that open the film. 9 “Thirty
foreheads damaged – scrap the people.”
10 Олошадить жителей Австралии.
Омолодить на 30 лет канадцев.
Принять рапорт в три минуты от полмиллиарда спортсменов.
Сделать сводку рапортов телемашинами в 10 минут.
Включить солнце на полчаса.
Написать на ночном небе 20 километров слов.
Разложить сознание на 30 параллелей. (Gastev, “Pachka orderov” 219).
11 Панихида на кладбище планет.
 265

Рев в катакомбах миров.

Миллионы, в люки будущего.
Миллиарды, крепче орудия.
Каторга ума.
Кандалы сердца. (Gastev, “Pachka orderov” 217–18) Notes to pages 139–44

12 “Speech travels between the separate parts. But in the perfect One there is perfect
silence and bliss” (Lawrence 423).
13 “We do not [wish to] preempt the forms of the word’s technicization, but it is
clear that this will be more than a mere amplification of sound; [the word] will
gradually separate itself from its living carrier – man” (Gastev, “Kontury” 333).
14 For a useful summary of these polemics, see DeKoven 675–9. Some of the main
Marxist texts in the debate can be found in Aesthetics.
15 Such comparisons were highly typical in the intellectual culture of the nineteenth
century. Writing in 1831, John Stuart Mill observed: “The ‘spirit of the age’ is in
some measure a novel expression. I do not believe that it is to be met with in any
work exceeding fifty years in antiquity. The idea of comparing one’s own age
with former ages, or with our notion of those which are yet to come had occurred
to philosophers; but it never before was itself the dominant idea of any age” (51).
16 For the influential treatment of style as individual signature, see Goodman.
17 This is what an art review of 1906 characterized aptly as the “sauce of history”
(qtd in Gray 71).
18 Simmel continued: “Earlier times, which only had one style which was taken for
granted were situated quite differently in these difficult questions of life. Where
only one style is conceivable, every individual expression grows organically from
it; it has no need to search first for its roots; the general and the personal go
together without conflict in a work. The unity and lack of problems we envy in
Greek antiquity and some periods of the Middle Ages are based on such an
unproblematic general foundation of life, that is to say, on the style, which
arranged its relationship to the individual production much more simply and freer
of contradictions, than is possible for us, who have a variety of styles at our
disposal in all areas, so that individual work, behavior and taste have a loose
optional relation to the broad foundation, the general law, which they do require
after all. That is the reason why the products of earlier times often seem to have so
much more style than those of our own age. For we say an object is devoid of
style if it appears to have sprung from a momentary, isolated, temporary
sentiment, without being based on a more general feeling, a non-contingent form”
(70).
266

19 See p. 15 in this book.

20 “All the intellectual attainments of mankind, all the wealth of achievements,
knowledge, and values accumulated by centuries have become oppressive to me
of late as an annoying burden or too heavy, too confining garment … I am
thinking what happiness it would be to plunge into Lethe, so as to wash Notes to
pages 145–50

forever from the soul the memory of all religious and philosophical systems, of all
knowledge, all arts, poetry” (Gershenzon and Ivanov 11).
21 Eight years later, in “The Building of a New Culture and the Question of Style,”
Lunacharskii offered a more cautious prognosis. He still hypothesized about a
future epoch endowed with a singular style, but its preamble, the period of
proletarian dictatorship, he saw as a protracted span of stylistic diversity.
22 “Horizon is the metaphor for what approaches without ever becoming a possessed
object” (Ricoeur 526).
23 Consider, for instance, Freud’s classic distinction between the “aim” and “object”
of sexual instincts (Three Essays 1–2), whose crucial import is that the aim is
constitutive and guides the selection of objects. For this reason, the objects of
desire are variable, interchangeable, contingent, and no single one of them can be
said, in sensu stricto, to be the “right one.” Consider also Hegel’s classic
discussion of desire in the Phenomenology (109–11), where every object and
objectivation proves transient, since desire is nothing other than the path of
consciousness’s return to itself.
24 See n25 of this chapter and n14 of the next chapter.
25 An editorial in Krasnaia nov’ celebrating the First Congress of the Union of
Soviet Writers captured also this chief characteristic of the grand new style: “The
style of our art, the style of socialist realism, demands organicity in creative work,
because this is the style of the most truthful art ever known …
“Precisely insofar as we provide artists with the possibility for organic
creativity, we now find ourselves on the eve of an unseen blossoming of art, on
the eve of a socialist Renaissance” (“Privet” 1; emphasis in the original).
26 Compare with Wilhelm Worringer’s enormously influential understanding of style
as a will-to-form that stems from a “world-feeling” (Weltgefühl) characteristic of a
given historical epoch (17). See also n18 of this chapter for Simmel’s notion of
style as grounded in “a more general feeling” (ein allgemeineres Empfinden).
27 Paul Cézanne described the creative process in these terms when he wrote: “The
landscape reflects itself, humanizes itself, thinks itself in me. I objectify it, project
it, fix it onto my canvas. Perhaps what I am saying doesn’t make sense, but it
seems to me that I am the subjective consciousness of that landscape, and my
canvas is the objective consciousness” (qtd in Arte Moderna, 68). An even better
 267

example, of course, would be the art of the Surrealists, which deliberately

abandoned itself to the power of the unconscious.
28 Spengler had been given a prominent place also in the lecture “Fundamental
Problems of Contemporary Culture,” which Bukharin delivered in Paris on Notes to
pages 150–7

3 April 1936, several months before his arrest (243, 257–8). The lecture addresses
most of the topics that Bukharin’s prison manuscript will treat at greater length.
29 Bukharin mentions Simmel, Max Scheler, and Karl Lamprecht.
30 There is an analogous passage in Bukharin, “Fundamental Problems” 237–8.
31 “The growth of socialism in the USSR has already worked out new forms (laws,
customs and a world outlook)” (Bukharin, The Prison Manuscripts 199).
32 In the speech concluding the Sixteenth Congress of the CPSU (July 1930), Stalin
announced: “It is clear that we have already entered the period of socialism, for
the socialist sector now holds all the levers of the entire people’s economy,
although the construction of a socialist society and the elimination of class
distinctions are still far ahead” (“Zakliuchitel’noe” 6).
33 See the quotation from Simmel in n18 of this chapter.
34 On the question of Stalinist literary criticism as an arbiter of vitality, see
Iampolski.
35 For a detailed discussion of these categories and their genesis, see James 2–14,
84–102. For a more recent treatment, see Balina and Günther.

7. The Unbearable Light of Being

1 The distinction between Darstellung and Vertretung is a pivotal theoretical point

in Gayatri Spivak’s appropriation of Marxism for post-colonial criticism (276–9).
2 The Seventeenth Party Congress, which has remained in history as the
“Congress of Victors,” was held in late January–early February 1934, in
Moscow. It celebrated the achievements of the First Five-Year Plan and, on the
basis of them, charted a course towards a classless society over the next five
years. The congress also celebrated the unity of the Party now that the “rightist
deviation” (led by Bukharin, Rykov, and Tomskii) had been neutralized.
3 Gor’kii’s rhetoric may well be a conscious echo of Stalin’s. Panferov has reported
the following statement made by the Leader during one of his meetings with
writers: “Let the writer learn from life [uchitsia u zhizni]. If he reflects the truth of
life in a highly artistic form, he cannot fail to arrive at Marxism [nepremenno
pridet k marksizmu]” (“Rech’”).
268

4 Cf. also in Gor’kii: “it goes without saying that socialist realism can only be
created on [the basis] of the facts of socialist experience” (“O sotsialisticheskom”
614).
Notes to pages 158–62

5 In his speech at the First Congress of the Union of Soviet Writers, Nikolo
Mitsishvili formulated a similar thesis: “In the years prior to the Second FiveYear
Plan, the transformation of people’s consciousness, the liquidation of the leftovers
of capitalism in the consciousness of authors, was determined not so much by
ideological factors, as by the very progress of socialist construction” (Pervyi 155;
emphasis added).
6 See pp. 118–19 in this book.
7 The following statement, from a review of Ehrenburg’s Ne perevodia dykhaniia
(Not Catching One’s Breath; 1935), highlights these shortcomings while also
providing a revealing explanation for them: “The internal principles
[zakonomernosti] of our development and their iron logic have not yet fully
etched themselves [otchekanilis’] in Ehrenburg’s consciousness, so as to cast
themselves [otlit’sia] into the sharply-defined plot lines of his books. Hence – the
amorphous structure of Ne perevodia dykhaniia, its formless, musical-lyrical
construction” (Gal’perina 233; emphasis added). Note how the author is displaced
as the subject of the sentence and his consciousness as the agency of
representation. They appear, instead, as locatives. In the place they circumscribe,
another agency does its work. This other agency is “reality” itself, which, through
the internal dynamic of its “principles,” proves capable of “etching” and “casting”
itself in the receptive medium and thus giving birth to representations. Since this
power of reality is constant and axiomatic, the shortcomings of actual artistic
representations (Ehrenburg’s books, with their discordant plot structure) can only
be explained through the inadequacies of the human medium. The critique’s
implicit message is that the place of inscription – Ehrenburg’s consciousness – is
still a “dense” one, if the hard tip of history’s iron logic has been unable to
inscribe therein the neat lines of a coherent story.
8 Since Russian lacks markers for the definite form of nouns, their translation into
English always involves interpreting the semantic context. In the present case, the
choice is between “in search of truth” and “in search of the truth.” I believe the
latter is more appropriate when the context is Stalinist discourse. In it, “truth”
usually figures as something already known, quite definite, and definitive.
9 See a similar characterization in another critical response to Den’ vtoroi, which
likewise undertakes to demonstrate the extent of Ehrenburg’s transformation:
Selivanovskii 227.
 269

10 In a discussion of John Dos Passos’s work, a Soviet critic explained how someone
living under capitalism can be made to see: “Even a relatively revolutionary
position on the part of the artist in the conditions of contemporary Notes to pages
162–5

capitalism opens his eyes for a truthful seeing and truthful depiction of reality and
saves art from destruction in the hopeless and hideous confusion of empirical
detail” (Kirpotin 40; emphasis added).
11 In the words of Régine Robin: “The general laws that govern nature apply to the
realm of History, taking into account the specificity of human societies. History is
no longer anything but a natural phenomenon; it produces only singularizing
effects growing out of the laws of nature-History, illustrations of a general
evolution, phenomena actualizing an essence … History thus becomes a version
of nature in the service of the political; it is preinterpreted, events are already
foreseen; or, if an event takes place that does not coincide with the path already
traced, this is because the struggle includes resistance from forces hostile to
socialism, which may take various forms (rightists, Trotskyites, kulaks, saboteurs,
spies, neo-Mensheviks, and so on)” (xxvii).
12 “It is a peculiarity of socialist society that it consciously plans its future; the
reality of its tomorrow becomes indubitable, it can be verified, controlled. Stalin’s
five-year plans give the opportunity to each Soviet citizen to breathe the air of a
future being actually created, being ‘made’ by history” (Tager 211). The same
critic went on to speak of socialist realism as the “art of a guaranteed future”
(211).
13 See Stalin, “K voprosam” 141–2; “Otvet” 232.
14 One is reminded of Rilke’s disenchanted invocation of what it means to live and
die as a modern: “One comes along, one finds a life all prepared, one only has to
put it on. One wants to leave or is forced to; no strain: Voilà votre mort,
monsieur’. One dies as one happens to; one dies the death that belongs to the
diease one has (for all diseases are known, one also knows that their various fatal
conclusions belong to the diseases and not to the person, and the ill person has, so
to speak, nothing to do)” (Notebooks 5–6).
15 Here is how the journal Literaturnyi kritik described the acquisition of ideological
knowledge by Soviet writers: “When the writer, the artist, leaves the narrow walls
of his studio and plunges head-first into the thick of life [golovoi okunutsia v
gushchu zhizni], when he sees in practice and feels with his own hands the great
transformations taking place in our country, the enormous shifts in the
consciousness of people … then he will master in the best way possible the
270

dialectics of life and will educate himself as a true communist, a Marxist-

Leninist” (“Marksizm-Leninizm” 10). We recognize here the gist of Gor’kii’s
story, in which dialectical materialism figures not as a prerequisite for knowing
the world, but as a point of arrival.
16 For testimonies on the blinding effects of socialism, see pp. 206–7 in this book.
Notes to pages 166–74

17 Just how widespread this rhetoric was can be seen from a letter published in
Literaturnyi kritik, in which a reader avows Soviet reality’s power of
“argumentation” (Lenobl’ 108).
18 Rozental’ was deputy editor of the journal for the first five years of its existence.
He replaced Pavel Iudin as editor-in-chief in 1938 and remained at this post until
1940, when the journal was closed. At the end of the 1940s, Rozental’ became a
target of the “anti-cosmopolitan campaign.”
19 The tragic fate of Bezhin Meadow (1935–7), which the authorities ordered
destroyed before final editing, and the ensuing vociferous campaign against its
director, proved that the “sins” of Eisenstein’s modernist past were never quite
forgotten.
20 John Locke once defined reflection as the “inner perception” by which the mind is
aware of its own thoughts. Before him, Descartes had famously grounded the
being of the ego in the self-evidence of this same inner perception. Kant’s version
of it was the unity of apperception.

8. Ideology as Authentication

1 The first appearance of the term “socialist realism” was in Literaturnaia gazeta on
23 May 1932, quoting a speech by Ivan Gronskii (qtd in “Obespechim vse
usloviia” 1). Subsequent accounts, however, routinely attributed the term to
Stalin, along with the definition of writers as “engineers of human souls.” This is
already the case in the 1935 volume of Bol’shaia sovetskaia entsiklopediia (see
“Iskusstvo”). See also p. 204 in this book.
2 In a revealing pronouncement made in 1933, the art critic Abram Efros noted the
seemingly paradoxical situation that the new Soviet style was both present and
absent: “We know its name; it is on everyone’s lips; everything speaks of
‘socialist realism.’ And yet there is nothing to which [this name] can be applied.
Not a single artist, not a single work, is yet equal to its parameters. Our art falls
behind our reality” (560; emphasis added). The new artistic style is absent to the
extent that no artist or work adequately conveys it. Yet it is present insofar as it is
presupposed by the socialist infrastructure, which, as Efros tells us, has run ahead
of the superstructure. In the same vein is the following statement in the inaugural
 271

issue of Literaturnyi kritik (June 1933): “Soviet literature has not yet become what
it could and should become” (qtd in “Nashi zadachi” 4; emphasis in the original).
Implicit in these typical pronouncements is the Stalinist ideologeme of theory’s
lag behind practice, which can be interpreted, more broadly, to mean the lag of
superstructural phenomena in relation to those of the base; see p. 165 of this book.
3 See K. Clark, Soviet 27.
Notes to pages 174–86

4 See above, pp. 164–5.

5 The thesis was advanced in Stalin’s speech to the Central Committee plenum of
July 1928 and elaborated in numerous subsequent pronouncements. See Stalin,
“Ob industrializatsii i khlebnoi probleme” 170–1; Stalin, “O pravom uklone” 34–
9; Stalin, “Politicheskii otchet” 302; Stalin, “Itogi” 211–12.
6 For examples of such accounts, see Kosarev 39; Kaganovich 18–21; Shubrikov
32–3.
7 In a footnote, Althusser points out that this explanation was prevalent even in
Communist circles, where various “deviations” were blamed on the actions of
such “cliques” of bad men (“Ideology” 165). It may be added that for a long time
this was also the prevalent explanation for the epochal historical deviation called
Stalinism. The ideological lies that covered up the tragedies and crimes of this
period were deduced straightforwardly from the actions of Stalin and his clique.
In recent years this type of historical demonology has mostly descended to the
shelves of semi-scholarly literature, yet its currency in popular consciousness –
both in Russia and in the West – remains high.
8 The way this insight is phrased in the text differs (“in letter, not in spirit”) from
my formulation. In Althusser’s words, the question of ideology cannot be a
question of “cause” (“Ideology” 165).
9 “[Ce] n’est pas leurs conditions d’existence réelles, leur monde réel, que les
‘hommes’ ‘se représentent’ dans l‘idéologie, mais c‘est avant tout leur rapport à
ces conditions d’existence qui leur y est représenté” (emphasis added).
10 “[The] Law, that has been lying in wait for each infant born since before his birth,
and seizes him before his first cry, assigning to him his place and role, and hence
his fixed destination” (Althusser, “Freud” 211).
11 Althusser expresses this with the statement that “individuals are ‘abstract’ with
respect to the subjects they always already are” (“Ideology” 176); and in another
place: “concrete subjects exist insofar as they are supported by a concrete
individual” (“Ideology” 174).
272

12 The case for an epistemological break between the thought of the early and late
Marx is developed at length in Althusser, “On the Young Marx.” For an unsparing
critical attack on this thesis, see Kolakowski. The idea of the “break” as the
principal object of Althusser’s theoretical oeuvre is treated in Balibar.
13 Althusser has characterized The German Ideology (along with the Theses on
Feuerbach) as a “work of the Break” (Althusser and Balibar, Reading Capital 31,
39).
14 See Marx, Capital 163–77. This inspiration is not acknowledged in the ISA essay
itself, but see Althusser and Balibar, Reading Capital 66, 191; Althusser, “Reply”
51–2.
Notes to pages 186–8

15 “Thus fetishism is not simply an illusory appearance. It is the mode of existence of

capitalist production. The mystified character of the system results not from some
accidental feature of it, or from the skill of the capitalists in fooling workers, but
from its very heart, from the nature of the commodity, that is, from the very form
that the products of labour must take under the capitalist mode of production”
(Callinicos 49; emphasis in the original).
16 This is what Slavoj Žižek has termed the “objectivity of belief.” Commenting on
the same text in Marx, Žižek states: “The point of Marx’s analysis is that things
(commodities) themselves believe in the place of subjects: it is as if all their
beliefs, superstitions and metaphysical mystifications, supposedly surmounted by
the rational, utilitarian personality, are embodied in the ‘social relations between
things’. They no longer believe, but the things themselves believe for them” (317;
emphasis in the original). There are serious difficulties in turning Marx’s account
of fetishism into a comprehensive view of ideology, apart from Marx’s own
unwillingness to do so. It is rather obvious that the vast array of practices
Althusser deems ideological – the actions of mourners at a funeral, those of fans
at a soccer match, and so on – do not stand in the same relationship of
straightforward determination by basic economic mechanisms. But if this is the
case, the thesis that these practices constitute a necessary imaginary relation
becomes unsupportable. Conversely, one could grant to Althusser that individuals
necessarily engage in activities through which some form of social identity is
exercised. But if ideology is nothing more than this general assumption of some
social roles, then it becomes logically impossible to demonstrate that it always
serves to reproduce existing relations of production.
17 For how Althusser understands Lacan’s role in transmitting and enriching Freud’s
legacy, see Althusser, “Freud.” For a critical commentary on Althusser’s
intellectual debt to Lacan, see Macey.
 273

18 This twofold dynamic is the subject of Althusser’s meditations in the first part of
the essay, where he endeavours to distinguish between the reproduction of the
forces of production and the reproduction of the relations of production.
19 In another text, borrowing an expression from Lacan, Althusser describes the
generation of ideology as a “theatrical machine” (“Freud” 216). On Althusser’s
mechanistic metaphors, see Thompson 132–42, 46.
20 See above, pp. 176–8.
21 Thus Lévi-Strauss famously declares that his interest is “not how men think in
myths, but how myths operate in men’s minds without their being aware of the
fact” (12).
22 The popularity of Althusser’s work, after the publication of For Marx (1965) and
Reading Capital (1968), ensured that his theorizations were criticized
Notes to pages 188–9

early and often, especially in Marxist circles. See Kolakowski, Lewis, Rancière,
Thompson.
23 It should be said, in all fairness, that Althusser devotes considerable effort to
eschewing the trap of economic determinism. The related notions of
overdetermination (borrowed from Freud) and structural causality are aimed
precisely against the treatment of the infrastructure as an essence of which
superstructural realities are phenomenal expressions (see Althusser,
“Contradiction”). Still, I believe that “Ideology and Ideological State
Apparatuses” surrenders a large part of these earlier conceptual gains. It would
seem that the concept of overdetermination is most useful when applied to
particular historical situations, when it can be shown that a given social formation
is constituted by “instances” of various levels and degrees of effectivity. But in the
ISA text, Althusser is dealing with ideology in general in its relation to society in
general. From this perspective, ideology is the product of an abstractly conceived
structure of economic relations. If Althusser is thinking in terms of Marx’s notion
of fetishism – as I believe he is – the same conclusion suggests itself: ideology is
the necessary form of appearance of a fundamental economic mechanism.
24 As Terry Eagleton has pointed out, things are not quite in order with Althusser’s
transplantation of psychoanalytic categories. He seems to confuse the constitution
of the ego with that of the unconscious (Eagleton 144–5). In the ISA essay, he
speaks often of ideology as an imaginary relation, with obvious reference to
Lacan’s Imaginary, but many passages make it clear that Althusser’s ideology is
also Lacan’s Symbolic Order. For instance, the child’s entrance into a life already
prestructured in terms of expectations, obligations, and family and social roles
274

(Althusser, “Ideology” 176) is, most certainly, an entrance into the Symbolic, not
the Imaginary. Althusser offers no argument for how these two aspects of ideology
can be made compatible or shown to interact. If – as one would have to assume –
the imaginary relation is what makes the necessary symbolic assignments
bearable, livable, then ideology becomes unbelievably omnipotent. It is both that
which creates roles and that which ensures their manning (through the primary
function of interpellation).
25 This possibility is prepared by Althusser himself, who holds that ideology remains
a component of the social whole even in communism. See the glossary definition
of the term at the end of Althusser and Balibar, Reading Capital (314).
26 On this point, see Rancière 131.
27 It is necessary to read Thompson’s vitriolic attack on Althusser with an
understanding of its immediate historical and intellectual context. On the British
Left after the mid-1960s, an old guard of intellectuals, including Notes to pages
189–92

Thompson, saw itself displaced by a new generation intent on infusing Marxism

with fresh theoretical vigour. For the latter group, Althusser’s writings held a
promise of pushing through the impasses of postwar Western Marxism. When
Thompson speaks of “Althusserianism,” he certainly means Althusser’s French
pupils (Étienne Balibar, in particular), but also British followers like Barry
Hindess, Paul Hirst, and – less directly – Perry Anderson, the editor of New Left
Review. For Anderson’s response to Thompson, see Anderson, Arguments. A
judicious arbitration of the sparring match between Thompson’s The Poverty and
Anderson’s Arguments can be found in Jacoby.
For in-depth treatments of the structuralist turn in Western Marxism, see Benton
and Resch. For an advocacy of Althusser’s anti-Stalinist thinking and politics, see
Lock.
28 “So ideology is as such an organic part of every social totality. It is as if human
societies could not survive without these specific formations, these systems of
representations (of various levels) which are ideologies. Human societies secrete
ideology as the very element and atmosphere indispensable to their historical
respiration and life” (Althusser, “Marxism” 232; emphasis in the original).
29 See “Priem.”
30 The “workday” (trudoden’) was legislated in 1930 as a unitary measure for
quantifying and remunerating labour on the newly created collective farms. The
basic meaning of trudodni is this: units of socially necessary work that, after
being performed by the farmer and registered in his “work book” (trudovaia
knizhka), can be exchanged for money or a share of the kolkhoz’s own products.
 275

31 The Russian baza is both “basis” and the (Marxist) “base.” The latter is awkward
in English, yet in this and many other instances, Stalin intends precisely the
meaning drawn from Marxist political economy. His point is that the characters of
these remarkable women could only have grown from a socialist infrastructure.
32 The speech did appear in Pravda the following day, 11 November 1935.
33 Cf.: “The biological men are only the supports or bearers of the guises
[Charaktermasken] assigned to them by the structure of relations in the social
formation” (Althusser and Balibar, Reading Capital 320; emphasis in the
original).
34 The next day the Pravda editorial reported these words of Mariia
Demchenko, one of the celebrities of the shock-work movement: “We can be
confident in our merry life [radostnoe zhit’e]. The old [times] won’t come back,
when my father worked for the landlords and my mother was in tears almost
every day because there was nothing to eat. Now my mother says, ‘It is as if I
Notes to pages 192–5

live in paradise.’ ‘No, mom,’ I answer to her, ‘This is not yet paradise. Paradise is
still ahead of us, and we will attain it. We will study, we will work, and we will
have it all” (“Priem” 1).
35 In the early 1930s, it was common to read stories of transformation in which
inanimate entities like the kolkhoz were the subjects of action, while animate
entities like the Soviet farmers were its object. A local Party activist, comrade
Zharkov, wrote in a letter to the journal Bor’ba klassov (“Class Struggle”): “This
is how the kolkhoz mass was educated in the struggle for socialism. The kolkhoz
firmly imparted upon it new thoughts, habits, notions” (“Bor’ba” 69; emphasis
added).
36 Here is another report from the provinces, which describes the transformation of a
certain Ershtadt under the beneficial influence of “socialist competition”
(sotssorevnovanie): “His psychology was not ours, not proletarian. He took no
part in social work, was not interested in the kolkhoz production, and only thought
of how to get home more quickly after work. Now he carries social
responsibilities and fulfills them conscientiously … The [socialist] competition
fundamentally changed his worldview” (“Odna” 2).
37 See p. 165 in this book.
38 See above, p. 160.

9. The Blind, the Seeing, and the Shiny

276

1 On the topic of objective enemies, see Arendt 423–5.

2 “[The objective enemy] is never an individual whose dangerous thoughts must be
provoked or whose past justifies suspicion, but a ‘carrier of tendencies’ like the
carrier of a disease” (Arendt 424).
3 “I think that in our country, under the conditions of proletarian dictatorship, there is
not and there cannot be a single, more or less important, political or economic fact
that did not reflect the existence of class struggle in town and country” (Stalin, “Ob
industrializatsii i khlebnoi probleme” 169). “It stands to reason: it is impossible,
given the existence of the petite-bourgeois element [stikhiia] and the pressure of
this element on our party, to not have Trotskyist tendencies. It is one thing to arrest
the Trotskyist cadres or expel them from the party. It is another thing to eliminate
the ideology of Trotskyism. This is more difficult” (Stalin, “Ob industrializatsii
strany” 278). Obviously, by “ ideology” here Stalin means not simply a certain
doctrine associated with Trotsky and his supporters, but the general mechanism by
which “opportunist” ideas are bred by the conditions of class struggle in the Soviet
Union. To eradicate Trotskyist ideology is difficult because it requires the
elimination of those objective conditions.
Notes to pages 195–7

4 “The strength of the right opportunism lies in the force of the petite-bourgeois
element, in the force exerted upon the party by capitalist elements in general, and
by the kulak class in particular. And precisely because the right deviation reflects
the resistance of the main elements of the dying classes, the right deviation
constitutes the main danger to the party in our times” (Stalin, “Politicheskii otchet”
361).
5 Cf. later in the same speech: “There are people in the ranks of our party who are
attempting to adapt – perhaps without even noticing it – the work of socialist
construction to the needs of the ‘Soviet bourgeoisie’” (Stalin, “O pravoi opasnosti”
226; emphasis added).
6 Here is the impression the accused Piatakov left on one of the notable foreign
guests in attendance, the German writer Lion Feuchtwanger: “I shall never forget
how [he] stood in front of the microphone, a middle-aged man of average build,
rather bald, with a reddish, old-fashioned, sparse, pointed beard, and how he
lectured. Calmly and at the same time sedulously he explained how he had
managed to sabotage the industries under him. He expounded, pointed his finger,
gave the impression of a school teacher, a historian giving a lecture on the life and
deeds of a man who had been dead for many years, named Piatakov, anxious to
make everything clear even to the smallest details so that his listeners should
understand fully” (125).
 277

7 Cf. earlier in the same speech by Vyshinskii: “Like a cinematic reel played in
reverse, this trial has reminded us of and shown us all the stages of the historical
path of the Trotskyists and Trotskyism, which needed more than 30 years to
prepare, at last, its transformation into an advanced detachment of Fascism, one of
the departments of Fascist police” (Protsess 168–9).
8 Given how such confessions were obtained, it is hardly suprising that they often
echoed Vyshinskii’s rhetoric. The following passage is taken from Kamenev’s last
plea: “I ask myself, is it an accident that alongside of myself, Zinoviev,
Evdokimov, Bakayev and Mrachkovsky are sitting emissaries of foreign secret-
police departments, people with false passports, with dubious biographies and
undoubted connections with the Gestapo. No! it is not an accident. We are sitting
here side by side with the agents of foreign secret- police departments because our
weapons were the same, because our arms became intertwined before our fate
became intertwined here in this dock” (“Last Pleas of Kamenev”; emphasis added).
9 Compare Vyshinskii’s harangue with Stalin’s words from the beginning of 1929:
“The Trotskyists’ struggle against the VKP(b) had its own logic, and this logic led
the Trotskyists into the anti-Soviet camp. Trotsky began by advising his followers
in January, 1928, to attack the leadership of VKP(b), without opposing themselves
to the USSR. However, given the logic of the Notes to pages 198–202

struggle, Trotsky reached the point where the blows he aimed at the leadership of
VKP(b), against the leading force of the proletarian dictatorship, were inevitably
directed at the very dictatorship of the proletariat, against the USSR, against our entire
Soviet society” (“Dokatilis’” 314–15; emphasis added). 10 See ch. 8 n33.
11 “We represent a most brutal gang of criminals who are nothing more or less than a
detachment of international fascism” (“Last Pleas of Mrachkovsky”; emphasis
added).
12 For Vyshinksii’s explanation of this logic of degradation, see Protsess 21.
13 This was the trial of the so-called Anti-Soviet Right Trotskyist Bloc. Among the
accused were Bukharin, Aleksei Rykov, and the former chief of OGPU/ NKVD,
Genrikh Iagoda.
14 An editorial in Krasnaia nov’ summarized the manifest significance of the
assembly days after it was over: “The congress of Soviet writers showed with
concrete clarity that our country is truly becoming the center of world culture, that
the best among the creators of truly cultural values are drawn to the
Soviet Union …
278

“Moscow became the centre uniting the thoughts and feelings of the best
people of all humanity, the greatest artists of the era, the bravest, the most honest,
the most devoted to the very essence of art” (“S”ezd” 4).
In a recent book (Moscow), Katerina Clark has investigated the campaign for a
Soviet Renaissance in the 1930s, which projected Moscow as the centre of a global
socialist culture. While it usefully draws attention to the cosmopolitan aspects of
Stalinism, the study tends to downplay the staged character of the campaign.
15 In the words of a distinguished foreign guest, André Malraux: “All delegations,
which brought to us, along with their gifts, the human warmth and extraordinary
friendship amidst which your literature grows, what did these delegations say? –
‘Express us, show us’” (Pervyi 286). Similarly, in the speech of Aleksandr
Afinogenov: “New people came onto this podium, and they said: ‘Describe us,
write about us’” (Pervyi 429).
16 Otto Schmidt (1891–1956) was the leader of the 1934 Arctic expedition of the
icebreaker Cheliuskin. After it was crushed by icepacks and sunk, 104 crew
members survived on the ice for two long months. During these desperate times,
Schmidt behaved as a true political and moral leader of the group: he organized
poetry readings, lectured on philosophy and world politics, and even published a
wall newspaper (!). In April 1934, the crew was rescued by Soviet airplanes,
which landed directly on the ice. The seven pilots participating in this
unprecedented rescue mission were among the first to be awarded the newly
instituted title “Hero of the Soviet Union.” Schmidt received the same honour in
1937.
Notes to pages 202–8

17 The coal miner Nikita Izotov (1902–52) was a pioneer of the shock-work
movement in the USSR. A 1932 article in Pravda devoted to him inaugurated the
Izotovite movement for training young workers and improving productivity.
18 Bill’ Belotserkovskii: “These days, every corner of the Soviet Union is saturated
with unusual life – a kind of life that may provide material for a truly universal
[literary] theme. Unfortunately, we do not see life, we do not study it sufficiently,
and know it very little” (Pervyi 428; emphasis added).
Anna Karavaeva: “Our enormous country has been seized, from end to end, by
the grandiose processes of building and transforming absolutely all aspects of life.
Great discoveries of Soviet science and technology are taking place all around us.
There is a serious flaw in our life as writers: we stand quite far from the
intellectual life of our country, we still live boring, limited, and insufficiently
social lives” (Pervyi 203).
 279

Boris Romashov: “To study, read, people, the new people, is enormously
difficult … I am not only not familiar with the new [Soviet] man – I often do not
know, cannot do, cannot hear…” (Pervyi 426; emphasis in the original).
19 From 1932 to 1938, Iudin was the director of the Institute of Red Professors,
while serving as the deputy to the head of the Agitprop and Press sections of the
Party’s Central Committee from 1934 to 1937; he was also editor-in-chief of the
journal Literary Critic (Literaturnyi kritik; 1933–7).
20 I have treated the issue of truth in Stalinist culture in another text; see Petrov.
21 I am in no way questioning the patent fact that Marxism-Leninism was an
institutionalized body of knowledge urged upon all Soviet citizens. I wish only to
emphasize that this knowledge led a double life in the Soviet period: on the one
hand, it was a supposedly scientific doctrine to be studied, understood, and
followed with conviction; on the other, it was a teaching-become-life, that is, the
very stuff of everyday experience. The latter aspect is the one that interests me
here. On the issue of life’s priority over “book” knowledge as a foundational trait
of socialist realism, see Ermolaev 154–7, 164–7.
22 See also ch. 7 n3.
23 It is worth remembering here that “sincerity,” understood precisely in these
traditional terms, was to become the slogan word for Thaw culture’s attempt to
veer off the course set by Stalinist socialist realism.
24 On the notion of sensibility in the context of eighteenth-century Sentimentalism,
see Todd 1–9.
25 An almost identical phraseology is to be found in Bukharin’s report to the
congress: “We, USSR, are the apex of the whole world, the backbone of future
humanity. We need to understand, think through, feel through [prochuvstvovat’],
this” (Pervyi 498; emphasis in the original).
26 See Stalin, “O pravom” 10–18.
Notes to pages 210–22

27 As one Stalinist critic expressed it years later, “it is a great happiness to feel the
surrounding world as one’s own world, to see in one’s native country the
embodiment of one’s own ideal, to have the right to depict actual reality as a
realized dream” (Bialik 195). 28 See p. 81 in this book.
29 Consider the following statement by the eminent artist Isaak Brodskii, which
collates the theme of belonging with the imperative for sincerity discussed earlier:
“Now all subjects [temy] are close, dear to us, these are the subjects of socialist
construction, the subjects of the proletariat’s revolutionary struggles, subjects
close to the heart of every artist, every citizen.
280

“If such subjects are commissioned to the artist, [he] will work upon them with
love, as long as this artist is an honest Soviet citizen; and an artist should be, in
the first instance, an honest, decent, earnest, citizen of his Motherland. There is
no need to chase after some freely chosen subjects and consider the
commissioned subject as something terrible. I find it wrong to allow students to
choose [their] subjects” (Pervyi 755; emphasis added).
30 See ch. 6 n25.
31 The “heaven,” in this case, refers to the celestial heights in which the objectivity
of the Marxist-Leninist “scientific” analysis is reinscribed as the effective force of
destiny that rules Soviet society.
32 Gusev’s improvised poem was read by Gor’kii during his closing speech.
33 This impression was captured in Vladimir Ermilov’s frequently quoted equation,
“The beautiful is our life” (Prekrasone – eto nasha zhizn’).

10. Life Happens

1 The Great Dawn is set on the eve of the October Revolution, during the last days
of Russia’s participation in the First World War. Next in the chronological
sequence is The Unforgettable 1919, which follows Stalin through the years of the
Civil War, focusing particularly on his leadership during the defence of Petrograd.
Broadest in its historical scope, The Vow covers the years from 1924 to 1945. The
Fall of Berlin mythologizes the Leader’s role in the Great Patriotic War of 1941 to
1945.
2 Chiaureli’s screenwriting partner for The Great Dawn was Georgii Tsagareli,
while on The Unforgettable 1919 he collaborated with Vsevolod Vyshinskii (on
whose original play the script was based) and Aleksandr Filimonov.
3 Apart from the symbolic association with pilgrimage, the episode is modelled,
quite deliberately, I believe, on the traditional image of the Russian peasant
appearing before the Tsar Himself as a last resort in the pursuit of social justice.
Notes to pages 222–31

4 This widely reproduced photograph is among the very scant evidence suggesting
any kind of close personal relationship between Lenin and Stalin. Needless to say,
it was heavily exploited for purposes of propaganda throughout the Stalinist
period.
5 Chiaureli and Pavlenko will redeploy the formula in The Fall of Berlin, where we
meet a multinational family of Red Army soldiers fronted by a modernday
Russian bogatyr’, Ivan.
6 See p. 183.
 281

7 I am alluding both to the classic essay “The Agency of the Letter in the
Unconscious or Reason since Freud” (delivered first as a lecture in the
Sorbonne on 9 May 1957) and to Lacan’s famous reading of Edgar Alan
Poe’s “Purloined Letter” in his seminar of 1954–5, hosted by the Société
Française de Psychanalyse (see Seminar 191–205). In both texts Lacan
emphasizes the independent and determinative workings of signification, the
preponderance of its “material” aspect (the “letter,” the signifier) over its
“ ideal” counterpart (the intended meaning, the signified).
8 Dušan Makavejev’s film W.R.: Mysteries of the Organism (1971), which
interpolates several scenes from The Vow, makes an explicit connection between
phallic sexual arousal and the idolization of Stalin.
9 An identical logic is at work in the ritualistic traditions of many Indigenous
cultures. Particular places within the tribal territory are associated with the
archetypal journey of the ancestor (cultural hero). This trajectory is retraced and
the places are revisited during holiday celebrations, when specific rituals evoke
the memory of mythic times, just as they evoke, for quite practical purposes, the
energy of the ancestral loci. See, for example, the discussion in Durkheim 330–40.
10 “Miraculation” is a term deployed by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in Anti-
Oedipus to designate a mechanism of mystification characteristic of socio-
economic life under capitalism (10). While wealth is – as always – created by
human agents and their labour, in the inverted world of bourgeois economic
relations it is as if wealth (in the form of capital) is the engine that drives
production and “activates” the labour of humans (a fact captured in such common
pronouncements as “investment creates jobs”). “Miraculation” refers to this effect
of inversion whereby capital serves as the (quasi-)cause of the subject’s actions
and in a deeper sense produces the subject. As I have been trying to show,
Stalinist socialism possessed its own version of the ideology of miraculation.
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 75; art vs craft, 93, 95–6; on daily
Index life as culture, 255n7; Iskusstvo, 96,
256n13; Proletkultism, 90;
“Rechetvorchestvo,” 75; review of
Pack of Orders, 140; social
commission,
142–3, 240n6. See also Futurism
avant-garde, 4–6, 14–15, 20, 235n1,
237nn15–17, 263n1. See also
modernism
Avdeenko, Aleksandr, 208–9, 216
Avenarius, Richard, 76, 252n6
Averbakh, Leopol’d, 111, 112, 115,
Adorno, Theodor, 15, 19–22, 135
118–19, 121, 124, 159, 261–2n31
AKhRR (Association of Artists of
Revolutionary Russia), 146
Babel, Isaac, 216
All-Russian Association of Proletarian
Bakhtin, Mikhail, 262n33
Writers (VAPP). See VAPP
Bakunin, Mikhail, 91
Althusser, Louis: on disappearance of
Balibar, Étienne, 270nn12–14, 272n25,
ideas, 173, 186; Eagleton on, 272n24;
272–3n27, 273n33
on Freud, 186–7, 272nn23– 4;
Ball, Hugo, 236n13
interpellation, 185; on Lacan,
Barthes, Roland: art and market,
186–7, 270n10, 271n19, 272n24; on
14–15; “The Death of the Author,”
Marx, 185–6, 270nn12–14, 271–
2n22; popularity of, 271–2n22; 9–14, 135; diachrony and history,
structural causality, 272n23; 241n11; historicity and universality,
Thompson on, 189, 272–3n27. 9–11; The Pleasure of the Text, 14–
See also “Ideology and Ideological 15; primacy of language in
State Apparatuses” modernism, 11–12
Althusser, Louis, works: belonging: death of the author, 15–16,
“Contradiction,” 272n23; “Freud and 30; at First Congress (1934), 33, 209–
Lacan,” 186–7, 270n10, 272n24; 10; and modernism, 15–16, 24, 146;
“Marxism,” and revolutionary romanticism, 209–
273n28; “On the Young Marx,” 10; and socialist realism, 30–1, 33,
185–6, 270n12; Reading Capital, 209–10, 278n29; and
Stalinism, 30; in The Vow, 223–5,
270nn13–14, 271–2n22, 272n25,
273n33 230–2
Anderson, Perry, 237n18, 272–3n27 Bely, Andrei, 235n1, 236n5
Benois, Aleksandr, 145
Anti-Soviet Right Trotskyist Bloc show
trial. See Moscow show trials Berdiaev, Nikolai, 5
Arvatov, Boris: artists and praxis, 24, Berkovskii, Naum, 259n3
Bespalov, Ivan, 61, 62–3, 247–8n16,
302 Index

247n15, 248–9n18, 249n19, 250n32 The Prison Manuscripts, 150, 265–

Bezymenskii, Aleksandr, 111, 259n2, 6n28,
261n22 266n31; Socialism and Its Culture,
Bialik, Boris, 157, 278n27 150, 262n39
Blok, Aleksandr, 5–6, 236n5 Bürger, Peter, 14
Bobrinskaia, Ekaterina, 237n15, Burke, Seán, 8, 23, 53–4, 236n11,
237n17, 256n10, 263n1 244–5n40
Bogdanov, Aleksandr, 75–89; Butler, Christopher, 263n3
empiriomonism, 58, 76, 88–9; and
Lenin, 76, 252n4, 259n5; Panferov’s capitalism: in Althusser’s theory of
painting of, 154–6; and ideology, 186–7; death of the author,
Proletkultism, 76, 90, 139; theory of 10; Great Depression, 161, 162–3;
culture, 90–1. See also science of and linguistics, 239n4; and
organization (tektology) modernism, 15; truthful seeing of,
Bogdanov, Aleksandr, works: 267–8n10
Elementy, 253n23; Empiriomonism, Cement (Gladkov), 25–6
76, 89; Filosofiia, 76, 81–9, 252n6, Cézanne, Paul, 265n27
252n8, 253n13, 253n19, 254nn24–7, Chiaureli, Mikhail, 33–4, 220–1,
254n33; “Kollektivisticheskii stroi,” 278nn1–2, 279n5. See also The Vow
81; “Ot filosofii,” 252n7; “Sobiranie,” Chornyi, K., 194
79, 253n18, 253n21; “Sotsialisticheskoe,” Chuzhak, Nikolai, 90, 91, 100, 142,
81; “Taina,” 77; Tektologiia, 76–8, 81, 89, 257n25 cinema: Constructivism,
253n16 Bois, Yve-Alain, 238n20 106–7, 111, 258n34; Eisenstein, 90,
Brecht, Bertolt, 11, 256n10 94, 166–7, 269n19; historico-
Brik, Osip, 38, 93–5, 104, 106, 111, revolutionary film, 221; newsreels,
258n31 107. See also Vertov, Dziga; The Vow
Brodskii, Isaak, 278n29 Clark, Katerina, 115, 276n14
Bruski (Panferov), 154–6 Clark, T.J., 15, 23, 236n7
budetliane, 12, 100, 135. See also Communist-Futurist collective
Futurism (Komfut), 102–3, 258n31
Bukharin, Nikolai: critique of Communist Party of the Soviet Union
Formalism, 245n2; form and society, (CPSU). See entries beginning with
150; Moscow show trials, 196, Russia
276n13; in prison, 262n39; socialism Congress of Soviet Writers. See First
as reality, 127, 150–1, 262n39; on All-Union Congress of Soviet
Spengler, 265–6n28; Stalin’s attack Writers (1934) consciousness:
on, 208; style of socialism, 150. See capitalism traces in masses, 267n5;
also Moscow show trials class and system of thought, 117–18;
Bukharin, Nikolai, works: class consciousness, 113–14, 119–21;
“Fundamental Problems,” 266n30; and death of the author, 8–9; and
demanding objects, 125; false
 Index 303

existence, 110–11; identity and agency, Dada, 13–14, 236n13 death of the
126; instrumentalization of, 110; and author: about, 3, 7–8, 16,
literature as device, 110–11; Lukács on, 26–30, 131–5, 235n1; agonism, 20,
113–14; RAPP’s theories, 125; Ricoeur 25–6; anonymous centre, 131–2, 138,
on, 149; art as symbolic performance,
8–9; science of organization, 81, 16–19; art’s apartness from life, 14–
254n33; “seen-ness” and reality, 167– 16, 203; belonging, 15–16, 30;
71; and social commission, Constructivism, 15, 29–30, 102–3; in
119–20, 125–6; and socialism, 160, Dada, 13–14; depersonalization, 12–
165; and structure or organization, 13, 19–20, 23–6, 30, 132, 146–8,
126 237n15; and Eliot on tradition, 12–
Constructivism: about, 6–7, 29–30, 95; 13, 134–5; and Formal ism, 29–30,
acts and facts, 99, 257n19; art vs 37–8, 44, 46, 53–4, 241n14; Foucault
craft, 93, 95–6; biomechanics, 100–2, on, 236n10; and Futurism, 16–18,
110, 256n10, 257n26, 257–8n27, 135; Gastev’s Pack of Orders, 136–
259n1; cinema, 103–9, 111, 258n34; 41; grounding,
death of the author, 15, 29–30, 102– 16, 18; historical context, 8–11, 13,
3; demanding object, 7, 238n20; 22–3, 26, 238–9n26; influence of
determinism, 98; faktura, 98–9, 125; Freud, Nietzsche, and Marx, 8–9, 14,
form and constructor, 98, 257n20; 236n11; and language, 7, 11–12;
here and there, 91–5, 102–3, 108; overcoming re-presentation, 71–2,
manifestos, 98, 134, 257n21; material 91–2, 94, 103, 123, 125; and
as active principle, 95; materiological personality, 13; rejection of creative
determination, 256n11; motivation, personality, 238–9n26, 255n8, 260n9;
98, 238n20, for the sake of something, 9–11;
257n20; principles, 97–9, 256n12, science of organization, 29–30;
256n17; social commission, 97, 122, socialist realism, 25–7,
125; socio- utilitarian tectonics, 95–9, 155–6; Sociological school, 29–30,
98–9, 102, 124–5, 256n12; 58, 68–9; summoning, 16; as
terminology, 98; theatre, 100–2, symbolic act, 18–19; text as token,
256n10, 258nn28–30. See also Gan, 30–1; theories of impersonality, 12,
Aleksei; 22–3, 238–9n26; universality and
INKhUK; Rodchenko, Aleksandr; historicity, 9–11
Vertov, Dziga “The Death of the Author” (Barthes),
CPSU (Communist Party of the Soviet 9–14, 135
Union). See entries beginning with De Chirico, Giorgio, 263n6 Deleuze,
Russia Gilles, 279n10 de Man, Paul, 244n34
cult of personality, 221, 230–1 cultural demanding object: about, 21–3, 29–30;
act, 15, 31, 91, 95, 103, 110, consciousness as, 125; Constructivism,
131, 135, 139–40, 216, 220, 225 7, 90–1, 238n20; dialectics of content
cultural politics, 111 and form, 152–3; Formalism, 41;
Futurism, 93; masses as, 92–3, 118;
304 Index

material as form or content, 21–3, 241n14, 242n16, 243n29, 246n10,

238nn22–3; and motivation of artistic 249n22
practice, 21–2, 238n20; organization Eisenstein, Sergei, 90, 94, 166–7,
(tektology), 78–9; science of 269n19
organization, 78–9, 88–9; socialism as, Eliot, T.S., 12–13, 134–5, 235n1
26 Engels, Friedrich: dialectical
Demchenko, Mariia, 273–4n34 materialism, 252n6; The German
Descartes, René, 269n20 dialectical Ideology,
materialism: Bogdanov’s critique, 76, 185–6, 248n17, 270n13; The Holy
252n6; dissimulation, 125; in Gor’kii’s Family, 260n11
speech, 156–7, 165–6, 268n15; history Envy (Olesha), 216–18
as natural phenomenon, 268n11; Erlich, Victor, 239nn2–3, 240–1n9
ideological conversion of writers, Ermilov, Vladimir, 159, 278n33
165–6; as outcome of practice, 159– Eysteinsson, Astradur, 7, 235n1, 263n5
60, 165; proletarian knowledge of,
157; and RAPP, 119–21, 125, 204; Faiko, Aleksei, 210–11 faktura, 42,
socialist realism, 157–8 53, 74, 84, 97–100, 125, 240–1n9;
dissimulation: and Bogdanov, 85–6, translation, 240–1n9
88; Constructivism, 96, 125; de The Fall of Berlin (Chiaureli), 221,
Man on, 244n34; demystifying acts, 278n1, 279n5
50; dialectical materialism, 125; Feuchtwanger, Leon, 275n6 film.
Formalism, 49–51; here and there, See cinema
91–5, 102–3; and Lenin, 85; First All-Union Congress of Soviet
organization (tektology), 85–6; Writers (1934): about, 33, 200–2,
Romanticism, 47; Sociological 276n14; Avdeenko at, 208–9, 216;
school, 60, 62 belonging, 33, 209–10; Darstellung
Dobrenko, Evgenii: Aesthetics, 118, and Vertretung, 202–3; Gor’kii at,
244n39, 255n8; creative personality, 201–6; method of socialist realism,
238–9n26, 255n8, 260n9; Formovka, 148, 204–5; new poetic language,
124, 238–9n26, 255n2, 260n9, 214–16; Olesha at, 216–18; Pasternak
261n29; proletarian writer, 121, at, 200, 201, 213–16, 218;
124; social commission, 118 proniknut’sia (rendering oneself
Doesburg, Theo van, 144, 153, 238n21 permeable), 207–9, 215, 217–18; as
Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 249n19 public spectacle, 33, 200–2, 214,
“Dyr-bul-shchyl” (Kruchenykh), 74 218–19; reformation of artistic
intelligentsia, 267n5; revolutionary
Eagleton, Terry, 188, 272n24 romanticism, 209–10, 214;
Efros, Abram, 269n2 “seenness,” 206–7; “shiny, happy
Ehrenburg, Il’ia, 160–4, 167, 171, people,” 200–2, 204, 207, 215–16;
267n7, 267n9 sincerity, 205–7, 277n23, 278n29;
Eikhenbaum, Boris, 41, 44, 135, social commission, 201–2; style of
 Index 305

socialist realism, 199–201, 213–16, 239n2; science of organization, 84;

265n25; writers’ roles, 201–5, and Sociological school, 56–8, 63,
212–13, 218–20, 277n18 65, 246nn7–8; in Stalinist culture, 53,
First Congress of Proletarian Writers 55–6, 246n4; text as machine, 84;
(1928), 260n8 text as token, 51; ustanovka
First Moscow Conference of Proletarian (orientation, set)
Writers (1923): “Materialy,” 242n17, 248–9n18; “word as such”
112, 113, 114–15 (slovo kak takovoe), 53. See also
Flaubert, Gustave, 11, 12, 18 Shklovskii, Viktor; Tynianov, Iurri
Fokht, Ul’rikh, 63, 246n8, 249n25 Foucault, Michel, 41, 87, 236n10
Formalism: about, 29–30, 37–8, 51–2, Freud, Sigmund: Althusser on, 186–7,
53–5; art-as-device, 38–45, 65, 69, 271n17, 272nn23–4; and death of the
84; art vs craft, 49, 94, 240nn6–7, author, 8–9, 236n11; desire, 9;
242–3n23; autonomy of the text, 19– dispersal of the subject, 8, 87–8,
20; background of formal innovation, 236n11; dream analysis, 48–51, 186–
42, 242n20; constructive principle, 7, 244n31; hermeneutics of faith and
30, 40–1, 44–7, 49, 65, 85, 241n13, suspicion, 47, 50, 237n14, 244n35;
243n27; death of the author, 29–30, Lacan on, 186–7; objects of desire,
37–8, 44, 46, 53–4, 241n14; 265n23; overdetermination, 272n23;
defamiliarization, poetics of witticism, 244n32; re-
39–40, 42–3, 52–3, 73, 240n8, 244– presentation, 71–2; Ricoeur on, 8–9,
5n40; demanding object, 41; 237n14; unconscious, 14, 48–9, 187,
diachrony, 42–3; differential quality 188, 272n24
(Differenzqualitaat), 40, 241n10; Friche, Vladimir, 246n5
dissimulation, 73, 244n34; — in “A frightened man was saying”
representation, 49–51; dominanta, (Guro), 16–18, 20
44, 46, 53, 65, 67, 86, 125, 241n10, Frye, Northrop, 250n31
251n35; fabula-siuzhet dichotomy, Futurism: about, 29, 73–4; “Art of the
43, 49, 59, 242–3n23; fairy tales, 40, Commune,” 93; Communist-
43, 46, 243n24; faktura, 42, 240– Futurist collective (Komfut),
1n9; form as autonomous principle, 258n31; death of the author,
38–43, 85; and Futurism, 53, 73, 16–18, 135; demanding object, 93;
245n42, 251–2n2; hermeneutics and “Dyr-bul-shchyl” (Kruchenykh),
analysis, 47–52, 244n31; “laying bare 74; and Formalism, 53, 73, 245n42,
the device,” 100; “literariness,” 42, 251–2n2; “A frightened man was
52, 102; and Marxism, 55, 58, saying” (Guro), 16–18, 20; making,
245n46, 246n9; and modernism, 53, construction, and arrangement, 74–5;
246n4; poetic and practical language, manifestos, 53, 73–4, 93, 133–4,
42, 242nn16–19, 244n39; precursors, 236n12; “new form engenders new
37, 46–7, 239n3; re- presentation, 72; content,” 243n26; perceptual
and Romanticism, 47, 243n30, 244– awakening, 84; poetics, 53, 73–5, 97,
5n40; science of literature, 37, 40, 100; primacy of language,
306 Index

12; struktura and faktura, 74–5, 84, Greenberg, Clement, 21–2, 140,
97; text as machine, 84; text as token, 237n16, 238n22
74; theory and practice, 73–4; “word Greimas, A.J., 46
as such” (slovo kak takovoe), 12, 135, Gronskii, Ivan, 204, 212–13, 269n1
236n12. See also Khlebnikov, Groys, Boris, 4–7, 20, 147, 236n3,
Velimir; Kruchenykh, 237n16
Aleksei Guattari, Felix, 279n10
Guro, Elena, 16–18, 20
Gabo, Naum, 145–6 Gusev, Viktor, 215–16, 278n32
Gan, Aleksei: art vs craft, 93;
Constructivism, 256n12, 257n21; Hegel, Georg Wilhelm, 118, 243n30,
Constructivist principles, 98–9, 265n23
257nn20–3, 258n30; influence on Howe, Irving, 133
Stepanova, 99; tektonika- Iagoda, Genrikh, 276n13
konstruktsiia-faktura, 98–9, 256n12; Iakubinskii, Lev, 242n16 ideology
and Vertov, 259n37. See also (general): Althusser on,
Constructivism 180–90; as authentication, 176–80,
Gastev, Aleksei: anonymous centre, 193, 199; hold upon subjects, 172,
138–41; human imperfection, 92; 177–9, 199; ideological propositions
“Kontury,” 138, 264n13; man and and systems, 178–80, 185; Marxist
machine, 110, 255n6; Nashi zadachi, understanding, 175; objectivity of
255n6; Pack of Orders, 136–41, 152; belief, 194, 211, 271n16; sociological
proletarian psychology, 138; understanding, 175; validation
Vosstanie, 92 (verification), 179, 180. See also
Gershenzon, Mikhail, 20, 264–5n20 Stalinist ideology
Gladkov, Fedor, 25–6 “Ideology and Ideological State
Gogol, Nikolai, 44, 67, 136, 243n29 Apparatuses” (Althusser): about,
Gorbachev, Georgii, 118 32–3, 180, 232–3; dream analysis,
Gor’kii, Maksim: Avdeenko’s mentor, 186–7; economic infrastructure and
208–9; on dialectical materialism, ideology, 184, 272n23; ideology as
156–7, 165–6, 268n15; early stories, immanent imaginary relation, 182–3;
62–3, 250n32; at First Congress ideology as inhabited representation,
(1934), 201–6; on literary polemics of 183–4; ideology as production, 187,
the 1920s, 239n28; revolutionary 190; individuals as always- already
romanticism, 209–10; on socialist subjects, 184–5, 270nn10–11; ISAs
realism, 266n4; and Stalin, 266nn3–4; (ideological state apparatuses), 180–
truth of socialism, 156–7 1, 184; Marxist duality of base and
Gough, Maria, 6, 24, 98, 102, 238n20, superstructure, 180; material life of
240–1n9, 256n11, 256n16 ideology, 183–4; need to lie, 181–2,
The Great Dawn (Chiaureli), 221, 270nn7–8; and Stalinism, 180, 188–
278nn1, 2 93; theory of subjectification, 185;
 Index 307

tokens of ideology, 33, 191–2. See struktura-rechetvorchestvo-faktura,

also Althusser, Louis 99; theory and poetic practice, 73.
INKhUK, 6, 99, 255n3, 256n16, See also Futurism
257n19, 257n24. See also Kruchenykh, Aleksei, works: “Dyrbul-
Constructivism shchyl,” 74; Faktura 2, 74;
Iudin, Pavel, 203, 205, 277n19 “New Ways,” 73, 243n26, 245n41
Ivanov, Viacheslav, 5, 145, 236n4, Kuleshov, Lev, 107
264–5n20 Kuznitsa (The Smithy), 112–13, 260n9
Izotov, Nikita, 277n17 Lacan, Jacques: Althusser on, 186–7,
Jackson, Robert Louis, 250n29 270n10, 271n19, 272n24; and
Jakobson, Roman, 42, 46, 52, 73, 135, Freud, 186–7, 271n17; Imaginary,
241–2n15, 242n17, 242n19, 242n21 272n24; primacy of the signifier
Jameson, Fredric: on craftsmanship, (letter), 226, 279n7; Symbolic
240n6; depersonalization, 20; on Order, 272n24
Formalism, 245n47; on linguistics, Lawrence, D.H., 264n12
239nn4–5; Postmodernism, 152; The LEF (Left Front of the Arts): about, 91–
Prison-House, 239nn4–5, 240nn6–7; 4; art vs craft, 93–6; creative
on Shklovskii, 240n6, 242–3n23; A personality, 93, 255n8; demanding
Singular Modernity, 20, 52; theory of object, 92–3, 118; here and there, 91–
modernism, 20, 237n18 5; material, 94–5; and RAPP, 118,
Joyce, James, 235n1 124; re-presentation, 94–5; social
commission, 118–19, 121–2,
Kamenev, Lev, 196, 198–9, 222, 275n8 135, 261n29
Kandinskii, Vasilii, 257n24 Lefebvre, Henri, 142–3
Kant, Immanuel, 269n20 Lehnert, Hans-Jürgen, 249n21,
Khlebnikov, Velimir, 5, 53, 73, 235n1, 251n36
236n12 Lelevich, Grigorii, 111, 259n2, 260n17
Khodasevich, Vladislav, 251–2n2 Lenin, Vladimir: and Bogdanov, 76,
Khrapchenko, M., 249–50n27 252n4, 259n5; Materialism and
Kiaer, Christina, 97, 256n16 Empiriocriticism, 70, 76; NEP, 23;
Kirchner, Ludwig, 263n2 objectivity, 70–1; social being, 70–1;
Kirshon, Vladimir, 159, 194, 211, 212 spontaneity, 120; and Stalin, 222,
Komar, Vitaly, 173–4 279n4; in The Vow, 222–3, 227,
Komfut (Communist-Futurist 231–2
collective), 102–3, 258n31 Lermontov, Mikhail, 135–6
Kruchenykh, Aleksei: and Formalism, Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 7–8, 87, 186–7,
53, 73, 245n41; making, 271n21
construction, and arrangement, 74–5; Lezhnev, Abram, 214, 216
manifestos, 53, 74, 236n12; poetics, Libedinskii, Iurii, 111, 113, 116–17,
53, 73–5, 102; Pomada, 252n3; 124, 159, 261n24
struktura and faktura, 74, 78, 84; Lisitskii, El, 94
308 Index

Locke, John, 269n20 RAPP; Sociological or Pereverzevian

Lukács, György, 113–14, 120, 260n11 school
Lunacharskii, Anatolii, 145–6, 150–1, Matiushin, Mikhail, 256n10
245n2, 246n9, 265n21 Mayakovsky, Vladimir, 3, 6, 90, 93,
245n41, 258n31
Mach, Ernst, 76–7, 252n6, 252nn9–10 Melamid, Alexander, 173–4
Malevich, Kazimir, 5, 6, 94, 153 Meyerhold, Vsevolod: biomechanics,
Malinovskii, Aleksandr, 76. See also 100–2, 110, 256n10, 257n26, 257–
Bogdanov, Aleksandr 8n27, 259n1; Constructivist theatre,
Mallarmé, Stéphane, 10–12 100–2, 256n10, 258nn28–30 Mill,
Malraux, André, 276n15 John Stuart, 264n15 miraculation,
MAPP (Moscow Association of 279n10 Mitsishvili, Nikolo, 267n5
Proletarian Writers), 115, 117–18 modernism: about, 3–6, 132–4, 147,
Marc, Franz, 143–6, 150–1 235nn1–2; activism vs aestheticism,
Marcuse, Herbert, 15 141–2, 147, 264n14; aesthetico-
Marx, Karl: Althusser on, 185–6, political project, 4–7; agonism, 25–6;
270nn12–14, 271–2n22; commodity art as symbolic performance,
form, 186; critique of early 16–19; art’s apartness from life,
materialist philosophy, 246–7n11; 14–19, 203; autonomy of the text,
dialectical materialism, 76, 252n6; 19–20; and avant-garde, 235n1;
dispersal of the subject, 8, 87–8, centrality vs suppression of self, 6–7;
236n11; fetishism of commodities, depersonalization and impersonality,
186, 253n19, 271nn15–16, 272n23; 6, 12, 19–20, 22–6, 237n15, 238–
hermeneutics of faith and suspicion, 9n26; “faithful to the text,” 134;
50, 237n14, 244n35; ideology, 181, faktura as concept, 240–1n9; and
185–7; labour theory of value, 9, Formalism, 53,
236n11; modernism’s intellectual 246n4; historical context, 8–11,
context, 71; Ricoeur on, 8–9, 237n14; 22–3, 237n18; horizon of, 147,
surplus value, 71–2, 251n1 265n22; and individualism, 143,
Marx, Karl, works: Capital, 185–6, 145, 264n16, 264n18; life-building,
251n1, 270n14; The Eighteenth 5–6, 236nn4–5, 237n18; manifestos,
Brumaire, 247–8n16; The German 19–20, 133–4; motivation of artist ic
Ideology, 185–6, 248n17, 270n13; practice, 22, 74, 98, 133, 147,
The Holy Family, 260n11; 238n20; and Soviet censure, 53; and
“Introduction to a Critique of Stalinism, 193; status of modernist
Political text, 132–4, 263nn1–2; style and
Economy,” 247n14; “Theses,” culture, 132–3, 142–6, 264–5n20;
253n13, 270n13 text as token, 27–9, 134, 152; and
Marxist literary criticism: about, 175; in theory, 133–5. See also belonging;
Soviet Union, 1920s, 55–6. See also death of the author; demanding
object
 Index 309

Moscow Association of Proletarian klassovost’ and partiinost’, 127;

Writers. See MAPP leadership of proletarian literature,
Moscow show trials, 196–200, 213, 118–19, 261–2n31; and Octobrists,
275nn7–8, 275–6n9, 276nn11–13 111–12; and the Party, 259–60n6,
motivation, 22, 74, 75, 89, 91, 98, 133, 261n22; and Pereval (Voronskii),
147, 238n20 115–17, 260n15; and Proletkultism,
movies. See cinema Mrachkovsky, 259–60n6; social commission,
Sergei, 199, 275n8, 118–19, 121–2, 261n29; and VAPP,
276n11 111, 259n2. See also RAPP
On Literary Guard (Na literaturnom
The Naked Year (Pilniak), 24–5 postu), 259n2 Opoiaz, 53, 239n1,
NARKOMPROS (People’s 257n24 organization, science of. See
Commissariat of the Enlightenment), science
112, of organization (tektology)
259–60n6 The Origin of Socialist Realism
New Economic Policy (NEP), 121, (painting), 173
238n25, 261n19
Nietzsche, Friedrich: dispersal of the Pack of Orders (Gastev), 136–41, 152
subject, 8, 14, 88–9, 236n11; Panferov, Fedor, 154–6, 190, 266n3
hermeneutics of suspicion, 50, Party, Communist (CPSU). See entries
237n14, 244n35; on horizons, 147; beginning with Russia
Ricoeur on, 8–9, 237n14; will to Pasternak, Boris, 2, 200, 201, 213–16,
power, 9 218
Pavlenko, Petr, 220. See also The Vow
objectism (veshchizm), theory of, 94–5 Pereval group, 115–16. See also
Octobrists: artistic-ideological Voronskii, Aleksandr
platform, 112–15, 260n8, 260n14; Pereverzev, Valerian: agency of the
class consciousness, 114–15; and analyst, 65–6; deformation-
MAPP, 115; as neo-Bogdanovites, misrepresentation-dissimulation,
112; and Onguardism, 111–12; and 59–60; on Dostoevsky, 249n19;
the Party, 114–15; platform, 114–15; immanentist approach, 249n21;
proletarian literature, monism, 58–9, 246–7n11; play
112–13, 260n14; and Proletkultism, (igra) and image (obraz), 63–4,
260n9; and RAPP, 260n14; and 249n24; social being, 58–62;
VAPP, 111–12, 115. See also RAPP sociological method, 29; texts as
Olesha, Iurii, 216–18 “living images,” 64, 249n23; unity
On Guard (Na postu), 259n2 of subject and object, 59–60. See
Onguardism: about, 29–30, 111–12, also Sociological or Pereverzevian
259n2; artistic-ideological platform, school
112, 116–18; death of the author, 29– Pereverzev, Valerian, works: “Essential
30; history of, 111–12, 259n2; Premises,” 58, 60, 65–6, 246–7n11;
310 Index

“Formalists,” 60; “K voprosu,” 115–18, 122, 259n3, 260n9, 261n24,

249n25; “Problems,” 63–4, 249n23; 261n27; authorship, 120–4, 127,
“Theoretical 261n27; class consciousness, 120;
Premises,” 57, 58–9, 247n12 dialectical materialism, 119–21, 125,
Pertsov, Viktor, 107 204; dissolution of, 55–6, 127, 157–
Pevsner, Antoine, 145–6 9, 192–3, 204, 245n2; klassovost’ and
photography, Constructivist, 106, 111, partiinost’, 125–7; leadership of
258n34. See also Vertov, Dziga proletarian literature, 118–19, 261–
Pilniak, Boris, 24–5, 235n1 2n31; leading figures, 115,
Platonov, Andrei, 255n1 261n27; “Materialy,” 112, 113,
Plekhanov, Georgii, 63–4 114–15; precursor to socialist
Poggioli, Renato, 20 realism, 126–7; proletarian
Pogodin, Nikolai, 202 literature, 117–18, 122–3; and
Poliakov, M., 246n8, 249n26 Proletkultism, 112, 124, 127,
Pospelov, Genadii: character-images, 260n9; social commission, 117–19,
64–5, 67, 250n28; “K metodike,” 61, 121–2, 124, 261n29; social psyche
66–7, 250n28, 250–1n33; socio- and ideology, 119; style and
psychological complex, 56, 63–7, sociographics, 122–3, 262nn33–4;
249n20, 250n28; “Stil,” 249n20, types of subjectivity, 125–6; and
249n25. See also Sociological or VAPP, 115; and Voronskii, 115–16,
Pereverzevian school 261n18, 261n24. See also Octobrists;
Potebnia, Aleksandr, 37 VAPP
Proletkult: about, 90–1, 112; Reich, B., 122–3, 262n33
artisticideological platform, 124, Richter, Hans, 13
259– 60n6; leading figures, 76, 90; Ricoeur, Paul: hermeneutics of faith and
Lenin on, 259n5; and Octobrists, suspicion, 50, 237n14, 244n31,
260n9; and Onguardism, 259–60n6; 244n35; “home of meaning,” 13,
and the Party, 259–60n6; poetry, 237n14; horizon, 147, 265n22; on
255nn1–2; and RAPP, 112, 124, Marx, Freud, and Nietszche, 8–9,
127, 260n9; reorganization of, 112, 47, 50, 237n14, 244n31
115, 259n5; and “Smithy,” 112–13, Rilke, Rainer Maria, 144, 268n14
260n9 Robin, Régine, 268n11
proniknut’sia (rendering oneself Rodchenko, Aleksandr, 94, 98, 153,
permeable), 207–9, 215, 217–18 256n18, 257n19, 258n34. See also
Propp, Vladimir, 46 Constructivism
Proust, Marcel, 10, 11, 235n1 Rodov, Semen, 111, 259n2, 259n4
Pushkin, Aleksandr, 38, 45, 60 Romanticism: and Formalism, 47,
243n30, 244–5n40; and Genius, 44,
RAPP (Russian Association of 47; and revolutionary romanticism,
Proletarian Writers): about, 112, 126– 157, 209–10, 214, 233; text as
7; artistic-ideological platform, 112, system, 47
 Index 311

Rozental’, Mark, 166, 269n18 culture; Stalin, Joseph; Stalinist

Russia, post-Revolutionary: about, 26; ideology
agonism, 25; artist as technician, not Russian Association of Proletarian
originator, 29; arts patronage, 23–4; Writers. See RAPP
CPSU debates (1926–7), Rykov, Aleksei, 266n2, 276n13
239n27; death of the author, 26; and Sartre, Jean-Paul, 14
the demanding object, 29; Saussure, Ferdinand, 71–2, 239n5
individualism’s end, 145–6; life- Schlegel, Friedrich, 46 Schmidt, Otto,
building, 5–6, 236nn4–5; modernism, 202, 276n16 science of organization
24–6, 235n1; NEP, 115, 121, 238n25, (tektology), 76–89; about, 29–30, 75–9,
261n19; organized cultural politics, 88–9; acts and facts, 78–9, 88–9, 95, 99,
111–12, 115–16; style’s resurgence, 114, 257n19; being as organizational
145–6. See also Constructivism; continuum, 252n8; causality, 82–6;
Formalism; Futurism; modernism; consciousness, 81, 88, 254n33; death of
Onguardism; RAPP; science of the author, 29–30; demanding object,
organization (tektology); 78–9, 88–9; dissimulation, 85, 88;
Sociological or empiriocriticism, 76, 252n6;
Pereverzevian school empiriomonism, 58, 76, 88–9;
Russia, Stalinist: about, 26; CPSU experience and subject, 79; and
Congress (1934), 266n2; CPSU Formalism, 84, 85–6; and Futurism, 84;
resolution on literature (1932), 127, gathering of man, 80, 88, 127; history of
157–9, 174, 192–3; cultural human development, 81–2, 86, 253n18,
revolution, 53, 55–6, 126–7, 204, 254nn24–7; individualism,
262n38; death of the author, 26; 79; knowledge and practice, 85–6,
ideology, 32, 165, 171, 174–6, 178– 88–9; labour causality, 82–6, 87–8;
80, 189–93, 194–200, 218–19, language, 86; Mach’s influence on,
231; kolkhoz system, 191–2, 273n30, 76–7, 252n6, 252nn9–10; machines,
274nn35–6; Moscow show trials, 80–4, 86, 253n23; matter as
196–200, 213, 275nn7–8, 275–6n9, resistance, 252n9; organization,
276nn11–13; objective enemies, 3, defined, 77–8; organization
194–5, 274n2; “shiny, happy people,” principle in knowledge, 85;
162, 200–2, 204, 207, 215–16; shock perceptual awakening, 84; re-
workers, 190–3, 201–2, 273–4n34, presentation, 80; sociomorphism,
277n17; socialism as reality (1930s), 85–7, 254n28; and Solov’ev’s
31, 150–1, 157, 159, 163–4, 171, theory of history, 254n27;
174, 262n39, 266n32; specialization, 80, 253n16; and
Stalin’s ideology and art, 175–6; structuralism, 87; tektology,
Stalin’s rise to power, 195; defined, 78; terminology, 87; theory
Thompson on Stalinism, 188; of culture, 90–1; theory of science,
working women, 191, 273–4n34. See 76–9. See also Bogdanov, Aleksandr
also socialist realism and Stalinist “seen-ness”: about, 31–2, 206; “caught
unawares,” 170; exhibitionistic scene
312 Index

as example, 167–71, 216; and 261n29; RAPP, 117–19, 121–2, 124,

socialist realism, 31–2, 206–7, 218 261n29; varied interpretations of,
Selivanovskii, A., 159, 267n9 261n29
Shaginian, Marietta: creative freedom vs socialist realism and Stalinist culture:
social commission, 118–19, 121, 159; about, 31–2, 146–8, 157–9, 174–6,
and “seen-ness,” 167; socialism 193, 204–5, 233–4; authorship,
as irresistible force, 159–60, 162, 212–13, 277n18; belonging, 30–1,
166, 170–1 33, 209–10, 278n29; cognitive clarity
Shershenevich, Vadim, 133 in artists, 161–2, 164–6;
Shklovskii, Viktor: art vs craft, consciousness and socialism, 160;
240nn6–7, 242–3n23; on canons, CPSU resolution on literature (1932),
244n37; cinema, 242–3n23; 127, 174, 192–3; cultural act as
defamiliarization, 39–40, 52–3, 73, performance, 176; Darstellung and
240n8, 244–5n40; device, Vertretung, 155–6, 176, 191, 202–3,
38–40; dichotomy fabula-siuzhet, 43, 233, 266n1; death of the author, 31,
49, 59, 242–3n23; faktura or 146–8, 155–6, 212–13; in
literariness, 240–1n9; habitualization, Ehrenburg’s works, 160–4;
244–5n40; laws of artistic tradition, Gladkov’s Cement, 25–6; history as
241n12; machines and machine destiny, 232–3; ideinost’, partiinost’,
metaphors, 240n7; new form and new tipichnost’, 32, 152, 175–6; as
content, 243n26; “stoniness” of ideological art, 175–6; klassovost’
stones, 52–3, 96; and partiinost’, 127, 152; life’s
on Tolstoy, 243n25. See also priority over book knowledge, 204,
Formalism 277n21; method, 148, 204–5; and
Shklovskii, Viktor, works: “Art as modernism, 3–4, 26–7, 31, 146–8,
Device,” 38–9, 96; Khod, 39, 41, 193; narodnost’, 127, 152, 262n37;
240n9, 241n12, 243n26, 244n37; objectivity of belief, 194, 211,
Rozanov, 43; “Sviaz,” 43, 241n10 271n16; in Panferov’s Bruski, 154–6;
shock workers, 190–3, 201–2, 273– proniknut’sia (rendering oneself
4n34, 277n17 show trials. See permeable), 207–9, 215, 217–18;
Moscow show trials Shpet, Gustav, RAPP as precursor, 126–7,
133 204; revolutionary romanticism,
Simmel, Georg, 143, 149, 264n18, 157, 209–10, 214, 233; “seen-ness,”
265n26, 266n29, 266n33 31–2, 206–7; “seen-ness” example
The Smithy (Kuznitsa), 112–13, (exhibitionism), 167–71; sincerity,
260n9 social commission: about, 97, 205–7, 277n23, 278n29; socialism as
118–19; consciousness, 125–6; irresistible force, 159–60, 162–6,
Constructivism, 97, 122, 125; creative 170–1; socialism-become-reality
freedom vs social commission, 118–19, (1930s), 163–4, 171–2; and
121, 159; and First Congress (1934), Spengler’s notion of style, 148–50,
201–2; LEF, 118–19, 121–2, 135, 153; Stalin’s cultural revolution, 53,
55–6, 126–7, 204, 262n38; style’s
 Index 313

return under, 31, 147–50, 165, 199– Soviet Writers, Congress of. See First
200, 213–16; terminology, 204, All-Union Congress of Soviet
269nn1–2; text as token, 27–32, 151– Writers (1934)
2, 156–7, 193; texts vs practices, 193, Sovsun, Vasilii, 63
277n21; theory’s lag behind practice, Spencer, Herbert, 252n9
165, 192, 269n2. See also First All- Spengler, Oswald, 131, 148–50, 153,
Union Congress of Soviet 265–6n28
Writers (1934); “Ideology and Spivak, Gayatri, 266n1
Ideological State Apparatuses” Stalin, Joseph: cult of personality, 221,
Sociological or Pereverzevian school, 230–1; and Lenin, 222, 279n4; in
56–69; about, 29–30, 56–7; Beingas- painting Origin of Socialist Realism,
Character, 68–9; causality (etiology), 173–4; rise to power, 195; on
56–7; character types socialism, 239n27, 266n32; socialist
(obraz), 62, 64–5, 111, 249nn24–5, realism, as term, 173–4, 269n1; on
250n29, 250n32; consciousness, 61, socialist realism, 204–5; speech on
247–8n16; content dimensions and intelligentsia (1931), 158; theory’s
hierarchy, 58–9, 67; death of the lag behind practice, 165, 192, 269n2;
author, 29–30, 58, 68–9; in The Vow, 227, 229–31; on writers
dissimulation- organization, 60–2; and socialism, 266n3. See also
and Formalism, 56–8, 63, 65, Russia, Stalinist; socialist realism and
246nn7–8; immanentist approach, Stalinist culture
63, 249nn20–1; Literaturovedenie, Stalin, Joseph, works: “Ob
56; Marxist analysis, 63–6, 247– industrializatsii,” 270n5, 274n3; “O
8n16, 247n14, 248n17; mechanical pravoi,” 195, 275n5; “Politicheskii,”
sociologism, 68–9; methodological 275nn4–5; “Priem,” 190, 273–4n34;
unity, 57, 246n7; play (igra) and “Rabotnikov,” 192; speech at 16th
image (obraz), 63–5; representation, Congress of CPSU (1930), 266n32;
59–61, 68–9; social being, 58–62; speech to shock workers (1935),
social reality and texts, 61, 68, 190–2, 273–4n34
248n17; socio-psychological Stalinist ideology: and Althusser’s
complex, 30, 62–8, 249n20, 250n28; theory of ideology, 188–93; as
structural reproduction, 249n26; style authentication, 176–80, 193, 199;
and social class, 64, 249– 50n27; class struggle, 274n3; cognitive
termination, 55–6, 245n2, clarity as product of socialism, 159–
246n7; terminology, 64–5, 245n3, 62, 164–6; cultural revolution (1928–
246n5, 248–9n18. See also 32), 55–6, 126–7; ideological
Pereverzev, Valerian; Pospelov, deviations, 195–7, 275nn4–5;
Genadii ideological lies, 270n7; and
Sokolov, I., 111, 258n29 Solov’ev, modernism, 193; objectivity of belief,
Vladimir, 5, 236n4, 254n27 194, 211, 271n16; “seen-ness”
Soviet Union. See entries beginning with example
Russia (exhibitionism), 167–71; sincerity
314 Index

and socialist realism, 205–7, 277n23, 152; socialist realism, 151–2; status
278n29; socialism, 188–9, 225–6, of text, 27–9; and style, 151–2
268n12; socialism as irresistible Thompson, E.P., 188–9, 191, 194,
force, 162–5; theory’s lag behind 272–3n27
practice, 165, 192, 269n2; validation Todorov, Tsvetan, 242–3n23, 243n24,
(verification), 179, 180; and The Vow, 243n30, 244n36, 244n38 Tolstoy,
229–30. See also ideology (general) Leo, 243n25
Steinberg, Isaak, 5 Tomskii, Mikhail, 208, 266n2
Steiner, Peter, 240nn6–7 Tret’iakov, Sergei, 90, 92, 100, 255n7,
Stepanova, Varvara, 96–7, 99 258n33 trials, Moscow show. See
Stites, Richard, 5–6 structuralism, Moscow show trials
9, 87, 188. See also Barthes, Trotsky, Leon: censure of Formalism,
Roland; Lévi-Strauss, 245n2; historical materialism, 211–
Claude 12; on laws of revolution,
Strzemiński, Wladyslaw, 238n22 style: 81; permanent revolution, 239n27;
and culture, 142–6; and Trotskyism and Moscow show trials,
individualism, 143, 145, 264n16, 196–8, 274n3, 275n7;
264n18; Lefebvre on, 142–3; and “Vneokt’iabr’skaia literatura,” 81
method, 148–9; and modernism, truth, as term, 267n8
132–3, 142–6, 264–5n20; and RAPP, Tynianov, Iurri: background of formal
122–3; and socialist realism, 31, innovation, 242n20; constructive
147–50, 165, 199–201, 213–16, 234, principle, 40, 44–5, 142, 243n27; on
265n25; sociographics, 122–3; Evgenii Onegin,
Spengler on, 148–50; 38, 45; literariness of text, 42,
text as token of, 152; as will-toform, 242n18; “Literaturnyi fakt,” 43;
265n26 Surrealism, 11, 14, 245n47, material as formal element, 43;
265n27 symbolists, Russian, 5–6, 18, “Oda,” 43–4; “O literaturnoi
236n4 evoliutsii,” 45. See also Formalism

Tager, E., 268n12 Udal’tsova, Nataliia, 255n3

Tarabukin, Nikolai, 90, 93, 95, 256n9 The Unforgettable 1919 (Chiaureli),
Tatlin, Vladimir, 27, 97, 98, 256n16, 221, 278nn1–2
259n37 UNOVIS, 6, 236n7
tektology. See science of organization USSR. See entries beginning with
(tektology) text as token: about, 27– Russia
9, 151–2; certification of belonging, 30–
1; dynamics of artistic medium, 28; Valéry, Paul, 10, 11
Formalism, 51; Futurism, 74; Gor’kii on VAPP (All-Russian Association of
living socialism, 156–7; modernism, Proletarian Writers), 111–13, 115,
27–8, 117–19, 259n2. See also RAPP
Vardin, Illarion, 111, 115, 116, 120,
 Index 315

259n2, 261n22 plot of film, 33, 221–9; “shiny, happy

Vertov, Dziga: camera/eye and people,” 223; socialist realism, 232–
method/expression, 164; “caught 4; and Stalin, 220–5, 227, 229–32,
unawares,” 105–6, 170; cinema- 279n8; trace and proto-story, 229–31;
eye’s superiority, 258n33; cinematic vow as belonging, 223–5, 230–2
theory, 103–9, 164, 170, 259n39; Vyshinskii, Andrei, 196–7, 275nn7–8,
consciousness and the camera, 110; 275–6n9, 276n11. See also Moscow
and Constructivism, 258n33, 259n37; show trials
kinochestvo, 107–9; life facts and
film facts, 105–6, 258–9n36; Watten, Barret, 134
Proletkultism, 90; and Reich’s Williams, Raymond, 235n2
sociographics, 123, 262n34; theory in Worringer, Wilhelm, 265n26
modernism, 136; Writers, First Congress of Soviet. See
totalizing cine-vision, 121. See also First All-Union Congress of Soviet
Constructivism Writers (1934)
Vertov, Dziga, works: “The Birth,”
106; “The Essence,” 105; “Kino- Zamiatin, Evgenii, 235n1 Zarudin,
Eye,” 105, 258n33; Kino-glaz, Nikolai, 154
258n32, 258n35; “Kinoki,” 103–4, Zhdanov, Andrei, 202, 210 Zhirmunskii,
258n33; Man with a Movie Camera, Viktor, 244n39
104, 107–8, 136; “To the Kinoks,” Zinov’ev, Gregory, 196, 199, 275n8
105; “We,” 105, 107, 258n33, Žižek, Slavoj, 194, 211, 271n16
262n34
Veselovskii, Aleksandr, 37
Voronskii, Aleksandr: about, 115–16; art
vs craft, 93–4; “Iskusstvo,” 116,
261n23; and NEP, 115; objective
moment, 116, 261n23; and
Onguardists, 115–17, 260n15; and
the Party, 115–16, 261n18; and
RAPP, 115, 261n18, 261n24
The Vow (Chiaureli): about, 33–4, 220–
1, 232–4, 278n1; agency of subjects,
220, 225–6; agency of the letter,
226–7, 232; cult of personality, 221,
230–1; empty spot and subjecthood,
33–4, 221–3, 225–6, 229–32; hero’s
journey, 221–3, 227–9, 279n9; and
Lenin, 222–3, 227, 231–2; logic of
reinscription, 227–8, 230–1, 233;
miracles, 222, 229, 231–2, 279n10;