Red Square Black Square

Vladislav Todorov
RED SQUARE/BLACK SQUARE
o r g a n o n for revolutionary imagination

to B. and to B.

C o n t e n t s

Acknowledgments
Introduction: The Book of Quest and Conquest of the Past

B E G I N I N G

1. Revolutionary Merger of The Political and Aesthetic
The Political Aesthetics of Modernization
Revolutionary Devices

2. Revolutionary Merger of Science and Art
The Plot of Modernism and Its Centers
On the Day After
Party Science vs. Political Art
The Hologram World

3. Induratio Spatii of The Revolution
Red/Black: Poetics of the Conspiratorial Space
The Appearance of The Whole is Figurative
Appendix: The Mummacrum of Power

4. Permutatio Publica
The Birth of The Mummy from The Spirit of Ideology
On The (Post)Conspiratorial Society
The Constitution of Social Integritas
The Dangerous Intellect

T H E E N D

Acknowledgments

       I owe an exceptional debt to my friends Ivailo Ditchev, Alexander Kiosev and Koprinka Chervenkova who gave me courage and illumination during one obscure decade. I hold in high reverence the artistic and academic circle at Sofia University among which the idea of this book grew up. Profuse thanks to Valery Podoroga and Mikhail Ryklin for their appreciation and support during my Moscow wanderings. I here express a profound gratitude to Julia Kristeva and Catherine Belsey who promoted my first writings on this matter. Susan Buck-Morss launched a bold campaign of creating a "hermeneutic circle" between East-European and American postmodern endeavor where, along with the main dialog, my wild Eastern vision faced its We-stern critical challenge. Peter Steiner granted me a second beginning. To Joseph Natoly I owe the final impulse of writing this book. Thanks to Carola Sautter for her professional attitude and efficient guidance through the publishing process.
       It was a real eye-opening month that I spent in the "Institute fur die Wissenschaften fom Menschen" in Vienna, developing the perspective of this book in conversation with its fellow Klaus Nellen. I am grateful to "Naumann Foundation" in Sofia for the financial support it provided making these investigations possible and special thanks to Dr. Arno Weckbecker, the Project Director, for his personal understanding and encouragement. I would also like to extend my thanks to "Open Society Fund" as well as to Central European University, and personally to Endre Bojtar for granting me support to complete my work.
       Special thanks to my mother, my father and my family for their devotion and love.
       Parts of this book are revised versions of essays originally published in L'infini no. 33, Textual Practice vol. 5 no. 3, The Yale Journal of Criticism vol. 6 no. 1, and College Literature vol. 21 no. 1.
       The chapter "The Mummacrum of Power" originally was written together with Ivailo Ditchev. The word "mummacrum" came out of a pun play with Valery Podoroga to designate the Eastern counterpart of the Western simulacrum.

    There is no difference between
    what a book talks about and how
    it is made.
      Deleuze, Guattari

spermatize the word
Maiakovskii

   that is why I do not give any sources,
   because it does not make any difference
   for me whether what I have thought
   somebody before me had thought already.
      L. Wittgenstein

THE BOOK OF QUEST AND CONQUESTS OF THE PAST

Es ist ein eigentumlicher Apparat
Kafka, "The Penal Colony"

HOW TO OPERATE WITH THE BOOK?

The Book you hold in your hands is an organon (instrument) devised in the time of The Grand Collapse of Communism.
With the Book one should operate in the same way one operates in Modern times with a medieval torturing machine which has been used for extortion of confessions. In this sense the Book is an exhibit which testifies to a time past, but still bears the terror of its usage.

THE CONQUEST OF THE RUINED SPACE

The events of The Grand Failure of Communism repeat the End of the Shakespearean tragedy "Hamlet." The tragic action heaps up on the stage ruins and corpses. It results in a pile of dead, poisoned and broken bodies. At the very End Fortinbras enters the stage in order to purge it from the dead flesh.
The monolith and monumental body of communism collapsed. The surviving Intellect is surrounded by the ruins of the system he/she used to resist. And just as at the End of "Hamlet" two bold Intellects, two Knights in charge with two different missions appear -- Fortinbras and Horatio.
Fortinbras (The Strong Hand) the embodiment of the just power conquers the stage and cleans up the public space from the ruins and rotting matter in order to establish the new authority.
Fortinbras is the Great Conquistador of the ruined space.

THE QUEST FOR THE GRAND RUIN

But Horatio, in contrast to Fortinbras, needs the ruins and the corpses on the stage. For his mission is to tell the story of Hamlet. Horatio -- the name itself implies oration. Horatio needs the traces and evidences of the Grand Plot. He collects the ruins that enable him to re-collect the story that is over and the spectacle that is finished.
The bequest of Hamlet is tell my story ... the rest is silence. In order to fulfill the be-quest Horatio launches a quest for the Grand Ruin buried in silence. To make the ruins speak -- this is the objective of the quest.
Horatio maps out the wrecked world. He dwells the rugged face of the ruins. He keeps the prosthesis of the time that was "out of joint."
Imagine Horatio possessed by the secret drive to have the corps of Hamlet mummified.

THE QUESTion: WHO TO BE?

Fortinbras -- the leader of the Conquest, or, Horatio -- the guide through the ruined space? The one who sweeps out the ruins or the one who collects and assembles them into shocking figures? The one who writes new just laws or the one who reads the rough face of the ruins thus extracting the Grand Narrative of the Past?
That is the QUEST-ION!
These are the two missions for the Intellect witnessing the End of the system. Horatio is my guide. He is my Vergilus to initiate me into the Infernal space.

THE COLLECTOR

The Collector is a major figure in Benjamin?s works. Poisoned by melancholy his imagination gets excited when touching the contagious matter of the remnants. He spends his time in his (all)political laboratory mixing substances of the Past, contemplating the reactions, elaborating his craft to embalm and stuff the body of history and to derive Specters out of them. The Grand Ruin is the ugly embryo of paranoid visions. It bears specters into life.
The act of reading ruins and fractured objects needs some deliberately twisted linguistic devices that figuratively resemble the ruined space itself. This book goes even further, it endeavors to materialize a paradox -- to build up a wreckage.
The Philosopher as a (re)collector of ruins inhabits the End.

THE PHYSIO-GNOMIC STYLE

Hippocratean Face

The signs to watch for in acute diseases are as follows. First study the patient's face ... the more abnormal it is, the worse it is. The terminal appearance may be described thus: sharp nose, sunken eyes, the temples fallen in, the ears cold and retracted with distorted lobes, the skin of the face hard, stretched and dry, and the color of the face pale and dusky ... and if there is no improvement within the prescribed time, it must be realized that this sign portends death.

Hippocrates, "Prognosis"

       Physio-gnomic is the mode of reading wreaked objects and faces. Gnomic is the style of this book. The original meaning of Physio-gnomonica is to acquire knowledge of the virtual condition of a human being by discerning its appearance, by reading its face as a configuration of features and expressions: physis is the system of nature and gnome is judgment of a special kind. Gnome is a short, aphoristic statement or maxim that formulates the nature of being.
       The ancient physician Hippocrates teaches how one may read the symptoms of a disease through the changing complexion and recognize the advent of death by the contortion features. The face is recognized as a battlefield where a lethal agon is staged. The face is at once the stage and the performer of the agony between life and death. As living nature dies in the features of the face it is transformed from an arena into a cemetery.
       In ancient times a mask was laid upon the face of the corpse in order to seal the physiognomy for eternity. Death-mask is the ultimate sclerosis of the face. It is an allegorical device assembled of ruins. This mask pieces the ruins of life together into an icon. The mask appropriates the physiognomy of the corpse and shifts it beyond decay. As the so called "Hippocratean face" is an aphorism of death it must be written down in another, solid medium then mere flesh, for the corporeal graph of the face is subject to decay. Death impregnates the face with decay. The mask solidifies it for eternity.

The Dreams of a Corpse

A key-figure of the early allegory is the corpse
Benjamin, "Central Park"

       Imagine the Mummy-Lenin as a lurid Gnomon that casts the shadow of communism on the face of the earth. Hence, a physio-gnomonic mode of writing will embrace it as its cult instrument.
       When communism set in the world it molded a physiognomic space of its own. It unfolded a grand monumental exterior fortified with the gross faces of the teachers and stuffed with the aphorisms of the doctrine. Although justified by science, pre-planned and pre-rationalized, communism had to be enforced by allegorical devices -- images, visions, ceremonies and monuments. The Corpse -- the mummy of the Leader pins down the center of this gigantic exterior. The Corpse unfolds the physiognomic spaces of communism. It induces universal melancholy and organizes people's mass grief. The Corpse is the engine of the people's paranoia. The mummy is the incarnate of the roaming communist specter which advertises its own imaginary space. If the Teaching of the Leader is the rational motive of communism, his Corpse is the carnal one. Thus communism merges the rational and the carnal in a political mode of life. The mummy suggests a politicized melancholy.
       The Corpse of Lenin has no Hippocratean face, no physiognomy to be decoded. Not death but dreams inhabit its face. For the face of the corpse is as if alive, sleeping and dreaming: and its dreams are the lives of the people. The corpse dreams life. The corpse dreams us and we become its nightmare. Our lives are its politically justified paranoia. Communist exterior is the set for the corpse's dream. Science and paranoia, rational and absurd are radically united in the Corpse. There is nothing beyond it. Here is life and life is grieving. In the works of Platonov grief is the mode psyche, much as horror in the works of Kafka.
       Whatever terror it unleashes, communism is excused, for a corpse may have nightmares. What overcomes the terror is people's existential sympathy for the poor corpse suffering nightmares. Mourning, melancholy, paranoia -- this is the mood around a corpse dreaming communism.

THE PRINCIPLE OF ORNAMENTAL MANNERISM

Of course the script should not be a simple one; it's not supposed to kill straight off but at an average of twelve hours; the turning point is reckoned to come at the sixth hour. So there have to be lots and lots of ornaments around the original script; the script itself runs around the body only in a narrow girdle; the rest of the body is reserved for the ornamentation. Can you appreciate now the work of the harrow and the whole apparatus? - Just watch it!
Kafka, "The Penal Colony"

Just watch it!
Fragmentation is the principle of this book.
The fragmentation should be perceived as a precise intervention that causes a miniature fracture and cuts to the very quick of the bone structure. A fragment demonstrates the point and the design much graphically than anything else could possibly do, either the logical or the rhetorical skeleton of this book. The fragment ultimately magnifies the point and utterly agitates contemplation. What should be understood should be beheld.

The fragment: this is the noblest matter of Baroque creation -- W. Benjamin, "Origin of the German Trauerspiel"

Aphorism is the bond of this book.
Aphorism radically consolidates theoretical observation, experimental operation and rhetorical attire of the matter.
Contemplate aphorism as modernized dithyramb! For it bonds theory, practice and utterance within an ornament -- a miniature oratory.
Aphorism is a special case of oration, incantation, elevating and demonstrative staging of the issue. Aphorism is theatricalized theory. It reverts theory back to the theater, observation to ceremonial beholding, sight to insight. Aphorism folds the physiognomy of the issue.
When a sharp vision transfix the word it proliferates ornaments through it. Ornaments testify to the conception of the ideas in the physiology of language. This book is a compound ornament.

Ornamental mannerism is the style of the book. Dithyramb, gnome, aphorism are the ancient, original forms of ornamental mannerism. This is a deliberate and demonstrative way to compose sentences that makes every single word in this book and the entity of the book itself something built on purpose. The whole enterprise implements a premeditated design: to manufacture a suggestive Narrative that will bring the Grand Past back in the aggregated wreckage of the Present. Words descend on the harsh sur-face of a wrecked reality and imprint its relief upon themselves.

* * *
The book itself creates what sustains it. The ship itself creates the sea it sails.

THE ORNAMENT UNDER MODERNISM

The Arrested Ornament

The modern man who tattoos himself is either a criminal or a degenerate. There are prisons in which eighty per cent of the inmates show tattoos. The tattooed who are not in prison are latent criminals or degenerate aristocrats. If someone who is tattooed dies at liberty, it means he has died a few years before committing a murder.
The urge to ornament one?s face and everything within reach is the start of plastic art. It is the baby talk of painting. All art is erotic.
The first ornament that was born, the cross, was erotic in origin. The first work of art, the first artistic act which the first artist, in order to rid himself of his surplus energy, smeared on the wall. A horizontal dash: the prone woman. A vertical dash: the man penetrating her. The man who created it felt the same urge as Beethoven, he was in the same heaven in which Beethoven created the Ninth Symphony.
But the man of our day who, in response to an inner urge, smears the walls with erotic symbols is a criminal or a degenerate. It goes without saying that this impulse most frequently assails people with such symptoms of degeneracy in the lavatory.
I have made the following discovery and I pass it on to the world: The evolution of culture is synonymous with the removal of ornament from utilitarian objects.
Adolph Loos, "Ornament and Crime" (7; 19)

MODERNISM ONCE AGAIN

The real world ... has always been the apparent world once again.
Nietzsche, "The Will to Power" # 566

The grand object of post-modernism is the project of modernism staged demonstratively once again. I would argue that modernism has no end in itself. Its end perpetually vanishes ahead (in the future). Completion of modernism is that same modernism once again. Precisely the post-modern endeavor stages the end. Thus it frames modernism.
I could establish a causal relation between modernism and post-modernism only on the basis of a paradox: the paradox of the self-portrait. While painting a self-portrait the artist gradually vanishes into it. And the brush, this indispensable prosthesis of creation remains attached to the work as the final stroke. Thus a rose remained completely (completed) in its name.
The postmodern mode makes you an actor standing at the End -- actor who holds in his hands the already proclaimed end(s) of history, art, ideology, God etc. The actor pulls these ends and thus he turns the gigantic body of culture into a formidable marionette. The better you master the ends the more organs and members of this body you will activate and the more stunning its movement becomes.
There is no way to escape from the bond of civilization you were raised in. Better drag it, this is your link to the body you want to shake up. My bond was called "communism." I consider it the last existing political installation of the modernist project that collapsed. The revolutionary project for building an unprecedented society utterly blew up the vision of the left radical modernism. The work of art happened to be used as a special kind of laboratory for designing and testing the project. Thus political and aesthetic dimentions merged into one vision. Then came the rigid period of a total party enforcement of the vision and authorization of the project -- the Red doctrine and the Proletarian Dictatorship. Communism petrified modernism. Lenin was mummified and this marked the beginning of the rigid stage. I regard the mummy as the most astonishing end of modernism. Then the vision feverishly consumed the entire social reality. Thus came my own endeavor to grasp this end.
I conceive my work as an action performed with the sclerotic end of the communist endeavor. I perform with the end(s) of the doctrine. And the "ornamental mannerism," as I name the style manifested throughout the book, comes to expose my generic aesthetic attitude toward the dead ends of modernism.
The problem is how to tackle this specific end of history. How to pull it out in writing? How to retrieve the initial arbitrariness of the modernist discourse and thus suspend its political self-authorization and drain everything away but its artistic impuls to mold a total space?
If you could imagine the double face of Janus as a temporal figure you will get my point. This side that faces the Future is a rigid mask. The vivid one mirrors the Past.

BEGINNING

Everything has happened in a figurative sense
Pascal

Communism is not impending. It has already happened.
Communism created ultimately effective aesthetic structures and ultimately defective economic ones. That is what empowers its strong presence and durability in the world. That is what fortifies it.
Factories are not built to produce commodities. They produce the united-working-class-body. They are allegorical figures of industrialization. Industry represents the leading metaphor of party ideology and factories are the works of this ideology. They result in a deficit of goods, but an overproduction of symbolic meanings. Their essence is aesthetic, not economic. They are the poems of communist ideology. The work process creates just these factories-poems, not commodities. Labor is a ceremony begetting the communal body of the working class. The worker labors for the sake of the factory-poem, not for the sake of the market. The aim of labor in the factory is the poetic completeness of the factory itself.
Promyshlenost in Russian means industry. Originally the word designates an entire order of things that has been completely thought out. It is a derivative form of myslit' - to think; myshlenie - thinking; mysl - thought. It is a verbal noun with a prefix pro- that implies a going through, or making thoroughly, penetrating throughout. The Old Church Slavonic meaning of pro-mysl is pro-vidence and indicates the Divine thought of the Master that thoroughly penetrated the entirety of the world. Hence promyshlenost (industry) suggests a major realm of the social life that has been thoroughly thought out and penetrated by a supreme Intelligence that pro-vides its perfection of an unique piece of genius. It would be a realm that was pre-viewed by a powerful Reason, projected and supervised by the ubiquitous vision of a Master.
Communism reified precisely this sacred meaning of the word by establishing One-party-plan-industry. It is a zone of reality where Party consciousness reaches its utter accomplishment and visibility. Industry has been pre-viewed by a Scientific Intellect and constructed as a huge master-piece. Communism claims to be a total pro-myshlenost (industrialization) of life.
A campaign of mass social engineering took place.
A definition of the social engineering could be -- Power forms the people whom to represent. Party power, according to a certain ideologically justified vision, designs and materializes its own social basis. The Party imagines its constituency and proceeds with its creation. It consolidates and disciplines the historical subject summoned to fulfill the party project. The Party has to provide itself with constituency holding the majority of the society which is automatically recruited to build up the Future.
The large-scale industrialization was a political action with the only goal -- to produce the Party constituency. Labor was designed to (re)produce the working class body as the social basis of the Party. Thus Party power provided itself with historical legitimacy.
The social engineering is a creation that has a grand aesthetic element.
The reality of communism is poetically worked out. Society is a poetic work, which reproduces metaphors, not capital.
The speech figures of party ideology are the building blocks of the mind. The key metaphors and symbols, the productive means of language, are worked out by the supreme organ of the party-politburo. It is crucial to own not the machines, but the metaphors, the means of production of symbolic meanings, not commodities. Labor forges symbols. The labor force cannot be a commodity, because it is the creator itself.
The fundamental academic field of communism lies in its political aesthetics. The political economy is a simulative one. It generates an initial appearance of an economically motivated society. Actually, it produces the symptoms of such a society, not the causes for it. The working out of metaphors and figures of speech is what generates life forms. The identity of communism reveals in the over-production of words and symbols. The political economy falsifies the genuine character of communism.
It has become quite popular the idea that we have lived in an actually fulfilled utopia. The common idea, that communism was impending, prevented us from seeing that we were actually in it. All the key metaphors of communist utopia have turned into reality, something which will be discussed further on. We made it through fraternity, equality, the liquidation of money, the disappearance of the state, of property, of economic structures. We experienced the conjuration of communism. We attempted to build it and to live in it. We survived in it.
Utopia is a certain poetic, a certain political genre. It is just that, a genre which has its own structure and generates its own metaphors. Utopia compensates for the displeasure of the over-imposed power structure by inventing a fictional perspective of life: an impossible perspective, which helps us to bear the actual order of life and to criticize it from the standpoint of another, non-actual but cherished order of life. The transformation of utopian structures into genuinely political structures creates a society based on political aesthetic and political rhetorical principles and not on economic ones. In such a society, power immediately reigns over bodies with words. It reigns over the social processes through the conjuring of language. It spellbinds.
The final objective that justifies this reality is not the legal order, but the mummy of the leader. The mummy objectivizes political power. It is the superior body. The party power finds its radical representation in the mummy. The political aesthetics of society reaches its sublime terms in the spectacle of the mummified Leader.
Political economy deals with idealized economic models, Political aesthetics with corporeality made eternal. Political aesthetics deals with mummified bodies, objects, spaces which eternalize the strong presence of communism on earth.
At home, everyone has a measure, which he or she uses to ascertain the real dimensions in space. But somewhere out there, kept in special conditions is the ideal measure. Its length is a convention. It is the original only by virtue of a social agreement.
Everyone has at home images and words of Lenin. They are signs, they are allegorical instruments, which testify to the existence of the original. The original Lenin is kept in a mausoleum and is a unique, not a conventional body. A mummified uniqueness spellbinds the space embracing it. His images and his words, spread everywhere, is the radiation which imbues minds with communism.
The reality of the communist experiment is guaranteed by the magic reality of the body, stuck to the magic words of the primordial experimenter. Lenin is the author of communism. His immortalized body perpetually authorizes and legitimizes the Party. That is why the mummy must immediately be appropriated and registered in the party inventory.
The problem of the political aesthetics of society is far more general than the problem of communism. In a historical perspective, the merging of the political and aesthetic projects for creation of a purely novel society-poem has existed as a process even before its actual accomplishment in 1917 in Russia. One of the characteristics of modernist culture at the beginning of this century was the idea of radical liquidation of the inherited structures and the generation of a bold phantasm for the organizing of an unprecedented society.
This radical phantasm creates its own genre: the manifesto. The manifesto is the verbal radicalization of the modernist vision and immediately builds the political aesthetics of the modernist endeavor. With a closer look into the different political and aesthetic manifestos, we could reconstruct a global Modernist project for unprecedented corporal integrity of society and for the daring act of building it.
In respect to this global project, political Dadaism in Berlin and the Proletcult in Russia during the 20's have quite decisive roles. The programs and projects of these two movements present to us a decisive merger of political and aesthetic ideas, of the concepts of artistic and civil action. The perfect manifestation of such a merging can be seen in the manifesto of the Berlin dadaists Hausemann and Huelsenbeck "What is Dadaism and what does it want in Germany."
A special exhibition of "degenerative," i.e. Modernist art mounted by the Nazis in 1937, also featured other Modernists on the Dada Wall - painters who had nothing to do with Dadaism. This was not accidental for Dada was exposed on the Wall as the greatest disgrace most severely condemned by the Nazis.
Dada is a condenser of the Modernist project. It radicalized the programs of other trends and assembled them within a political machine. It was short-lived (about six years, from 1916 to 1922) and made possible the major trends in the visual arts of the late capitalism: pop art, performance, happening, assemblage, photo montage, video clip, etc. Dada radically changed the life/art relation, as well as the figure of the artist as a brutal activist attached (not detached) to life as a preposterous punk.
Dada is a re-active phenomenon in character. In this sense, it lacks the phenomenology of the classical type of trends. It is wrong to treat Dada as a crazy isolated phenomenon, a curio from an eccentric culture. This is precisely why this study will try to discuss Dada's cultural manifestation as maximizing the Modernist projects, its principles, expressive devices and directions for political and aesthetic action. Dada is not just an artistic trend as it is usually presented on the basis of its Parisian version.
The 1920s saw the birth of a powerful political art both in Russia and Germany, an art which deliberately scrapped the border between artistic and political action. This political art was subsequently repressed by "Party" art. Nazi and Bolshevik partisanship in the arts, imposed through administrative channels by Hitler in Germany and by Stalin in Russia, liquidated political art.
It is symptomatic that Nazi in Germany repressed political Dadaism, whilst the same happened to the Proletcult in Russia, liquidated by Lenin. Party policy abolished political art, especially Proletarian art. This will be discussed in more detail later. For the moment I will say only that identifying the principles of political art with the principles of party art is a gross error. Of course, Nazi, as well as Bolsheviks turned into reality many of the radical metaphors and visions of Modernism, of Futurism, of Constructivism, of Political Dadaism. The political aesthetics of communism manifests the most terrorist recurrence of the modernist phantasms.
My point is that the principles of party art cancel the principles of modernist art, i.e. that art in which visions and metaphors of future radical change arise. In short, totalitarianism as a kind of realization of the political aesthetics of Modernism arrested Modernist Art.
In this respect, Lenin is an interesting case. He is the man whom the Dadaists in Zurich pointed out as the greatest Dada on Earth. Political Dadaism in Berlin embraces the ideas of Lenin and gradually melts into the radical communist movement. Lenin is directly involved in the Proletarian modernization of the political ideas of that time. That same Lenin carries out the Bolshevization (read Modernization) of life through a radical act: the Revolution. After performing it that same Lenin devised party policy as the rule of the starving Bolshevik lands. Party policy liquidated the processes of Modernization.
Lenin's mummy blocks any further modernization. In it, the political and the aesthetic merge as the ultimate party body. The mummy of Lenin is the point at which modernization is terminated and the omnipresence of the Party is imposed. This is the very point at which the idea of a political modernization of society terminates in a totalitarian mummified communism.
Communism realized a radical aesthetic, non-economic modernization of society.

C H A P T E R O N E:
REVOLUTIONARY MERGER OF THE POLITICAL AND THE AESTHETIC

DADA AND VESHCH
Dada emerges as an international movement in Zurich in 1916, in reaction to the World War and as a re-active concerted action of radical leftist and anarchist intellectuals of different nationalities and styles who were in Zurich at that time.
Dada is a reaction against bourgeois culture. Dada modernizes the world in an insolent anti-bourgeois style. The motives of artistic action are far wider than the territory of art. Dada presents itself as a daring intervention, which will cure humanity of bourgeois dementia, such as politics, art, morality. Dada will chase away the monsters which have crawled out on the earth's surface, such as Imperialism, Victorian morals and prejudices, together with the chef d'oeuvres of classical art. Dada acts, it doesn't produce works of art. Dada shakes up the stiff corpse of European culture. It tramples sanctimonious bourgeois morality. It seethes in the cells of the healthy bourgeois brain. Dada blocks the logical train of thought and thus frees the human being from its importunate training in common sense.
Dada stripped tabooed organs, objects and actions naked, introducing a new material in art which was base and depressing by bourgeois moral standards. Through blatant musculature of expression, Dada brought to the limit the unrestrained collective will to mock the bourgeois individual cocoon in his morality.
Tristan Tzara arrived in Paris from Zurich. Tzara is seen as a leading Dadaist which he was - but he was an exponent of a certain French version of Dadaism. Parisian Dadaists, including Tzara's main rival, Andre Breton, concentrated on the techniques of insolent preposterous humor and nonsense under the direct influence of Breton's friend Jacques Vachais. The Paris-based magazine “Litterature” attracted a group subscribing to shock humor and bizarre actions. Influenced by psychoanalysis and Bergson, this group evolved the technique of automatic writing and free association. Dadaists turned themselves into devices and automata registering their own impulses, into wires transmitting the will to life through their resistance. That is precisely why Dadaists did not create works of art by laws inherent to art itself but, so to speak, brazenly accumulated interesting documentation on their brutal genius. Dada is a campaign which leaves an archive rather than museum exhibits and works of art.
Unlike all other Dadaist groups and centers, the Berlin wing was very active politically and charged with ultra Bolshevism. Events in Russia ultimately politicized the programs of Berlin Dadaists. During the revolution in Germany, Huelsenbeck was proclaimed Commissar of the Arts. Hausmann adopted the pseudonym of "Dadasov". Later a large part of the Berlin wing got direct political assignments from the communist movement.
The demand for political efficiency in artistic action leads Dadaist techniques to decisive public operations and offensives which undermine the bourgeois political system, the bourgeois moral imperative and the phantoms of bourgeois art. All of this helps adapt the project to the radical modernization of society. The will that modernizes society is syncretic in its nature. In it, the aesthetic and the political are inseparable. The chief materialization of this will are photo montage, propaganda posters, allegorical constructions and assemblages of machinery which disturb the bourgeois order of things. Industry, art and politics are three heads of a single body, in the throes of one and the same will to modernization.
An exhibition of Soviet avant-garde art was held in Berlin in 1922. Arriving with the exhibition, constructivist Lisitskii started publishing, along with Yerenburg, the magazine “Veshch” (Object) which introduced the West to modern art in Soviet Russia. The spirit of Constructivism, new objectivity and new materiality promoted by Veshch was already popular among Berlin Dadaists. Russian constructivist Tatlin was a dominant influence on the first Dada Fair in Berlin in 1920.
Political Dadaism is infected by the ideas of Machinism and the organizational theories of the Russian Constructivists, obviously mixed with the organizational theories of the Proletcult and its ideologist Bogdanov. Constructivist art neither embellishes life, nor creates works beyond it. It organizes life completely. In its aesthetics, the geometrical and the political mind coincide. Constructivism is a syncretic state of science and politics. The modernization of society is guaranteed by such mergers of science, art and politics.
If Constructivism is called the Socialism of vision, then Dadaism could be called the Bolshevism of action. In Germany Dada is taken over by Bolshevik visions of a "laboroid" space assembled of flesh and metal, of bodies and aggregates, of scaffolds and machines, of clenched fists and chanting mouths. In Berlin, Dada organizes political attractions, mounts centaurs of bodies and machines, in order to make a show of the magic of the endless Proletarian feats of labor.
Constructivism and Dadaism, those kindred trends, formally met in Weimar in 1922.
George Grosz published his collection The Face of the Ruling Class, which Lenin enjoyed immensely, in 1922 and 1923. A year after, he became the leader of the Red Group of artists ancillary to the German Communist Party.
If Parisian Dada died with the advent of Surrealism, in Germany it acted as a combination of political Constructivism, proletarianization of the visual and objective world and industrialization of the artistic performance.
Dadaists Hausmann, Hanna Noech, Hans Richter and Kurt Schwitters later formed the core of German Constructivism. In Berlin, meanwhile, Expressionism was just as powerful, its left wing being definitely political and far from alien to the idea of a mass labor, political feat of the proletariat. However, Dada attacked Expressionism. This is entirely understandable considering Dada's sympathies for Constructivism. Dada attacked Expressionism precisely through Constructivism. It attacked Expressionism for its exalted phony imagery that expresses a sick inside, for rejecting the factual zone of life and the objects which populate it. Machinism and rationalism, the mainstays of Constructivist organizational theory, were naturally hostile towards euphoric expressions and visions.
Art works directly on the factual plane of life, while the sights it leaves there and the visions it evokes should not stun. They should canvass. They activate the work of reason rather than the morbid imagination. Reason is the supreme motor of the creating human body. The first international Dada Fair featured a poster which read "Art is dead. Long live Tatlin's new machine art". Exhibits at this fair included impressive collages, photo montages, photo attractions of participants themselves; their bodies; workaday, everyday objects and items, contraptions, propaganda posters and dummies; installations and aggregates which could be operated, destroyed or at least touched; the blasphemies of the Dadaists themselves. The factuality of life was turned into a circus, into circus tricks, attractions, an orgy of objects. This was the political circus of life.
Contrary to Left Political Expressionism, Dada is remarkably sinuous. After the trampling of the revolutionary movement in Germany, some of the Expressionists retire, others commit suicide, still others sink into a deep mysticism. Dada, on the contrary, experiences exasperation. It accuses Expressionism of consecration of the sick inside of man, of whimpering over its Gothic structures. Dada has no illusions. Dada does not suffer from any prophetic spirit. Dada is a saboteur and is oriented externally, towards expansion. During these years of social shock, the ontology of the world changes for the Expressionists - which destroys them. For Dada, the only thing that changes is the direction of the Proletarian strike, and that doesn't in the least make them turn off the engines. Because the noise of the engines manifests the (idio)syncrasis of the political, industrial and aesthetic modernization of the world.
The athletic Proletarian body molds details from metal and with a geometrical precision puts together machines with which to attack the complacency of the senile world. Dada amplifies to the limit ideology and practice of the creator - Machinist.

Since machinery is the soul of the modern world, and since the genius of machinery attains its highest expression in America, why is it not reasonable to believe that in America the art of the future will flower most brilliantly?
F. Picabia (24)

Dada spread fast in New York thanks to the incoming European knights of Dadaism like Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray, Francis Picabia and Arthur Craven. That this Dadaist wing was leftist radical is evident by Man Ray's recollections of the Dadaist newspaper which he used to publish: The heading consisted of tree black letters: TNT. It was a political paper with a very radical slant. The words Communism and Bolshevism didn't exist then in America. TNT was a tirade against industrials, the exploiters of workers. We were all mixed up with the anarchist group. It was anarchism rather than anything else... (16, p. 146).
In New York -- this stunning artifact of the industrial machine age, this mammoth realization of Constructivist reason and ultimate crowding of bodies, objects and apparatuses -- Dadaists found their ultimate project fulfilled: Duchamp saw his "ready-mades" on a giant scale, the mass production of identical artifacts, streams of ready-to-wear and modular space assemblages. All in all, geometrical reason has tailored titanic spaces and artifacts, buildings and prospects through its ingenious prostheses: machines, automata, cranes. Picabia saw his machine visions operating on a mass scale. The new materiality, new objectivity and new media unfolds the city's unprecedented space. New York is a unique fold - not in the Earth's crust, but in the industrial massif of civilization. All suggestions for a natural essence of spatial rhythm are dispelled. The motors of this awesome swelling relief are industry and politics. They are the motors which Dada forces to the brink of a radical accident.
Political scandal, abolishing the natural geometry, uprising of the objective order: all these actions Dada deployed on the relief of civilization.

1. THE POLITICAL AESTHETICS OF THE MODERNIZATION

The Magic of the Apparatuses

The establishing of a class bond that is visual (kino-eye) and auditory (radio-ear) between the proletarians of all nations and all lands, based on the platform of the communist decoding of the world -- this is our objective.
Dziga Vertov (20, p. 50)

Dada appears in an age already proclaimed modernistic. It extols the beauty of war; Mass-Man's athleticism; synthetic materials; mechanized voice -- radio and megaphones; the machine-eye -- photo and movie cameras. The legacy of Modernism, have been also absorbed by parties' and organizations' political programs on setting the world straight and replacing it by a radically new, a Brave New World. Marinetti extols war as a natural excess of the senses, of the machinism and communal athleticism of bodies. War is the remarkable transgression through which politics is wholly transformed into aesthetics, and political passion into immediately aesthetic passion. Political interest contorts in a sublime military convulsion and spews forth the charred images of the new world.

The Machine

We cannot improve the making of our eye, but we can endlessly perfect the camera.
The weakness of the human eye is manifest. We affirm the kino-eye.
Dziga Vertov (20, p. 15-16)

In it the human is overcome. The organic is surpassed by the mechanical. In the machine, life reaches its ultimate organization. The human body is merely an organ of the machine. The organic element is one of the nodes of a mechanic totality. Only now and now at last is the Mind freed from the pathetic body and moves into a dwelling organized and invented by itself -- the machine.
The Machinist is Superman. The Machinist is not subjected to subconscious repression, or sense guilt, he is not infected by individuality or sensitivity. The Machinist is the creator of the modernized age, who has decisively overthrown the yoke of the sniffling sentimentality of his perverse body, its ugly organs bandaged with the outfits of culture -- clothing. The Creator Machinist represents the mass super-organization of bodies. In this sense, he himself is not a separate body. He is the radically organized state of the laboring bodies with a machine-like principle of common action.
The creative body attains a communal machine-like physiognomy never seen before. In it, the political and the aesthetic are one.

Oculus ex Machina

I am a mechanical eye.
I, a machine, show you the world
as only I can see it.
Dziga Vertov (20, p. 17)

Eyeglasses are a prosthesis to the eye. They help it see. The snapshot and movie cameras are the super-prostheses of the eye. Through them, the eye overcomes its human principle of seeing and becomes a machine. The eye itself becomes Machinist. In this sense, it becomes collective, because it overcomes its individual being, its pathetic partiality and lachrymal. The eye begins to see objectively.
The camera's objective lens overcomes the eye's organic optics. The objective lens is a crystal absolute. It is a super-individual organization of sight. It is the unified being of all possible eyes. The object-glass is the new communal constructivism of sight. It is the ultimately modernized liturgical eye. The Cyclops.
The camera is a prosthesis which has reached its perfection. Its super-human inventiveness has radically supplanted the function of the organ. The principle of this self-activating prosthesis manifests the essence of the new agent of modernization. The new communal medium. The mass-medium.
The "objective genius" manifests in itself the political order of things. It is the assembly line of inter-jointing attractions. Eisenstein's "montage of attractions" ingeniously accomplished in "Potemkin," for example, is a manifestation of the contemporary political flux.
According to Eisenstein, "Attraction" is every aggressive moment ... which acts upon the spectator's senses or psychology, an effect which is experimentally verified and mathematically calculated with a view to causing definite emotional shocks in the perceiver; which makes possible the perception of the idea of the things demonstrated, the final ideological conclusion." (8; 269-73)
On the contrary, according to the classical bourgeois intuition "the subjective genius of art" cannot be political, in that it opens and guards the eternal, age-old order of things. In principle, it transcends the political and the eye opens itself to eternity. "Subjective genius" does not rest on montages and collages, on cutting out and patching up of shocking sights, on attractions. It rests on the internal integrity of the chef d'oeuvres. It could not stand prostheses.
Inversely, the political art represents an ultimately focused objective genius, driven by the performance of wonderful aggregates, contraptions and joints, by the vision of unseen laboring automata, which modernize the procession of life. In general, the idea of world modernization is of inordinate political relevance.
The eye becomes agent of the objective lens. The organ appropriates the principle of action of the prosthesis. The natural is overcome. Objective vision marks a decisive victory of the unified automatic mass principle, that stems not from the integrity of bourgeois genius, but from the rhythmic action of the apparatuses.
Objectivity originates in the Machine, which has radically overthrown the Human. Thus, the objective world is always produced and never found. The modernization of the world is represented as mass production of objectivity.
Political Dada does not merely make collages of things and baubles. The world in which Dada raves is not the mercantile world of things, it is not the space of the bourgeois and of things soaked into a small private world. The world is industrial, labor communal, objective; things are uniform, not unique. They refract mass industrial relations. This is a world, in which the uniformity reigns. Dada attacks the production of linear uniformity. It attacks common standards of vision. It takes over objective eye, takes over the forms of mass consciousness. It accomplishes wild patching of details and documents, of pieces and industrial wastes. This is a circus of industrially produced uniformity, a sudden breakdown of the prostheses which stimulates an erotic shivering in the organs supported by them.
The camera's objective lens forms a joint between the eye and the view. The change in the optics of the objective lens makes the joint move. The objective lens is an Eye-Centaur, who gallops.
The view, as well as the eye, is an agent of the optic structure of the objective lens. Political Dadaism does not merely pick in your eyes and break objects. It attacks the objective structure of vision - the conjuncture formed by the eye and the object in the photograph. It attacks the photograph, i.e. the joining of eye with view. Dada is a decisive intervention in the joint. It dismantles it by a kick.
Photo montages, splicing and gluing, the re-tailoring of ready-made reality -- this is the new artistic technique. Objectively snapped reality can only be re-cut, it cannot be re-created. The reality, which appears through the action of the machine reactivates the action of the scissors and the saw not of the brush and carver. Cutting and fracturing, bandaging and plastering, affixing prostheses -- this is the political orthopedics of modernism.

The Cuts of the Collage.

He spoke about a surgical intervention in the grand organism of literature and life, and to prove his operation justice (Pravda) he cited by hart a series of excerpts from the works of the world famous surgeons.
V. Kamenskii, “Zhizn' s Maiakovskim” (13, p. 59)

The eye armed with scissors and saw insolently crosses the spaces of objective reality by endowing objects with impressive fractures, and then proceeds with plasters, bandages and prostheses. The scissors, this tireless guillotine, is the magical instrument of modernization. For example, the diaphragm of the photo camera is an eye turned into scissors. It cuts off like a guillotine pieces of the vision -- frames, snapshots. The diaphragm performs spasm and contracts the vision. This contracted and cut off view must be bandaged and fortified with prostheses. Then comes the magic of pasting, which reassembles the view chopped up in the camera.
The vision of the artist cannot be embodied in a picture. It can be rejoined after it has been fractured and dismembered by the diaphragm. In this political surgery of sight, the look acquires a distorted body. From this comes the feeling of a disparate and then indecently re-joined defective vision of the artist in political art. It is this principle of vision which Nazism attacks later from its party position, in order to liquidate political art of modernism.

The New Authenticity: Justice of Scissors

FACTORY OF FACTS.

Filming facts. Sorting facts. Disseminating facts. Agitating with facts. Propaganda with facts. Fists made of facts.
Dziga Vertov (20, p. 59)

The modern age establishes a brand new notion of "fact", "objectivity", "authenticity", "documentation" and "technical reproduction of facts". The transmission of information becomes a problem of the Media, not of personae. The principles of reporting and documenting events is completely mechanized: machine voices, microphones, sequential views, wave transmission. The collage principle of broadcasting reports induces the impression of their autonomy and causal independence. They co-exist, concur and associate in the flux of information disregarding any speculative holistic picture of the world.
Classical intuition for the organic integrity of the world is abolished by the intuition for the objective-collage structure of the world and its political design as a motor of the progress. The intuitions for sacral continuity and immanent providence are replaced by intuitions for collage discreteness and political premeditation. The authenticity is mastered by the Media.
"They" see design rather than providence, facts rather than truth, objects rather than organs of the infinite world body.
The mammoth archive of the world swells every minute: facts, evidence, reports. What testifies and verifies the actual picture of the world is its File. We dwell into it: a File-World with perfectly developed media of tracking, deletion, documentation, registration, cataloguing.

The Newspaper.
The newspaper is doubtless a collage of documents and reports, interpretations and news, type and photos. It does not represent and manifest the sacral continuity and causality of events in the world.
The paper documents facts and presents interpretations. The interpretation of a fact does not substitute the fact itself -- it adjoins it within a collage, stuck on it as outfit. The collage structure generates a new intuition for authenticity -- the Truth (Pravda) of Scissors and Gluing.
The world is not divinely providential per se. It is a dynamic constellation of a multitude of ad hoc acting political designs and interests. The newspaper is a predetermined space. The exact location of a fact or document originates its political implication. Thus the paper designs the political appearance of the today's world. The papers are shots in a reel with meaningful assemblage. The newspaper is a political "attraction" inducing ideological conclusions.

Attraction... is every aggressive moment... which acts upon the spectator's senses or psychology, an effect which is experimentally verified and mathematically calculated with a view to causing definite emotional shocks to the perceiver; which makes possible the perception of the ideas of the things demonstrated - the final ideological conclusion.
Sergei Eisenstein, "Montage of Attractions," 1923 (8; 269-73)

However, let us harbor no illusions that this political aesthetics of newspapers lasts long. In totalitarian societies where the idea of "party" Pravda abolishes all others, the newspaper formally preserves its collage appearance. Party Truth and Justice (Pravda) justifies the party design for permanent usurpation of power, control over all spheres of life, inaugurating mandatory ideological figures, metaphors, images and interpretations. The totalitarian newspaper does not proceed from the political flux of facts and documents. Facts serve the implicit or explicit party design. The party minded newspaper is a monumental piece for it represents the party mold of the World.
The communist papers publicize precisely the unified party interest. Those papers do not report facts but rather their mandatory interpretations. They do not document events but their party significance. Facts or documents cannot be credible in these papers. Only their interpretation is either credible or not. The totalitarian newspaper does not misinform. It performs the Party course. Communism is not politically discrete, but homogeneous for it expresses the unified party will to power. Every day the newspaper informs the population about a single fact: the Party is on power.

The Classical/Modernized Work

Crystallize man not by a single "synthetic" portrait, but by a whole lot of snapshots taken at different times and in different conditions.
A. Rodchenko (2, p. 254)

The lofty classical notion of a work of art, of a creation, enacts an inherently complete and self-sufficient entity with its own order -- beginning, progression, end and self-enclosing space. The creation is perfect in its finality, proportion and integrity.
Contrary to the act of creation, everyday life is dissipation. The constitution of the artistic entity has nothing to do with the constitution of facts in life. Creation manifests the principle of being. Thus creation testifies per se to the veritable order of the world. It is itself a travesty of the Logos. The creation conjures up an otherwise boundless entity making it commensurate with the small-sized human being. In this sense the creation is not grounded in the everyday course of life. Everyday life strands us amidst singularities and partialities. The creation builds universal forms. We face what is made invisible and unrecognizable in the course of profane life.
The classical notion of a creation is based on the radical discrimination between facts of life and facts of art. These two realms of being are regulated by different orders and rules. The modern age has started demolishing this border.
This study will not dwell on the history of the issue. The important point is that Dada brought the "world of creation" to catastrophe because it is precisely this world that decrees art as a super-disciplined and super-ordered activity. The creative-work is a barracks. Poetics is a command. Creativity is disciplined by a multitude of orders, rules and laws. Not for Dada. As far as Dada is concerned, the artistic act does not happen beyond the course of life. It is the maximum of life.
The artistic is closely related to the erotic: Eroticism un-bandages the cultural plasters of the body because certain parts of this selfsame entity are treated as bruises, wounds and fractures of morals.

Photo

And show me where, and when, and of which artistically synthetic work one could say: this is the real V. I. Lenin.
There is not one. And there will not be. -- because there is a file of photographs, and this file of snapshots allows no one to idealize or falsify Lenin.
... no one would allow artistic nonsense to be taken for the eternal Lenin.
A. Rodchenko (3; 254)

The magic of the photographic plate imposes a inverted notion of "an original" in art. Unlike the classical creation as immediate manifestation of essence, the photo is a substitution of life authenticity by a picture directly derived from profane reality, from the blanket empiria of life. The photo is a shot phantom from the world of appearance. The photo is a void original for it bears the appearance of something which has vanished. It could be an original only by force of a convention not by its material.
The virtual original retains a physical uniqueness. In this respect the negative is the photographic original. From an aesthetic perspective, however, the negative is an absolutely "reverted" excerpt from the entire picture of life. This excerpt becomes aesthetically representative only when it is developed. Various print-positives are something like phantoms of the original-negative that could change and be different. In this respect the photographic original is shaken to the utmost insofar as it is in force only when subsequently developed and released through phantoms. The magic of the photographic plate stems from its negative aesthetic representation. It is a negative vision of life.
In brief, the photographic original is nothing but a mold that manufactures pictures and is significant as a technological curio. By contrast, the classical original is not an out print of any event nor a generator of any phantom-copies. It bears being, not appearance in life.
Another peculiarity of classical art is that the borders of the work do not encompass in time and place the act of creation itself. The chrono-topos of creation lays beyond the boundaries of the work insofar as the creator is located in life with his/her body and beyond it with his/her genius. The Modernist creation, in contrast, gets the creator's body involved. This is precisely why the creation is an action, not an artifact beyond life. The creator is nowhere else but here, in the work, neither before nor behind it. This is the principle of the performance, happening, action. The first Dada Fair was precisely such an action. Those actions do not have meaning, they have political design. They canvass and instigate.

The Erotic Revolt of the Objects

The shadow cast by a four-dimensional figure on our space is a three-dimensional shadow...
The set of these three-dimensional perceptions of the four-dimensional figure would be the foundation for a reconstruction of the four-dimensional figure.
Marcel Duchamp (24; 55)

The eye recognizes only the three-dimensional shadows of four-dimensional figures. The eye actually sees negatives. The question is how the eye can unfold the fourth dimension out of what it sees or how to develop the view. The three-dimensional objects that come to sight are allegorical figures open to their four-dimensional completeness. The eye must dear to extrapolate the forth dimension.
Marcel Duchamp is best known for his ready-mades: mass-produced artifacts which have congested the space and create mass automatic habits of eyes and bodies of those who use them. The trick of the mass product is that it is no longer noticed precisely because of its regular everyday automatic usage. The body stops feeling its own prostheses which guide and control its actions. These mass-produced series of identical forms occupy the vision. The eye coasts along a vast objective field without even noticing it. We can say that this is the trick of the three-dimensional constitution of space: to discipline an automatic vision and automatic body habit on a mass scale. The three-dimensional space is stuffed with mass-produced and mass-used ready-mades.
In order to develop the fourth dimension, the eye and the body must be prevented from using the objects correctly. Three-dimensional space is regulated by the correct automatic usage of the objects. The fourth dimension emerges when the automaton fails since precisely this failure opens the eye into the four-dimensional space. The new modern age does not need new objects, be they objets d'art. The world has been stuffed and turned into a storehouse. Art must de-automatize the objects already there and related to them visions and bodies. In this sense, art is an action on, rather than production of objects. It triggers catastrophes of automata by the shock wave of the vision penetrated the four-dimensional space.
The emergence of the fourth dimension is caused by the break down of the automatic usage of the objects. Duchamp -- he takes an urinal and entitles it Fountain. This urinal is a ready-made installed in the public lavatories, of the mass industrial urban space. Duchamp confronts the eye with this urinal in a public place where the body cannot do what it has always done in the "other" place. The reflex of excretion is prompt but so is the prohibition of its gratification. The break down emerges because of the conflict between the impulse of the eye and that of the excretory system. The title, Fountain, causes another shock. The name has not been merely replaced. The urinal is labeled with a name which assigns right the opposite action: not a funnel which drains the discharge but which spews it. Reading the title, the eye is panic-stricken, exposed to the danger of being splashed. This geyser-urinal is an allegory of the revolt of objects. The fourth dimension might prove presence of a will in the object which we have never ascribed to it.
Let us examine another of Duchamp's masterpieces -- Large Glass or its full title: The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even. It is even, big, transparent, flat glass. A bizarre machine-like figure is engraved on it. We assume that the glass is a two-dimensional space on which a three-dimensional figure casts its shadow. The figure in the flat transparent glass is such a shadow or a negative through which the eye must extrapolate the missing dimension of the object thus developing its positive. The large glass must be developed. Duchamp loved having photos (shadows) of ready-mades at home. The Large Glass is precisely such a photo (shadow).
Large Glass is also a show-case but a special one. Nothing is displayed behind it. What is behind is invisible. This show-case projects just the silhouettes of the objects displayed behind it. The exhibits are displayed as allegorical figures engraved on the show-case itself.
The figure depicted on the Large Glass is no doubt an erotic one: this is a "sex machine". The bride stripped bare by her bachelors is presented as a puppet machine. The various units and joints of this machine are ready-made objects bound and activated through transmissions. This is an allegorical orgy of objects which the eye must recognize as human intercourse. A "sex machine" which must be recognized as an organic act.
The machine is an allegorical show-case of the organic; the ready-made object -- of the human body and the transmission -- of copulation. The erection of the fourth-dimensional body is erotic.
The world is transparent. What is not transparent are the shadows of "something" invisible in this world. "Something" which is lost in the world transparency. Thus every visible object is an allegory which figures the invisible and prompts the eye to plunge into it.

2. REVOLUTIONARY DEVICES

A. THE DEVICE AS A STRATAGEM

The purpose of art is to make us see not recognize things; the device proper of art is the de-familiarization of things and the encumbered form which makes perception a harder and longer process.
Art is a way to experience the making of things, what is already made in art is of no importance.
V. Shklovskii, "Art as Device" (41; 334-342)

In 1919 Shklovskii published a small piece titled Art as Device. It is considered to be the major manifesto of the Formal school which aspires to shake up the senile and sclerotic field of art criticism. What he claims in it is that art criticism has lost its proper object and urgently needs to regain it, to recognize it anew. The problems of art criticism stems from the fact that it, in a historically developed self-oblivion, has dropped out the art itself and substituted it with issues borrowed from secondary fields -- such as psychology, sociology and cultural studies.
The first thing to be done is to abstract differrentia specifica of art which could demarcate it from the zone of everyday life. Art makes the great difference precisely against the background of everyday life.
Let us summarize the basic discrepancy between everyday life and art: Life presents facts that are self-evident the way they appear. Art devises conjuring tricks, stunning skills and never seen before worlds. Life implies automatic recognition of the realities. Art implies contemplation, vision, abstention from utilizing them. Art blocks any automatic recognition and consumption of its pieces. Life communicates perception with familiar phenomena. Art de-familiarizes and excommunicates its objects by giving them estranged shapes and never tested properties. Life is an automated zone where everything works as if by itself and in accordance with an unfathomable principle. Art makes things work in an unpredictable and unprecedented manner making no accordance with any general or particular law of life.
Man slides over the sur-face of everyday life realities using different facilities that diminish friction. Inversely, man encounters the rugged-face of art where friction and resistance are utterly maximized. Life is a pre-figured phenomenon. Art is a puzzle. Life facilitates existence. Art perplexes it. In life rules the principle of the minimum resistance, in art -- the maximum resistance of the material.
Device is termed the constitutional unit of art. It is an invention designed on purpose to block up the principle of everyday life. The artist creates a whole set of artful plots and artifices in order to discriminate art from everyday life. Device is the differrentia specifica of art and art criticism must get aware of it.
The artist, as opposed to the agent of everyday life, breaks into its automation using special techniques, stunning gear and equipment. According to this creative strategy art is a techne and the artist is a master of an action that breaks through the thick flow of everyday life and brings turbulence into it. Art as techne fits together arbitrary devices that take over the causal principle of everyday life. The artist as master conducts the emergence and the expansion of this planned arbitrariness. Hence Revolution could be considered as a performance with the same features and causing the same effects as art does.
The device does target not trigger the automation of life. It encumbers life imposing maximal retardation or acceleration, deviation and suspension of its strictly directed and channeled flow. We recover from life through art. We need to retrieve our initial ability to see and to wonder, not to recognize and to label things using ready-made patterns. The encumbered recognition agitates vision. The suspended recognition proliferates device making. The device resembles a miraculous prosthesis assembled in the organism of life that makes life act in a stunning way or blocks its functions and generates a sudden unprecedented performance. This makes you see things bare without being forced to recognize them. According to Shklovskii the ultimate goal of art is a device to be invented and not an image to be drawn. The device generates vision and not recognition of things (veshchi kak videnie, a ne kak uznavanie).
The artful device triggers vision through estrangement and de-familiarization of things but not recognition through their probable appearance. The device inaugurates absolute discrepancy and disobedience to any common-sensical everyday virtue, decorum and rationality. The device could be termed organon not in the sense of an organ that belongs to an organic entity but in its other meaning of a "battle machine" that destroys walls and breaks into the fortifications of the stronghold called everyday life. More than this, the master exposes the devices that has been invented and worked out, lays them bare and thus agitates the contemplation. All that props up a work, all what justifies the composition of devices, all what motivates the plot -- the whole set is laid demonstratively bare so that the spectator could contemplate the very formation of art, the very composition of the work as a thing different in its origin and goal orientation from what life is.
The doctrine for art formation is the doctrine for life transformation.

Device and V-effect

Zeigt das Zeigen!
Show that you are showing! You should not forget the attitude of showing. The attitude of showing should be basic to all other attitudes.
Brecht (54; 71)

A similar idea occurred to B. Brecht. He formulated the famous V-effect (Verfremdungseffekte) as opposed to the Aristotelian mimesis and "dramatic" effect of art. Julian Wulbern in his book Brecht and Ionesco (54) sums it up -- Verfremdung, intentional destruction of the illusion of reality or of dramatic continuity, though of course for strictly ironic effect. (p. 64); ... perversion of logic, destruction of familiar relationships, and distortion of the traditional patterns of language (p. 66).
V-effect targets to expose through de-familiarization of the automatic principle and hidden motor of everyday life realities, to estrange the implied politics in everything that happens. V-effect makes the machine of life visible, makes you realize its principle and makes you plan how to improve, how to repair or, eventually, how to replace it. The anti-Aristotelian idea for a mimesis that terrifies not the senses but propagates the intellect of the spectators we have elaborated in his article The Street Scene: A Basic Model for an Epic Theater (5; 85-96). Mimesis is understood as political act of estrangement of everyday flux of life that abstracts and sketches its automaton.
There is the conceptual core of this piece:
The actor used a somewhat complex technique to detach himself from the character portrayed ... 'see things a different way'
It is most important that one of the main features of the ordinary theater should be excluded from our street scene: the engineering of illusion. The street demonstrator's performance is essentially repetitive. The event has taken place ; what you are seeing now is a repeat.
We now come to one of those elements that are peculiar to the epic theater, the so called V-effect (Verfremdung). What is involved here is, briefly, a technique of taking the human social incidents to be portrayed and labeled as something striking, something that calls for explanation, is not to be taken for granted, not just natural.
There is one thing more that we need to make the picture of the epic theater complete -- the concept termed Gestus. Brecht in his outspoken Little Organon for the Theater coins the Gestus :
The realm of attitudes which the characters adopt toward one another we shall call the realm of Gestus. Bodily posture, accent, and facial expression are determined by a social Gestus (54; 57).
The metaphor gestus proliferates through his theoretical works in order to formulate a basic political understanding of life which is directly related to the V-effect of art. We could say that the epic (non-dramatic/non-Aristotelian) strategy of acting exercises an impact on the invisible dominant Gestus which in a certain way keeps society disciplined together. By means of the V-effect-mimesis art exposes its hidden mechanism thus makes it recognizable for the vigilant gaze of the spectator. Aristotelian mimesis induces terror and pity and thus purifies the soul of the spectator from the passionate partiality accumulated in the course of life. Inversely, Brecht launches a political campaign toward obscurantism through the artistic mode of mimesis. Mimesis equals deautomatisation of the dominant Gestus through estrangement of its corporal social integrity, then abstraction and manifestation of its mechanism on the stage.
Basically what we face here is a socio-political approach toward acting. Every day society reproduces an invisible automatic system of social habits -- Gestus. Through repetition and special technique of de-familiarization and estrangement (V-effect), the stage lifts this Gestus demonstratively visible and exposes it to the bombarding of the critical reason. The master and the spectator have to be equally aware of what they do on the both sides of the work of art -- to be aware of the political assignment of art itself.

Economy of Life and Art
At that time the term economy was a key term that penetrated the public discourse and different works on sociology, philosophy, aesthetics, politics etc. In Shklovskii's manifesto we find formulated two "economic principles":
1. Economy of everyday life enacts less resistance and minimum spending of life resources, sliding over the surfaces of reality and acting in accordance with the automata of the major social habits. Perpetual self-affirmation of an one-and-the-same value system and status quo.
2. Economy of art enacts utmost gratification through utter exhaustion, excessive spending, maximum resistance, strong friction between objets, languages and bodies.
Following this strategic division we could go further:
The verbal agenda of the everyday utterance is to convey maximum explicit information and contents. What matters is the specific message abstracted from any possible form of the utterance.
The verbal agenda of art is not the priority of a message, but an erotic massage of language that agitates and propagates the swelling of a never seen before meaning.
The one is a demonstrative and the other an informative event. The one pronounces its contents and meaning. The other announces its shape. The one proposes and the other exposes.

Parody and Irony in a Clinic of the Arts

There is a lot of talk these days about irony and humor, especially by people who have never been able to practice them but nevertheless know how to explain everything. I am not completely unfamiliar with these two passions.
Kierkegaard (22)

Parody and irony are special kind of meta-devices. They are devices for detecting and laying bare other devices. In an imaginary clinic of art irony and parody would be the major methods of treatment.
Parody is a special kind of mimesis that copies devices from one work and pastes them into a different work, overexposes them by augmenting their major features, twists them, schematizes their appearance and triggers their mechanical repetition. This idea of parody was developed by Tynianov who detected a figure of Dostoevskii's fiction -- Foma Fomich as a parody of Gogol' (49, 30).
Parody could repair a worn out device by retrieving its original status of a deliberately planned unit of art. The everlasting recurrence of the device from oblivion into art goes through parody.
The realm of everyday life stores the worn out devices abandoned by art. Using parody art calls them back. Parody occurs when art re-collects its own devices.
Irony in Shklovskii's understanding, opposes the naive attitude toward any specific utterance and language in general. It lays demonstratively bare the so called motivation (justification) and the linguistic machine that manufactures any particular poetic utterances and literature in general -- Zeigt das Zeigen!
Irony makes us abstract not what but how something has being said. It abolishes the subject-matter and overexposes the speaking subject through the very formation of the utterance. Sentences mean nothing, they refer to nothing but to the speech act itself. They emerge as suggestive heraldry of the speaking subject. They testify only for the subject that utters them. The ultimate irony is a sheer symptom for the condition of the speaking subject and provides no detached subject-matter.
Following Soren Kierkegaard, this major theologians of irony, we could say that man is doomed to use irony in order to put indirectly what God puts directly -- Ego sum qui sum! In man's utterance between ego sum -- and -- qui sum lays bare the verbal corpus of irony. Through irony the mode of "qui sum" is de-familiarized and alienated from the fact of "ego sum". The human mode of being renders Ego incognito. Ego becomes an ever wondering stranger in the domain of being.
In Fear and Trembling he reflects on irony as an example for a radical resignation (alienation, estrangement, incognito) of the speaking subject from the speech act itself. Irony is a trace testifying to the fact that the speaker resigns beyond language and that the act of utterance is the device by means of which he performs this. Irony provides the utterance with suggestive appearance but annihilates the immediate presence of the speaking subject himself. Irony launches the subject beyond the language and leaves the uttered matter as tokens of an inconceivable and arbitrary subjectivity. "Irony and humor are also self-reflective and thus belong to the sphere of infinite resignation; their elasticity is owing to the individual's incommensurability with actuality." (22; 51)
Irony suggests -- watch how, not what has been said, there you find the only thing that matters -- the speaking subject, not the subject-matter. The speaking subject over exposes the make of the subject-matter itself and thus screens himself completely. We contemplate how a subject forms and annihilates matter and thus regains his transcendent status proper.
Only through irony the artist could master the work. Through irony the artist over exposes his/her own made devices as the only exhibits in the space of the work. The subject-matter of the work becomes the mortal body of the eternal genius.

Z O O Laid Bare
Shklovskii devised a work titled ZOO where he reflects on irony and simultaneously performs it. Irony is equally a subject-matter of the work and a mode of the work itself. Let us dismantle the major figure in it -- the title itself. ZOO has no referential meaning. It is a heraldry. It heralds the intelligence of the master that invented it. It has been drawn, not written.
Let us examine the figure. It contains two circles -- YorkOO and two angles put across each other -- Z. It is an assemblage fitted together by two wheels and a angular construction.
G. Apollinaire said that the wheel was invented when man wanted to imitate walking. The wheel does not resemble the leg but it was devised through imitation of the motion of the leg. Mimesis was performed as a metamorphosis not as analogy, as a refraction not a reflection -- the leg was twisted into wheel. The wheel is a prosthesis that accelerates walking and speeds up moving.
The two angles of the figure mentioned above are nothing else but two crutches put together. The crutch resembles a leg much more then the wheel does. The crutch is a heraldry of a disabled leg. It makes you move much slower than by nature. The crutch is a heraldry of disability and the wheel of super-ability of the leg. The one resembles the figure of the organ, the other one transfigures it into a never seen before shape that overcomes the natural principle. The one is a token of the decline and the other one is a token of the super-natural recovery of the leg.
The device of the disabled walking -- the two crutches, is put into a figure together with the one of the super-abled -- the two wheels. The figure manifests the revolution of the device.
ZOO heralds human progress.

B. L E F DEVISES REVOLUTION

It is not accidental that LEF called itself a LEFT FRONT of the ARTS: it include in itself many different detachments - poets, artists, writers, theoreticians etc.
Each of these detachments masters a different kind of weapon - for example among the poets we have 1) specialized laboratory workers preparing the models of the word 2) poets of the future writing mainly about the coming day and finally 3) agitators and poster makers working on the topic of the day.
LEF-AGITKI (26; 3)

LEF - or Left Front of the Arts is an union of the revolutionary artists and writers initiated in Moscow at the end of 1922 by Maiakovskii and other futurists. The idea was an universal Front of the Avant-Garde to be established with strictly formulated strategy and goal that could put together the endeavors of various revolutionary minded groups from different branches of the art. The Front had to chase away the apparitions of the bourgeois vision of life. Members were artists and writers as Pasternak, Kamenskii, Rodchenko, Stepanova, Tatlin, Brik, Shklovskii and close to this milieu were film directors as Eisenstein, Dziga Vertov, Kuleshov and Shub.
As The Grand Soviet Encyclopedia reports, Maiakovskii eventually realized the mistake he made and deserted.

Condense your thoughts into a slogan -- Maiakovskii

How can we establish an audio link right along the front line of the world proletariat. -- Dziga Vertov (30; 56)

The following are notes taken at the time of my travel along the trenches of the Left Front of the Arts deserted after the End of the battle. What I am aiming at is a reconstruction by using the remnants and the ruins scattered along the Front, a restoration of the battle field by operating with the objects and icons of the destruction it had caused on earth. Using the mannerism of the battle, its peculiar revolutionary gestus, and political jargon, using its smashed and crashed armor let me talk about the Left Front. By quoting not only slogans but quoting also the manner of speech, let me evoke the picture of the Front, let me stage the LEF - this is the objective of the text that follows.
Keep moving along the Front from Right to Left and from the general to the particular and you will run into a dashing figure -- Maiakovskii!

LEF's command:
                                  to the left -
                                           single file -
                                                        forward march!
                                                                                      -- LEF to Battle! (25; 233)

THE TELEGRAPH: Revolutionary Spermatizer

... and what an outrage provoked his demand -- "spermatize the poetic word."
V. Kamenskii, "Zhizn' s Maiakovskim" (21; 27)

Here we will consider the machine of the revolutionary language and its main units as something that provides the global context for the "device theory" and appoints art as a major conscious, goal oriented activity which aims the achievement of a definite political effect. Revolution could be considered as a system of extreme devices that gradually gets normalized in a new system of society.
The flux of revolutionary time was utterly accelerated by the help of the telegraph. It made possible the instant transfer and exchange of information. The commands and imperatives, the messages and requests circulating through the telegraphic system were the Revolutionary language proper mastering the spontaneous flow of events. The telegraph-machine provided the communicability of Revolutionary turbulence. It generated an unprecedented speech style characterized by an instant language. The word sent through the channels of the telegraph is supposed to be immediately performed, turned into acts. The rhetoric of the telegraph assembles such linguistic devices which are to invade the flux of Revolution in order to channel its direction or to conduct it towards a strategic end. This word is charged with an enormous Will to be performed and materialized right away, to be turned into action at once and thus to overtake the spontaneous turmoil. This word runs Revolution.
The revolutionary speedy word penetrated the whole body of letters and agitated a drastic political acceleration of life. The outpouring flow of slogans, advertisements, leaflets, handouts, etc. resembles a perpetually gushing ejaculation caused by the machine (the telegraph) that disseminates genes of revolution all over the world.
This word is to be ultimately short, broad-casting maximum information, imposing maximum will, having maximum strategic meaning and purpose. The telegraph is the great constructivist of Revolution. It organizes the language, it cuts out the new figures of speech, it maximizes the poetic jargon of Revolution.
The verse of Maiakovskii could be regarded as a poetically amplified telegraphic jargon. His verse is visually organized in special figures and constructions. It resembles a bulletin board with roughly pined down commands, imperatives, announcements, assignments. It resembles a rail assembled for the revolutionary word-engine. It is a leaf of steal with words welded on it which the Poet casts into the public space. The revolutionary leaflets replaced the sacramental tablets.
The telegraph was the machine pen of Revolution. It made possible the aesthetics of maximal exhaustion (Maiakovskii) of the creative force. ?Me myself? -- this is the auto-biography of Maiakovskii. It has the form of a revolutionary CV, of a auto-report made by using a telegraph. It is a confession mutated into series of short, quick, articulate declarations that constitute the rhetoric of report and announce the commitment of the confessee in the Revolution.

TELE-ICONO-GRAPH: Letters and Arts ex Machina

The Revolution did not annul any of its achievements. It increased the force of its achievements through material and technical forces. The book will annihilate the tribune. In its time, the book did annihilate the handwritten manuscript. The manuscript is only a beginning of a book. The tribune and the public platform will be carried forward and expanded by the radio. The radio -- that is a further advancement of the word, of the slogan, of poetry. The revolution gave us the audible word, audible poetry.

Maiakovskii (25; 263)

The rhetoric of the tele-graph affected and was affected by the general revolutionary icono-graphia. The prodigious appearance of the Revolution was generated in the camera. The movie or the moving vision cut out by the machine and projected on the screen had the same speed and shocking rhetoric. Mechanically accelerated Icon had the same constructive principle as Maiakovskii?s verse. Launching visions into life by means of the camera-catapult demonstrate the same revolutionary strategy as the telegraphic language does.
Both, the telegraph and the iconograph (shooting and projecting apparatus) were the new speed assembly lines where the linguistic and the visual elements of Revolution were fit together. The grammar is the same -- to produce shocking and politically appointed linguistic or visual devices. The artful work of the speed mechanisms caused an enormous acceleration in society pushing it towards its futuristic perfection and integrity.
According to Eisenstein, Attraction" is every aggressive moment ... which acts upon the spectator's senses or psyche, an effect which is experimentally verified and mathematically calculated with a view to causing definite emotional shocks in the perceiver; which makes possible the perception of the idea of the things demonstrated, the final ideological conclusion."
Eisenstein?s idea about the montage of attractions as the new iconographic principle of the cinematograph is, in fact, the same principle already manifested in the telegraphic verse of Maiakovskii. By assembling pieces of revolutionary reality - objects, names, visions, to create a new tough poetic construction which agitates for and propagates Revolution.
The new poetics is assigned by the Revolution to re-organize the structure of the psyche, to excite an sharp perception in the new agent of history (the proletariat), to push the consciousness of the masses into the battlefield of the political interests.
Art has political assignment. It leads consciousness to the pre-designed ideological conclusion -- the Last ideological judgment.

ART and FACT: The Virtual Reality of the Revolution
...work represents for us not an aesthetic goal-in-itself, but a laboratory for the best articulation of contemporary facts.
Maiakovskii, Brik (44; 98)

In order to become a fact, an event should be broad-cast through the channels and the speed lines of the media. It should be mediated in order to acquire virtual reality. It should acquire publicity and political actuality through the new administrative language of the Revolution. The fact is an event transformed into a political attraction, charged with ideological significance, accelerated to the utmost and launched into the public space by means of telegraphic and iconographic apparatuses.
Art manufactures facts. Art turns the empirical reality of Revolution into outstanding and suggestive aggregate of facts. Art produces the virtual reality of the revolution. Art provides revolutionary turbulence with political design and premeditation. It makes revolution visible. Art is the ideological conclusion of the empirical flux of the revolution.
Revolution plus facts-manufacture and acceleration: that is Art.

AGIT-PROP ACADEMY OF THE ARTS

Our weapon is model, agitation and propaganda"-- LEF (6; 235)
...assignment instead of content.. -- Tretiakov (6; 238)

Revolutionary Ideology is elaborated into universal science because its concepts are originally fabricated and tested as metaphors and icons in the Agit-Prop guilds of the Arts.
Agit-Prop invents stunning fortifications for the Left Front. The system of Agit-Prop brigades has different detachments following different assignments -- theory of device, visual device, verse device and divisions for constructors, for workers, for directors, for party design of life etc. It is an Academy, a Laboratory and a Workshop in One.
Agit-Prop Lab accelerates class consciousness to the point of a miracle.
The Agit-Prop becomes the Head-Quarters of LEF with a clear cut mission -- to educate the masses, to accelerate the class consciousness and to stimulate self awareness of the historical moment, to launch campaigns against obscurantism.
Chemistry, for instance, as modern science was abstracted from all-chemy. From the figurative turbulence of the magic signs and operations was extracted the purity of a science.
Inversely, a scientific concept in order to function as a weapon of the Left Front needs to be transformed into a blasting metaphor. Some poetic devices, manufactured by Agit-Prop, are concepts borrowed from science and recharged for the purpose of the Revolution.

THE POLITICAL LABORATORY

Experiment with a march-like structure in order to organize the revolutionary turmoil.
Tretiakov (44; 99)

A treaty between LEF and MAPP:
Both sides agree:
Without interrupting the laboratory work to direct all creative activity towards organization of the reader's psyche and consciousness according the communist targets of the proletariat. -- (6; 246)

It is explicitly declared in the programs of LEF that the work of art is a laboratory where the future forms of life are worked out, experimented, tested and glorified. It is there that the weapons and the devices are assembled by the help of which the Left Front moves forward and the limits of art are pushed forward. Thus the territory of revolution expands.
The verbal armor of the Teaching is forged in the Laboratory. The ideas are objectivized as revolutionary badges one bears on the lapel when marching in the lines of the Revolution. The badges of revolution are molded by Agit-Prop Art. A wave of badges with revolutionary symbols engraved on them, and revolutionary slogans imprinted on them, overwhelmed life. The badge (znachok) is a special sign (znak) borne by the Revolution, charged with a suggestive political significance (znachenie) and a demonstrative propaganda assignment (na-znachenie).
Agit-Prop-manufactory has designed and produced series of conceptual badges. The major revolutionary symbols and figures are engraved on them. These badges propagate the revolutionary imagery but first and foremost various suggestive figures of Lenin. These are the ornamental miniatures of the grand communist conception of the new world. People bear them on their lapels, move them around and these disseminate revolutionary concepts and icons. The badges agitate people's awareness of communism and keep class consciousness vigilant for none of the bourgeois viruses to spoil proletarian adjustment of vision. These badges impregnate the micro structures of everyday-life-consciousness and expand the circuit of the so called "universal connection" of communism down in the lower depths, in the most diversified zone of life. These are the smallest meaningful units of communism, tokens that signify and assign communism to the people.
In the spring of 1991 I happened to be in Wien and visited the exhibition of Russian constructivism (Rodchenko and Stepanova) which was opened recently. There I found an amazing exhibit. It was a small candy box with a constructivist label transfixed by an inscription that prompted: "Buy this caramel, that will make the Red banner shine." Thus a magic connection was established between the profane, everyday-life-act of purchasing a caramel and the sacred shine of the revolutionary sacraments, inviolable symbols and objects impregnated with proletarian consciousness. The caramel was hereby advertised not as healthy and nutritious but as politically efficient product. You buy it, and thus you keep the revolution shining through the minds. You suck it on and thus you charge the battery of revolution. Through the simplest everyday-life-activities people communicate with the sublime and propagates revolution. Thus the "universal connection" of communism was established between things, names and acts.
Let us go back to the beginning of the western metaphysics and compare the revolutionary hierarchy of images and representations with the one built by Plato in his allegorical Cave. There are three main stages of abstraction and purification of vision, three main figures manifest them: Idols -- mortal corporeality and changing appearances grow together and diversify life; Icons -- the appearances are abstract from corporeality, conceptualized and idealized despite any diverse body that could possibly bear them; Ideas -- there are neither appearances nor bodies around any more but a pure Paradigm that emerges through contemplation of the mind. Vision ascends crossing a polluted realm where only diversities of bodies and appearances proliferate and then enters the radiant realm of universal Ideas.
Agit-Prop builds a different, in a sense inverted hierarchy. Generated by the pure Ideas and abstractions of the Teaching that awaken class-self-consciousness, proletarian vision enters the realm of party concretized signification -- badges-signifiers, conceptual icons, directives and slogans. Finally it descends down there in the virtual "Cave" to see the Idol -- the mummy which immediately radiates communism.
What metaphysic enacts as Self-same being -- the Paradigm which is representable only through pure contemplation of ideas and agitates insight, communism poses as Idol -- the mummy incarnate of the doctrine that agitates paranoia. Phantoms and shadows acquired bodies, appearances were made identities. The ultimate Other -- the Corpse was radically familiarized.

ENGINEERING THE PSYCHE

The worker of Art must become psycho-engineer, psycho-constructor.
Tretiakov (6; 242)

Psyche is a special membrane, an extremely sensitive tissue of nerve knots and endings which transforms the elemental resources of the revolution into individual power and spiritual integrity. The worker of the Agit-Prop Lab makes the psyche membrane of the masses resound with Revolution. Thus Left Front line expands in the territory of the psychic and chases away the bourgeois ideologies who tamper with the consciousness of the masses. The Artist is charged to keep a constant watch for a bourgeois sabotage not to disorder the Left Front of the psychic. For this purpose Agit-Prop impregnates the psyche of the masses with symbols of the class interest.

THE GRANITE PILLOW
We, the communists, are people of a special make.
We are made of a special material. -- Stalin

It is said that Maiakovskii used to sleep on a stone instead of a pillow in order to train his body and his dreams to acquire the features of the future human corporeality.
A revolutionary used to sleep on a board with nails, Maiakovskii -- on a grave stone instead of bed in order to break with the fear of death. The grave is the future bed of the body and the body should not to be scared of it, more than this, it has to experience an overwhelming longing towards its future. Through the funereal exercise the body is penetrated by the stone might of its future bed. The body memorizes its own future resting on the grave memorial.
Revolution is an ordeal for the human physique. The mortal corporeality should be trained and solidified in order to endure the ultimate strain in the time of revolution. Maiakovskii trained himself to be a citizen of the future, to resist death having a stone like body, to testify to the future by the properties of his body.
This was Maiakovskii as he was told to be -- not just a craftsman cutting out the word according to a modernistic pattern, but a body that suffers the same modernization as the verse itself.

I do not belong to the group of worshippers of this kind of poetic talent (Maiakovskii's), although I fully appreciate my incompetence in that field, but I have not for ages experienced such a pleasure from a political and administrative perspective. -- Lenin (26; 9)

C H A P T E R T W O: REVOLUTIONARY MERGER OF SCIENCE AND ART

Social revolution is a gate in the kingdom of consciousness, in the world of though and triumphant science. The communism itself became a real, formidable, invincible power when it became science.
Platonov, “Steps are Heard” (33; 39)

Radical left Modernism feels a strong trust in constructive rationality, which has overcome bourgeois prejudices and developed its own bold visions in the industrial spaces. The political geometric mind is the genius of Modernization and finds its final justification in science. Each action of the new agent of history, the Proletariat, is constructively and scientifically guaranteed in advance in the clear spaces of political Geometrism. It is here that the Utopia of Modernism arises. When the concepts of each scientific field are deliberately generalized and made to solve global problems, they turn into metaphors. They turn into crevices, through which gapes the wonderful view of a brand new world. Such an amplification of the scientific concept into a world-building metaphor, into a mythical poetic figure is a political manipulation. To be precise, it is a propaganda manipulation of a political plot for a total and radical world modernization.
The concept as an instrument of a scientific theory is usurped by the actual political design and comes to be used as a metaphor. It becomes pregnant with revolution. That is exactly what was done to critical spirit of Marxism, to the racial theories, to the organizational theories. That is what was done to the scientific laboratories, whose poetic glorification made possible the mass experiments over immense areas of the Earth.
Science justifies all. The politically perfect world is the one which can be scientifically justified. Modern art builds just such a world. In this sense, Modern art is science turned into a work-world. That is the pinnacle of Modernization.

THE RED GEOMETRIST

Man invents and produce ever finer and more perfect implements. Man constantly lowers their weight and thus achieves great technological and social results. These implements make man move ever faster and more precise. They enable man to master the world and push man to the congenital limits of his corporal being. Propped up by these miraculous prostheses, man surpasses his earthly limitations and enters the spheres of the omnipotent inventive rationality. Art is a sublime organizational condition of those prostheses.
Russian Proletarian art, i.e. political art, is in a decisive struggle with the irrational Russian soul, with the forces of its sobbing sentimentality. Proletarian political Constructivism introduces the Nordic spirit of the geometrical mind.
The red Specter of Communism becomes the Geometrist of the new age, the greatest Constructivist and political Dadaist. This Geometrist invented and produced unprecedented prostheses which would release the laboring body and would throw it into the community of radiant comradeship.

THE BODY-AGGREGATE

I am kino-eye. I am a builder.
I create a man more perfect than Adam, I create thousands of different people in accordance with preliminary blueprints and diagrams of different kinds.
I am kino-eye.
From one person I take the hands, the strongest and the most dexterous; from another I take the legs, the swiftest and most shapely; from a third, the most beautiful and expressive head -- and through montage I create a new, perfect man.
Dziga Vertov (30; 17)

Modernized commune does not come together on a congregational basis, i.e. on the principle of religious faith and initiation. It is built up on "aggregational" basis. The future collective body is represented as an electrified machine-like aggregate. This body, as any aggregate, cannot be described. The descriptive line (discourse) is helpless in this case. That is why the Constructivists and the Dadaists repudiate descriptive lines (discourses), because they have no political constructivist potentialities and power. Such a power has only planning, designing lines. Because of that, the body of the new political agent, the Proletariat, can be neither drawn, nor described. It can only be designed, tailored and assembled. The red Geometrist designs and cuts out the body-aggregate of the Proletariat using special kind of tailoring machine like film camera and scissors.

DISCIPLINING OF THE MASS-MAN

The Futurists make it possible for the masses to become complete masters of their language
Tretiakov (25; 245)

If we attempt to reconstruct the modernist project from the start of this century, we would see that it owes its political aesthetic radicalism to the imperative - "Here and now replace this world with a new one!" -- to exchange the old exhausted bourgeois world for a new, differently ordered world. That presupposes two things - invention, design of the new unity of the world and the disciplining of an agent, or rather an actor, who would erect it. The new Unity of the world and the athletic capability of the Erector -- these are prerequisites for the project. What remains to be done is for the action itself to happen to us here, now, immediately. This action is the Modernist act of genius which will be achieved not by that degraded bourgeois personage the Artist, or by a senile, exhausted God. The decisive act of genius is achieved by the Mass Man. His communal body accomplishes a radical feat of labor by erecting the final work - the New World.
Apparently, the political order of this New World is designed as a work ultimately open, encompassing in its space the body of its creator. The creator moves into his creation. This waste-free act of creation leaves nothing behind itself or outside itself, which with its sick body could inflame the new flesh of the world.
The suitability of the Modernist project to life is guaranteed by an already completed rational act, which aspires to the high status of being scientific. The project is scientifically thought out and proven. The designing of the new world is based on the cool minded Geometrist - the predecessor of Scientific Communism. The heat arises only later in the communal body of the Mass Man, who will make the effort of the construction itself. The Modernist Manifesto calls for an immediate mass action. In this sense, behind the manifesto lies the cool mind of the Modernist designer, and after it must be brought out the creative Mass Body. The Manifesto is framed by a scientific Mind and an artistic Creation. Before is the political design, after is the new political order of the world. It might be said that the manifesto is the third position, which stands between the scientifically worked out normative poetics and the concrete work created in accordance with it. In the manifesto, the scientific and the artistic, the political and the aesthetic discourses fuse. The scientific concept and the poetical metaphor merge in the imperative form of Manifesto. And began the Grand construction of scientifically proved metaphors i.e. the imperatives were realized.
The only thing that has been accomplished after the calls of Dada and of Scientific Communism is the party procedure of disciplining Mass Man. The creation of a new world did not take place, because the body refused to accept the communal state as its own creative state. The totalitarian State came to discipline a Mass Body, but it failed and it could not "wither away," as predicted by Scientific Communism.
When speaking of the "old world" one may say that bourgeois society has transformed the social bodies into organs of the personal, the one-sided and peculiar. Bourgeois space rests on the principle of heterogenia because by virtue of its definitions every body is alien to all others. Bourgeois democracy creates a political order capable of governing the segmented social space and enabling the communication of the alien bodies. Bourgeois law regulates the possible concord, accordance and togetherness of the heterogeneous bodies. It organizes into a community the individuals that occupy a different place in society. According to this juridical principle, no physical body may exist outside the law or above it. The law acts equally both on the body of the President and the Dadaist. In contrast to this the bodies are entitled to differ with respect to their property, interests, physiognomy and choice. Equivalent social relations are introduced and ruled by mediators, such as money, alienated from the bodies. Precisely money enables the expression and realization of the actual differences between the separate bodies and their peculiar intercourse in the common space of the market.
And conversely, in order to create a Mass-Man, it is necessary to liquidate all attributes, procedures and principles which identify the bodies as particular and one-sided, as personal entities in a common space. In this case, equivalence will not be ensured by alienated mediators such as money, but by the physical bodies of the subjects of the new communal world. Thus they become equal and Homo-genius which makes possible the act of a great Construction that involves a maximum of mass participation and ultimately welds the bodies together. The communal body consists of fragments that have an equal stake in the common entity and an equal interest in everything beyond their physical limits. Thus money is rendered superfluous, and so is the right to be different and so is the state as an institution which protects the differences. What remains is the body of the Mass-Man, left alone with his own will which draws strength from his primal natural drives: to eat, to copulate, to be in a well-lit and warm place.
An interesting example of Mass-Man Utopia are the ideas of Bogdanov, that vigorous ideologist of the most outspoken political art in Russia -- the Proletcult. This art was suffocated by Lenin because it did not give in to Bolshevization and did not conform to party interests. The political Modernism of Bogdanov became harmful, because Lenin had already turned the political idea into a party idea and the Proletariat had to build not a world, but a party.
Bogdanov charged the Proletariat with ontological interests. Lenin charged it with ideological ones. Modernization as the meaning of political art manifests intuitions of a World. Ideology as the meaning of party art manifests intuitions of a Power.

* * *
Up until now the major concern of this book was the invention and use of various revolutionary devices, apparatus, appliances, gear and the way artists operate with them and cutting out a new reality. From now on we'll direct our attention to the planning and establishing centers for mass scale modernization of human consciousness and physique, for a scientifically justified social engineering. We will examine various projects that enact the spaces of the bright future -- the new cities, together with numerous bold visions for a universal perfection of man achieved through abolishing gender, class and mental differences and launching humans in the outer space for final reunion and eternal life.

1. THE PLOT OF MODERNISM AND ITS CENTERS

Sie haben eine Welt zu gewinnen -- Manifest der kommunistischen Partei

1.1 THE CENTER, THAT UNITES THE CLASS

It was Bogdanov the author of the "organizational theory" of society, who worked out various visions and metaphors for the role and place of the new Proletarian art, which captivate the mass conscience even now. Art, he said, is the higher organization of the social experience, the most powerful means for the concentration of the collective forces of the new class. Art is a perfect organization of the class struggle. It is a radically collectivized labor. In it the notion of private property and personality cannot exist. It is a supreme stage of mass Proletarian labor.
Modern grand scale industry is turned into a gymnastic platform with futuristic apparatus assembled on it where Proletarian art demonstrates its stunning "attractions" (Eisenstein), its grotesque "bio-mechanics" (Meyerhold). All of this rests on the scientific justification of modern technology and automation. Here originates the principle of the creative mass force engaged in this process: Comradeship. The collectivism of the Proletarians homogenizes their social interest. It unifies them and sensitizes them to all things alien, to all things bourgeois. Comradeship does not arise from religious love, but from the technological togetherness of bodies in the process of labor. Comradeship springs from the new geometrical mode of life. The human corporality must become the immediate substance of comradeship. That is why the Proletarian body of the new class must be united through a common substance.
For Bogdanov, blood is the very substance which should be exchanged between comrades and thus comradeship will flow directly into the bodies of the Proletarians. He founded the first blood transfusion clinic, only not with a medical but with an immediately political purpose. Science thus directly begins serving politics, or to be more exact, directly grows into politics. Blood transfusion as the subject of science becomes a means for homogenizing a united collective political agent: the Proletariat.
Brotherhood solidified through blood fusion is an ancient ritual which has charged with enormous symbolic power. This sacred act, which has its cause in the poetic/mythical constitution of the world, becomes an instrument of science and is conducted through a sheer medical procedures ideologically justified and practiced on a mass scale.
This took the life of Bogdanov, himself. He exchanged blood with a man with whom he was totally incompatible. He failed to survive through the antagonism of the alien blood and died. The attempt to produce a purely communal body ended with death. Dada also dreams of such a body and such a center - only not for blood, but for sex (see Dada manifesto below).

* * *
Modernized mind controls the body through designing and mastering prostheses -- of all those machines, transmissions, apparatuses and automata that make body super-able and take over its dark knobby irrationality.

1. 2 MODERNIZATION OF THE HUMAN CORPOREALITY

Ideology and Genitals

According to Ermilov, the "harmonious man" would maintain equilibrium between "psyche and ideology," between "instinct and consciousness," between "the conscious and the subconscious." Ideas acquired through conscious effort would penetrate and become one with the subconscious and the instinctive. Upon reaching this stage of development, a man could manifest his ideology spontaneously by an unconditioned reflex. When the right ideology had entered the "psyche" of the masses, the cultural revolution would be accomplished and Russia would then be a socialist country.
Ermolaev (10; 61-62)

We hit here one of the most far reaching strategies of political modernism, namely: Ideo-logos realized as Physio-logos! Ideology has to penetrate the unconditional nature of physiology and its basic instinct. Revolutionary ideology is expected to set the biological motor and thus to mobilize the primal functions of the human organism. Ideology impregnates human corporality with class self-consciousness and thus makes it proof against decay.
Communist ideology conducts the class interest in the realm of proletarian consciousness, while the bourgeois ideology obscures the interest that it stands for. And Red ideology will transgress the limit of consciousness itself growing ultimately into the proletarian physiology. There it starts tempering with and conditioning the basic reflex. Red ideology is not a bare super-structure that hovers around the basis of social reality as its rival does. It penetrates the very human fabric and resets its unconditional set-up. Thus it is set to change the constitution of the very human physique by building a proletarian proper body which possesses unprecedented faculties and is capable of doing miracles on Earth. Ideology becomes inborn property of the body. Ideology penetrates the genitals. The intercourse disseminates ideology.
The director Meyerhold and the artist Lisitskii staged in 1928 I Want a Child, a play written by Sergei Tretyakov. This teem of authors was apparently influenced by the idea for a biological selection of the sound constituency of the new world and purification of its class essence through matching the most sound representatives. The theater critic Konstantin Rudnitskii abstracts the ideological point of this radical Left-Front performance: The idea of the play is strikingly simple. The construction of the new world requires physically perfect and ideologically healthy cadres. Therefore, it is equally criminal to waste sexual energy and to bear children of men selected by the caprices of love. Healthy, strong, whole woman of proletarian background must mate with healthy worker males. “The State”, said one of the heroes of this play, the Disciplinarian, “encourages such selection” in consequence of which “a new breed of people” appears. He warned that “for all the sickly and the sexual wastrels the day of frightful fasting was coming. Love, according to this program, was not totally eliminated, but was put off until better times. “When the human species is uplifted, you can love all you like, but for now, take it easy.”
It was with accordance with this program that the heroine of the play, the young Latvian Communist woman Milda Gri

Vladislav Todorov / Владислав Тодоров

"... на хаоса из мрачните гърди ..." Данте, "Ад", Песен първа