Vol 20 Number 3 July 2008
SYMPOSIUM
RUSSIAN AESTHETICS UNDER CAPITALISM
Russian Aesthetics under Capitalism: An Introduction
Yulia Tikhonova
This essay on movements in Russian art and aesthetics introduces a collection of essays, interviews, art, and other contributions by Russian scholars and artists and by international scholars. It situates a number of contemporary questions on art, aesthetics, culture, and politics in relation to the realities of post-Soviet Russia, emerging capitalism, and international Marxist currents. The essay briefly surveys the rise of Left practices and cultural movements from 2000 up to the present, and considers the implications of Marxist thought for contemporary art and politics. ;
Why I am a Marxist
Vladislav Sofronov
Reflecting on my own Soviet education and past, I argue that Marxism stagnated in the USSR, but has growing relevance to the emerging capitalism of post-Soviet Russia. Thanks to the achievements of the socialist regime, the concepts of classical Marxist theory became abstract and speculative to Soviet citizens. At the same time, Soviet Marxism lost its essential link to democratic debate and independent political action, both necessary to its development and vibrancy. By contrast, post-Soviet capitalism has the potential to invest Marxist thought with newly practical meaning and heuristic value for Russians. Indeed, for post-Soviet thought and change, Marxism, with its search for truth and its transformative capacity, has unique standing in Western philosophy.
The Theory of Marxism: Questions and Answers
Vladislav Sofronov, Fredric Jameson, Jack Amariglio, Yahya M. Madra
Vladislav Sofronov questioned a number of prominent Marxist scholars on the challenges to contemporary Marxism posed by volatile post-Soviet conditions. He seeks a way forward: away from neoliberalism, and toward a leftist consciousness that can be articulated across borders. This article publishes the responses of Fredric Jameson (during a one-on-one conversation that took place in Moscow) and of Jack Amariglio and Yahya M. Madra (on a separate occasion, via email). Jameson's answers reflect his attitude toward contemporary Marxism: its dialectic, the relationship between labor and the theoretical problems of the present. He outlines the challenges that affect Marxism, particularly the disparity between labor and technology and the pressure from postmodernity and culture. Amariglio and Madra stress the enduring significance of the Marxist dialectic, and give a descriptive analysis of the alternations between labor and capital.
The Karl Marx School of the English Language
David Riff
This essay describes the Karl Marx School of the English Language, a reading group of artists and intellectuals based in Moscow. It explores the backgrounds and details of their reading practice, going into particular detail concerning the “Theses on Feuerbach.” It also discusses the implications of the reading group's transformation into an art project.
You Can't Anticipate Explosions: Jacques Rancière in Conversation with Chto Delat
Jacques Rancière, Artemy Magun, Dmitry Vilensky, Alexandr Skidan
Jacques Rancière and members of the group Chto Delat (St. Petersburg/Moscow)—Artemy Magun, Dmitry Vilensky, and Alexandr Skidan—discuss the pertinence of the concept of the avant-garde to the history of art and the present day. Chto Delat members defend the thesis of an essential link between art's political message and its formal features, such as a general “negativity” in relation to the classical canon. They also suggest a distinction between modernism and the avant-garde based on differences in the relation of art to life. Rancière argues against this thesis, returning in detail to the history of art in the twentieth century. He suggests that avant-gardism was a specific, strategic understanding of art that aimed to transform life. The art of the twentieth century was much broader than the avant-garde movement, including a more abstract, minimalist movement as well as an attempt to be faithful to the new forms of modern life.
Profanation of the Profane, or, Giorgio Agamben on the Moscow Biennale
Alexi Penzin
This essay outlines several points discussed during Giorgio Agamben's visit to Moscow in 2006. Among these were the problems of contemporary genealogy and the economy of power, in which capitalism operates as a religion. This is discussed in connection with a Russian cultural scene that has been fueled by petroleum dollars.
The Story of Angry Sandwich People, or, In Praise of Dialectics
David Riff, Dmitry Vilensky
This essay introduces Angry Sandwich People, or, In Praise of Dialectics, a slide show and audio staging of a poem by Bertolt Brecht that Chto Delat made in collaboration with local activists and lay actors to commemorate the centenary of the Russian revolution of 1905. The text details the context of this artwork and its possible meanings.
Legally Soviet: A Conversation
Yevgeniy Fiks, Olga Kopenkina
This conversation between Moscow-born, New York-based artist Yevgeniy Fiks and curator Olga Kopenkina raises issues pertinent to Fiks's work since the early 2000s, which has been focused on the legacy of the Communist movement in the West. His practice is informed, on the one hand, by the legacy of late-Soviet visual culture and, on the other, by developments in contemporary Western, left-leaning art. Fiks's post-Soviet diasporic subjectivity is revealed in a series of projects devoted to the legacy of the Communist Party USA, which signal the “return of historical memory.” Pursuing a critical reexamination of twentieth-century political history in both East and West, Fiks proposes a notion of “critical nostalgia” in stark contrast to the nostalgic melancholy of the 1990s.
art/iculations
Massive Change: The Exhibit as Apology for "New Capitalism"
Lauren Langman
Massive Change, a museum exhibition with accompanying book that has traveled widely in North America, consists of demonstrations and displays of the role of design in dealing with various complexities of modern life. Exhibits and displays show renewable resources and energy, ecologically friendly buildings, energy-efficient trains and recyclable cars, efficient transportation systems, and leading-edge agriculture, medicine, and biotechnology. There is an implicit promise that a well-meaning, technologically based Utopia can and will end poverty, destitution, and environmental despoliation. Embedded within that promise is the assumption that technological innovation rests on global capitalism as the engine that will end poverty and war and turn our planet green. Its major function is ideological. Like many other such exhibits since the Crystal Palace and technology museums, it is part of a long history in which capitalist technologies promise the good life. But capitalism, by definition, must seek surplus value and it depends on externalization of costs. While there have indeed been “massive changes” in the nature of capitalism over the past two centuries, these have always rested on contradictions evident in alienation, poverty, and immiseration, and capitalism always depended on various expressions of ideology to mask its contradictions and instill “willing assent” to its domination.
ALSO IN THIS ISSUE
Foucault, Marxism and the Cuban Revolution: Historical and Contemporary Reflections
Sam Binkley, Jorge Capetillo-Ponce
This article relates central themes of Marxist and Foucaultian thought to the intellectual and political legacy of the Cuban revolution. Against the backdrop of a reading of Foucault's relationship to the revolutionary Left, it is argued that Marxist theoretical discourse on guerrilla struggle (as articulated by Mao Zedong, Che Guevara, and others) provides an intriguing case for biopolitical struggle. In the case of the Cuban revolution, an ethics of self-transformation appears in which new ways of living and practicing life are cultivated in opposition to sedimentations of state power. Moreover, in addition to this historical case, a discussion is offered of the reception of Foucault's work in contemporary Cuba, through an analysis of the published proceedings of a conference on Foucault held at the University of Havana in 1999. Here, Foucault's thought is appropriated as part of an effort to revitalize Cuban socialism itself.
Foucault and the "New Man": Conversations on Foucault in Cuba
Sam Binkley, Jorge Capetillo-Ponce
The following narrative serves as a companion piece to “Foucault, Marxism, and the Cuban Revolution: Historical and Contemporary Reflections.” It presents excerpts from several conversations conducted by Sam Binkley with professors at the University of Havana in June 2007, many of whom participated in a conference held in 1999 on the topic of Michel Foucault's work. Drawing on their testimonies and experiences, these discussions extend our inquiry into the reception of Michel Foucault's work in Cuba, and the relevance of Foucault's ethical theory to revolutionary praxis and socialist ethics. Discussants describe changes in their intellectual outlooks following the collapse of the Soviet Union, surveillance in Cuba, Cuban nationalism, and the ethics of socialist revolution.
REMARX
Development, Capitalism, and Socialism: A Marxian Encounter with Rabindranath Tagore's Ideas on the Cooperative Principle
Anjan Chakrabarti, Anup Kumar Dhar
This paper rediscovers Rabindranath Tagore as delivering an innovative understanding of economy and a critique of the mainstream ideas of development and capitalism. Demonstrating that capitalism appears through the logic of development, his intervention finds fault with individualism, income fetishism, progress, capitalist ideological apparatuses, and bourgeois subjectivity. In contrast, he lays down an alternative idea(l) of ethical economy founded on the template of cooperation. Tagore's ethical economy is read as pointing toward a communist form of living that is holistic, balanced, and responsible.
REVIEWS
Children of Men, or, A Brief Guide to "Embedded" Cinema and the Remapping of Global Dispossession
Mikel Rapent
A review of the film Children of Men, directed by Alfonso Cuarón, argues that it presents a fascinating look at the politics of state power and coercion in advanced capitalist “societies of control.” The review also argues that the film gestures toward a vision of emancipatory politics while simultaneously and unflinchingly dealing with the contradictions of neoliberal social engineering, modes of manufacturing consent, and economic strategies of accumulation by dispossession.
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