FREE CHEESE OR FREE BREKFAST

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 Free cheese is only in a mice trap

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                              free tomato

THE WORLD IS FULL

irkutsk

sandbags and rocks

The slower you go, the further you get

A Trompe L'Oeil Chair

Russian, 20th Century
after a design by Vasili Petrovich Shutov

socialist object

It is worth mentioning that in their interpretation of the Constructivist veshch (thing) most scholars limit their analysis to the NEP period, the time when capitalist objects were reintroduced within the socialist context. In other words, they are talking about an object in its transition (and its division) – a dichotomised object still hesitant to quit its horizontal axis but already exploring the vertical one. Parallel to the NEP’s aim to re-introduce capitalist commodity to a country swept by communalism, there was yet another process that had been developing on a much larger scale. I am referring to the production of socialist commodities -- things that can be characterized as both psychedelic and didactic. These “quasi-objects” had nothing to do with the items of everyday use -- kitchenware, furniture, clothing, etc. Such items were habitually dismal; they lacked any sense of pleasure, any hope for prestige or comfort. The ways in which the communal psyche connected itself to communal objecthood were completely de-fetishized. The communal Eros was redirected to the sphere of public (read socialist) objecthood which -- for the most part -- consisted of indexical sign-objects from the inventory of photographic, sculptural, or architectural agitprop.ii These also included “cine-forms” through which one could “perceive a tempestuous and incessant flow of people as an interrupted moving form of never stopping content.”iii Even if they looked tangible, they were still images and traces of something else. Thus, socialist commodity had a repeatedly postponed presence -- an object in its pure potentiality. However elusive, especially as seen through the lens of individual (i.e., noncommunal) optics, socialist commodity (“obshchestvennaia veshch” in Aleksei Gan’s terminology) has never failed to be perceived as an object. By this I mean the tendency to objectify the indexical and anticipatory nature of socialist commodity by turning the representation of its presence into the presence of representation. As was mentioned earlier, many socialist objects functioned as instruments of synchronicity (they were “in charge” of channeling the waves of communal desire in the “proper” direction). The fact that socialist commodity had a postponed presence was in harmony with the deferral of individual subjectivity.iv With this double deferral, the capitalist subject/object dichotomy was subjected to the same fate.

Victor Tupitsyn

emblematics of the prison

http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/gallery/2014/sep/18/decoding-russian-criminal-tattoos-in-pictures

Aug und seiner Mandel

Мясницкая, 15. Дом Кузнецова

Мясницкая, 15. Дом Кузнецова

Архитектура советского авангарда.

 

А. Никольский, И. Белдовский, В. Гальперин, А. Крестин. Крематорий. План

POTEMKIN VILLAGE

Definition of POTEMKIN VILLAGE

: an impressive facade or show designed to hide an undesirable fact or condition

Origin of POTEMKIN VILLAGE

Grigori Potëmkin, who supposedly built impressive fake villages along a route Catherine the Great was to travel

First Known Use: 1937

coming apart at the seams

The Socialist Object

.. the light from the East is in the new relation to the person, to woman, to things. Our things in  our hands must be equals, comrades, and not those black and mournful slaves, as they are here..

Rodchenko in Paris

The production should bring out the material of the action quite soberly and objectively.
Brecht

Kingdom of Shadows

Last night I was in the Kingdom of Shadows. If you only knew how strange it is to be there. It is a world without sound, without colour. Everything there – the earth, the trees, the people, the water and the air – is dipped in monotonous grey. Grey rays of the sun across the grey sky, grey eyes in grey faces, and the leaves of the trees are ashen grey. It is not life but its shadow, it is not motion but its soundless spectre. Here I shall try to explain myself, lest I be suspected of madness or indulgence in symbolism. I was at Aumont’s and saw Lumière’s cinematograph – moving photography

Maxim Gorky July 4, 1896,  the Lumière Bros. films at the Nizhny-Novgorod fair in Russia. 

flyer / meteor

mourning horses

“Do something undreamed-of,” demanded Khlebnikov, “strictly new, you horses pulling the hearse of the world!”

shklovsky

 

“The road keeps turning. The turns throw back the highway like a roll of fabric on the counter.

corporation of the dying

red cabbage soup
carbonic acid bath
marzipan
ochre-yellow Italian scarf
whipped cream
meringue
coffee
a fur outfit with variegated pearls
felt footwear
program for a materialist encyclopedia



tungus

30 January 1927

But I also came across a real parrot, a white macaw: on Miasnitskaia, sitting on a basket containing linen goods a woman was selling to passers-by.


Judith Butler on Benjamin's Theses on the Philosophy of History

партизаны

The Revolt in Łódź in 1892

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The Revolt in Łódź in 1892

Barbara Wachowska

The events which began in Łódź on 2 May 1892 shook the city, which, at that time, was the largest industrial center in Russian-ruled Poland with a population of nearly 150,000. The factory workers who numbered around 40,000 halted their work and went on strike in ‘the leading fortress of our capitalism’—in the words of Julian Marchlewski, one of the leaders of the Polish labor movement. Soon, this protest turned into a general strike. As declared by Konstanty Miller, the governor of the Piotrków province, ‘the workers stopped working and gathered in the city in large numbers’.(1)

The strike of the Łódź proletariat was its first mass protest. It was referred to by the tsarist authorities as a bunt (‘revolt’) and it is known as such among historians. It was not a coincidental occurrence.

*

Contradiction and Overdetermination

Louis Althusser (1962)

The concentration of industrial monopolies, their subordination to financial monopolies, had increased the exploitation of the workers and of the colonies. Competition between the monopolies made war inevitable. But this same war, which dragged vast masses, even colonial peoples from whom troops were drawn, into limitless suffering, drove its cannon-fodder not only into massacres, but also into history. Everywhere the experience, the horrors of war, were a revelation and confirmation of a whole century’s protest against capitalist exploitation; a focusing-point, too, for hand in hand with this shattering exposure went the effective means of action. But though this effect was felt throughout the greater part of the popular masses of Europe (revolution in Germany and Hungary, mutinies and mass strikes in France and Italy, the Turin soviets), only in Russia, precisely the ‘most backward’ country in Europe, did it produce a triumphant revolution. Why this paradoxical exception? For this basic reason: in the ‘system of imperialist states’ Russia represented the weakest point. The Great War had, of course, precipitated and aggravated this weakness, but it had not by itself created it. Already, even in defeat, the 1905 Revolution had demonstrated and measured the weakness of Tsarist Russia. This weakness was the product of this special feature: the accumulation and exacerbation of all the historical contradictions then possible in a single State. 

*

Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism

Fredric Jameson (1991) 

....the great Althusserian (and Lacanian) redefinition of ideology as “the representation of the subject’s Imaginary relationship to his or her Real conditions of existence.

...

Transcoding all this now into the very different problematic of the Althusserian definition of ideology, one would want to make two points. The first is that the Althusserian concept now allows us to rethink these specialised geographical and cartographic issues in terms of social space – in terms, for example, of social class and national or international context, in terms of the ways in which we all necessarily also cognitively map our individual social relationship to local, national, and international class realities. Yet to reformulate the problem in this way is also to come starkly up against those very difficulties in mapping which are posed in heightened and original ways by that very global space of the postmodernist or multinational moment which has been under discussion here. These are not merely theoretical issues; they have urgent practical political consequences, as is evident from the conventional feelings of First World subjects that existentially (or “empirically”) they really do inhabit a “postindustrial society” from which traditional production has disappeared and in which social classes of the classical type no longer exist – a conviction which has immediate effects on political praxis.
The second point is that a return to the Lacanian underpinnings of Althusser’s theory can afford some useful and suggestive methodological enrichments. Althusser’s formulation remobilises an older and henceforth classical Marxian distinction between science and ideology that is not without value for us even today. The existential – the positioning of the individual subject, the experience of daily life, the monadic “point of view” on the world to which we are necessarily, as biological subjects, restricted – is in Althusser’s formula implicitly opposed to the realm of abstract knowledge, a realm which, as Lacan reminds us, is never positioned in or actualised by any concrete subject but rather by that structural void called le sujet supposé savoir (the subject supposed to know), a subject-place of knowledge. What is affirmed is not that we cannot know the world and its totality in some abstract or “scientific” way. Marxian “science” provides just such a way of knowing and conceptualising the world abstractly, in the sense in which, for example, Mandel’s great book offers a rich and elaborated knowledge of that global world system, of which it has never been said here that it was unknowable but merely that it was unrepresentable, which is a very different matter. The Althusserian formula, in other words, designates a gap, a rift, between existential experience and scientific knowledge. Ideology has then the function of somehow inventing a way of articulating those two distinct dimensions with each other. What a historicist view of this definition would want to add is that such coordination, the production of functioning and living ideologies, is distinct in different historical situations, and, above all, that there may be historical situations in which it is not possible at all – and this would seem to be our situation in the current crisis.
But the Lacanian system is threefold, and not dualistic. To the Marxian-Althusserian opposition of ideology and science correspond only two of Lacan’s tripartite functions: the Imaginary and the Real, respectively.