The Hand at Work: The Poetics of Poiesis in the Russian Avant-Garde 9781644697085

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The Hand at Work The Poetics of Poiesis in the Russian Avant-Garde

The Hand at Work

The Poetics of Poiesis in the Russian Avant-Garde S u s a n n e Str ä t l i n g

Translated by Alexandra Berlina

Boston 2021

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Strätling, Susanne, author. | Berlina, Alexandra, translator. Title: The hand at work : the poetics of poiesis in the Russian avant-garde / Susanne Strätling ; translated by Alexandra Berlina. Other titles: Hand am Werk. English (Berlina) Description: Boston : Academic Studies Press, 2021. | Translation of: Die Hand am Werk : Poetik der Poiesis in der russischen Avantgarde. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2021033453 (print) | LCCN 2021033454 (ebook) | ISBN 9781644697078 (hardback) | ISBN 9781644697085 (adobe pdf) | ISBN 9781644697092 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Experimental poetry, Russian—20th century—History and criticism. | Literature, Experimental—Russia—20th century—History and criticism. | Literature, Experimental—Soviet Union—History and criticism. | Avant-garde (Aesthetics)—Russia—History—20th century. | Avant-garde (Aesthetics)—Soviet Union. | Gesture in literature. | Gesture in art. | Hand in literature. | Hand in art. | Arts, Russian—20th century. Classification: LCC PG3064.E94 S7713 2021 (print) | LCC PG3064.E94 (ebook) | DDC 891.709/1109041—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021033453 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021033454 The book is an abridged translation of Die Hand am Werk. Poetik der Poiesis in der russischen Avantgarde, München: Fink Verlag, 2017 The translation of this work was funded by Geisteswissenschaften International—Translation Funding for Work in the Humanities and Social Sciences from Germany, a joint initiative of the Fritz Thyssen Foundation, the German Federal Foreign Office, the collecting society VG WORT and the Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels (German Publishers & Booksellers Association). Copyright © Academic Studies Press, 2021, English translation ISBN 9781644697078 (hardback) ISBN 9781644697085 (adobe pdf) ISBN 9781644697092 (epub) Book design by Tatiana Vernikov Cover design by Ivan Grave Published by Academic Studies Press 1577 Beacon Street Brookline, MA 02446, USA [email protected] www.academicstudiespress.com

Contents

Introduction I. Speaking. From Hand to Mouth II. Writing. Letters at Play

IX 1 63

III. Pointing. Theater between Performance and Perception

114

IV. Working. The Word as a Tool

153

V. Acting. Poetics of Operativity

177

VI. Giving. Poetics of Life

223

VII. Touching. Tactile Text Experiments

248

VIII. Toward a Philology of the Hand

280

Bibliography

288

Captions

312

Index

319

He is as unfamiliar to me as the back of my hand. That’s what you should say about someone whom you don’t know. —Viktor Shklovsky, “Chaplin as Policeman,” 1923

Introduction 1. Starting Point: Images of the Hand Pointing, modelling, grasping, reaching, holding, throwing, catching, giving, stroking, writing, hitting, clutching, shaping, gripping, releasing, pushing, pressing, taking, pulling, drawing. . . . In the diversity of its motions, the hand shapes the relationship between the human being and the world. Its actions realize creative impulses; its sensory perceptions open up zones of experience and comprehension; its gestures form the foundation of social interaction. A tool of building and forming, an organon of knowledge, a medium of contact and communication—the hand unites body control, perception, and media use. Coordinating muscles and sensory stimuli, synchronizing motions of the fingers and palm, exercising gross and fine motor skills, we work, write, handle tools, and create tactile worlds. This brief description merely touches the surface of human hand use. Beyond the handling and handiwork listed above, there are also numerous manipulative steps and procedures in which the hand determines the form and content of artworks in both the productive and the receptive process. The interplay of the left and the right hand must be mentioned, too, since the manual spectrum is significantly expanded by their interaction. Despite all this, the history of art and culture has rarely paid attention to the hand. This practical body part seems ill-suited for theoretic, let alone aesthetic, analysis. In constant competition with the eye as the primary organ of philosophical and aesthetical reflection, the hand has been leading a shadowy existence to the present day.1 Cultural anthropology and media studies diagnose a constant regress of the hand while manual activities are being 1

Matthew Fulkerson’s monograph The First Sense. A Philosophical Study of Human Touch (Cambridge, Mass., 2014) is a recent important exception. Fulkerson breaks ground for a new conceptual understanding and—finally—appreciation of touch.

x Introduction

outsourced to machines and technical apparatuses. Only the touch technologies of the twenty-first century have granted the hand a comeback of sorts. Under these conditions, the hand is and remains the great unknown, as proclaimed by Viktor Shklovsky in 1923 in the epigraph. Against this backdrop, an attempt is made here to take a closer look at the hand in all its obscurity. The analyses in this book critique the established consensus that represents the avant-garde as a picture-book epoch of visual lust fueled by media technology and propaganda art. The historical configuration of the avant-garde in the context of the “hand at work” is complicated not merely by the intensity with which it conjures up and rejects the image of the hand. Rather, the continuous reference to the hand as an aesthetical model leads to a shift in the aesthetical system itself, a shift that is concealed rather than illuminated by the much-mentioned synesthesia of this epoch. With unprecedented perseverance, the Russian avant-garde explores manual practices and haptic forms of experience. It exploits the hand as a primary organ to make aesthetic and poetic procedures graspable as poiesis, that is, the operative use of materials, techniques and instruments from and with which texts are created. Here, the hand is a model of both aesthetical reflection and artistic practice. In a demonstrative display, the working, forming, and creating hand thus becomes the central organ of art, emblematic of creative power and will, of productivity and manipulability. Almost all art forms use the palm and fingers to symbolize artistic self-reflection. This is particularly evident in the visual arts, where the motif of the hand—active or resting, pleading or refusing, giving or taking, tense or relaxed, clenched or opened—occupies a key position. Even a cursory glance at the iconography of that period suggests the dominance of this leitmotif, whose most complex visual formulation is arguably El Lissitzky’s self-portrait The Constructor (1924) with its palimpsest of face, hand, curve diagram, and a pair of compasses serving as the icon of the modern artist’s image. More than a recurrent motif, the image of the hand suggests an aesthetic experience of difference in the haptic area, as enabled especially by the plastic arts. In 1914, Vladimir Tatlin programmatically demanded that in the future “the eye should be placed under the control of the haptic sense,”2

2

Vladimir Tatlin, “Nasha predstoiashchaia rabota” [1920], in Mastera sovetskoi arkhitektury ob arkhitekture, vol. 2 (Moscow, 1975), 76–77, qt. 77.

1. Starting Point: Images of the Hand

proposing to transfer this tactile sphere of experience into the other arts as well. Such border crossings are experimentally supported, for example, by studies that Mikhail Matyushin conducted in 1923–24 at the Department of Organic Culture (Leningrad Institute of Artistic Culture; INChUK). In order to research and train the faculty of art perception, he subjected the sense of touch to “intensive training.” He went on to involve this training in the study of colors and the drawings of contours, exploring the skin and hand lines as papillary perceptors along with the muscle relaxation in hand motions.3 Such training programs go far beyond the scope of aesthetic experience expansion; they are geared to the physical reequipment of humankind. The psychotechnical discourse of the 1920s uses sophisticated performance and aptitude tests to optimize and finetune perceptual capacities, stereognostic skills, and the dexterity of the hand. These tests involve comparing sandpaper of different grain sizes and the structures of metal surfaces, sorting feathers and pieces of cardboard (according to their elasticity and thickness respectively) and detecting minimal differences in height by touch. One of the most active participants of this project, Alexei Gastev, subjected the hand to an elaborate training program and, in 1923, proposed to introduce an “exam of work motions” for all Soviet citizens. This exam was supposed to test two types of motion—powerful strikes and moderate pressure—for “one must be able to strike correctly and to press correctly.”4 This also applies to the arts, especially visual ones. After all, the cinema or “cine-eye” (kino-glaz), as Dziga Vertov envisages it, was supposed to “grope through the thicket of life,” but also, as Sergei Eisenstein demands, polemically distancing himself from Vertov, to strike painfully as a “film fist” (kino-kulak).5

3

Mikhail Matiushin, “Arbeitsbericht vom Leiter der Abteilung für Organische Kultur am Leningrader INChUK, 1.10.1923–1.10.1924,” in Zwischen Revolutionskunst und Sozialistischem Realismus. Dokumente und Kommentare. Kunstdebatten in der Sowjetunion von 1917 bis 1934, ed. Hubertus Gaßner and Eckhard Gillen (Cologne, 1979), 95–96, qt. 96.

4

Aleksei Gastev, “Trenazh” [1923], in his Kak nado rabotatʹ. Prakticheskoe vvedenie v nauku organizatsii truda (Moscow, 1966), 51–54, qt. 51f.

5

Dziga Vertov, “Nashe techenie nazyvaetsia ‘kino-glaz’” [1924], in his Iz naslediia, vol. 2: Statʹi i vystupleniia (Moscow, 2008), 400–401, qt. 401; Sergei Eizenshtein “K voprosu o materialisticheskom podkhode k forme” [1925], in his Izbrannye proizvedeniia v 6-i tomakh, vol. 1 (Moscow, 1964), 110–117, qt. 117.

xi

xii Introduction

However, this powerful position of the hand remains to be contrasted with the hymnal celebration of the eye. We are talking about an epoch when the image learns to move and acquires a new status as a leading medium; an epoch when the drastically shrunken manual and tactile dimensions of experience prompt widespread haphephobia and sensual alienation. In this context, the loss of the hand seems paradigmatic for modernity. It marks the transition to a “push button culture,” in which, as Hans Blumenberg stated, manual functionality is “homogenized and reduced to the ideal minimum of pressing a button” and “human actions become increasingly unspecific.”6 In this culture, “the regress of the hand is the price we pay for the progress of technology.”7 Among all aesthetical currents of modernity, constructivism was arguably most consistent in promoting this logic. Its aggressive campaign for the artifact as a technofact continues a historically far-reaching polemic against the error-prone hand. Displaced into the niches of retro arts and craft practice, the deficient hand ekes out a shadowy creative existence— until the sharp invective against the Romantic passéism of handicrafts takes even this last refuge away. Though the antagonism of the hand and the eye has discursively solidified in art and cultural history, a mere juxtaposition of haptic vs. visual arts proves to be strongly schematic. This applies not only to the visual arts but also, perhaps even more clearly, to literature. Oriented toward the eye, avant-garde poetics initially enthusiastically supported the oculocentrism of modernity. Shklovsky’s canonical formula—the literary work of art as a means of “new seeing” (novoe zrenie) through defamiliarization (ostranenie)—expresses this unequivocally. At the same time, however, avantgarde poetics demands a manifold use of hands by focusing on the operative handling of texts, by drawing literature into manual letter play, and by stimulating the tactile dimension of text experience. Above all, the physical nature of writing and reading has been considered with regard to handwriting. According to Heidegger, it is the only form of notation in which “the word belongs to the hand”—a belonging shattered under the mechanical

6

Hans Blumenberg, “Lebenswelt und Technisierung,” in his Wirklichkeiten in denen wir leben (Stuttgart, 1996), 7–54, qt. 36.

7

Bernhard Waldenfels, Sinnesschwellen. Studien zur Phänomenologie des Fremden, vol. 3 (Frankfurt/M., 1999), 100.

1. Starting Point: Images of the Hand

stroke of the typewriter.8 Handwriting carries the burden and promise of presence and authenticity. The avant-garde treatment of letters in artists’ books and densely textured autographs following the samopisʹmo (literally, self-writing) style also draw on this capital. They emphatically stage the writing and reading processes as “material events,”9 in which cognitive processes of deciphering are inherently embedded into an act of physical grasping. When the imagist Anatoli Marienhof says he feels a splinter in each verse, which is supposed to pierce the reader’s hands, when OBERIU poets invite their optically distanced readers to “come closer” and touch the object of the text “with their fingers,” then ‘reading’ literature implies a phenomenology of the text body as corpus and opus.10 A look at utilitarian poetics reveals that this handbound palpability of literature as an interaction of writers, texts and readers concerns not only haptic stimulation (be it tender or hurtful). It also touches upon praxeological questions, which revise the history of literature as the history of text usage. Utilitarian poetics approaches the hand in its own fashion. It meticulously measures the parameters of psychophysical book use, optimizes reading and writing techniques and thus develops an awareness for the operative use of literature. It turns the hand into a tool capable of closing the gap between literature and life, poetics and production. By bringing together the organon of the word and the instrumentum of the hand, the writer’s hand explores the potential performativity of speech. In their diversity, all these approaches aim to trace the hand’s grip beyond the threshold of the text and into its center. Not only does the hand write—it also becomes a literary figure. Accordingly, the encounter with the hand is a key scene of literary self-reflection. Rilke’s Malte finds himself uncannily confronted with his own hand while searching for a fallen pencil; the linguistic creator in Velimir Khlebnikov’s experimental text Ka (1915) explains that there are “word hands” that can make things; in Konstantin 8

Martin Heidegger, Parmenides, in his Gesamtausgabe, section 2, vol. 54 (Frankfurt/M., 1982), 118f.

9

Elisabeth Strowick, “Lesen als material event. Materialität in Literatur und Literaturtheorie,” in Poetiken der Materie. Stoffe und ihre Qualitäten in der Literatur, Kunst und Philosophie, ed. Thomas Strässle and Caroline Torra-Mattenklott (Freiburg i. Br., 2005), 77–93.

10

“Manifest Oberiu,” in Literaturnye manifesty ot simvolizma do nashikh dnei, ed. S. B. Dzhimbinov (Moscow, 2000), 474–483, qt. 476.

xiii

xiv Introduction

Vaginov’s The Goat Song (Kozlinaia pesnʹ, 1927), an unknown poet gratefully kisses his own crippled hand, the organic instrument of tragedy. In these and other scenes, the hand mutates from a writing implement into an eerie or sublime medium of literary inspiration. These texts deploy the hand as a terminus medius (Cassirer), transforming the literary work into a zone of contact, touch, action, and creation. This manual mediality of texts cannot be grasped with a “philology of the eye” (Stiegler); it requires a philology of the hand.

2. Hand Motions: A Manual So what does a philology of the hand set out to do? It does not comb through texts looking for the keyword “hand”; neither does it record literary evidence of the hand as a body part or write a motif history. Rather, it follows the trace of the hand at work to conceptualize how it operates in the field of literature and the arts, how it negotiates relations to bodily life and sensory experience as an anthropological intermediary. It deals with the hand as a figure and a medial-discursive interface of both incorporation and emancipation. To systematically move away from a biologically oriented narrow focus—while also avoiding getting lost in abstractions— the following analyses are guided by a concept both metonymically and metaphorically related to the hand: the gesture. Tracing selected gestures, the next chapters consider key scenes in which the hand acts and works, forms and designs, formulates and designates. Yuri Tsivian recently introduced one of Nabokov’s neologisms into scholarly discourse, using the word “carpalistics” for an aesthetical approach to and through gestures.11 The present gestological (or carpalistic) approach places the interaction of hand and oeuvre on the threshold of physical palpability and symbolic action, thus rendering symbolic techniques and manual-material performative practices understandable in their mutual referencing. By capturing this interrelationship in motion (mostly, in the motion of the hand), the gesture accentuates its dynamic, processual character. Situated in space and

11

Iurii Tsivʹian, Na podstupakh k karpalistike. Dvizhenie i zhest v literature, iskusstve i kino (Moscow, 2010).

2. Hand Motions: A Manual

time, gestures form flexible figures that are deictically vivid and somatically manifest—but also ephemeral, fleeting; indeed, fated to instantly disappear. Established concepts of the gesture reach from instinctive muscle contractions to symbolically highly codified forms of expression—and thus oscillate between an organistic and a semiotic perspective, two views that cannot merge completely. However, disciplines such as biology, ethology, ethnology, psychology, linguistics, art, and theater studies offer an interliminal space between these perspectives. Here, the gesture is regarded as a designed form that has a high degree of artificiality and transformability but at the same time carries the memory of a natural, authentic, physical form. It is a stylized, socio-culturally transformable and standardizable body sign—and yet it is not altogether one of many decipherable symbolic acts. Situated between corporeality and symbolism, cultural intentionality and individual impulsiveness, the gesture merges the internal with the external. In modernity, the multidisciplinary debate on the gesture has led to a gradual metaphorization of the term. From Darwin’s studies on expression, Sittl’s theories of the gesture in antiquity, Klages’s “expressive motion” (Ausdrucksbewegung), Warburg’s pathos formula, Eisenstein’s cinematic gesture, and Eikhenbaum’s word gesture to Mukařovský’s semantic gesture—there is a multitude of gestural concepts that resist a strict typology. Still, attempts to typologize have been made. For instance, in the 1920s, the art historian Mikhail Fabrikant at the State Academy of Art Sciences (GAKhN) developed a systematic approach to gestological research that followed four strands. The first was the iconographic study of the gesture as a “permanent attribute.” The second studied the affect gesture, that is, emotional expression. The third strand discussed form, distinguishing between the gesture as a way to fill space, the gesture as a contour, and the dimensionally stylized gesture in two- and three-dimensional space. Finally, the fourth strand was sociologically oriented and studied the gesture as an ideological symbol.12 Though this system is clearly built on material from the visual arts, it can also be productive for other art forms. This applies to the dimensional dynamics of the gesture and especially to the issue of form.

12

M. I. Fabrikant, “Zhest,” in Slovarʹ khudozhestvennykh terminov. GAKhN. 1923–1929, ed. I. M. Chubarov (Moscow, 2005), 156–157.

xv

xvi Introduction

The gesture is arguably the perfect point of departure for a discussion of form as a dynamic, processual phenomen. While moving motorically, the gesture also semiotically initiates a sign motion. In an interliminal space, it forms an authentic figure of transition. And it is precisely this transitory and transfigurative aspect of the gesture that determines its well-known openness. Giorgio Agamben has described this openness as an oscillation between act and potency, between a means and an end. This intermediate state enables to grasp the mediality of the gesture: instead of communicating a clear message or producing a practical result, it “makes visible the means as such.”13 The gesture remains in limbo—beyond a stringently regulated process of transmission, no longer embedded in the kinesthetic continuum of communication—neither clearly signifying nor completely appropriable. Brian Rotman introduced the term “gesturo-haptic” for this suspension of the alphabetical body. This term marks “a mediating technology that escapes the bounds of coded signification by operating within interactive, participatory, and immersive regimes. In other words, the gesturohaptic doesn’t communicate in the accepted sense—source A sends signifying item B to a recipient C—it doesn’t convey messages, send information, transmit meanings, or bear significations which exist and are determined in advance of its action.”14 Gestures here mark a motion, an action, an event, a point in time, a stage or a plane of observation on the boundary. This is true not only in regard to language, which stands in a particularly complex supplementary relationship to the gesture. In his phenomenology of gestures, Flusser also locates the gesture at the boundary to facts and artefacts that do not, at first glance, seem gestural—such as listening to music or planting—and also to the act of love, which is associated with an almost unlimited number of gestures.15 Flusser’s approach has led him to include all this in his catalogue of gestures as expressions of liberty. The present study, too, makes a selection that breaks the narrow definition of “gesture=expressive hand motion.” In addition to the gestures

13

Giorgio Agamben, “Noten zur Geste,” in Postmoderne und Politik, ed. Jutta GeorgLauer (Tübingen, 1992), 97–107, qt. 103.

14

Brian Rotman, Becoming Beside Ourselves. The Alphabet, Ghosts, and the Distributed Human Being (London, 2008), 51.

15

Vilém Flusser, Gesten. Versuch einer Phänomenologie (Frankfurt/M., 1994).

3. Discourses: Operativity, Rhetoric, Phenomenology

of speaking, writing, and showing, which are closely related to literature, it also addresses practices of working, acting, giving, and touching, thus significantly expanding the poetological definition of the gesture. These fields represent vastly different actions with diverse scripts and sceneries, which use gestures in highly heterogeneous ways. What unites them is their focus on the transformative practice and the symbolism of motion forms, which show how the hand and its handling intervene in the poetic process. They are centered around acts in which construction and meaning intertwine or diverge, opening up a multifaceted view of avant-garde poetics as poiesis.

3. Discourses: Operativity, Rhetoric, Phenomenology In the image of the hand, the artist is represented both as homo significans and homo faber. The Aristotelian characterization of the hand as a “tool of tools” remains largely unchallenged throughout cultural history. In the late nineteenth century, philosophy of technology developed a far-reaching theory of organ projection proceeding from the “innate tool” (Kapp)—the hand. In the twenty-first century, the hand is still celebrated as the “master instrument of the Masters of the Universe.” This technical grandeur is underpinned by physiological findings that praise the unique flexibility of the chiro-digital musculoskeletal system as well as by paleo-ontological and neurobiological studies that link the development of manual dexterity and the growth of brain mass. Moreover, anthropological treatises consider manual manipulation the “dominant aspect of our biological and cultural adaptation,” thus classifying the hand as the number one cultural tool. Freed by the upright posture, the hand has a guiding function in modelling the human being as animal laborans and animal symbolicum. The homo erectus rebels against gravity, stands apart from most other animals, and rises above nature. Expressions like “being upright” and “having a backbone” draw considerable symbolic capital from this superiority pose. The upright walk is a “leitmotif in the formation of the human organism,” which determines its anatomical shape from head to toe. Moreover, the position of the upright body and the upright gait establish a specific relation to the world, a mode of experiencing: “Upright we are, and we experience ourselves in this specific relation to the world. . . . Upright posture pre-establishes

xvii

xviii Introduction

a definite attitude toward the world; it is a specific mode of being-in-theworld.”16 This mode of being is characterized by distance—not just detachment from the ground but the distancing resulting from the changed perspective, the view from above. It is here that Erwin Straus pinpoints the transition from the earth-bound necessity of touching everything (as can be observed in crawling babies) to an expanded field of remote perception, which makes the eye the primary organ and the remote sense of vision the primary sense. The development from the earth-bound grasping reflex to the distant view, from direct gripping to mediatized, indexical pointing, is a vertical motion within a horizontal space of perception. What happens to the hand in this process of verticalization and distancing? Released from the task of carrying the body, the front extremities develop into arms and hands. “In upright posture, the hand becomes an organ of active gnostic touching—the epicritic, discriminative instrument par excellence. As such, the hand now ranks with the eye and the ear.”17 This suggests not only an innate entanglement between touch and cognition but also an epistemic hiatus: cognition does not strive for identity with the objects it grasps but neutralizes them. The reconfiguration of the hand as an intellectual instrument and its function for the emergence of semiotic systems needs to be understood in the combination of action and meaning. Symbolic worlds are rooted in action. According to Cassirer, this origin shapes the human approach to the world—and it is clearly expressed in manual signals. Ritual practices—such as blessing, healing, administering justice, promising, vowing, protecting, conjuring, greeting, affirming, and proving—fuse body and sign in the motions and shapes of the hand. As a symbolically overdetermined body part, the hand (and its distinction between right and left) has a rich tradition in myths, legends, and superstitions. Tom Thumb and Thumbelina live on in cultural history; chopped off hands serve as fetish and remedy; itchy fingertips mean deceit; injured hands signal grief; numb phalanges prove guilt, malformed hands announce misfortune, and so on.18 16

Erwin W. Straus, Phenomenological Psychology (New York, 1966), 139.

17

Ibid., 150.

18

Lewis Dayton Burdick, The Hand. A Survey of Facts, Legends, and Beliefs pertaining to Manual Ceremonies, Covenants, and Symbols (Oxford, 1905 [reprint Purdue, 2002]).

3. Discourses: Operativity, Rhetoric, Phenomenology

In this intersection of operativity and symbolism, we can discover areas where aesthetic objects exhibit themselves as formed, manufactured, made artefacts—and where, by profiling the hand as a medium of manipulation and construction, the work of art projects itself from the aesthetic sphere into instrumental and technological ones. The fact that Greek antiquity did not distinguish between craftsmanship and the arts, combining both in the word techné, has been noted often enough but rarely considered in depth. In the grey area between the aesthetic and the technical, the hand leads a mostly skeptically viewed existence as an object that participates in the discourse of beauty and yet remains a foreign body in it. In addition to these operational aspects, rhetorical discourse is addressed here: the hand can only be the “master tool” when it usurps a skill usually reserved for the mouth—when it speaks. Gestures accompany the verbal act and supplement acoustics with visual expressiveness. Moreover, the hand forms its own language, independent of the mouth. Already the ancient actio teachings deal with this double function of the hand gesture: translating what is being said into what is being shown vs. creating complex kinetic systems, which have no direct equivalent in spoken language. Still, both forms of the oratorical gesture, the derivative as well as the autonomous manual motion, transform the body, especially the hand, into a sign that oscillates between a seemingly primordial, natural mode of expression and a highly artificial, culturally codified one. The gesture of embodied speech renders the separation of the physical from the symbolic impossible. Not only rhetorical declamation and sign language derive from this close coordination of hand and word. It is also the basis for a performative use of language, which unites word and deed. Moreover, it manifests itself in the deictic competence of language, which Karl Bühler defined as evoking a space of perception and experience by verbal means.19 These possibilities show: not only can the hand accompany or substitute speech but also vice versa—language can complement and supplement the hand by creating spaces for verbal action. In the figure of the hand, language transcends the “mere” rhetoric of the word, so often perceived as empty, and leaves the world of signs for the world of things. The conceptual conjunction of word and deed involves a dimension of linguistic behavior in which

19

Karl Bühler, Sprachtheorie. Die Darstellungsfunktion der Sprache (Stuttgart and New York, 1982).

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xx Introduction

verbal utterances become effective in reality. Linguistics tends to limit this mode to performative speech acts. However, this kind of language use goes far beyond such speech acts as promising, marrying, vowing, and naming. It characterizes a mode of language use that turns words into agents of the body by means of the hand, thus morphing the classical manus loquens into a manus agens. In addition to the operative and rhetorical dimensions, we must consider the hand’s phenomenal function in the structure of perception and in sensorially based cognitive processes. In the history of the senses, a powerful position was almost continuously attributed to the theoretically inclined eye (as evident, for instance, in its metaphorical ennoblement as oculus spiritualis), while hands-on experience was given a subservient role. However, in the history of science, there is also a strong tradition of picturing the hand as an organ of powerful experience and consciousness. In this discourse, the haptic becomes a metaphor for comprehension, as in the well-worn metaphor of grasping an idea. Herder, the model philosopher of tactilism, ties his privileged treatment of the hand to the epistemic function of haptics, since the “ophthalmic human being with a thousand eyes but without feeling, without a sensing hand . . . would remain in Plato’s cave all his life, without clearly conceptualizing any physical property. . . . But the more he grasps and possesses the body qua body rather than gazing at it and dreaming of it, the more alive do his senses become.” He goes on to point out that the German word Begriff (concept) is derived from greifen (grasping).20 What Herder has claimed for sculpture also holds true for the perception of less obviously three-dimensional aesthetic objects as an intrusive, sometimes painful bodily experience. After all, literature—which tends to draw heavily on the tactile metaphor of texture in all its interweavings—uses haptic experiments and physical presence to shape the act of reading into a phenomenological approach to the body of the text. At the intersection of the three discourses, a central problem of aesthetic theory comes into the focus: the relationship between poiesis and manipulation. Through the figure of the hand, a work (of art) can be grasped as a medium of manipulation. Here, the term manipulation actualizes both its meanings: that of manually using, producing and manufacturing ob20

Johann Gottfried Herder, “Plastik. Einige Wahrnehmungen über Form und Gestalt aus Pygmalions bildendem Traum” [1778], in Herders Werke, ed. Hans Lambel, part 3, section 2 (Stuttgart, 1890), 273–357, qt. 279.

3. Discourses: Operativity, Rhetoric, Phenomenology

jects—as well as that of subtly changing, subordinating, deceiving, making subservient, objectifying, controlling, appropriating, taming, arranging and (technically) transforming. In his 1926 study “The Nature of Aesthetic Experience,” George H. Mead defines the human being as a subject who must experience and generate meaning in direct physical manipulation.21 It is the “compulsion to manipulate” that enables the essence of aesthetic experience. When one hand presses against the other, Mead writes, one feels the pressure of the hand as well as pressure against the hand; things and their tactile handling constitute the meaning and the world. By means of manipulation, the hand offers itself for a poetics of poiesis in several ways. It figures as a tool that affects body and media control in equal measure. It mediates between the poles of artistic creation and technology, aesthetics and technics, artistry and mechanics. It creates a space in which aesthetic experience emerges in its sensory resistiveness and affective range. Tracing and working out concepts of a poetics of poiesis thus means exploring the genesis, use and form of artworks via the hand. The readings in the present monograph explore poetologies of touch through basic procedures of “handling.” In individual chapters, they examine the gestural complexes of speaking, writing, showing, working, acting, giving, and touching. Through its gestural leitmotif, each of these chapters analyses a specific poetological problem that is particularly contentious in the avant-garde and predominantly manifested in a specific gesture. Thus, the chapter on giving focuses on the question of literature’s claim to life; the chapter on touching explores the literary desire for evidence between image and touch; the one on working deals with the possibilities of a poetics of practice; and the one on showing discusses the theatrical dispositive of the gesture as representation and experience. It is to be hoped that this selection will also prevent misunderstandings: the present study neither sets out to catalogue early Soviet gestures and their iconography, nor does it provide an inventory of emblematic 1910s and 1920s gestures or a “handy” dictionary of the avant-garde. Rather, the systematics of the study are designed to negotiate central questions of poetics in the light of specific gestures. Uncovering the “invisible hand” in the

21

George Herbert Mead, “The Nature of Aesthetic Experience,” International Journal of Ethics 36, no. 4 (1926): 382–392.

xxi

xxii Introduction

poetics of the avant-garde in every chapter, the study aims to rediscover it as an epoch of new sensing rather than new seeing. Many people have contributed to this book. Georg Witte has shared his immense knowledge of the avant-garde with me throughout the manuscript’s creation. During a year of research at the University of California, Berkeley, generously funded by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, Niklaus Largier took the time to discuss the book’s essential theses. I conferred with Philipp Kohl, Brigitte Obermayr, Torben Philipp, Heike Winkel, and Barbara Wurm about individual chapter versions; finally, Gabriele Brandstetter and Sylvia Sasse assessed the text as a whole, fundamentally enriching the manuscript. The book you are holding now differs considerably from the manuscript which was completed in 2014 and published in German in 2017. The present version is not only greatly abridged; it has also changed languages and contexts. I would like to thank Alexandra Berlina who translated this book into English, the Deutscher Börsenverein for its generous funding of the translation, Katia Yanduganova for her meticulous editing of the manuscript, and Igor Nemirovsky, who took the risk of including the volume in the publishing program of the Academic Studies Press. When Igor and I talked first, he suggested a monograph on Boris Pilnyak—what he received was a handbook on the Russian avant-garde. His unwavering support through the twists in topic and the turns of translation was a constant source of inspiration through the peripeteias of this book.

I. Speaking. From Hand to Mouth

As a point of intersection where discourses on human expression touch on theories of language, the gesture keeps challenging the foundations of communication. In gesticulation, anthropological models meet biological, theatrical, and oratorical ones: here, body and language are intertwined in the interplay of mouth and hand, sound and motion. Gestures have been interpreted as the original human language, a lingua franca connecting people across time and space; as a natural involuntary expression; as the artistic form of a somatic figure. No matter how diverse these approaches may be, they are united by the assumption that the hand is a sign, and that its motion is a symbolic action. Cultural history has made numerous attempts to classify and control the interaction of hand and mouth, most prominently in the concept of eloquentia corporis, the language of the body that elaborates an multifaceted system of non-verbal linguistic competence with particular attention to the hand. Superimposed onto the acoustic act of speaking, moving fingers provide the audible voice with visual expressiveness. However, the functions of gestures exceed handy visual evidence of verbal eloquence. Rather, the relations between the mouth and the hand are characterized by mutual appropriation attempts, ranging from subtle supplementation to open usurpation. Fingers not only accompany but also deny what the larynx, lips, and tongue audibly articulate—and often even convey what no mouth has uttered. “One who has eyes to see and ears to hear will see that mortals cannot hide a secret. If the lips are silent, the fingertips still chatter”—this is how Freud summarized the eloquent somatic symptoms

2

I. Speaking. From Hand to Mouth

of the eighteen-year-old “Dora” in Bruchstück einer Hysterie-Analyse (1905).1 Since its beginnings, rhetoric has sought to discipline this “chatter of the fingers,” which Cicero dismissed as effeminate.2 Ancient rhetoric explored the conflict between the subjugation of the gesture to speech and the tendency towards the autonomization of the speaking hand long before sign languages were designed by schematizing finger, palm, and hand position (from the seventeenth century onward). In actio teachings, the rhetoric of physical eloquence reserves its own territory. Here, the hand acquires a power of speech, emancipating itself from merely emphasizing what is said in words. Quintilian’s characterization of hand gestures as the “universal language of humanity” (omnium hominum communis sermo)3 proceeds from the assumption that the hand does not merely aid speech but itself speaks. Joined by a growing interest in physiognomy, these tendencies towards autonomy led to an appreciation of the gesture in comparison to the spoken word in modern times. In the seventeenth century, an independent rhetoric of the hand emerged, separating the hand from the officia of actio or memoria and making it the superior guiding figure of an original rhetorical concept. One such figure was the image of the five-fingered hand as an allegory of the five parts of speech, as in Stefan Yavorsky’s The Rhetorical Hand (Ritoricheskaia ruka, late seventeenth century). The gesture, too, could become the core of an ars oratoria. Taking up Quintilian’s thesis of gesture as sermo universalis, John Bulwer half a century before Yavorsky bases two complementary studies on the plan “to handle gesture as the only speech and general language of human nature”: Chirologia (1644) and Chironomia (1644). While Yavorsky unites the “speaking motions, and discoursing ges-

1

Sigmund Freud, “Bruchstück einer Hysterie-Analyse,” in his Studienausgabe, vol. 6 (Frankfurt/M., 1982), 83–312, qt. 148.

2

Marcus Tullius Cicero, De Oratore / Über den Redner, ed. and trans. Harald Merklin (Stuttgart, 1997), 18 and 59.

3

Marcus Fabius Quintilianus, Institutionis oratoriae / Ausbildung des Redners, book 12, ed. and trans. Helmut Rahn (Darmstadt, 1975), XI, 3, 87. On the persistent topos of the gesture as universal language, see J. R. Knowlson, “The Idea of Gesture as a Universal Language in the XVIIth and XVIIIth Century,” Journal of the History of Ideas 26 (1965): 495–508.

1. The Performative Paradigm: Poetry as Gesture

tures thereof,” Bulwer is dedicated to “natural expressions, digested by the art in the hand.”4 According to Bulwer, the hand, “the chief instrument of eloquence,” not only possesses a vividness unattainable to the spoken word, but also, through this vividness, is more precise and faster. Not infrequently, the hand anticipates the spoken word, “making a more quick dispatch by gesture.” From this perspective, the hand does not accompany the speech, as is traditionally claimed, but precedes it: “For, the gesture of the hand many times gives a hint of our intentions and speaks out a good part of our meaning before our words, which accompany or follow it, can put themselves into a vocal posture to be understood.” And precisely because the hand often anticipates the word, the tongue spares itself “the labor to prevent a needless tautology.” Whenever the hand thus enters into competition with the tongue, it seems to “overmatch it in speaking labors.”5 These few details from the premodern history of hand/word relations illustrate a crucial idea: gestures are not a negligible accompanying phenomenon. Where the mouth remains silent, the hand can eloquently take its place. Where the signing hand forms its own language, it tends to be perceived as independent of the mouth: “Speech is not bound to oral expression; it can articulate itself just as freely and unrestrictedly in the manual mode.”6 This freedom of the gesture has created both control mechanisms and specific decoding models.

1. The Performative Paradigm: Poetry as Gesture (Anna Akhmatova vs. Vasilisk Gnedov) The early twentieth century takes up the position of the gesture between representation and expression, between the seeable and the sayable. At the 4

John Bulwer, Chirologia: or the Natural Language of the Hand, and Chironomia: or the Art of Manual Rhetoric [1644], ed. James W. Cleary, foreword by David Potter (London and Amsterdam, 1974).

5

Ibid., 17 and 19.

6

Gisela Fehrmann and Erika Linz, “Shifting Gestures. Deiktische Verfahren in sprachlicher und visueller Kommunikation,” in Zeigen. Die Rhetorik des Sichtbaren, ed. Gottfried Boehm, Sebastian Egenhofer, and Christian Spies (Munich, 2010), 387–408, qt. 387.

3

4

I. Speaking. From Hand to Mouth

same time, a decisive revision of the gesture takes place: apart from the traditional promise of universal sayability, the idea of linguistic regress comes to the fore, explored in archaeological work aimed at the origins of articulation and expressiveness. Anthropology, dramaturgy, linguistics, and literary theory examine the gesture as a means of language critique through motion. They all investigate the gesture as a type of sign that indicates a shift away from classical ideas of manual alphabets or chirology to modern concepts of verbal gesture. The classical principles concentrated on the possibilities of using hand motions for eloquence, possibly even surpassing the word in expressive power. Modernity goes a step further, locating the gesture in the mouth and the word itself. On the surface, the two concepts seem connected via the programmatic concept of a gesture language, that is, primarily understood in the sense of gesture as language. However, while “hand history” from Quintilian’s universal language of manus loquens to Bulwer’s “natural language of the hand” or the eloquentia corporis deals with a “linguization” of the body, modernity subjects this concept to a critique. Instead of a language of gesture, it seeks to conceptualize the gesture of language. It transcends the paradigm of bodily eloquence, according to which gestural signs are coded into a language, by incorporating the gestural register into the phonetic and articulatory one. In other words: instead of a rhetoric of gesture, modernity develops a gestology of speech. Under these auspices emerges a multitude of gestural systems, which can hardly be integrated into a coherent system of body codes. Fragments of handed-down gestural ceremonial grammars overlap with elements of archaic sign languages and borrowings from magical body practices; folkloristically stimulated enthusiasm for primitive hand signals is juxtaposed with biometrical proxemics. Literary performances of the era reveal the new culture of gesture in all its diversity. Futuristic poets especially create a “pre-aesthetic”7 style of behavior characterized by aggressiveness and dynamism, which Kruchenykh captures in the image of a “lecturer who, with a calculated gesture, produces cold tea drags from behind his back and splashes them into the audience.”8 In addition to Mayakovsky’s legendary

7

Ekaterina Bobrinskaia, “Zhest v poetike rannego russkogo avangarda,” in Kharmsizdat predstavliaet. Avangardnoe povedenie (St. Petersburg, 1998), 49–62, qt. 49.

8

Aleksei Kruchenykh, Nash vykhod. K istorii russkogo futurizma (Moscow, 1996), 61.

1. The Performative Paradigm: Poetry as Gesture

performances, other, more gesture-specific, forms of declamation should also be examined—forms that at first glance may appear just as scandalous and loud, but that are more closely related to the word. An example can be found in Zenkevich’s Belletristic Memoirs, where he describes a soirée at the Apollon in 1913. The historical protagonists are as motley as can be: cubofuturists, imagists and symbolists all present their verses and theories. At one table, Bely “bustles about like a magician with his box”; then, Khlebnikov emerges from a corner in a soldier’s blouse and recites a poem consisting of punctuation marks, followed by Ignatiev, who manages a few words in a failing voice and then suddenly lets his speech come to a bloody end by cutting himself with a razor. Finally, another young man walks into the middle of the room, even cheekier, with a wide flat face, in a shabby jacket, without a collar, in frayed greasy trousers—Vasilisk Gnedov. He is poetry itself. He reads his ingenious “Poem of the End.” “In the book, there is an empty page under this title but I’m still going to read it!” he shouts. And instead of reading, he makes a sweeping obscene gesture with his right hand.9

Only a few months earlier, the young Gnedov had come to Petersburg with the intention of “overthrowing literature.” Very quickly, he became a sought-after poet-performer.10 In a short sketch about Meyerhold, Tretyakov recalls how, in early 1914, still feeling like a stranger in Meyerhold’s Petersburg apartment, he became involved in a literary debate. He was pondering his theses when he heard someone say, “the whole motion of this boy is very interesting, something about it promises outrageous things to come.” Tretyakov wondered who the boy in question was and soon heard an unexpected answer: “Vasilisk Gnedov.” He comments: “A rather tense boy from Petersburg; the extreme left. Amazed, I stared at his respectable frock coat.”11 Gnedov’s gestures went on to make literary history and eventually even inspire late twentieth-century visual poetry (see fig. 1). 9

Mikhail Zenkevich, “Vecher v Apollo,” in his Elʹga. Belletricheskie memuary [1928] (Moscow, 1991), 36–44, qt. 39.

10

Cf. Vasilisk Gnedov, [autobiographical comment], in his Sobranie stikhotvorenii, ed. N. Chardzhiev and M. Marcaduri, comments and introduction by S. Sigei (Trento, 1992), 130–131, qt. 130.

11

Sergei Tretʹiakov, “Vsevolod Meierkholʹd,” in his Slyshishʹ, Moskva?! (Moscow, 1966), 162–166.

5

6

I. Speaking. From Hand to Mouth

Fig. 1. Ry Nikonova, “Gesture—hyphen” (“Zhest — defis”).

This motion, or the ingenious “Poem of the End,” belongs to a cycle of poetic miniatures that Gnedov published under the polemical and topical title Death to Art! (Smertʹ iskusstvu!, 1913). Its fifteen text fragments investigate the shattering of language, reaching the self-destruction of poetry as a logical consequence. In the final fragment, “Poem of the End” (“Poema Kontsa”), the book’s programmatic title is condensed into the ultimate minimum: the lyrical zero form (fig. 2). This poem, which, as Gnedov’s publisher Ignatiev notes, “is also a poem of nothing(ness) [poema nichego], a zero in graphic terms,”12 leads into the emptiness of silence. Gnedov, who elsewhere celebrates himself as an eloquent “poet of the future, mastering 80,000,000,001 words squared every minute,” thus performs the muchmentioned end of art as an act of consistent speech refusal.13 “Poem of the End” does not only come to a poetic full stop. It also marks the starting point of recitation practice as gestural performance. This recoding of the poetic declamation act from word to hand is such a provocative practice that contemporary literary memoirs repeatedly address it, all the more intrigued by the fact that Gnedov’s reading gestures varied in their performance and interpretation from the obscene to the indeterminately 12

Ivan Ignatʹev, “Preslovie,” in Vasilisk Gnedov, Smertʹ iskusstvu. Piatnadtsatʹ (15) poem (St. Petersburg, 1913), 1–2, qt. 2.

13

Vasilisk Gnedov, “Ogniana svita,” in his Sobranie stikhotvorenii, ed. N. Chardzhiev and M. Marcaduri, comments and introduction by S. Sigei (Trento, 1992), 58 [first publication in his Nebokopy (St. Petersburg, 1913)].

1. The Performative Paradigm: Poetry as Gesture

Fig. 2. Vasilisk Gnedov, “The Poem of the End” (“Poema kontsa”).

mysterious and the religiously ritualistic. Georgy Adamovich writes in his notes on The Impossibility of Poetry (Nevozmozhnostʹ poezii, 1958): In the first, mischievous futurist years, there was a man named Vasilisk Gnedov, who was considered a poet, though it seems he wrote nothing. His only work was called “Poem of the End.” At literary evenings, people

7

8

I. Speaking. From Hand to Mouth

shouted for him: “Gnedov, poem of the end! Vasilisk, come on!” Out he came, gloomy, with a stony face, Khlebnikov-style, kept silent for a long while, then slowly lifted his heavy fist—and quietly said: “over!”14

Vladimir Piast remembers that Gnedov’s recitation style “was nothing but a motion of the hand, quickly raised to the hair and lowered violently, then swung to the right. That gesture, a kind of hook, was the whole poem.”15 Viktor Shklovsky, on the other hand, sees in Gnedov’s gesture an allusion to crossing oneself: “He also had a poem that consisted of a crossing hand gesture.”16 And Ignatiev describes it as “rhythm motion” (ritmo-dvizhenie) in which “the hand drew lines, from left to right, and vice versa.”17 When lines are empty of speech and writing, a space opens up for a poetry of gesture. The shift from speech to gesture, the closing of the mouth by the hand, the translation of metrical speech into rhythmic motion—all this indicates more than a demonstrative act of language liquidation. Rather, a significant change in avant-garde poetics takes shape here, exploring a virulent issue—the end of art and the death of language—by presenting the word in gestures. In a 1939 essay, Bertolt Brecht describes how he developed a “very specific technique” for speaking, be it in prose or verse: “I called it gestural. This means: language should follow the gesture of the person speaking.”18 This technique, clearly derived from stage experience, points toward a shift of dominance from word to gesture. Gnedov’s approach to this shift is radically different: he is not interested in orienting the word toward the gesture (which in Brecht’s work leads to a concentration of deictic pronouns). Rather, Gnedov suspends the word in the gesture. This gesture expresses the unspeakable, that which cannot be said in words.

14

Cf. Georgii Adamovich, “Nevozmozhnostʹ poezii,” in his Sobranie sochinenii (St. Petersburg, 2000), 221–246, qt. 244.

15

See Vladimir Piast, “Vstrechi” (Moscow, 1997), 176. A list of Gnedov’s readings is provided by Sergei Sigei in Gnedov, Sobranie stikhotvorenii, 146–152.

16

Viktor Shklovskii, “Sluchai na proizvodstve,” Stroika 11 (1931): 6.

17

Ignatʹev, “Preslovie,” 2.

18

Bertolt Brecht, “Über reimlose Lyrik mit unregelmäßigen Rhythmen” [1939], in his Schriften zur Literatur und Kunst, vol. 3: 1934–1956 (Frankfurt/M., 1967), 20–30, qt. 29.

1. The Performative Paradigm: Poetry as Gesture

Death to Art! and “Poem of the End” gravitate toward the zero point of speech. After watching Gnedov’s performance with undisguised skepticism, Zenkevich leaves the table (ignoring tea and pastries) and goes to an adjoining room, where Nikolai Gumilev introduces him to “an interesting woman.” Gumilev, for his part, also proclaimed a gestural principle of poetics. In an essay entitled “The Life of the Verse” (“Zhiznʹ stikha,” 1910), he states that a “truly good” (that is, a vivid, living) poem must have two main characteristics: style and gesture. What I call the gesture of a poem is such an arrangement of words, such a selection of vowels and consonants, such an acceleration and deceleration of rhythm, that the reader of the poem unwittingly assumes the pose of its protagonist, takes over his facial expressions and body motions and, thanks to this bodily guidance, feels the same as the poet, so that the thought spoken becomes not a lie but the truth.19

Through the gesture, a text becomes a special kind of speech—so structured in sound and rhythm that the act of reading subjects the body to mimetic mimicking. But back to that evening: another gesture awaited Zenkevich, a gesture of Gumilev’s first wife, Anna Akhmatova. In a separate room, she welcomes him on a sofa, which is flanked by two military men. “‘Elʹga Gustavovna’, introduces Gumilev. ‘Echanté,’ says the lady and extends her hand to me, the long black glove reaching to the elbow.”20 Hardly could a confrontation of two gestures and thus two poetic poses be more flagrant. After Gnedov affronted his counterpart with the irritating gesture of a half cross, now a gloved hand is gracefully offered for a ceremonial kiss. The contrast between Gnedov and Akhmatova, masquerading as “Elʹga Gustavovna” here, is by no means accidental: Akhmatova was regarded as a lyricist with a pronounced elegiac-tragic habitus as early as the 1910s. The accessories that appear in this scene almost stereotypically accompany every memoirist mention of her. Zholkovsky and Panova point out the nearly clichéd fame of Akhmatova’s gesture described in the poem “Song of the Final Meeting”

19

Nikolai Gumilev, “Zhiznʹ stikha,” in his Pisʹma o russkoi poezii (Moscow, 1990), 45–66.

20

Zenkevich, “Vecher v Apollo,” 40.

9

10

I. Speaking. From Hand to Mouth

(Pesnia poslednei vstrechi, 1911): “I fumbled the glove for my left hand / Onto my right.” (“Ia na pravuiu ruku nadela / Perchatku s levoi ruki”).21 Lidia Ginzburg proceeds from Akhmatova’s gestural manners to a reflection on the cultural and historical degeneration of the gesture in modernity. In her diaries, she notes a precarious loss of gestural significance in post-avant-garde Russian society. She attributes this erosion of gestural culture to the habitual disorientation of the subject, who sees signifying bodily behavior as a mere externality and no longer understands its subtle codes. Only in a few individual cases, she writes, the awareness of kinetic expression is preserved, and even there it can no longer be translated into an elaborate language of gestures. According to Ginzburg, this can be seen in Akhmatova’s eccentric style, which suggests a rich body language. Ginzburg detects the “secret of Akhmatova’s habitual appearance and the secret of the fascinating impression she makes” in a “system of gestures.” Akhmatova’s “gestures, poses, and facial motions are not random; like everything constructed, they penetrate the consciousness of the viewer. Unused to such organized gestures, the modern observer and interlocutor tends to perceive them as an aesthetic effect. Our time may produce individual speech systems, but it levels gestures.”22 As this differentiation shows, gestures can be an aesthetic construction of poets’ bodies, a stylization of a poet’s imago, forming its appearance in pointed kinesics. In addition to observing Akhmatova as an exemplary figure, Ginzburg attempts a historical reconstruction of symbolic postures as constituents of social forms with a strong ritual character. To her, etiquette, ceremony, religious rituals, salons, “good manners,” family hierarchies, ranks, and regulated daily routines—a “rhythmic impulse of life” (ritmicheskii impulʹs zhizni)—had been both stimulus and condition of differentiated proxemics in the past. However, in the culture she observes at the time of writing, in 1929,

21

Aleksandr Zholkovskii and Lada Panova, “Pesni zhesty muzhskoe zhenskoe. K poeticheskoi pragmatike Anny Akhmatovoi (Das Karpalistische Opfer),” in Ot slov k telu. Sbornik statei k 60-letiiu Iuriia Tsivʹiana (Moscow, 2010), 50–71, qt. 50. Anna Akhmatova, “Pesnia poslednei vstrechi” [1911], in her Vecher. Stikhi (St. Petersburg 1912), 25–26. Poem quoted in A.S. Kline’s translation: “Song of the Last Meeting,” https://ruverses.com/anna-akhmatova/song-of-the-final-meeting/2058/, accessed December 15, 2020.

22

Lidiia Ginzburg, Zapisnye knizhki. Vospominaniia. Esse (St. Petersburg, 2002), 69.

1. The Performative Paradigm: Poetry as Gesture

Expressive gesticulation is forbidden, at least at work. It only breaks through sneakily and haphazardly in the overly low bow or the overly gentle smile of a sycophant. Of course, this is not because the distinction between those who give orders and those who carry them out has been erased. It is because (and this development began back under the bourgeois order) power and subordination are seen as workrelated, functional human states—while in the times of class thinking, power and subordination were organic qualities, signs of the social breed to which one belonged. This is why external behavior used to go beyond its necessary application and spread to all human habits. We, on the other hand, only know professional, functional—and, therefore, conditional23—systems of gestures. Articles of War prescribe certain gestures to the military; job descriptions prescribe certain gestures to waiters and hairdressers—but to our minds, these are only signs of a profession, which their wearer takes off in the evening along with the uniform or the work clothing.24

A gap opens up here between the pragmatics and the aesthetics of the gesture, indicating an externalized or eccentric function ascribed to posture. It attracts attention when, while still subject to a normative action code, the gesture transcends its scope—be it by reclaiming the old-fashioned hand kiss or by celebrating itself as a mere bodily ornament. Ginzburg is not alone in observing this bizarre misplacement of the gesture. From a completely different perspective, Boris Arvatov also perceives a similar formlessness of everyday gestures. However, he laments this disruption as a consequence of social upheaval. In his opinion, the traditional habitus clashes with the new constructivist life design where scientific work organization methods are not yet fully implemented in everyday life: People do not know how to talk, to walk, to sit, to lie down, to arrange furniture, to conduct public affairs, to receive guests and to go to funerals. . . . Are they even human—all these specialized cripples with their twisted joints, cotton muscles and monkey gaits, these cripples that we for some reason call our equals? We are living in a disharmonious 23

The original uses the word uslovnyi, which is notoriously difficult to translate: deriving from uslovie (convention, condition), it means something like “based on a tacit convention,” “culturally conditioned.” Another possible translation is “notional.” Uslovnostʹ suggests something temporary and external. (Translator’s note.)

24

Ginzburg, Zapisnye knizhki, 70.

11

12

I. Speaking. From Hand to Mouth

world of clichéd things that we don’t feel, emotions that we don’t believe, motions that we can’t control.25

Giorgio Agamben writes that the Western bourgeoisie had entirely “lost its gestures” by the end of the nineteenth century.26 “Gestural derailments” were quick to follow. Tics and apraxia, he argues, do not evidence a general loss of control over the body but are symptoms of a “catastrophe of the gesture.” Convulsions and automaton-like motor activity embody a crisis in the symbolic system of modernity. We are dealing with a strange disintegration of the gesture/word unity, a specific incongruity of verbal and non-verbal codes, which characterizes modernity. In this context, Akhmatova’s gestural decorum appears as a striking aesthetic staging as well as an enigmatic pose. The cited and versified gesture of slipping the left glove over the right hand not only expresses emotional confusion: according to Zholkovsky and Panova, it is also an impossible, oxymoronic gesture.27 Ginzburg interprets it as a sign of arbitrariness that resists all readability: As for Anna Andreyevna [Akhmatova], who inspired me to all these considerations: her gestures are both orderly and unmotivated. The motions of her hands, shoulders, mouth and head are unusually systematic and expressive—but what they express remains unrecognizable because there is no life system to include them. This here is splendor pure and simple, not justified by any social or domestic categories.28

Akhmatova’s gestures, which were often perceived as highly annoying, shed some light on the gestural specificity of her poetry, above all, on acmeist procedural minimalism—the laconic figures, the reticence (skupostʹ slov), which Mikhail Kuzmin demanded in 1910. Akhmatova’s poetry exemplifies the change from the rhythmic and expressive opulence of symbolism to the reduced rhetorical humilitas of acmeism. In his short 1923 monograph on Akhmatova, Boris Eikhenbaum argues that the “verbal per25

Boris Arvatov, “Ot rezhissury teatra k montazhu byta” [1922], in his Ob agit i proz iskusstve (Moscow, 1930), 156–159, qt. 156.

26

Agamben, “Noten zur Geste,” 99.

27

Zholkovskii and Panova, “Pesni zhesty muzhskoe zhenskoe,” 51.

28

Ginzburg, Zapisnye knizhki, 70f.

2. The Linguistic Paradigm

spective has shrunk”: the words no longer “flow into each other in a strong stream but only touch each other at the edge, like parts of a mosaic.”29 He believes that this transition from the extensive verbal force of symbolism to concise condensation sensitizes for the motion of the word itself, for articulation, for facial motions and intonations. Euphony and rich tonal instrumentation are replaced by the motions of speech. This gives “language a special articulatory and facial expressiveness. One began to perceive words not as ‘sounds’ but as motions.” Eikhenbaum goes on to say that this applies most strongly to lip movements when pronouncing vowels.30 His formula of articulatory poetry gains relevance against the background of Akhmatova’s gestural expressiveness. Where the expression of poetry becomes readable as mouth motion, lyrical style is infused by facial and gestural aspects of the poetic habitus.

2. The Linguistic Paradigm 2.1. Kinetology: The Gesture as Philosophical Language (Jacob Linzbach) In 1916, the Estonian mathematician and linguist Jacob Linzbach (1874– 1953) published his Principles of Philosophical Language (Printsipy filosofskogo iazyka. Opyt tochnogo iazykoznania). Now largely forgotten, Linzbach’s study was controversially discussed by his contemporaries. The most detailed review and at the same time the most violent reaction came from Pavel Florensky, who considered Linzbach’s Principles an “interesting and revealing” attempt at an exact linguistics—but above all an unprecedented attack on the essence of language, an outrageous act of despotic language rape: “never before has anyone made such a ruthless, inhuman, unnatural attempt to attack the most central human gift, the most intimate of our treasures—language.”31 Linzbach, who liked to call himself a linguistic

29

Boris Eikhenbaum, Anna Akhmatova. Opyt analiza (St. Petersburg, 1923), qt. 31.

30

Ibid., 86f.

31

Pavel Florenskii, “Antinomiia iazyka,” in his U vodorazdelov mysli, vol. 2 (Moscow, 1990), 152–199, qt. 187.

13

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alchemist,32 was searching for a universal, translingual form of speech— neither proceeding from any existing language nor following such models as Esperanto or Volapuk. In contrast to these artificial languages emanating from natural ones, the idea of a philosophical language attempts to form an a priori system whose classification principles and logical rules exclude diachronic development. This idea had circulated as early as the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries and was essentially influenced by Leibniz’s reflections on rational language as algebra of thought. This language envisioned by Linzbach can be most precisely characterized as prelingual rather than translingual, since, as he says, “we unconsciously master it from birth.” It is a language “without grammar,” “without vocabulary,” a “natural” language, so to speak, or at least “less artificial” than the existing ones. Above all, however, it is transmedial: “based on free creativity,” it can be used by any art form, rendering all art forms mutually translatable: It can be represented graphically, as a drawing; plastically, as a model; scenically, as a performance that moves in time. It can also be represented as a melody or as the play of body motions, a dance, or rhythmic gymnastics. Also, as the interplay of colors on carpets, fabrics, and other decorative objects. All forms of representation are possible: not only those that exist now but also those that existed before or are still to be invented.33

The basic characteristics of Linzbach’s universal language are the principles of abbreviation, simplification, (dis)continuity, and adaptability. They are all meant to guarantee principal translatability: just as philosophical language can be transferred into any system of signs, these systems can be transformed into each other in any way, “a formula corresponding to a drawing, a drawing to a painting, a painting to a poem, a poem to a melody, a melody to a dance, and so forth.”34 For such versatile code compatibility, “artificial language” is hardly an adequate term. Rather, Linzbach’s system attempts to find a language of art that brings together all art forms in

32

Iakov I. Lintsbakh, Printsipy filosofskogo iazyka. Opyt tochnogo iazykoznaniia [1916] (Moscow, 2008), V.

33

Ibid., VIII and IX.

34

Ibid., X.

2. The Linguistic Paradigm

a general symbol theory. As a formal discourse, this theory demands a high level of abstraction. At the same time, though, a surprisingly concrete detail emerges: Linzbach locates the key to the equivalence principle of this (natural) artistic/scientific language in the hand gesture. To him, this motion— a drawing in the air—precedes every graphic mark on a surface. The gesture thus contains an immediacy and vividness that beckons with the promise of direct communication. At the same time, the spatio-temporal, bodily execution of the gesture suggests differentiation and transitivity, enabling the dissection into disjointed particles and their transfer into another medium. Linzbach now sets himself the task of developing a notation system that would correspond to the gesture as the origin of language. To this end, he revisits the basic idea of an instruction for learning shorthand in two days, which he had published as early as 1901. Linzbach’s stenographic method was based on the concept of a linguistic golden ratio corresponding to the structure of the hand. Assuming that the three phalanxes stood in a golden ratio to each other, Linzbach systematized the letters of the proposed stenographic alphabet according to this mathematical ideal of beauty, regarding them as a concealed form of calligraphy.35 However, the alphabet was also to be usable for speed writing—without any elisions and other abbreviation procedures of conventional shorthand systems. Instead, it was supposed to follow the speed of speech while recording the information completely. Linzbach hoped to achieve this by referring to the organic analogy of writing and speaking: just as several organs are involved in the process of speaking (lungs, palate, lips, tongue, vocal chords, teeth, larynx, and others), the writing process was not to be limited to one or a few fingers. In conventional graphic recording systems, “the writer actively employs only the index finger, using others to hold the quill. Moreover, he only gets to really use the last phalanx of this finger, scratching individual letters onto paper with a quill, an analogue of the finger.”36 To reform this reductionist notation model, Linzbach suggests we integrate all fingers into the writing process in a ten-finger writing system, which he calls “multi-finger writing” (mnogopaloe pisʹmo; cf. figs. 3–4).

35

Cf. Iakov I. Lintsbakh, Universalʹnaia stenografiia (skoropisʹ) kak zapisʹ momentov dvizheniia organov rechi (fonografiia). Teoriia, usvaivaemaia v dva dnia (Moscow, 1901), 4f.

36

Lintsbakh, Printsipy filosofskogo iazyka, 27.

15

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Fig. 3. Jacob Linzbach’s “multi-finger writing.”

Imagine a typewriter with only ten keys, which designate not letters but the different organs of speech and their forms of articulation: this is the instrument Linzbach envisions to render speaking and recording simultaneous. On it, the fingers move “like the extremities when running.”37 In addition to this stenographic model, Linzbach conceived a second notation system arising from the transfer of gestural motions onto paper: While we rarely use sign language as Fig. 4. such nowadays, we frequently do use the language of drawing. It is not difficult to see that, in essence, it is also a body language, only technically more perfect. The motions of the depicting hands do not take place in the air— where they’d immediately disappear like the sounds of spoken language— but on a hard surface, creating durable traces, like writing. We usually only use our fingers to draw, proceeding in such a way that the motions

37

Ibid., 29.

2. The Linguistic Paradigm

to be fixed coincide with the plane of paper. As a consequence, the third dimension is presented here conditionally [uslovno], as perspective.38

Sketches of this “hand language” (ruchnoi iazyk) combine to form a cinematographic sequence in which any array of motions and changes of state can be imagined and depicted at the same time (cf. fig. 5).

Fig. 5. Notation of a movement sequence.

In detailed calculations, Linzbach proves that this form of presentation by no means takes more work or time than an ordinary verbal description. For example, to describe (in Russian) a person raising and bending an arm, one would have to touch the quill to paper 9x16=144 times for the corresponding word sequence, while a cinematographic drawing of the same process only requires 7x8=56 lines. This number could be reduced

Fig. 6.

Fig. 7.

Fig. 8.

38

Ibid., 65.

17

18

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even further if one were only to show the start and end positions of the sequence, possibly indicating a connecting central figure or integrating metonymic sections of the motion (cf. figs. 6–8). Linzbach’s theory of language as well as his script model assume that language can be loss-free and simultaneously visualized as a drawing, diagram, or picture. Whereas conventional systems operate with disjoint units such as numbers, letters or other symbols, the density of gesture-based systems enables “continuous representation” through lines, areas, and volumes, their meaning directly accessible on sight (see fig. 9).

Fig. 9. Linzbach’s notation system depicting the journey of a man who lives in a hut on a mountain slope. On a winter morning at sunrise, he sets off for the town in a sledge. A part of the way leads him through the forest, where he meets a hunter whom he takes onboard. A blizzard comes up, they get lost and are pursued by wolves. They manage to drive the wolves away by shooting and eventually reach the hut they had been looking for, have dinner there and stay overnight, although the blizzard subsides.

Linzbach’s ambitious project of designing a notation system which would render the symbolic schemes of highly diverse art forms mutually compatible fits into the framework of what Nelson Goodman has defined

2. The Linguistic Paradigm

as the necessary conditions of notation and scores—but also goes beyond it. According to Goodman, notations have to be syntactically disjoint, finitely differentiated and semantically unambiguous.39 These criteria also apply to Linzbach’s model. However, there are two differences: firstly, Goodman assumes a system of art-specific notations, while Linzbach works on a holistic universal notation whose principles enable coding and transcodability. Second, Linzbach adds the aspect of evidence to the minimal consensus of notationality. Here, he proceeds from the optical system of gesture language, which in turn goes back to a “primordial language” (pervobytnyi iazyk), primarily based on gestures and facial expressions rather than sounds: The general comprehensibility of expressions and gestures, especially the latter, resides in their figurativeness. By showing something via a gesture, we more or less skillfully describe the corresponding object, present its shape, size, position, movement, etc. Every position and motion of the hand represents something and depicts—not conditionally [uslovno] but directly—the corresponding object as given in reality.40

With the categories of figurativeness, immediacy and comprehensibility, Linzbach takes up the most stable topoi of gesture research. A few years earlier, the entanglement of pointing and drawing in the gesture had led Wilhelm Wundt to distinguish between two forms of gesture: indexical (pointing, in relation to objects present) and iconical (drawing, a schematic air painting of objects absent).41 To Linzbach, the drawing gesture can do more: it provides an impression of reality as if the depicted object was present. This is achieved by combining his approach with the alphabet of gestures from Émile Jaques-Dalcroze’s eurhythmics, which were extremely popular in the 1910s. Dalcroze’s approach, which aimed above all to harmonize the rhythm of music with the rhythm of body motion or to translate “musical rhythms into physical movements,”42 is relevant

39

Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art. An Approach to a Theory of Symbols (Indianapolis, 1976), 127–157.

40

Lintsbakh, Printsipy filosofskogo iazyka, 65.

41

Wilhelm Wundt, Elemente der Völkerpsychologie. Grundlinien einer psychologischen Entwicklungsgeschichte der Menschheit (Leipzig, 1913), 62f.

42

Émile Jaques-Dalcroze, Rhythm, Music and Education, trans. Harold B. Rubinstein (New York, 1921), 206.

19

20

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for Linzbach in as far as it discusses the possibility of “plastically embodying” music: tones translated into body forms, melodies into sequences of motion, volume into muscle play. Without delving into Dalcroze’s concept of moving sculptures and “muscular senses”43 or adopting his rhythmical refoundation of aesthetics, Linzbach tries to prove the binary codability of gestures and body motions. Dalcroze had tested how a variety of musically induced muscle motions could be used as elements of teachable symbol systems. Linzbach Fig. 10. disregards the programmatic “sensualization” of See also fig. 5. music and emotion, shrinking the repertoire of body motions to two elementary gestures: the raised and the lowered arm (see fig. 10). Starting out from this basic gesture, increasingly complex poses can be formed. According to a paradoxical formulation by Linzbach, they are “all very artistic and above all quite natural” and “clearly differ from Jaques-Dalcroze’s system of rhythmic gymnastics”44 precisely through this criterion of seeming physical unforcedness. Not only do they combine nature and art; as an analytical gestural typology, to Linzbach, they also enable the exact transposition of musical codes onto the “plastic expression of linguistic signs,” which achieves more than Dalcroze’s system. It gives the impression of musica muta: “Instead of rhythmic gymnastics, which are just a partial, abbreviated description of music, we will have here a full plastic image of it—music for the deaf, so to speak.” 45 Linzbach presents a distorted fragment of Jacques-Dalcroze’s model in his reading in order to achieve his goal: he hopes to use the hand gesture to arrive at a system of signs that is as total as it is optocentric. Everything is to be grasped—with the eyes via the hands. Yuri Tsivian saw Linzbach’s approach as an avant la lettre theory of modern cybernetics and multimedia interface design.46 He argues that 43

Ibid., 211–213.

44

Lintsbakh, Printsipy filosofskogo iazyka, 169.

45

Ibid., 170.

46

Yuri Tsivian, “Cyberspace and Its Precursors: Lintsbach, Warburg, Eisenstein,” in Transmedia Friction: The Digital, the Arts, and the Humanities, ed. Marsha Kinder and Tara McPherson (Oakland, 2014), 80–99.

2. The Linguistic Paradigm

Linzbach designed his system of signs not as a simplified analogue skeleton of a natural language but as a semiotic system capable of reproducing one utterance in different ways. Not least because of this universal translatability principle, Linzbach was ranked among the founding figures of semiotics. There are unmistakable parallels to the Cours de linguistique générale (1916), which was published by Saussure’s students only a few years after Linzbach’s Principles of Philosophical Language. For instance, Linzbach states that “words in themselves do not express anything but are merely conventional signs whose meaning must be known.”47 Like Saussure, Linzbach uses chess to illustrate the paradigmatic and syntagmatic embedding of signs: So we have two things here: the pieces and their locations. The pieces themselves represent only individual objects, but their position expresses some kind of mutual relationship. . . . Each initial piece now has two meanings: its own and that of its position. Just as in a chess game, the value of the pieces depends not only on themselves but also on the position they occupy.48

Linzbach’s versatile transcodability complements Saussure’s semiology in a way that has not received attention so far. But unlike Saussure’s work, Principles of Philosophical Language makes a double claim. On the one hand, the parameters of arbitrariness and conventionality are used to create an iconicity-based model of language. On the other hand, Principles of Philosophical Language is an attempt to move away from purely descriptive linguistics and toward a constructive theory of language. For both aspects, the ultimate aim is to break away from “word language” altogether. Reference to the gesture as the historical source of language is merely a springboard for a utopia of the gesture as the language system of the future. In this future, we won’t use the mouth to communicate. After all, it “was originally created not for speaking but for eating and is therefore ultimately unsuitable for the purpose of articulation; its construction brings disharmony into the structure of language.”49 Beyond a semiology still rooted

47

Lintsbakh, Printsipy filosofskogo iazyka, 64.

48

Ibid., 77.

49

Ibid., 31.

21

22

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in the Indo-Germanic past, Linzbach thus finds his vision of a future language as a sign system “without words and without grammar.”50 In the following years and decades, Linzbach continued the studies he had begun in Principles of Philosophical Language, especially regarding a mathematical universal language—the ideal of a consistent, complete, and clear model. However, all manuscripts on mathematical ideography as well as his last draft on “Universal mathematics and universal language” remained unpublished and without resonance. Like many other approaches to language philosophy at that time, Linzbach’s Principles of Philosophical Language fell victim to a strong competitor: another gesture-oriented linguistic master plan. Its author was Nicholas Marr. 2.2 Glossogenesis: The Hand as the Origin of Language (Nicholas Marr) In both onto- and phylogenetic models, the gesture is often associated with genesis: it is described as the origin of humanity, the origin of civilization, the origin of culture. Not infrequently, these lines converge in the motif of the gesture as the origin of language. While Linzbach envisions a future language based on the hand gesture, Nicholas Marr locates the gesture at the beginning of language—as do many paleolinguistic models in the early twentieth century. According to a catachresis by Wundt, sign language is a way to “hear the very moment of language creation.”51 From this perspective, verbal language is a later development of human communication, emancipated from the system and symbolism of gestures. Tadeusz Zieliński sums up this development in a succinct formula: “the word has killed the gesture” (“slovo ubilo zhest”).52 Marr’s Japhetic theory ties in with this linguistic and languagephilosophical debate but shifts the accent: Marr aims to rethink linguistics in relation to the gesture. In 1950, Japhetic theory wax attacked in Stalin’s pamphlet “Marxism and Questions of Linguistics” (“Marksizm i voprosy iazykoznaniia”) as an obscure perversion and a pseudo-Marxist paralinguistic theory. Nevertheless, Marr proved to be a key figure in the discourse 50

Ibid., 75.

51

Wundt, Elemente der Völkerpsychologie, 59.

52

Faddei Zelinskii, “Vilʹgelʹm Vundt i psikhologiia iazyka,” in his Iz zhizni idei, vol. 2 (St. Petersburg, 1911), 151–221, qt. 188.

2. The Linguistic Paradigm

on the gestural origin of language; Walter Benjamin, for instance, explicitly refers to Marr discussing the mimetic language model.53 Benjamin had read Marr’s study On the Origin of Language and included its “many new, often disconcerting ideas” in their “great significance” in his examination of recent linguistic models potentially capable of shedding light onto the nature of language as a medium beyond mere communicability. In his “Japhetic paleontology,” Marr proceeds from the observation that the Kartvelian verbs for “give,” “bestow,” and “take” are derived from the word for “hand.”54 This assumption leads to two others. Firstly, “that one of the basic properties of Japhetic speech, as opposed to Indo-European and other languages, is the evidence of prehistoric word-creation, when concepts were associated not logically but figuratively, pictorially.”55 This image of prelogical pictorial thinking is partly borrowed from Lévy-Bruhl’s La mentalité primitive (1922), partly directly extracted from the word for “hand” as the root of many verbs in tribal languages. But Marr goes beyond this etymological assumption. The speculative explosiveness of his concept lies in the fact that he sees the hand as the origin of all language. This needs to be understood in two ways. Firstly, for Marr, the “numerous semantic emanations” of the hand prove that spoken language originates from a few primary lexemes—words for “sky,” “cosmos,” “human,” and also “hand.” Thus, there is only one answer to the question “What comes first, the sky or the hand?”: “Japhetic linguistics returns us via the paleontology of speech from heaven to the hand as the first word, to the hand of a working human, this creator of all our material culture, including language.”56 Secondly, this paleolinguistic model aims at a glossogonic theory. According to it, language is not only etymologically but also genetically rooted in the hand: not just the protoword for hand but the hand

53

Walter Benjamin, “Probleme der Sprachsoziologie,” in his Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 3, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Herrmann Schweppenhäuser (Frankfurt/M., 1991), 452–481.

54

Nikolai Marr, “O proiskhozhdenii iazyka,” in his Izbrannye raboty v 5-i tomakh, vol. 2: Osnovnye voprosy iazykoznaniia (Leningrad, 1936), 179–209, qt. 186. Cf. also idem, “K proiskhozhdeniiu iazykov,” in his Izbrannye raboty v 5-i tomakh, vol. 1: Etapy razvitiia iafeticheskoi teorii (Leningrad, 1933), 217–220.

55

Marr, “O proiskhozhdenii iazyka.”

56

Ibid., 209.

23

24

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itself is a prototype for language. In 1924, Marr proclaims the existence of a prelinguistic, gestural “linear language” (lineinyi iazyk): Japhetic theory establishes that sound speech did not originate from sound imitation; no, onomatopoeia appears late in human languages, when tribes already have a rich vocabulary at their disposal. The most primitive tribes had only one word, that is, tribes in a primitive stage of their development did not yet have sound speech but used gestures and facial expressions instead, perceiving the world and all life around them in images and via the affinity of images. Accordingly, they explained themselves to each other using linear motions that symbolized these images and forms.57

Fig. 11. Visual representation of linear language as the root of further developments in individual languages and their ramifications.

57

Nikolai Marr, “Osnovnye dostizheniia iafeticheskoi teorii,” in his Izbrannye raboty v 5-i tomakh, vol. 1: Etapy razvitiia iafeticheskoi teorii (Leningrad, 1933), 197–216, qt. 212.

2. The Linguistic Paradigm

Marr’s concept of linear language has consequences for at least two further definitions of language as a manual system (fig. 11). Firstly, the deictic foundation of language must be reconsidered: from an acoustic concept of speech, Marr gradually moves to an optical one. Secondly, the concept of linear language relates to the differentiation between human speech and animal communication, which became increasingly topical in the 1920s. Experiments by Wolfgang Köhler and Robert Yerkes had caused Lev Vygotsky to regard the transitional forms between grasping and pointing in chimpanzees as a genetic hinge in the development from “emotional” to “objective” language.58 Marr, for his part, opposes attempts to derive language from animal sounds or from screaming. For him, “Japhetics has blown up all the grounds for pursuing the unrealistic question of the social humanization of animals by speech sounds by introducing linear speech as a state between sound speech and animal existence.”59 From this perspective, the linguistic evolution toward humanity does not take place via the development, refinement and differentiation of animal sounds. Rather, the essential evolutionary step lies in the development of the claw into the hand.60 Humans can speak, as Heidegger later put it, because they have hands.61 Marr argues otherwise. For him, linear language points directly to concrete “manual work” as speech. To him, the hand as a cultural tool is an organic instrument of language production: Initially, the hand was the only natural instrument of speech, as well as the only tool of production. Only later would the production force— the working human—create substitutes for it: artificial production tools, objects of material culture. Then, and only then, the function as the instrument of speech naturally passes on to the tongue—which, let

58

Lev Vygotskii, “Myshlenie i rechʹ” [1934], in his Sobranie sochinenii v 6-i tomakh, vol. 2 (Moscow 1982), 5–361, qt. 93.

59

Nikolai Marr, “K semanticheskoi paleontologii v iazykakh neiafeticheskikh system,” in his Izbrannye raboty v 5-i tomakh, vol. 2: Osnovnye voprosy iazykoznaniia (Leningrad, 1936), 246–288, qt. 271.

60

Cf. Peter Risthaus, “Pfote, Klaue, Hand. Zum anthropogenen Zwischenraum,” in Politische Zoologie, ed. Anne von der Heiden and Joseph Vogl (Zürich and Berlin, 2007), 57–70.

61

Heidegger, Parmenides, 118f.

25

26

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us not forget this, shares its name with “hand,” as established by speech paleontology.62

This coupling of language and production via the hand as instrumentum instrumentorum harks back to Engels’s theory of language emerging from the working human hand. But though Marr integrates this Marxist approach into his theory of language origin, his argument ultimately goes back to Ludwig Noiré.63 Noiré’s studies The Origin of Language (Der Ursprung der Sprache, 1877) and The Tool and its Significance for the History of Human Development (Das Werkzeug und seine Bedeutung für die Entwicklungsgeschichte der Menschheit, 1880) postulate that language is rooted in the tool, and the tool is rooted in the hand. To Noiré, both language and work are ways in which humans form and transform the world. He assumed that the “modifications of the outside world brought about by work” were “twinned” with the sounds accompanying these activities.64 In this accompaniment, sounds gain a meaning fed by their operative reference. According to Noiré, the first sound connections—the “links” between humanity and the world—formed “a first seed from which the whole multi-branched human work activity in its wonderful organic interactions subsequently developed, and this first seed was the tool.”65 Through the tool, “the human being has become a tool-being [Werkzeug-Wesen]; through their artificial creations, natural humans have become different: the way they are today.”66 The model for this artificial tool is, in its turn, a natural organ: “The hand, the grasping hand, the tool of the

62

Marr, “O proiskhozhdenii iazyka,” 209. Révesz cites a long list of contrary examples of languages in which the word for language is identical to or derived from that for tongue or mouth. See Géza Révész, Ursprung und Vorgeschichte der Sprache (Berlin, 1946), 76.

63

Lawrence L. Thomas, The Linguistic Theories of N. Ia. Marr (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1957), 102. Engels, too, refers to Noiré’s writings. Zhirmunsky assumed the influence of the first volume of Cassirer’s Philosophie der symbolischen Formen. See V. M. Zhirmunskii, “Lingvisticheskaia paleontologiia N. Ia. Marra i istoriia iazyka,” Protiv 2 (1952): 172–208, qt. 186.

64

Ludwig Noiré, Das Werkzeug und seine Bedeutung für die Entwicklungsgeschichte der Menschheit (Mainz, 1880), 4.

65

Ibid., 33.

66

Ibid., XVI.

2. The Linguistic Paradigm

tools, which is itself motion but creates effects—that is what creation has given us to transplant our personal activity into the world of things.”67 In this way, Noiré positions language at the intersection of the hand, the tool and work—but he is not concerned with sign language. To him, the hand is a tool of work, not of speech. Here lies the significant difference to Marr, who aims for the gesture of speaking. Here, emphasis lies on the second aspect of linear language, its optical form. Noiré’s work complements Marr’s argument by suggesting that showing and pointing came before telling. If the first language was linear, then a deictic rather than phonetic (animal sound based) principle can be applied to its foundation: “First human speech was not sonic. . . . Indeed, the primitive human who did not possess articulated sound speech was happy to indicate or show an object in any way, and he had a special instrument adapted for this purpose—the hand, which makes him so different from the rest of the animal world.”68 To Marr, this is also the reason why the grammatical category of the subject appears to be lacking in this phase of linguistic history. He believed that it probably did exist but—unlike the object—did not “articulate itself independently.”69 These arguments will be developed more clearly in a later essay on the Abkhazian language: There is a deep abyss between the speaking human and the animal. This abyss would be impassable—and language would have to be recognized as a gift of god or, synonymously, a miracle of nature—if the interval was not dominated by homo sapiens, already endowed with reason, already working and creating, using his hands. For the hands gave humans the opportunity to create and to know, the hands served as a communication tool, the hands were used for working and making, and for many tens of thousands of years, people spoke by hand, using a kinetic, gestural, facial language, and managed their everyday life without any sounding speech.70

67

Ludwig Noiré, Der Ursprung der Sprache (Leipzig, 1877), 341.

68

Marr, “O proiskhozhdenii iazyka,” 200.

69

Nikolai Marr, Iazyk i myshlenie. Doklad na chrezvychainoi sessii Akademii nauk v Moskve 21.–27.11.1931 (Moscow and Leningrad, 1931), 52.

70

Idem, “Postanovka ucheniia ob iazyke v mirovom masshtabe i abkhazskii iazyk,” in his Izbrannye raboty, vol. 4: Osnovnye voprosy istorii iazyka (Leningrad, 1937), 53–84, qt. 59.

27

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The Marxist overtones in Marr’s theory of language cannot be ignored. Still, behind the linear reading of the hand as the primal word there seems to be a thesis that points beyond production. The early, somewhat schematic formulation—early humans using hands to show something or point toward something that they could not name—reappears in Marr’s later writings in a much more differentiated form. Using the “fossil remnants of linear or manual language” that have survived in spoken language, he now wants to prove that language functions deictically, that the basic principle of spoken language still feeds on the imagery of gestures and facial expressions. For “the connections between the images of hand language were transferred to spoken language.” Glossogenesis—the transition from linear to spoken language—now is presented as follows: [words] gradually dialectically diverged from kinetic speech, sign language and facial expressions—next to which elements of sound speech had served for a long time only as auxiliary material, used mainly for objects and representations of the magical order. When sound speech developed and went beyond the limits of magic needs, into the world of ordinary subjects and representations, kinetic speech was defeated. The winner [spoken language] seized all the achievements of linear language: the first words and derivative formations of sound speech are but the translation of linear or kinetic symbols, previously signaled by the hand, into sound symbols.71

With the theses formulated here, Marr joins the research of his time in its attempt to define language as the gesticulation of sound tools. Richard Paget, for example, also believes that the gesture preceded the sound; he, too, sees gestures and facial expressions as the foundation of phonetic language. If the study of Japhetic languages shows that the word for “name,” that is, designation, derives from the word for “hand, used to point to body parts,”72 then each act of naming is a pointing gesture that echoes the original deictic act. This deictic core of language proves a recurrent motif in numerous linguistic theories. In his Theory of Language (Sprachtheorie, 1934), Karl

71

Nikolai Marr, “Pochemu tak trudno statʹ lingvistom-teoretikom,” in his Izbrannye raboty v 5-i tomakh, vol. 2: Osnovnye voprosy iazykoznaniia (Leningrad, 1936), 399– 426, qt. 418.

72

Marr, “O proiskhozhdenii iazyka,” 201f.

2. The Linguistic Paradigm

Bühler argues, on the basis of Indo-Germanic positional pointers, that in addition to the “symbol(ic) field” (Symbolfeld) there is also a “pointing field” (Zeigfeld), essential for the orientation of human beings in space and language. Even if phenomenologically, “the index finger, the natural tool of the demonstratio ad oculos, is indeed replaced by other pointing tools,” still, “the help that it and its equivalents provide can never disappear and will always be needed.”73 At the same time, however, Bühler unequivocally rejects the “myth about the deictic source of descriptive language” to insist that “pointing words” (Zeigwörter) and “naming words” (Nennwörter) are two classes to be clearly separated. Even if the finger gesture is at the root of a specific Indo-Germanic type of deixis, and even if every phonetic pointing sign needs the gesture or an equivalent “sensory guide”—still, the difference between pointing and naming cannot be erased by any origin speculation.74 It is precisely this gap, named by Bühler and also by Révész, that Marr wants to close. He finds support in the contemporary cognitive psychological school centered around Vygotsky: it postulates that the word is “initially a mediating substitute for the gesture,” which is why the first words can only be correctly translated by the pointing gesture.75 Marr radicalizes this argument: he does not want to limit this mediating power to an onto- or phylogenetic early phase of language development. To him, language always preserves its deictic dimension—just as no language could be created without the hand, so the mouth will speak “for the hand” even when this is not obvious at first sight. According to Marr, “the hand or the hands were the first human tongue.”76 Thus, oral speech always carries the gesture within itself: it speaks gestures out loud. In Wundt’s terms, it is a vocal gesture (Lautgeste). Though Marr’s paleolinguistic assumptions about the origin of articulation failed to assert themselves in linguistics, they form an enlightening contrasting concept in the poetological debate about the intersection of hand and word. After all, it is not only the historical linguistics of 73

Bühler, Sprachtheorie, 80.

74

Ibid., 86f. and 93. Révész similarly categorically rejects the idea of a gestural origin of language. Cf. Révész, Ursprung und Vorgeschichte der Sprache, 78.

75

Vygotskii, “Myshlenie i rechʹ,” 87.

76

Marr, “O proiskhozhdenii iazyka,” 201.

29

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modernity that sets out in search of the roots of language, from which the utopia of a new lingua franca could grow. Poetics, too, takes the struggle for new forms of speech back to the beginnings, to the “primitive” early stages of human communication. In this fashion, Marrism experiences a concealed reception. In poetics, Marr’s theses are subject to reinterpretations just as idiosyncratic as those used to linguistically support literary theories of language gestures. While Andrei Bely subverts Marr’s thesis of the hand as the primeval human language, Aleksey Tolstoy uses Marr’s glottogony to create a typology of narrative gestures. Before considering Bely’s glossolalist perversion of linear hand language models, let us take a closer look at Aleksey Tolstoy’s “narratological Marrism.”

3. The Poetological Paradigm 3.1. Res Gestae: Gesture-Guided History Writing (Aleksey Tolstoy) The artistic phrase appears as an expression of a gesture system. —Aleksey Tolstoy, “O dramaturgii,” 193477

Literary history knows Aleksey Tolstoy as the author of historical novels and stories, not as a language historian. This gap in the canon is all the more precarious as Tolstoy not only wrote extensively on paleolinguistic issues but also elaborated the connection between literary historiography and language history in many metatextual commentaries, finally declaring it the conceptual key of his poetics. At the intersection of linguistic and literary discourses, he refers to the gesture. For him, the actions and events of history are res gestae in the literal sense; more than that: he distils from the gesture a specific model of narration and diction. To him, actions within the narrative and also the very act of speaking and narrating are gestures. This view crystallizes in an extensive project: Tolstoy’s narrative historiography of Russia under Peter I. Here, we see the gesture becoming functional in order to bring historical distances into tangible proximity, to

77

Aleksei Tolstoi, “O dramaturgii,” in his Sobranie sochinenii v 10-i tomakh, vol. 10 (Moscow, 1961), 248–276, qt. 261f.

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make silent history speak and to force the openness and diversity of an event into the form of a narrative plot. While Vilém Flusser’s phenomenology asks whether the gesture is to be analyzed from the perspective of history (and answers no), Tolstoy is attempting the opposite: understanding history from the perspective of the gesture. At the risk of overstatement, we could say: Tolstoy uses the gesture to give an event, res, the shape of history, res gestae. As res gestae, events and gestures are brought together to form a narrative.78 But how does res become res gestae? How is a historical fact transformed into a narrative event? First, this transformation requires a gesture-sensitive study of language history, clearly inspired by Marr’s gestological glottogenesis. In 1934, on the verge of the transition to socio-realist normative poetics, Tolstoy, in a kind of poetic confession, defines language in a way that can hardly hide the influence of Japhetic theory: What is language? First of all, it is an expression of the internal and external gesture. Originally, when there was no language, people were half animals. They gesticulated, made sounds, gave signs of danger, location, and so forth. In short, they used sign language, like the deaf and dumb. Later on, these gestures came to be accompanied by sounds, those turned into words, and, finally, coherent speech was formed. Speech is a function of the gesture. The human being is constantly gesticulating in a social environment. A person connected with the social sphere receives an infinite number of reflexive impulses from it and responds to them with gestures. Not necessarily hand gestures—it can be an inner gesture, too, the gesture of an idea. Here is the key to understanding and studying languages. The language of the people is completely made up of gestures. But literary language has lost its gesture.79

Marr’s signature is evident in this primordial language scene (an image quite common in popular gestural language theories). His influence becomes even more apparent when, in a lecture “On Dramaturgy”

78

“Geste,” in Deutsches Wörterbuch von Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, vol. 5 (1897), column 4207.

79

Aleksei Tolstoi, “Moi tvorcheskii opyt rabochemu avtoru,” in his Sobranie sochinenii v 10-i tomakh, vol. 10 (Moscow, 1961), 239–247, qt. 245ff.

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(“O dramaturgii”) at the first Soviet Writers’ Congress in 1934, Tolstoy refers to language as “the trail of society’s giant productive labor” that forms “the deferred crystals of myriad labor movements, gestures and the spiritual energy they induce.” From this, he concludes: “The origins of language lie in the vocal expression of productive labor gestures.”80 So you have to start with “the roots of the language, the beginning of all things”—with work. There, you will “find the long-lost key—the gesture—with it, you can open the word.”81 The incessantly gesticulating human, or rather the primitive “human animal” (chelovek-zverʹ) who reacts to environmental energy impulses with reflexes, screams, exclamations, and inarticulate primal words, has developed into a working animal and sublimated primitive gestural language into the linguistic gesture. First verbs are formed, then nouns, then epithets, and finally, as the crowning glory of logos, concepts.82 But if literary language has lost these primordial gestures, where can they be found? At a conference of the Soviet Writers’ Union on December 30, 1938, Tolstoy presented a possibility. It boils down to applying the evidence principle to literature. He asks: How can you find the gesture where the word reigns? How can you suss it out? Especially if it is not always openly expressed but can remain hidden as an inner gesture, as an inhibited or “unfulfilled gesture wish”? The answer could not be shorter: “It must be seen.”83 For: “Until I have seen the gesture, I do not hear the word, either.” In this way, Tolstoy argues, one arrives at gesturally “refined” language: How do you approach this diamond language? How do you find it? This language has no laws, it has no grammar, and none can be written. Human speech completes a complex spiritual and physical process. In the human brain and body, a continuous flow of emotions, feelings and ideas is followed by physical motions. People constantly gesticulate—not just in the literal sense. Sometimes, a gesture is just an unfulfilled or restrained gesture wish. But the gesture must always be sensed (by the artist) as a result of mental motion. The word follows the gesture. The gesture

80

Tolstoi, “O dramaturgii,” 257f.

81

Ibid., 165.

82

Ibid., 257f. Aleksei Tolstoi, “Otvet Ilʹenkovu,” in his Sobranie sochinenii v 10-i tomakh, vol. 10 (Moscow, 1961), 234-238, qt. 236f.

83

Aleksei Tolstoi, “K molodym pisateliam,” in his Sobranie sochinenii v 10-i tomakh, vol. 10 (Moscow, 1961), 407–414, qt. 412f.

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defines the phrase. And if you, the writer, have sensed and foreseen the gesture of the character you describe (under the indispensable condition that you clearly see this character), then, following this gesture, you will guess that unique phrase—that exact arrangement and choice of words, that rhythm—that corresponds to your character’s gestures, that is, his or her mental condition at present.84

Tolstoy imagines the primal scene of the gesture as a primitive by the fire whose rhythmically well-honed motions of hunting, hacking, hitting and rubbing create images in the dancing shadows: The paleontological human being—the one who tied a flint shard to a handle with animal veins and left magical animal drawings in caves— probably had a different thinking process than us. The struggle against nature, the hunting and working, required familiar motions, handed down from generation to generation. When repeated (say, in a cave at the open fire), these gestures caused familiar images in the human brain. Before his gaze, the shadows of animals, enemies, humans appeared in the smoke. He would gesticulate and imagine, creating ethereal doppelgangers. This was magic. Increasingly complex work processes required more precise definitions. Gestures led to sounds, and sounds formed a language.85

This almost Platonic image of the primitive human crouching by the fire in a cave, gazing at moving shadows, spellbound, immersed in rhythmic body language work, conceals the prototype of a poet. After all, it is the poet who can sense the archetype of gestural-kinetic image evocation, the “primitive language” (iazyk-primitiv), under the civilizing dross of rhetoric.86 As a writer, though, Tolstoy does not go back to the early evolutionary period of “primitive humans” in his search for the gesture. Instead, he enters the epoch in which Russia moved from its Middle Ages into the modern era. He finds the archetype of gestural language not at the fire in

84

Aleksei Tolstoi, “Moe tvorchestvo,” in his Sobranie sochinenii v 10-i tomakh, vol. 10 (Moscow, 1961), 112–114, qt. 112.

85

Tolstoi, “O dramaturgii,” 256.

86

From this primal scene, Tolstoy distils a typology of gestures, whose basic forms are the conditional (uslovnyi) and the unconditional (bezuslovnyi) gesture. This term alone gives an idea of how strongly he reflexologically underpins his cave allegory.

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a cave but in Russian torture chambers under Peter I. Proceeding from these chambers, Tolstoy develops one of the most problematic conceptions of gestural narrative ever conjured up. For at the core of Tolstoy’s narratology, gesture is twinned with violence. Tolstoy has often given literary accounts of how the historiographical-gestural turn in his writing came about. In 1924, in response to Lenin’s Pravda note “On the Purification of the Russian Language” (December 3, 1924), he published an article on “Purity of Russian Language” in the Krasnaya gazeta. In it, Tolstoy reports how the only thing that saved him from an artistic crisis in the revolutionary year 1917 was the reading of seventeenth-century torture acts: In 1917, I went through a literary crisis. I felt that despite knowing a huge number of Russian words, I still do not have command of Russian. Wanting to express a given idea, I can find one way to do it, and another, and a third and a fourth. But I don’t know the true and only way. I found my way back by studying seventeenth-century judicial acts. These acts were written by deacons who tried to record the narrative of the person being tortured as concisely, colorfully and accurately as possible. Without pursuing any “literary” tasks, in their wisdom they created high literature. In their records lies the key to transforming folk speech into literature. I highly recommend the book Word and Deed by Professor Novombergsky.87

Under the title Word and Deed (Slovo i delo), Novombergsky had compiled and commented on nearly two hundred indictments as well as torture and confession transcripts from the secret chancellery that dealt with people accused of insulting royalty. Reading these torture protocols became a key event for Tolstoy, to which he would keep returning in his numerous guides for budding authors. Novombergsky’s collection not only lays the ground for Tolstoy examining the coercive rhetoric of accusation and confession but also initiates his interest in the historical genre. In the very year when he first reads Novombergsky, Tolstoy begins to use documents from Slovo i delo to create narratives set in the time of Peter I. Thus, the story “Delusion” (“Navazhdenie,” 1917) is based on the investigation against hieromonk Nikanor, followed a year later by “Peter’s Day” (“Denʹ Petra”),

87

Aleksei Tolstoi, “Chistota russkogo iazyka,” in his Sobranie sochinenii v 10-i tomakh, vol. 10 (Moscow, 1961), 80–82, qt. 82.

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and, in 1928, by the drama On the Torture Rack (Na dybe), later reworked into the play Peter I (Petr Pervyi, 1937–1938). Even years later, when Tolstoy had already begun work on his historical novel about the Petrine era, he recommended Novombergsky’s collection of torture acts as a lesson for budding writers, arguing that a new, genuinely Russian literary language could be squeezed from the “expressiveness” (krasochnostʹ) of the tortured word. In April 1933, the magazine Smena invited Tolstoy to read from the play Peter I, on which he had been working since 1929. The reading was followed by a discussion, whose shorthand Smena published in May 1933. In addition to Tolstoy’s handling of historical documents and Peter’s adequate characterization, the discussion focused on problems of style. When asked how he managed to get each of his characters to speak a language that was only their own, Tolstoy answered with a lengthy linguistic-historical exposition, proposing an ideology of torture as a means to gain a new literary language: I had the opportunity to read the book Word and Deed by Prof. Novombergsky. These are court acts from the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries. They were written in the following way: the questionee was hanging on the rack; he was tortured, whipped, burnt with a burning wreath. He said crazy things, which usually weren’t true. He was then tortured a second time and a third time to match his testimony. Writing down this kind of testimony is a great responsibility. The deacons who recorded the deposition were educated people. They had to write down the statements accurately and concisely while preserving the individual character of the person. The text needed to be succinct and accurate, made up of short energetic phrases—not in a bookish but in living language. These records are highly artistic works. You can learn Russian from them. These are monuments to the real language of the people, literarily processed. You begin to analyze how the deacons constructed the phrase. They proceeded from a gesture. Imagine: we have a thought, a desire. Following the thought and desire, a gesture arises. Internal and external—a hand motion, an expression of the face and the eyes—then, this gesture is confirmed by the word. The word completes a complex process. There is always a gesture between the thought and the word.88

88

Aleksei Tolstoi, “Stenogramma besedy s kollektivom redaktsii zhurnala ‘Smena’,” in his Sobranie sochinenii v 10-i tomakh, vol. 10 (Moscow, 1961), 207–216, qt. 212.

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This quote is rich in irritating aspects, not least among them the fact that Tolstoy approves of torture to sing the praises of bureaucratic literature. In representational aesthetics, it has often been said that literature (or, more fundamentally, art) begins where life ends. But rarely is this “symbolic exchange” (Baudrillard) so unrestrainedly brutal, so violence-drunk, and at the same time so soberly executed as in Tolstoy’s work. Every concept of “literature as non-violent discourse” is perverted here. Against the background of the strong confessionary tradition in Russian literature, Tolstoy’s position raises additional questions. One of them lies in the way staged confessions draw on the power of the word—which is then used to justify its compulsive regulation and violent production.89 Here they meet: the word as unconditional truth and the word as crime. Tolstoy participates in this conditional relationship when staging torture and forced confession as a literary primal scene. At the same time, however, he is also concerned with physical and psychological torture as a means to extract from the body a poetics of expressive gesture. He makes torture the instrument of a language catharsis. Violence is thus a technique of renewing the word as gesture. Like the scribe in Petrine torture chambers, the writer must also start from the gesture of the tortured. The writer reads the documents of agony, the protocols of pain, as texts in which the primitive gesture of the people is paradoxically “ennobled” into the poetic language of literature, and unbridled expressiveness becomes art. Tolstoy is not the first one to transform torture protocols into literature. In 1860–1862, his predecessor Mikhail Semevsky compiled a collection of files from the secret chancellery (Tainaia kantseliaria rozysknykh del) of Peter I, on the basis of which he aimed at a literary historiography of the Petrine period, published under the title Slovo i delo. 1700–1725. However, Semevsky’s anthology is only a model for Tolstoy to a limited degree.90 What Semevsky hoped to find in these trial acts was above all a historiography of the “base classes” (podlaia poroda), a historiography that shows the concealed conversations, the rumors, the speech of the “little men” (melkyi

89

Sylvia Sasse, Wortsünden. Beichten und Gestehen in der russischen Kultur (Munich, 2009).

90

Mikhail Semevskii, Slovo i delo. 1700–1725. Ocherki i rasskazy iz XVIII veka (St. Petersburg, 1883 [reprint Moscow, 1991]).

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liud), the “rabble” (tolpa) forgotten by historians.91 The narrative begins where the voice of torture speaks its pain. While for Semevsky, crime and punishment are a prerequisite or a condition of narrative, Tolstoy fishes in the depths of denunciations, communiqués, interrogation protocols, verdicts, and confessions to create the program of a new literary language. For him, law must be violated, and the body must be mutilated in order for the “artistic phrase to express a system of gestures”92 and for literary language to recall its origin in the gesture. Tolstoy pushes the conflicting relationship between gesture, rhetoric and law to its outer limits. He seeks the transformation of the gesture into the word at the threshold of death, extracting the expressive speech of the gesture from a maimed body. Hoping to reanimate dead bookish language through the expression of agony, he develops an astonishingly cruel and rigid system of notation as a model for historiographical literature. It is the files of juridical discourse in which torture is filtered into literary stylistics. Along this poetics of pain, Tolstoy establishes a non-elective affinity between violence and the gesture, which renders history narratable as res gestae in the gestus and yet always remains marked by a law that punishes the word and breaks the body. 3.2. Glossolalia: A Gestural Dance of the Tongue (Andrei Bely) Unlike Tolstoy’s historicism, symbolist poetics dances its way to linguistic hand/mouth models. This applies especially to the Japhetic hypothesis that the hand created the human tongue. From a paleolinguistic perspective, the mouth extends into the extremities in a linear language development; from a poetological one, the hand retracts into the mouth, forming the act of articulation as a vocal gesture (Lautgeste in Wundt’s terms). Andrei Bely’s investigations into the musicality of language and the eurhythmics of literature, in particular, explore a poetics of the vocal gesture. Like Marr, Bely proceeds from the double meaning of iazyk: language and tongue. But what he derives is a gesture theory of the tongue: according to Bely, not the hand becomes the human tongue, but the other way around. By locating the

91

Idem, “Tainaia kantseliariia pri Petre Velikom,” in his Slovo i delo. 1700–1725. Ocherki i rasskazy iz XVIII veka (St. Petersburg, 1883 [reprint Moscow, 1991]), 3–10, qt. 4.

92

Tolstoi, “O dramaturgii,” 261f.

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gesture in articulation and bodily gestology in phonology, Bely’s concept of speaking in tongues introduces a striking shift compared to all models that proceed from pointing to signing. From early programmatic symbolist writings to studies on rhythm dialectics published in the late 1920s, the idea of the gesture pervades Bely’s poetics. His spectrum ranges from the intonational impulse of an artwork via the gesture of rhythm to plot-forming and semantic gestures. In all these variations, the concept of gesture is rarely limited to body motions. But even in “sublimated” forms, which are primarily concerned with dynamics and the effect of motion, there remains a trace of a motus corporis. Referring to the kinetic organism of spoken language and to the expressive motion of the hand, Bely hopes to retrieve from the speech-accompanying or -supplementing kinetics of motus and gestus a dynamic inherent to the word and the phonetic laws of articulation. His kinetic approach to a theory of linguistic gesture does not fit into the gestural language models of actio or of sign alphabets for the deaf. Rather, he designs an intraoral gesture form that addresses both the eye and the ear. Hereby, Bely seeks the origin of the gesture in the mouth. Instead of shifting verbal speech competence from the mouth to the hand, he situates the hand and its manipulations in the mouth cavity. There, language is formed as an “extremely fine body” (tonchaishee telo) via sound and can be perceived in its acoustic image. In varying and partly Christological phrasing, Bely discusses sounds as expressions and gestures, as the contours of a Word made flesh: “The word of the mind must have flesh. The flesh must have the gift of speech. The word must become flesh.”93 And this flesh is, above all, a tongue that is a hand. For Bely, rhythmic word motion and living vocal gestures form the basis of every verse theory. In 1917, he summarized their basic features in the essay “On the Rhythmic Gesture” (“O ritmicheskom zheste”). Here, he turns away from his early, primarily morphological studies of versification and moves toward a physiological theory that defines rhythm as a living pulsating line. The core of this teaching is expressed in the essay’s subtitle:

93

Andrei Belyi, “Simvolizm” [1908], in his Simvolizm kak miroponimanie (Moscow, 1994), 255–259.

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“Rhythm is a gesture.”94 But this formula remains enigmatic in its brevity, only becoming clearer in a further essay, “Rhythm and Sense” (“Ritm i smysl,” 1917). The gesture, it says, can be calculated and visualized as a lifeline or curve: “The series of verses form a sum. The graphic line that emerges from these sums forms the gesture of the rhythm curve.”95 Each gesture curve remains closely interwoven with the text’s semantics but does not mirror them. In Bely’s words, this curve is visible but non-figurative (bezóbrazno zrima).96 This is crucial for his poetology of the rhythmic gesture: it enters the visuality of poetry but “drives away” its “garland of images.” The gestural motion of rhythm can be drawn as a kinetogram of verses; however, the gesture itself remains without precise contours, beyond images and forms (vne-formenen). Until his death in 1934, Bely continued to expand the corpus of his gesture-rhythmic analyses, ultimately relating them to prose so as to exploit the compositional, plot-forming function of the gesture. In his study Masterstvo Gogolia (1934), he sees Gogol’s second creative phase as characterized by the “atomization of the gesture”—the decomposition of rhetorical density and narrative stringency. Decomposition is the dissolution of a body filled and inflated by pentons;97 a motion separated into ten different moments is interspersed with dialogue; atoms of the gesture are provided between the phrases; the phrase is a sounding pause; the kaleidoscope tape is slowed down tenfold, so that gestural moments do not merge; there is a push and a pause.98 94

Andrei Belyi, “O ritmicheskom zheste” [1917], Trudy po znakovym sistemam 12 (1981): Struktura i semiotika khudozhestvennogo teksta, 132–139, qt. 132. On Bely’s theses, see also Gennadii Obatin, “O ‘ritmicheskom zheste’,” in Ot slov k telu. Sbornik k 60-letiiu Iuriia Tsivʹiana (Moscow, 2010), 243–269. Cf. also Dmitrii Torshilov, “‘Ritmicheskii zhest.’ Stikhovedcheskie shtudii Andreia Belogo revoliutsionnykh let,” in Otechestvennoe stikhovedenie, ed. S. I. Bogdanov and E. V. Khvorostʹianova (St. Petersburg, 2010), 425–434.

95

Andrei Belyi, “Ritm i smysl” [1917], Trudy po znakovym sistemam 12 (1981): Struktura i semiotika khudozhestvennogo teksta, 140–146, qt. 143.

96

Ibid., 144.

97

A penton is a five-syllable meter studied by Koltsov and mostly used in folk songs.

98

Andrei Belyi, Masterstvo Gogolia [1934] (Moscow, 1996), 179. Cf. on the vocal gesture in Bely: L. K. Chursina, “Kontseptsiia ‘zhesta’ v rabotakh A. Belogo,” in Slovo i zhest v literature (Voronezh, 1983), 24–40.

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Fig. 12a.

This breaking up of a gestural sequence, its fragmentation and decomposition is shown by the single shots; “the photograph of some little gesture” (fotografiia zhestika) takes up a page. Not combined into a “synthetic dynamic,” the figures are physically trapped in gestural petrifaction (cf. figs. 12a–b).99 Beyond the gestology specific to Gogol, what matters here is how Bely uses this terminology (noticeably influenced by Eisenstein’s montage technique) to explain the gesture as a constitutive aspect of narration, an integral compositional element co-determining narrative structure. But Bely’s actual target is the vocal gesture. He extends this term borrowed from Wundt (Lautgeste) far beyond its original meaning. Wundt’s experimental psychological studies received a strong response in prerevolutionary Russia, and his comments on gestural language were also met with great interest. Tadeusz Zieliński, who wrote a study on Wundt in 1902, devoted a lengthy section to the concept of the sound gesture in the second volume of From the Life of Ideas (Iz zhizni idei, 1911). Zieliński’s main concern with the phonetic gesture is to perceive the word not only acoustically

99

Andrei Belyi, Masterstvo Gogolia, 176f.

3. The Poetological Paradigm

Fig. 12b. Preliminary drawing for fig. 12a from the manuscript of Bely’s Gogol study.

but also as a physical or even physiognomic structure. According to this logic, spoken language can be understood as a “direct correlate” of gestural language as it involves the coordinated interaction of mouth and face muscles.100 Zieliński argues that this interplay can only be explored if the word is regarded not as an isolated acoustic phenomenon but as an expression of the vocal gesture (Lautgeste).101 The concept of the vocal gesture also enters formalist poetics through the works of Yevgeny Polivanov. In 1919, he published a short essay entitled “On ‘Vocal Gestures’ in Japanese” (“Po povodu ‘zvukovykh zhestov’ v iaponskom iazyke”).102 In this essay, he differentiates between natural and symbolic gestures, crystallizing a third type, the “potentially natural ges100 Zelinskii, “Vilʹgelʹm Vundt i psikhologiia iazyka,” 177. 101 Ibid., 182. 102 E. V. Polivanov, “Po povodu ‘zvukovykh zhestov’ v iaponskom iazyke,” in Poetika. Sbornik po teorii poeticheskogo iazyka, vol. 1 (Petrograd, 1919), 27–36.

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ture.” Not merely a mediator between the two preceding forms, it is also a transition into the field of vocal gestures. After all, asks Polivanov, aren’t there some universally comprehensible sound combinations? And couldn’t they be called vocal gestures by analogy? Polivanov cites the example of onomatopoieia that transfigure sounds rather than imitating them—for instance, through the doubling of syllables. In this process, vocal gestures celebrate language as an acoustic experience in which the original substrate— the expressive gesture—remains audible. In the face of such transpositions and transfigurations, outdated onomatopoietic theory begins defining articulation as a gesture of the speech apparatus alongside other facial movements and expressions. At the same time, the understanding of expressive facial movements changes dramatically. Bely’s studies of the vocal gesture are created in this resonance space. In Glossolalia (1922), he compares the vocal gesture with the hand gesture based on the intimate affinity between the linguistic and the vocal image. Here, cosmic sound and experiential imagery intertwine. Glossolalia has been called a “singular Russian contribution to Indo-European studies,” since Bely draws on Indo-European theories of his time to construct etymological and phonetic kinship relations.103 After his return from Dornach, he worked on several essays for The Scythians (Skify), including a lengthy study “On the Sound of Words” (“K zvuku slov”), which was published in Berlin and later became part of Glossolalia.104 Its starting point is the image of a gesticulating speaker whom we only see but do not hear: “By observing the speaker and his gestures, without hearing the content of his speech from the distance, we can still guess at the content by the gestures that express fear, enthusiasm, or indignation—and conclude that this inaudible speech expresses ‘something admirable’ or ‘terrible’.”105 Though this passage on the speaker’s pantomimic power may bring to mind the rhetorical doctrine of actio and its expressiveness, Bely is not interested in the ancient topos of the gesture as a performative universal 103 Thomas R. Beyer, “Introduction,” in Andrej Belyj, Glossolalie. Poem über den Laut / Glossolalia. A Poem about Sound, ed. Taia Gut (Rastatt, 2003), 11–33, qt. 33. Bely’s IndoEuropean references mostly come from Max Müller’s lecture collection Vorlesungen über den Ursprung der Sprache (Leipzig, 1892). 104 Ada Steinberg, “Marginalia to Andrey Bely’s Glossolalya,” The Slavonic and East European Review 65 (1987): 404–410. 105 Andrei Belyi, Glossolaliia. Poema o zvuke (Moscow, 2002), 3.

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language whose mute evidence may surpass the spoken word in precision. Instead, he wants to uncover an image of speech rooted in the archaic state of the world, buried under linguistic rationalizations. To Bely, images are to be found within sounds. These can be expressed as motion, color, brightness, intensity, dynamics, or harmony—speech images that refer back to a lost gestural quality of the sound.106 After all, sounds are but “motions of the larynx,” that is, gestures: Here, I regard sounds as gestures on the surface of conscious life—gestures [of/with] lost content; and when I say that “Ss” is something luminous, I know that the gesture is correct overall. My figurative improvisations are models for the facial expressiveness that sounds have lost.107

Fig. 13.

Bely explores this composition of color, dynamics, and motion in every vowel and consonant, proceeding phono-gestologically, designing a comprehensive audio-facial expressive system. If sounds are put together to form words, then the sound shape of the name “Zarathustra,” for instance, results in the image of a figure (see fig. 13). The choice of this figure is not accidental: In Human, All Too Human (Menschliches und Allzumenschliches, 1878), Nietzsche vaguely attempts to connect gestures and sound 106 Ibid., 73. 107 Ibid., 32 and 33.

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symbolism. In the unconscious, involuntary imitation of gestures, he sees a preliminary stage for successive abstraction—from kinetic mimeticism toward conventionalized symbolism, which accompanies conscious speech as a “tone sign language.” To him, it ends up by vanishing but leaves behind a trace of the gestural instinct in the symbolic, “absolute” act of speech.108 When Bely relates the body to the image of speech, it is first of all a matter of synchronizing motions of the tongue and those of the hands in the act of speaking. This becomes clear in the articulation of the Russian word luna (moon): Sound “el”: the tongue is raised; its surface touches the roof of the mouth / the sky;109 the flow hits it and breaks; drops down; rises up again and— bending down, I let my arms fall, raise them again; sound “u”: I close my hands at an angle; “en” is a light body motion; the same exact motion of the hands; the gesture—the touch—is like touching the tongue to the upper mouth cave with the lightest flow overtaking the tip [of the tongue]; “a” is the opening of hands. 110

Here, the motion of the body and especially of the hands follows the articulating motions of the tongue. Through this dynamic, the entire body becomes a visible organ of speech, whose steps, turns, bends, and motions apply phonological and metrical laws of poetry to spatial performance. In the following, Bely focuses on the shift of the gesture from the hand to the mouth: “Sound gestures come together by the touch of the tongue and the spiral of the flow . . . the unity between the lines of the flow and the tongue equals the unity of the body and hands.”111 Even where no step, gesture, turn, or inclination of the body physically accompanies speech, they are still present in the process of speaking, in the microcosm of the oral cavity. For Bely, this sound gesture can be recorded as an ornament of sound 108 Friedrich Nietzsche, “Gebärde und Sprache,” in his Menschliches, Allzumenschliches, in his Werke (Frankfurt/M., 1999), 340. 109 If no difference between the letters е and ё is made (as is the case in this text), the Russian word for “roof of the mouth” and “sky” look identical (nebo), which enables Bely to parallel the movement of the moon and of the word luna in its pronunciation. The Russian ruka can mean both “hand” and “arm” and is translated depending on the context. (Translator’s note.) 110 Belyi, Glossolaliia, 115f. 111 Ibid.

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lines, a kinetogram of air streams and tongue motions in their dancing interplay (cf. fig. 14). Bely’s sound diagrams clearly differ from sound figures as recorded by his contemporaries’ experimental approaches to voice, resonating spaces, sound sensations, and acoustic transmission phenomena. While acousticians try to objectify articulation processes as physiometrically calculable sound structures, Bely’s phonetic physiognomics turn the narrowed

Fig. 14. Sound gesture of “passion.”

Fig. 15. Eduard Sievers' system of sound curves. Sievers directly draws on Gustav Becking's musicological classification of conducting curves, so called Becking curves.

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oral cavity into a space of resonance. There is an apparent proximity to Eduard Sievers’ sound analysis, which attempts “to determine, with the help of systematic psycho-physiological reaction experiments, which psycho-physiological conditions are needed for human speech to be formed, and which unwritten specific characteristics it thus possesses.”112 Consequently, he produced sound-analytical curves correlating a person’s voice with letters and motions: “further investigation shows that every specific mental motion can be projected externally as an accompanying physical curve, always in a single specific way, with the exclusion of all other ways unless one wants to cause inhibitions” (cf. fig. 15).113 Though Sievers lectures on “the inner vibrations” that accompany the rhythm and melody of speech, he is ultimately concerned with the stand-

Fig. 16. Sketch from Andrei Bely’s drafts for Glossolaliia. The six sketches illustrate the first sentence of the Genesis in Cyrillic transcription .

112 Eduard Sievers, “Ziele und Wege der Schallanalyse. Zwei Vorträge,” in Stand und Aufgaben der Sprachwissenschaft. Festschrift für Wilhelm Streitberg (Heidelberg, 1924), 65–111, qt. 69f. 113 Ibid., 72ff.

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ardization of pronunciation—too narrow a muzzle for the phonetic expressiveness of Bely’s tongue dances. Bely does not use gestures to illustrate abstract phonemes, neither are his sound kinetograms designed for analysis. In his eurhythmics-inspired observations, Bely assumes that the hand gesture “corresponds” to the spoken word, thus defining sound as a handless gesture. This consideration reaches into the physiology of articulation. For Bely, the motion of the tongue—originally, a tongue of fire in an elementary cosmic primeval state—has become language now that the cosmos of the world has shrunk to the vault of the palate, to the cave of the mouth (cf. figs. 16–17). Still, this dance, this flickering of linguistic fire can be recovered from language, from its articulation: All motion of the tongue in the cavity of our mouth is the gesture of an armless ballerina, twirling the air like a dancing gauze veil. . . . The gestures of the hands reflect all the gestures of the armless dancer in her dark dungeon: beneath the arches of the palate; hand motions reflect facial motions. . . . Our handless tongue had spied upon the hand gesture

Fig. 17. Andrei Bely’s drawing of the oral cavity.

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and repeated it in sounds; sounds know the mysteries of ancient spiritual motions; just as we pronounce the sounding meanings of words, so, too, we ourselves had once been created: pronounced with meaning; our sounds—words—will become the world: we create people and worlds out of words; and the words are acts.114

In a short article entitled “The Armless Dancer” (“Bezrukaia tantsovshchitsa,” 1918), Bely elaborates on this image: If I could build my gesture in the image and likeness of sound, an entire art would emerge before us: the art of knowing sound. This art has indeed emerged. I’ve seen it. I have seen eurhythmics— the ballerina of sounds expressing for us in gestures what is not said in sounds. She expresses the spiral of folded worlds and every day of genesis in a cosmic dance, in the harmony of the living sphere. In her lies the tongue of tongues. For the first time, a poet’s alliterations and assonances sparkle for us in the reality of motions; the sun, earth, moon speak with her gestures; luminous meanings come down to us along the line of gestures. Gesticulation and eurhythmics are a gift; . . . the gestures of the hand’s sound cut through the covers of nature; the nature of consciousness is in the gesture: here, God is within the human being.115

Fig. 18. Vocal gesture for “Rrrr!”

114 Belyi, Glossolaliia, 9f. 115 Andrei Belyi, “Bezrukaia tantsovshchitsa,” Literaturnyi kalendarʹ 5, no. 2 (2009): 5–25, qt. 7.

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This crossfading of dance and speech, which goes back to antiquity, experienced a renewed boom in the avant-garde. Consider, for example, the immense significance of Loïe Fuller’s “metamorphosis dance” for modern conceptualizations of the (poetic) artwork from Baudelaire to Rilke, Valéry, and Mallarmé. The latter uses dance in his essay Ballets (1886) as a perfect example of poetry pure. For Mallarmé, the dancer “is not a woman but a metaphor summing up one of the elementary aspects of our form: sword, cup, flower, and so on.”116 Valéry, for his part, compares the dancing body to a flame in L’Âme et la Danse (1921)—a recurrent image in Bely’s work, as well. Both are intrigued by the transitory nature of dancing, which removes the figure from too narrowly defined mimetic relations into a gesturalism of expression. This point makes clear how profoundly Bely’s Glossolalia reconfigures the practice of speaking in tongues. The First Epistle to the Corinthians, probably the most influential reference on speaking in tongues, glóssais lalein, exhibits a tense, ambivalent relation toward this cult practice. It appears situated between Babel and babble—between a foreign language in need of interpretation and infantile nonsense. But at the same time, this verbal behavior is described as an apostolic language power—a view that will become dominant in the linguistic intoxication of the Pentecost miracle. At the turn of the twentieth century, the discourse around glossolalia dealt not as much with the origins of language as with the psychopathological roots of this suggestive and enigmatic speech process. Thus, speaking in tongues was seen in the context of compulsive disorders, of aphasia and other speech impediments. But in the second decade of the twentieth century, we observe an increased poetic interest in pseudo-glossolalia, in phenomena that appear to make languages of all times and cultures poetically available in spiritual ecstasy. Bely’s Glossolalia, however, is not particularly concerned with The Great Lalulā (to use a title by the German poet Christian Morgenstern) with which modernity advances into areas of transrational linguistic genesis along with aphatic and asymbolic aberrations. Instead, Bely anchors glossolalia in a rhythm and expression theory defined by body language, conceptualizing poetic speech as shaped gestures.

116 Stéphane Mallarmé, “Ballets,” in his Œuvres completes, ed. Henri Mondor (Paris, 1945), 303–307, qt. 304.

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3.3. Articulation Motions: Narrating as a Grotesque Gesture (Boris Eikhenbaum) The formalist concept of literature and language to a large degree springs from the way the word is contained in the body, the way the body’s gestures create poetic and metapoetic dynamics. This concept reflects on the connection between the corporeality of language and the gestural act of speech with regard to the perceptual dispositives of literature. First of all, it is a matter of sensitizing the audience to the aisthetic dimension, to the sensory stimulus of poetic texts. In an essay on Nikolai Leskov’s prose, Boris Eikhenbaum states: “Our attitude toward [words] has become more concrete, more sensory, more physiological. . . . We want to hear [the word], to feel it like a thing. ‘Literature’ thus returns to its origin as the art of the word, slovesnostʹ; narrative returns to the telling of a story. . . .”117 Surprisingly, Eikhenbaum does not deduce the perceptive intrusiveness of textuality from its graphic dimension. Rather, he proceeds from literature as the art of the text to the “art of the word,” from writing to voice, to capture a sensual reading experience in the entanglement of acoustics and haptics. The concept of the touchable word aims at a form of reading that appeals as a bodily experience, a tactile encounter with the text as texture, as a thing (not to be confused with a book or a piece of writing as an object). The connection between the body and the book, the text and the object, is upheld by an emphasis on narration as a performative act. In his essay on plot and style, Shklovsky also circles the reembodiment of the word, when he considers the “word artwork” as “a network of sounds, articulatory motions and thoughts.”118 Here, art becomes a fully experienced, dance-like walk. This image combines the choreography of body motion with increased perception of the word as an articulatory movement: One word approaches another, they feel each other like a cheek feels another person’s cheek. Words are taken apart, and instead of a single complex—an automatically pronounced word spat out like a bar of

117 Boris Eikhenbaum, “Leskov i sovremennaia proza,” in Texte der russischen Formalisten, ed. Jurij Striedter, vol. 1 (Munich, 1969), 208–243, qt. 243. 118 Viktor Shklovskii, “Sviazʹ priemov siuzhetoslozheniia s obshchimi priemami stilia” [1916], in Texte der russischen Formalisten, ed. Jurij Striedter, vol. 1 (Munich, 1969), 37–121, qt. 107.

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chocolate from a snack dispenser—the sound-word is born, the word as an articulatory motion. Dancing, too, is walking that is experienced; or rather, a movement constructed for the sole purpose of being experienced. So here we are, dancing behind the plough.119

Eikhenbaum takes up this image when he equates the difference between “practical” and poetic speech to that between “automatic normal walking” and dancing.120 As with Bely, the dance metaphor suggests how the staging of the word as a dynamic body can be imagined on the basis of a moving image, how the gestural form can turn into a lyrical sound structure—or a narrative event. Shklovsky’s almost catachrestic image of dancing behind the plough in the field of the text points to the fundamental formalist debate on the connection between the corporeality of language and the gestural speech act. This connection also matters for the reorientation of the literary field between optics and acoustics. The question of gesture always remains embedded in a debate about addressing the senses. References to gestures usually suggest a promotion of the eye, a way of intensifying the visual vividness of texts. Gestural motion enables texts to be not only heard but also seen. In formalist skaz theory, especially in the work of Eikhenbaum, Vinogradov, and Tynyanov, this sensory interference culminates in a debate between a “philology of hearing” (slukhovaia filologiia) and a “philology of the eye” (glaznaia filologiia). Closely following the concepts of “speech and ear philology” (Sprech- und Ohrenphilologie) coined by Sievers in his Rhythmic-Melodic Studies (Rhythmisch-melodische Studien, 1912), Eikhenbaum writes in his sketch “The Illusion of Skaz” (“Illiuziia skaza,” 1918): We bookish people can only see the word; for us, it is inseparable from the letter. We often forget that the word itself has nothing to do with the letter—that it is a living, moving activity formed by voice, articulation and intonation, joined by gestures and facial expressions. We think that the writer writes. But this is not always so, and in the field of the artistic word, it usually is not. . . . Writing is not always good for the artist of the word. A true artist of the word contains and carries the primitive organic 119 Ibid., 37. 120 Boris Eikhenbaum, “O khudozhestvennom slove,” in his Moi vremennik. Khudozhestvennaia proza i izbrannye stat’i 20-30-kh godov (St. Petersburg, 2001), 151– 528, qt. 517.

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forces of living narration. The written word is a kind of museum. A return to the living word is characteristic of our crazy but creative time.121

Bely is among those cited by Eikhenbaum as carriers of a poetics that “breaks the usual written syntax,” using various means to “preserve all shades of oral skaz in written speech.”122 In these relationships between script and word, letter and sound, skaz figures as “attunement to the word, to intonation, to the voice, even when transformed into writing,” initially in reference to redefining the position of textuality between the eye and ear.123 This leads to a phonocentric turn, which abandons the graphic appearance of the text as a written document, turns to the acoustics of the narrative voice—and finally arrives at the gestural (and thus visual) narrative act. This script-skeptical view suggests a narrative mode that repositions literature in the triad of hand, eye, and ear. It sensitizes discourse to textual phenomena that lead to a “gestology of narration” somewhere between a “philology of hearing” and a “philology of the eye”—and thus call for a “philology of the hand.” When the hand no longer writes, when it detaches itself from the surface, it becomes free for gestures. This interrelation of writing, speaking and moving advances the development of a narrative theory that proceeds from a gestural-verbal narrator. What would have been considered a narrative modus can now be grasped as narrative gestus. It unfolds in a conceptual spectrum that ranges from articulatory motion to the vocal gesture (Lautgeste) and to skaz. This “reveals the primordial basis of human speech—spontaneous, sensual, inextricably linked to facial expressions, to the movements of speech organs, to the sound of words, to the gesture.”124

121 Idem, “Illiuziia skaza,” in Texte der russischen Formalisten, ed. Jurij Striedter, vol. 1 (Munich, 1969), 161–167, qt. 161 and 167. Sievers writes: “consequently, what we can call the philology of the eye, which up to now has mainly worked with silent reading, should be complemented by a philology of speech and ears based on the study of the peculiarities and laws of living, loud speech, along with independent supplementary disciplines.” Eduard Sievers, Rhythmisch-melodische Studien. Vorträge und Aufsätze (Heidelberg, 1912), 78. 122 Eikhenbaum, “Illiuziia skaza,” 167. 123 Idem, “Leskov,” 241. 124 Idem, “O khudozhestvennom slove,” 515.

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This restructuring of the binary antagonism of speaking and writing to return to the “living” word of skaz, away from the “dead museum of the written word,”125 has often been observed. However, it tends to be overemphasized at the expense of another aspect. What is at stake here is the principle position of the word, not so much against as in writing. This also affects the possibility of using gestures in writing, that is, the question of how gestures that accompany narrative speech are reflected in written form. Viktor Vinogradov, in particular, reinterprets the formalists’ radical critique of writing more subtly, discussing the mutual influence and transformation of the spoken and written word. Protesting against a slavish orientation toward the ear, Vinogradov demands that the concept of skaz be negotiated on the basis of a “syncretistic philology.” He points out that in written narratives, articulatory reproduction and acoustic reception are not necessarily primary. Texts are composed of “representational notions” and “syncretistic word perceptions,” which include optical, acoustic, and motoric elements. Moreover, the literary device of skaz is also significantly influenced by the culture of writing. For this reason, Vinogradov argues, skaz does not merely return writing to its oral origins; it also generates word forms whose gestural elements can be designed and experienced even—or especially—in the written text.126 The words of a text can be conceptualized as gestures, as gestural writing. Indeed, Eikhenbaum’s concept of skaz exhibits a close connection between sensory concreteness and acoustic elementarism. In his Leskov study, he defines skaz as a “deformation” of literary language, which increases the “tactility of the word”; Leskov, he argues, arrives at skaz by consistently moving toward the “tactile word” (oshchutimoe slovo).127 According to Eikhenbaum, poetry does not imply empathy as claimed by poetics of affect. Rather, the only feeling stimulated by reading is the “feeling of the word: a special sense hitherto unconsidered by physiology.”128 Tynyanov later boils this thesis down to one phrase: “Skaz makes the word 125 Idem, “Illiuziia skaza,” 167. 126 On Vinogradov’s objections, see Viktor Vinogradov, “Problema skaza v stilistike,” in Texte der russischen Formalisten, ed. Jurij Striedter, vol. 1 (Munich, 1969), 169–191, esp. 173ff. 127 Eikhenbaum, “Leskov,” 231. 128 Idem, “O khudozhestvennom slove,” 520.

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physiologically perceptible.” At the same time, however, his perspective on this effect differs: Skaz makes the word physiologically perceptible. The whole story becomes a monologue addressed to every reader—and the reader enters the story, starts to intonate, gesticulate, smile; he does not read the story but plays it out. It is not the protagonist whom skaz introduces into prose but the reader. There is a close connection to humor here. Humor thrives on words that are gesturally powerful, that appeal to physiology—on intrusive words. . . . Comic skaz somehow physically fills the word[.]129

This represents a significant shift. While Eikhenbaum—and with him, Vinogradov and Shklovsky—defined skaz above all by a plastically contoured narrative figure, Tynyanov regards it as a reading experience. To him, the act of skaz reception is the physically stimulated perception of the text, its performative shaping. Despite these differences, the decisive factor in both definitions is the aspect of play. Eikhenbaum’s “The Illusion of Skaz” already suggests this line of argument: skaz as a playful mode of treating the written text. Using Gogol’s “The Overcoat” (Shinelʹ, 1842), Eikhenbaum differentiates between two types of skaz.130 While narrative skaz is limited to semantic word play, the other kind—reproducing skaz—determines textual composition through “a certain system of facial and articulatory gestures.”131 Here, the narrator becomes an actor whose tone “takes on the character of a grotesque gesture or grimace.”132 When texts “not only tell stories, not only speak but reproduce words complete with articulation and facial expressions,” when their sentences are chained together “according to the principle of expressive speech, in which articulation, facial expressions, phonetic gestures, and

129 Iurii Tynianov, “Literaturnoe segodnia” [1924], in his Poetika. Istoriia literatury. Kino (Moscow, 1977), 150–166, qt. 160. 130 Boris Eikhenbaum, “Kak sdelana Shinelʹ Gogolia,” in Texte der russischen Formalisten, ed. Jurij Striedter, vol. 1 (Munich, 1969), 123–159, qt. 133 and 137. 131 Ibid., 123f. 132 Ibid., 149.

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so on each have a special role,” when they create a “word mask,” lively ludic skaz opens up a “play with reality” that has theatrical qualities.133 While Eikhenbaum considers the theory of skaz particularly relevant to the literature of his time (Remizov, Bely, Zamyatin, Zoshchenko, and others), it is above all nineteenth-century narrators whom he uses to exemplify his model. Besides Gogol, Dal, and Pushkin, he repeatedly turns to Leskov’s prose. Here, in storytelling trained on folk tales and old Russian legends, he sees the “battle of book learning with the living word” conducted with particular intensity; here, the “primitive but organic forces of living storytelling” seem to be preserved in their pure form.134 Eikhenbaum reads Leskov’s narrative oeuvre as an inventory of various skaz procedures: from the plastic contouring of the narrator figure through lexical and syntactic elements of oral speech to the formation of new narrative forms. He follows Otto Ludwig in calling such forms “scenic,”135 arguing that here, the narrative aspect recedes and is ultimately reduced to a stage direction. This heralds a change of genre: prose approaches drama—not only because dialogue is beginning to play a dominant role. Above all, it is a matter of transition from a narrative mode to a performative one: “everything is perceived not as a narrative (an epic) but as events happening before our eyes, on stage.”136 Through various methods of creating facial expressions and gestures with words, the narrator becomes a performer or actor. Skaz “takes on the character of a play, and the composition . . . is determined by a certain system of different facial and articulatory gestures.”137 Here, too, the vocal gesture is mentioned: all methods of manipulating speech and creating

133 Eikhenbaum, “Leskov,” 209. Tynyanov defines these procedures as word masks, i.e. as the construction of “a mask and its motion proceeding from a word sign.” Iurii Tynianov, “Dostoevskii i Gogolʹ,” in Texte der russischen Formalisten, ed. Jurij Striedter, vol. 1 (Munich, 1969), 301–371, qt. 315. 134 Eikhenbaum, “Illiuziia skaza,” 167f. 135 Otto Ludwig differentiates between “actual” and “scenic” narrative in Formen der Erzählung (1891). Whereas in the “actual narrative” an author or narrator addresses the listener and the narrative dominates, in the “scenic narrative” the story is allowed to “tell itself ” in a seemingly unmediated fashion. 136 Eikhenbaum, “Leskov,” 208f. 137 Eikhenbaum, “Kak sdelana Shinelʹ Gogolia,” 125.

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articulatory expressiveness (giving speech the power of facial expressions) gravitate toward this concept.138 Walter Benjamin also used Leskov’s prose to reflect on narration, reaccentuating the issue of skaz and the gesture embedded in it. The starting point of his reflection is not the lively narrative shading into dramatic play conjured up by early formalism but rather the observation of a “narrative disability,” which, initiated by the First World War, expresses the subject’s impoverishment of experience. Benjamin argues that even a written narrative is fed by the “experience that goes from mouth to mouth.”139 In skaz, Benjamin detects a practice that derives from craft—from handiwork. To him, only forms that still cultivate narration as an “artisanal form of communication” can conquer the worrying tendencies of the time: the narrative moving “away from the realm of living speech,” communication being replaced with information. Just as Nietzsche made the “seriousness of the capable craftsman” the model for the novelist,140 Benjamin argues that every wandering artisan transforms news from afar into a story for those at home, creating the capacity to “exchange experiences.” The narrative, “as it has long been flourishing among craftsmen,” immerses itself “into the life of the storyteller to retrieve it out of him. In this way, traces of the storyteller cling to the story like the handprints of the potter cling to the clay vessel.” The dialectical image of immersion and retrieval, which considers narration in a material dynamic between objectification and realism, captures not only the narrator figure in its physical presence. In this image, Benjamin mirrors a triad observed by Paul Valéry regarding artistic activity: the triad of soul, eye, and hand. With these words [of Valéry], soul, eye, and hand are brought into connection. Interacting, they determine a practice. We are no longer familiar with this practice. The role of the hand in production has become

138 Ibid., 133. 139 Walter Benjamin, “Der Erzähler. Betrachtungen zum Werk Nikolai Lesskows,” in his Illuminationen. Ausgewählte Schriften, vol. 1 (Frankfurt/M., 1977), 385–410, qt. 393. Here and further on: partly quoted in translation by Harry Zohn with some alterations by Alexandra Berlina: Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller,” in his Illuminations. Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York, 2007), 83–109. 140 Nietzsche, Menschliches, Allzumenschliches, 323.

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more modest, and the place it had filled in storytelling lies waste. (After all, storytelling, in its sensory aspect, is by no means a job for the voice alone. Rather, in genuine storytelling, the hand plays a part that supports what is expressed in a hundred ways with its gestures trained by work.) That old co-ordination of the soul, the eye, and the hand that emerges in Valéry’s words is that of the artisan, encountered wherever the art of storytelling is at home. In fact, one can go on and ask oneself whether the relationship of the storyteller to his material, the human life, is not in itself a craftsman’s relationship. Is it not his very task to fashion the raw material of experience, his own and that of others, in a solid, useful, and unique way?141

This passage points at a content of the narrative gesture that can be traced back neither to the visual appearance of staged play nor to the acoustics of the gesturally intensified voice. Rather, the gesture appears as the signature of action, as a trace of lived experience and active performance. The passage hints at a regress of the hand in the machine age, in which manual work is used only in unspecific, mechanical acts of manufacture. In this context, the art of narration is situated between familiar practice and alienated technology. Here, the hand gesture gains aesthetic relevance from its foundation in life and work. This relevance refuses to be absorbed by the narrow framework of utilitarianisms or instrumental redefinitions of literature and the arts. Narrating is a practice that transcends pragmatic usability. It literally keeps in touch with a living world, which is always structurally detached from the narrative. As a practice, however, storytelling rests in the motions of the hand as a deeply material, texture-bound action. Adorno rejected Benjamin’s view of the gesture as somatic reduction, as an expression of “anthropological materialism” that follows an undialectical ontology of the body.142 But the reference to Valéry, whose distance to Leskov could hardly be greater, suggests: the image of the hand and the gesture is rooted not only in the body, in the “creatureliness,” the “orientation toward the practical interest,” the “instructive life rule” (Benjamin) of Russian realism—but also in the vacuum where these rules are broken. Though craft and epic poetry may be preserved in Russian realism

141 Benjamin, “Der Erzähler,” 409. 142 Theodor W. Adorno, “Brief an Walter Benjamin vom 6.9.1936,” in his Über Walter Benjamin (Frankfurt/M., 1970), 152–154, qt. 153.

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in a quasi-organic symbiosis, still, the idea of storytelling as a narrative craft touches upon the triad of eye, hand, and soul—a structure that also matters for a literature in which no life line can be read from the palm of the hand. In a subtle essay about Kafka, Benjamin reconsiders the connection between hand and work, this time not as the bodily trace of a word that creates life but as an emptied gesture. This gesture is the “non-action in action, the exile of the action from the action: exaction; a nothing that causes something.”143 Benjamin introduces his essay with an anecdote, a form close to orally staged narration with its emphasis on presence. At the same time, he distances himself from this aura of presence by means of a neutral prelude. The anecdote describes an eighteenth-century event, as bizarre as it is meaningful: It is related that Potemkin suffered from states of depression, which recurred more or less regularly. At such times no one was allowed to go near him, and access to his room was strictly forbidden. This malady was never mentioned at court, and in particular it was known that any allusion to it incurred the disfavor of Empress Catherine. One of the Chancellor’s depressions lasted for an extraordinary length of time and brought about serious difficulties; in the offices documents piled up that required Potemkin’s signature, and the Empress pressed for their completion. The high officials were at their wits’ end. One day an unimportant little clerk named Shuvalkin happened to enter the anteroom of the Chancellor’s palace and found the councilors of state assembled there, moaning and groaning as usual. “What is the matter, Your Excellencies?” asked the obliging Shuvalkin. They explained things to him and regretted that they could not use his services. “If that’s all it is,” said Shuvalkin, “I beg you to let me have those papers.” Having nothing to lose, the councilors of state let themselves be persuaded to do so, and with the sheaf of documents under his arm, Shuvalkin set out, through galleries and corridors, for Potemkin’s bedroom. Without stopping or bothering to knock, he turned the door-handle; the room was not locked. In semidarkness Potemkin was sitting on his bed in a threadbare nightshirt, biting his nails. Shuvalkin stepped up to the writing desk, dipped a pen in ink, and without saying a word pressed it into Potemkin’s hand while putting one of the documents on his knees. Potemkin gave the intruder a vacant stare; then, as though in his sleep, he started to sign—first one paper, then a second,

143 Werner Hamacher, “Die Geste im Namen. Benjamin und Kafka,” in his Entferntes Verstehen. Studien zu Philosophie und Literatur von Kant bis Celan (Frankfurt/M., 1998), 280–323, qt. 319.

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finally all of them. When the last signature had been affixed, Shuvalkin took the papers under his arm and left the room without further ado, just as he had entered it. Waving the papers triumphantly, he stepped into the anteroom. The councilors of state rushed toward him and tore the documents out of his hands. Breathlessly they bent over them. No one spoke a word; the whole group seemed paralyzed. Again Shuvalkin came closer and solicitously asked why the gentlemen seemed so upset. At that point he noticed the signatures. One documents after another was signed Shuvalkin. . . . Shuvalkin. . . . Shuvalkin. . . .144

The anecdote does not only tell a story about the impossibility of authentication, about fake authorization, and about, so to speak, Potemkin papers. It is also a historical anecdote about the signum of a gesture that designates nothing: no real signature, no sign, no significance. Benjamin sees in this tragicomic scene a “herald storming in, two hundred years ahead of Kafka’s work,” prefiguring K. in Shuvalkin. With its mis-signatures, it can also serve as a prototype for numerous stories about clerks who lose their minds while engaged in the lustful and painful copying of files. Significantly, the writing fetishism—or writing fatalism—of these clerks stubbornly remains a frequent subject of skaz narratives. Yet this anecdote contrasts these scenarios: Potemkin signs with another man’s name. Benjamin’s reading of this gesture attracts attention to the impossibility of deriving skaz from rhetorical or theatrical doctrines of motion. The deictic aspect and discursive function of the gesture must be determined differently, for skaz can neither be reduced to the vividness of declamatory deixis nor does it find symbolic support in the evoked presence of an acting narrator. In skaz, according to Eikhenbaum, words stop being “conceptual signs,” and figures tend to lose their visual imaginability; their language degenerates into “puppet speak,” it stands “outside time, outside the moment.” In this chronological rift, the flip side of skaz emerges from the exuberant dynamics of grotesque gestures: skaz as a “dead language.”145 This dead language can show nothing but distorted images of signs: gestures contain a mode of reference that can neither be grasped nor conveyed in language.

144 Walter Benjamin, “Franz Kafka,” in his Illuminations. Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York, 2007), 111–140, qt. 111f. 145 Eikhenbaum, “Kak sdelana Shinelʹ Gogolia,” 139 and 143.

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This tendency of the narrative gesture may also be one of the reasons that led Benjamin to introduce his essay on Kafka with a skaz scene. Benjamin presents Kafka’s work as a “codex of gestures, . . . which by no means have a certain predetermined symbolic meaning for the author.” In the hand gesture, literal “graspability” collides with semantic incomprehensibility: Kafka’s gestures are “repeatedly staged and labeled anew by the author without delivering their symbolic content at any specific point.”146 Benjamin persistently uses the concept of the gesture as grasping at a meaning that keeps retreating. He uses the cloud as a signum of this gesture situated between giving and taking back: “For Kafka, some things were only graspable in the gesture. And this gesture, which he did not understand himself, forms the cloudy part of the parables. From it, the poetics of Kafka’s work emerges.” Benjamin’s considerations derive from the assumption that gestural and spoken expressions cannot be strictly separated, though they are not necessarily mutually deducible. Werner Hamacher proceeds from this “cloudy part” to reflect on a semantic cloudiness “which no longer represents, mediates or instructs,” on the “impossibility of meaning, of naming, of language”—on the “irreducible residual phenomenon” of speech.147 But what is the gesture if read as a sign of the unrepresentable and the signless? This perspective makes the gesture, of all things, into a topos of showing the unspeakable, of refusing to represent. The gesture would thus object to the possibility of naming by pointing to that which cannot be named. With the “dissolution of events into gestures,” the gesture—that at first glance seems the originating figure of the text—becomes a trace of its disappearance, a remainder of the narratable: “Kafka demonstrates the striking tendency to siphon off the meaning of the events, so to speak. . . . All that remains is the gesture, detached from all affective contexts.”148 From this perspective, fantasies of the gesture as the ultimate origin of speaking and signing are reversed. It is not the beginning but the end of language, the end of narration—a gesture whose meaning can hardly be grasped and whose semiotic features suggest freedom from all symptoms 146 Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser, vol. 2, part 2 (Frankfurt/M., 1991), 418 and 1264. 147 Hamacher, “Die Geste im Namen,” 285, 287 and 316. 148 Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 2, part 2, 1227 and 1201.

4. The Gesture of Speaking

of the natural, immediate signal. While language historians considered the gesture to be the source of all human speech, for poets, it becomes the end point, a mere remnant of linguistic ability. It appears as the nothingness of speaking, no longer that which wants to say something but that which is emancipated from the constraints of speech and its manual supplementation. It stands beyond the word. From a sign pointing toward language, the gesture turns into a sign of retraction. The supplement of speech becomes its ellipse.

4. The Gesture of Speaking Linguistic and poetic theories of the Russian avant-garde that regard the gesture as origo of language persistently accentuate this precarious inbetween status of the word. The search for gestural residues in the grey prehistoric times of the cave or in the dark cavity of the mouth goes beyond “manually” questioning the non-gestural word. Above all, this search aims to critique the philosophy of language. In the interactions of hand and mouth, the focus is on how the gesture—language made visible—shows words beyond the deictic nominal reserves, in the liminal space. In this process, the gesture always oscillates between the outside and the inside of the mouth, the outside and the inside of language. Behind these transitory shifts lies a more general question: is non-discursive language possible at all? Which also means: is there a concept of gesture neither based in some rhetorical or theatrical theory of motion nor limited to deictic designation functions? In addition to the gestures of loving and smoking, of creating and searching, of shaving and painting, Vilém Flusser includes in his collection of essays on the phenomenology of human gestures a short sketch on the gesture of speaking. For him, speaking is part of a mosaic of gestures, like planting a seed, cutting hair, and lighting tobacco. Together, these gestures can be used as the basis for a general theory of free and independent communication. According to Flusser, this freedom would be derived from the gestures’ resistance against irreducible explainability or determinabil-

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ity, focusing on the possibilities for changing a given word, material, or medium. This gesture-driven communication theory is thus characterized by a paradox: while gestural communication is dedicated primarily to the incommensurable and non-communicable, it opens up spaces for dialogical speculation. The gesture constitutes the “negative side” of knowledge, which can only be seen in its phenomenal manifestations—without ever becoming completely graspable.149 Flusser’s theory of gestures provides a new perspective on language— above all because its definition of communication transcends universal codability. It does not aim to decode all gestures as “linguistic” but attempts to decipher language as gesture—proceeding from a general gestural theory. It is, in other words, not a linguistic theory of gesture but a gestural theory of language. If speech becomes gesture in this reversal, it is by no means because it shows (or conceals) a body motion subject to semiotics. Proceeding from the anatomy of speech organs, the conventions of articulation and the reciprocal transformations of speech practice and speech logic, Flusser approaches a zone of linguistic gesticulation in which the word is formed “in the head just before the motion of the speech organs,” in the “interior of the speaker, just behind the vocal chords and just before the utterance.”150 This gesture is therefore not quite speech but rather a potentiality of speech. In this interliminal not-yet-space, the gesture of speaking oscillates between turning into language and refusing to do so.

149 Flusser, Gesten, 217–220. 150 Ibid., 41ff.

II. Writing. Letters at Play

Writing and playing are both explorative acts that enable expeditions into the unfamiliar, that create and transform worlds, oscillating between mimesis and transfiguration. The manipulating hand plays a prominent role not only in writing but also in playing, especially if the ludic activity arises from or leads into writing. This interrelation reveals an inner connection between writing and play: they reflect and illuminate each other in as far as the concept of writing is oriented toward play, and in as far as play moves into practices of writing. This interrelation is not limited to modernity; indeed, it begins long before the educational, aesthetical and philosophical rediscovery of play by the enlightenment. Harking back to mystical letter combinatorics, it experiences a heyday in the baroque ars combinatoria and does not end with the invention of Scrabble. The ludographic principle becomes particularly explosive in the post-revolutionary Russian avant-garde. Here, script and play are at the crossroads of a conceptual upheaval. The operative use of cultural techniques and arts advances, driven by a production aesthetic; accordingly, writing and play are positively reevaluated in terms of their concrete and practical action. But at the same time, their pragmatization aims to restrict them, to turn them into compliant tools for result-oriented forms.

1. The Craft of Writing 1.1 Mediology Writing as a cultural technique that touches the hand in so many ways needs to be explored at the intersection of mediology, anthropology and praxeology. Media history records transitions from the oral to the chirographic, from the chirographic to the typographic, and finally from the typographic

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to digital cultures. This history of writing is commonly told as a narrative of minimizing the manual mode. The hand, which had been moving in threedimensional space, is first bound to the surface of the paper. Subsequently, the man-machine interaction of the typographic era marginalizes the hand, leading to a displacement of manual writing from the public space into such spheres as private recording and intimate correspondence. Finally, the digital age shifts from gestures that shape or set letters to gestures that trigger signals or manipulate touchscreens. Arguably, though, this stage marks a change of course: the touchpad system suggests a subtle secondary renaissance of the hand, giving it the ability to write, move and change things with nothing but the index finger. The established narrative of gradual regress suggests a cultural pessimism influenced by Heidegger’s apologia of the manuscript—a constant point of reference since the media effects of writing were first discussed. Heidegger criticizes typewriting as a “signless cloud,” a technique that contributes to the “destruction of the word” by removing writing from the “essential area of the hand, i.e. of the word” and degrading it to a means. This view is based on a belief in an “essential connection” of being, word, reading and writing.1 Writing by hand, after all, is the verbal gesture par excellence; it cannot be imagined outside of speech. To Heidegger, the hand thus “reveals” what is “concealed.” He proceeds: “By showing and drawing and drawingly showing, [the hand] forms signs into structures. These entities are called γράμματα after the ‘verbum’ γράφειν. The word revealed by the hand and appearing in such a drawing is writing.”2 Proceeding from the hand as the “essential characteristic of man,” Heidegger concludes: The word as what is inscribed and what appears to our gaze is the written word, i.e., script. And the word as script is handwriting. It is not accidental that modern man writes “with” the typewriter and “dictates” (the same word as dichten, to write poetry) “into” a machine. This “history” of the kinds of writing is one of the main reasons for the increasing destruction of the word. The latter no longer comes and goes by means of the writing hand, the properly acting hand but by means of the mechanical forces

1

Heidegger, Parmenides, 119 and 125f.

2

Unfortunately, the translation does not fully mirror that Heidegger’s thoughts are expressed in (and perhaps derived from) word play. In the original, the first cited line is as follows: “Indem sie zeigt und zeigend zeichnet und zeichnend die zeigenden Zeichen zu Gebilden bildet.”

1. The Craft of Writing

it releases. The typewriter tears writing from the essential realm of the hand, i.e., the realm of the word. The word itself turns into something “typed.”3

Few modern writers were as deeply influenced by Heidegger’s apologia of the manuscript as Vasily Rozanov. “Damned Gutenberg,” he writes, had “licked all writers with his copper tongue,” so that writing “lost its soul, its face, its character in print,” for its “self is only to be found in manuscripts.”4 More than that, Rozanov claims that “book printing made love impossible.”5 Even a less critical archaeology of writing cannot help but note a growing distance between the writer and the written word due to the increasingly liminal position of the manuscript. The media history of writing thus becomes a history of alienation from the hand. At the same time, the evidence of media upheavals speaks an ambivalent language: while fingers steadily retreat from the text production, and writing as print is celebrated, we also see constant references to handwriting. Benjamin prophecies that “the typewriter will alienate the writer’s hand from the pen only when the precision of typographic formations is directly incorporated into the conception of his books.” Instead of a smooth technical detachment motion, he envisions a subtle change of text concepts and font formats, in which the hand is by no means amputated but rather recoded: “Presumably, new systems with variable font designs will then be needed. They will replace the fluid hand with the innervations of the commanding fingers.”6 Inevitably, the transition to the modern portable typewriter culture stigmatizes the hand for its allegedly imperfect, inefficient and slow writing. Nevertheless, the manuscript remains a privileged instrument for sketches and drafts, as well as the focal point for the conceptualization of literary poiesis. The concepts, however, differ. Yevgeny Zamyatin, for instance, re3

Heidegger, Parmenides, 125 and 118f. English translation: Parmenides, trans. André Schuwer and Richard Rojcewicz (Bloomington, 1992), 80f. (with some slight changes by Alexandra Berlina). The brackets are Heidegger’s own; diktiert (dictates) and dichtet (writes poetry) are not really “the same word,” but they look and sound similar.

4

Vasilii Rozanov, O sebe i o zhizni svoei (Moscow, 1990), 39.

5

Ibid., “Opavshie listʹia. Korob pervyi” [1913], in his Sobranie sochinenii, vol. 30: Listva (Moscow and St. Petersburg, 2010), 75–188, qt. 80.

6

Walter Benjamin, “Einbahnstraße,” in his Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser, vol. 4, part 1 (Frankfurt/M., 1972), 85–146, qt. 105.

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fers to the “useful slowness” of writing by hand; Maxim Gorky mentions a specific rhythm of chirography that communicates itself to the syntax.7 At the same time—as Nikolai Nikitin describes it—writing by hand can also become mechanical, as if in anticipation of typography.8 Almost always, however, the switch from handwriting to typing is understood as a separation of the author from the text. Aleksey Tolstoy calls this effect de-individualization: I sketch the drafts with my pen and then immediately type them. The typewriter gives me a text that is not related to the individuality of handwriting. The printed text appears like something alien, where I see all the mistakes and [can envision] the right arrangement of words and phrases, the way it will be in the book. I’ve been using a typewriter since 1912. In rare cases, I dictate; but dictation always produces a lower quality than writing [typing]. The only thing that works well is dictating a play when it is already sketched out in drafts.9

Similarly, Tolstoy’s contribution to an anthology on avant-gardist poetics, The Way We Write (Kak my pishem, 1930), argues: “A handwritten text is always unclear (handwriting is individual, sometimes illegible, the number of words on a page is small compared to print): all this prevents you from taking a step back, looking critically at your own work as if it were someone else’s.”10 Rozanov speaks of even more radical self-distancing in the First Basket of The Fallen Leaves (1913): “The impression of the printed text is striking: ‘Not mine’.”11 These experiences reflect a disconnection from handwriting, which Flusser reads as a “liberation”: the typewriter does not restrict writing, quite the opposite, “one is freer when typing than when writing with a fountain

7

Maksim Gorʹkii in Kak my pishem (Leningrad, 1930 [reprint Moscow, 1989]), 21–24, qt. 23; Evgenii Zamiatin in Kak my pishem, 25–41, qt. 36.

8

Nikolai Nikitin in Kak my pishem (Leningrad, 1930 [reprint Moscow, 1989]), 92–105, qt. 100.

9

Aleksei Tolstoi, “Kak ia rabotaiu,” in his Sobranie sochinenii v 10-i tomakh, vol. 10 (Moscow, 1961), 131–133, qt. 131f.

10

Aleksei Tolstoi in Kak my pishem (Leningrad, 1930 [reprint Moscow, 1989]), 123–135, qt. 131.

11

Rozanov, “Opavshie listʹia. Korob pervyi,” 133 (italics in the original).

1. The Craft of Writing

pen,” since typing is a “more obvious form of thinking.”12 There may still be a genre-specific differentiation of writing cultures in the era of typescript—drama, for instance, might be assigned a writing scenery oriented toward orality—but still, the typewriter releases words and subjects from too close a bond that enslaves both. But Tolstoy’s observation also reveals something else: even in times of mechanized text production, a fetishistic love of the device perseveres, a love that has been extolled in hymns to inkpots, quills, nibs, and pens. Tolstoy also admits to this weakness: “I love writing utensils—fountain pens, good paper. Ah, the paper shops in France! Fantasy refuses to imagine all these silly and sweet little things. Let the border guards know it: if I ever go abroad, I’ll smuggle a bag of writing implements under the keel of the steamer.”13 In confessions like these, the material inventory of typography and the economy of typographic text production oscillate between rationality and obsession: Pencils, I just hate. But fountain pens—those I might even steal, such a psychotic passion do I have for them. If I lived in a bourgeois country, I’d probably open a shop for fountain pens and other writing implements. I assert that using a typewriter is better and quicker than writing by hand, and, under the current conditions—when you don’t get to change anything in the proofs—the resulting quality is better, too. In the process of typing (you get used to the typewriter in two weeks and stop noticing it), you see the text naked, devoid of all the individual features of handwriting, and so you can see all the errors. This is extremely important. Typewriting is two or three times more intensive and productive than manual writing. Having someone else type up a handwritten manuscript is not the same: you’ll never make such significant amendments to a copy that you’d make in the fever of work.14

The rationalistic logic of faster, “more intensive and productive” typing has much to do with anonymity: facelessness enables one to edit one’s own text from a distance, as if it was someone else’s, to a certain extent turning the author into a casual reader. But this praise of typing cannot conceal 12

Flusser, Gesten, 34f.

13

Tolstoi, Kak my pishem, 134.

14

Idem, “Moe tvorchestvo,” 113.

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a melancholic longing for chirographic writing implements, a widespread suffering under the technological rationality and pragmatism of typographic textuality. The typing writer is haunted by an unquenched lust for the pen and the inviolability of the handwritten text. 1.2 Anthropology The second relevant area concerns anthropological questions of writing analysis and writing discipline. At least since the Renaissance, handwriting has been regarded as a privileged yet quite obscure source of subjectivity, a conviction that has been spelled out in chiromantic, physiognomic and graphological ramifications of script studies. They explore writing styles, considering the graphic form of letters as indelible manifestations not only of an individual’s hand but also of an individual’s character. Even when the document in question is anything but intimate, graphological study allows for a reading of every writing sample as “soul script.” Hence, handwriting always has a double aspect: on the one hand, it objectifies the writing ego in a medium; on the other hand, this very medium is subjectified with regard to the writer’s inner self. Motions of the soul and the writing hand are thus placed in a mutual indexical relationship, forming a psychogrammatic symptomatology of writing, in which chirography translates into individual expression. This discourse on chirographic expressiveness can, however, only unfold against the media-historical background of an established printing culture. It is the standardized appearance of typography that enables the manuscript to add on symbolic value, to expand its potential. Avant-garde autographs with their program of “self-writing” (samopisʹmo) exploit this potential with particular intensity. Here, manuscript culture creates an aesthetic space in which writing and drawing meet in impure, disrupted, illegible figures. Samopisʹmo compositions are locations of indeterminate form and meaning, in which the semantic functions of script recede behind writing as ductus, as gesture, as processual event and graphic design. As an experimental investigation into the scope of writing techniques between strict notational systematics and self-sufficient scribbling, samopisʹmo handles handwriting as a construct to be experienced sensually and aesthetically—beyond (or even against) legibility. This rephenomenalized perspective on writing is programmatically represented by Velimir Khlebnikov’s and Alexei Kruchenykh’s proclama-

1. The Craft of Writing

tion The Letter as Such (Bukva kak takovaia, 1913), which shudders at typographic series of letters as an enslaving unification of samopisʹmo. “Why,” they ask, “don’t they go all the way and make [letters] wear grey prison robes? You saw the letters of their words—all lined up, their heads shaved, sulking, each a dead ringer of the other—gray, colorless—not even letters at all, just some faded marks.”15 In contrast, only the writer-craftsman (pisatelʹ-remeslennik) able to grasp the meaning of handwriting as an “integral part of the poetic impulse” can be considered a true writer.16 Similarly, in 1914, David Burliuk argues: The premise of our attitude toward the word as a living organism is that the poetic word is sensual. It changes its qualities depending on whether it is written, printed, or thought. It affects all our sensations. . . . First of all, you have to distinguish between the author’s handwriting, a scribe’s handwriting, and typefaces. Some words can never be printed: they need the authorial hand. Recently, this has been partially understood: for instance, the author’s surname has started to appear in his handwriting [on book covers]. A facsimile of the handwritten manuscript is of great value to a true amateur. Literaturnaia Kompania has now published handwritten books.17

The repeated references to the sensory essence of the word, made touchable by handwriting, activate a pneumatic vitality in the text—a vitality that does not only evoke the presence of the writer but above all addresses the senses of the reader. The anthropological history of writing is not merely about the techniques that transform characters into means of expression, be it within the iron corset of typography, in the typological framework of graphology, or in the laboratories of poetic chirography. It is also a narrative of suppression, of domesticating the clumsy hand, an endless drama of manual dressage. Even before bulges and curves in individual letter profiles acquire any 15

Velimir Khlebnikov and Aleksei Kruchenykh, “Bukva kak takovaia” [1913], in Russkii futurizm. Teoriia. Praktika. Kritika. Vospominaniia, ed. V. N. Terekhnina and A. P. Zimenkov (Moscow, 1999), 49.

16

See point 5 in the preface of the manifesto for the volume “Sadok sudei” [1914], in Literaturnye manifesty ot simvolizma do nashikh dnei, ed. S. B. Dzhimbinov (Moscow, 2000), 147–148, qt. 147.

17

David Burliuk, “Poeticheskie nachala,” Futuristy. Pervyi zhurnal russkikh futuristov 1–2 (1914): 81–85, qt. 81 (italics in the original).

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psychological or poetological significance, they are pressed into the scheme of beautiful and clean writing (chistopisanie in Russian). Alphabetization forces the entire body and especially the hand into complex coordinated motion sequences and positions so as to form or set graphemes according to standards. This applies not only to calligraphic forms of writing but also to the physical orientation toward standard forms, accompanied by a rich arsenal of writing and learning tools. This sacred and often painful “scriptorial seriousness” is felt every time when literacy training is mentioned. Benjamin sees it as an ambivalent process of bondage and renewed disengagement: Salto mortale of the s / Watch how the hand seeks the place on the page where it should make a start. The threshold before the realm of writing. When the child writes, its hand sets off on a journey. A long journey with pauses as camps to spend the night. The letter disintegrates into pauses. Panic and paralysis  of the hand. The pain of leaving the accustomed landscape of space, because from now on it may move only along the surface.18

This dark side of the writing process refers not only to abecedaries and orthographic measurements of the calligraphic hand but also and above all to memories of the initiation into writing. They add up to an extensive history of blotches and scribbles.19 In his memoirs, for example, Shklovsky tells of his fingers’ laborious wrestling with pen, ink, and paper: I wrote badly, cramping the cold insert with my little fingers; I held it with a rounded hand right at the quill. The quill had a number, 86. It was a hard quill for handwriting training. My handwriting training was to no avail. I remember a five-kopek notebook—expensive, made of good paper; on the blue cover, it said “Gerbach,” and there was a drawing of a clean, unattainable hand, correctly holding the insert in elongated fingers. Then in this notebook, there were white pages and samples of letters with the correct pressure, blue inclined contours on black double lines. Gerbach’s science remained inaccessible to me: I never learned

18

Walter Benjamin, “Betrachtungen und Notizen,” in his Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser, vol. 6 (Frankfurt/M., 1983), 195–211, qt. 200. English translation by Rodney Livingstone and others (with changes by Alexandra Berlina): Walter Benjamin, “Notes (II),” in his Selected Writings, vol. 2, part 1 (Cambridge, Mass. and London, 1999), 285–287, qt. 285.

19

Cf. Konstantin Bogdanov, Iz istorii kliaks. Filologicheskie nabliudeniia (Moscow, 2012).

1. The Craft of Writing

how to stretch my fingers properly. Before exams, my hands were washed with soap, and my index finger was rubbed clean with lemon and black bread. This mixture was usually employed to clean copper dishes: with it, saucepans turned red and sparkled like the sun.20

Even when the craft of writing is mastered, the ordeal is not over. It is repeated in a modified way when learning the craft of literary writing. Zamyatin compares this process with the first driving lessons: in both cases, one is missing a third hand. Once, I felt acutely that I had lost a hand—that my third hand was missing. It was in England when I first drove a car: at the same time, you had to turn the wheel, move the gear stick, accelerate, and beep. I had experienced something like this long before, when I was starting to write: it seemed unthinkable that you could simultaneously control plot development, and the feelings of people, and their dialogue, the devices, and images, and rhythm. Later I realized that two hands were quite enough to drive. This happened when most complex motions became subconscious reflexes. This sensation of being comfortable in the driver’s seat is sooner or later reached at the writing desk as well.21

The laborious sweaty agony of writing is the opposite of textual pleasure, which—both onto- and phylogenetically—only seems to develop later. This is how we first encounter the violent power of writing. With its meticulous conditioning of motions, writing is one of those cultural techniques that subject the human being to a specific order. And yet, this friction, this resistance of the materials and tools sensitizes for the affective dimension of notational practices, so that the scribble can finally coagulate into the conditio sine qua non of literary writing. As Tolstoy puts it: “You have to cross out things, the more, the better. You can’t write without crossing things out. Only graphomaniacs write like that.”22

20

Viktor Shklovskii, Zhili-byli (Vospominaniia). Memuarnye zapisi. Povesti o vremeni (Moscow, 1966), 46.

21

Zamiatin, Kak my pishem, 35.

22

Tolstoi, “Moe tvorchestvo,” 113.

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1.3 Praxeology The third relevant area in the history of writing concerns praxeological problems. These range from (literally) manual aspects via the differentiation of application areas and formal functionalization to the institutionalization of writing. The latter in particular reveals how writing as a social practice is intimately interwoven with political authority. Above all, the concept of writing as an act and action (Schrifthandeln) accentuates a basic fact: writing is a process in which producers and recipients interact with and through texts. A praxeology of writing could thus be understood in the broadest sense as a reflection on its performative aspects. From a somewhat narrower perspective, the praxeology of writing overlaps with the anthropological aspects discussed above, especially regarding physical writing practice. Both meet at threshold of literacy, where the status and treatment of the book as an object is negotiated. Alexei Sidorov’s The Art of the Book (Iskusstvo knigi), published in 1922, was the first Russian work in book studies to consider physiological questions of book handling. This is how any reflection on the book as an object must begin, according to Sidorov: “Let us start at the beginning. A book is an object that we perceive while holding it in our hands. This has a certain material logic,” for when you do, it can be “quite uncomfortable” if the book is too heavy or too light.23 Building on these basic parameters, the psychophysical study of book use becomes increasingly differentiated. In the late 1920s, Soviet mass literacy campaigns produced a wealth of instructions on the use of writing as a cultural technique and on the book as its medium. Diagrams showed the correct handling of the book: techniques of turning the pages (clean hands, no saliva on the fingers), transport (never folded, rolled, or tucked under the belt, always in a dust jacket), storage (protected from direct sunlight), positioning (never with a folded spine), posture while reading (with an upright back, in direct light, never in twilight) and the choice of reading matter (only useful literature) (see fig. 19). These manual handling instructions are followed by an attempt to heighten awareness for the operative use of the book: “Without books, neither a teacher, nor an engineer, nor a young

23

Aleksei Sidorov, Iskusstvo knigi (Moscow, 1922), 12f.

1. The Craft of Writing

Fig. 19. Instruction how to handle a book.

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pioneer can work. For all these people, a book is like an axe for a carpenter or a hammer for a smith. It is a tool without which they can’t do their job.”24 The extent to which this praxeology of writing reflects its own history can be seen in book exhibitions increasingly organized in these years. For instance, an exhibition of Soviet children’s books that visited various European cities in 1931 had a section on “book hygiene”: here, typographic examples of poorly and confusingly printed books were collected. These included copies in which “drawings and text are mixed up in such a wild pattern as if the artist, typesetter, and printer were hallucinating while working.” Another section illustrated the correct posture when reading—healthy reading is not to be had lying on your back in bed, on your stomach in the grass or while eating. This was followed by a showcase on “Times and books,” where you could turn a crank to see four writing and reading scenes from the eighteenth to the twentieth century presented as a short puppet show (see fig. 20).25 With its focus on conditioning “correct” reading and writing, the praxeological perspective explores the application of writing in various spheres of social life, developing a “grapho-politics.”26 Thus, for instance, bureaucracy, business correspondence and law each have their own pragmatics of writing, including forms, scenarios, codification, canonization and finally the translation of texts Fig. 20. Showcase “Times and books” into action. The activation and ap(“Vremena i knigi”) at a Soviet propriation of writing, as well as children’s book exhibition. 24

“Kak rabotatʹ s knigoi,” Pioner 20 (1926): 21.

25

Ia. Meksin, “S detskoi vystavkoi po Evrope,” Pioner 13–14 (1931): 17–19, qt. 18.

26

Roger Chartier, “Macht der Schrift, Macht über die Schrift,” in Schrift, ed. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht and Karl Ludwig Pfeiffer (Munich, 1993), 147–156, qt. 147.

1. The Craft of Writing

its deposition and archiving, are processes that happen within social and institutional frameworks. These frameworks regulate the material form of writing, create its standards, control its authorization, production, authentication, distribution, circulation, reading, and finally, its interpretation. This control over writing—be it as a graphic marker in public space, a signature of power, or a privatized form of graphic individuation—is an essential concern of grapho-politics. This also applies to literary texts, whose production is ordered and manipulated in normative poetics and writing manuals. Paradigmatic for this tendency is the volume The Way We Write (Kak my pishem), published in 1930 by the Leningrad Writers’ Publishing House. It assembles the answers of about twenty authors to a questionnaire on impulses, dynamics, situations, phases, and materials of their writing. Do they follow a plan? Does it change during the writing process? How many pages a day do they write? At what time of day? With how many correction cycles? Taking which stimulating substances? Using which sources and writing implements? The resulting anthology of poetological confessions aims at nothing less than “organization of literary work.” Its model is scientific management and labor productivity: following the example of manufacturing processes such as the assembly of parts, the unloading of boxes and the forging of metal, it dissects the phases of writing to find out the most effective and economically optimized settings for the writing scene (figs. 21–22). Similarly, the steps of literary creation are to be analyzed as manageable working skills in order to develop a “technology of literary mastery” on the basis of objective literary productivity parameters.27 What the anthology The Way We Write presents as mere poetological advice, possesses precise regulative power for the institution of literature. This becomes especially evident in a number of collective writing projects—above all, The History of Factories and Enterprises (Istoriia fabrik i zavodov) and the journal Literary Learning (Literaturnaia ucheba), which Gorky published from 1930 to 1941. In these projects, literary writing enters a systemic network of training, organization and standardization, whose aim is not only to establish an obligatory poetic program but also to build up a centralized administrative management of (literary) texts. Their

27

Kak my pishem (Leningrad, 1930 [reprint Moscow, 1989]).

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directives combine the teaching of writing techniques with institutional control.28

Fig. 21. The sequence of images shows an experiment testing the adjustment to writing in different settings.

Fig. 22. The test person must draw these figures after getting up.

28

Jurij Murašov, “Schrift und Macht in den 1920er und 1930er Jahren der sowjetischen Kultur,” in Schrift und Macht. Zur sowjetischen Literatur der 1920er und 30er Jahre, ed. Tomásh Lipták and Jurij Murašov (Vienna, Cologne, and Weimar, 2012), 1–44, qt. 14ff.

2. Language Games and Letter Play

All these institutions and techniques work on an operative model of writing that ascribes immense importance to the hand as well as to the handling of script, which assumes a dynamic textuality. Keller uses the term Schrifthandeln—writing(-based) action—for any social interaction that integrally involves textuality, be it writing, reading or merely holding up or handing over a document. Such actions are pragmatic if they “serve a purpose . . . or are designed to guide human actions by providing knowledge.”29 This textual action is by no means arbitrary but certainly variable. This is to say, it involves, establishes, and maintains routines—but under certain circumstances, these routines can be altered. Thus, from a praxeological point of view, an imperative for action—possibly also the power or a compulsion to act—can be derived from writing. However, this imperative is always located within the possibility space of variations and reconfigurations of writing-based actions. Frequently, this leads to behavior that is far from the original imperative of a text or even contradicts it. Approaching the history of writing as a history of practice implies two consequences. On the one hand, this approach questions the typological differentiation of texts in terms of pragmatic vs. poetic genres: under the a priori of textual action, every text has an operational, that is, pragmatic dimension. On the other hand, texts are no longer passive objects for the actions of subjects: to use Latour’s expression, they become actors in a network, participants in a media ensemble, actants in a network of notation.

2. Language Games and Letter Play The three areas of mediology, anthropology, and praxeology are all intertwined in a functional matrix that assigns specific tasks to writing and attempts to structurally grasp and channel its media mechanisms as well as its communicative and cognitive effects. In this context, playful writing practices are of considerable importance—which is underestimated in most analyses. Usually, writing and play are seen as mutually exclusive or antagonistic. While writing is assigned to rational comprehension, a stage 29

Hagen Keller, “Die Veränderung gesellschaftlichen Handelns und die Verschriftlichung der Administration in den italienischen Stadtkommunen,” in Pragmatische Schriftlichkeit im Mittelalter. Erscheinungsformen und Entwicklungsstufen, ed. Klaus Grubmüller, Hagen Keller, and Nikolaus Staubach (Munich, 1992), 21–36.

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of cognitive development that replaces the play phase (rather than integrating it), antonyms of the word “play”—work, function, rationality, reason, norm, utilitarianism—suggest that play opposes writing as a cultural technique born of economic and administrative purposes. The key categories of play compiled by Johan Huizinga in his study on homo ludens support this polarization: free action, withdrawal from real life, lack of material interest and utility characterize the play situation asa form of action “outside the immediate satisfaction of wants and appetites.” Detached from the rules of everyday life, play creates an as-if world “within certain fixed limits of time and place,” shaped by the awareness of its aberrational status.30 It would be only a slight overstatement to say that writing is considered a technique of homo sapiens but not of homo ludens. While the former uses the written word as an instrument of conceptual abstraction and epistemic structuring, the human at play seems to have a closer connection to the spoken word; constantly modifying the given, homo ludens shuns the fixed written text. Accordingly, the player is regarded as a savage, a child, untouched by one of the most fundamental cultural techniques. But this perspective overlooks the many forms in which homo sapiens and homo ludens interact closely. As it happens, writing is a prominent field of this interaction—for several reasons. Firstly, while play is “free,” games tend to be rule-bound and strategic. They require organizing agreements and normative settings; they create orders with a structuring power and social commitments beyond the current moment. Play and games do not just “liberate” from social constraints but also enable to try them on and out. As demonstrated by Bateson, play goes beyond mere compensatory logic or trial-and-error motions, introducing central communicative patterns such as the distinction between true and false statements, the formulation of paradoxes, the differentiation between fictitious and real actions, and so on, through its specific dual character.31 Instead of a homogeneous concept of play, we must therefore assume a spectrum of variations that oscillate between free play and instrumental games.32

30

Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens. A Study of Play-Element in Culture (London, 1949 [reprint Abingdon, Oxon, 2002]), 9 and 28.

31

Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind. Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution, and Epistemology (San Francisco, 1972), esp. 177–193.

32

Roger Caillois, Les jeux et les hommes. Le masque et le vertige (Paris, 1958), esp. 25–51.

2. Language Games and Letter Play

Second, writing is not only a stable system for the permanent fixation of information, not only a tool that expands erudition, it is above all an invitation to play: a graphic inventory that enables one to experiment, to explore configurations of knowledge and representation, to change one’s views of an object or call for its modification. The varying arrangements of characters on the surface, the shifting and flexible constellations of graphemes playfully open up epistemic spaces that had been or seemed unthinkable. For Rheinberger, writing games serve to lay tracks for science in experimental situations. It is the “arrangement of . . . graphemic traces or graphemes and the possibility of their shifting in the representational space that compose the experimental writing game”33 and thus generate (scientific) reality. This ludographic component of notation has accompanied the history of writing since its beginnings. Particular aesthetic significance emanates from combinatorial typeface arrangements, in which aleatoric grapheme mutations or signifier splitting testify to a delight in configurative play with script. Combinatorial poetry, such as baroque Proteus verses, is based on these procedures—even when it claims that the letter play is subject to algorithmic calculability. This ludic component of writing is also evident in marginal graphic phenomena, for example, when scribbling shades into doodling: here, the strict systematic concept of writing gives way to transitional forms. Usually, it is demanded that writing appears as a regularly ordered sequence of legible letters. However, it can also be dysfunctional, illegible, intensive, untamed. Such subversions contain the potential of script but cannot be positioned unambiguously and unchangeably in a specific graphic sign system. The concept of the scriptural “thus undermines . . . the radical separation between the world of signs and the world of non-sign phenomena”; it explores writing as a “place of indeterminacy.”34 Playful, experimental, intoxicating or simply inattentively scrawled scribbles—enigmatic forms or graphic mistakes—can precede or supersede writing genetically; structurally, they stand next to it.

33

Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, Experiment, Differenz, Schrift. Zur Geschichte epistemischer Dinge (Marburg/L., 1992), 23 and 30.

34

Annette Gilbert, Bewegung im Stillstand. Erkundungen des Skripturalen bei Carlfriedrich Claus, Elizaveta Mnatsakanjan, Valeri Scherstjanoi und Cy Twombly (Bielefeld, 2007), 31.

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The concept of writing play (Schriftspiel) calls up associations with Wittgenstein’s concept of language games (Sprachspiel), all the clearer in German, which makes no distinction between “play” and “games.” Admittedly, Wittgenstein defined language games as “self-contained systems of communication” in The Brown Book (Braunes Buch, 1934–1935), but he broke away from this assumption in his Philosophical Investigations (Philosophische Untersuchungen, 1936–1946/1953). Here, he opened up the language game to all kinds of empirically well-founded use, be it goal-oriented and precise or experimental and unpredictable. What unites the various language games in their highly divergent complexity—from simple exclamations to whole discursive systems—are their roots in concrete usage. These make the language game recognizable as linguistic action or practice: “I shall also call the whole—language and the actions into which it is woven—‘the language game’.”35 The text of the Philosophical Investigations is full of analogies between using language and using one’s hands (see §12), based on the concept of Spiel (game/play) as an accentuation of language in use. It leads Wittgenstein back to the concept of the tool. He repeatedly uses the tool metaphor to explain word functions through the handling of levers, hammers, saws, pliers, screwdrivers, brushes, and glue pots. Each speech act appears as an activity that goes beyond naming: using a word, one negotiates the possibilities of its use and its “translation” into life, for “to imagine a language means to imagine a way of life” (§19). Such negotiations can arise, for instance, from misunderstandings that originate in language games and expand their potential for semantic ambiguity. Even the term Spiel itself has “blurred edges,” like a fuzzy image—and therein, according to Wittgenstein, lies its productivity: is not “the blurred often just what we need?” (§71). Significantly, this becomes apparent when the language game is imagined as letter play. As early as in the fourth paragraph of his Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein himself transfers the idea of the language game to writing, initially merely for a simile: Think of a piece of writing in which letters are used to designate sounds but also to indicate emphasis and as punctuation marks. . . . Imagine now that someone regarded this writing as if every letter simply corresponded

35

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophische Untersuchungen, in his Werkausgabe in 8 Bänden, vol. 1 (Frankfurt/M., 1984), §7 [241].

2. Language Games and Letter Play

to a sound, as if the letters did not also have this completely different function. Such an oversimplified understanding resembles Augustine’s language concept.36

Inscribed in this example we find the option that a sign might stand for something else than its usual meaning. We see here the fundamental semantic overdetermination of the sign, an extension of its conventionalized functional assignments. Wittgenstein calls this explanation of the game by means of examples a “language game/play,” with the word Spiel (§71), possibly alluding to the fact that the German for “example” is Beispiel— though not etymologically related to Spiel (“game/play”), it evokes a phonetic allusion. These examples “don’t draw boundaries” but “make a pointing motion with the hand” (ibid.). In the second part of his Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein develops this idea into the more complex psychological structure of aspect seeing and aspect blindness (§11). So far, these concepts had been interpreted primarily in terms of image theory; however, they also refer to seeing writing in a diagrammatic sense (fig. 23).

Fig. 23. Wittgenstein's writing play with the word "joy".

The category of aspect seeing introduce the possibility of changing shape, of experiencing images, words and other phenomena differently. Aspect seeing suggests that our perception always contains something unavailable, something that is present without coming to the fore. Thus, every seeing necessarily implies an overlooking, and every seeing is a “seeing as.” But unlike the prominent rabbit-duck head, the inversion of, say, the word Freude (joy) does not create a different image. Rather, the tilted term transforms a readable graphemic sequence into a (crypto)graphic figure. This

36

Ibid., §4 [239].

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change of aspect does not require a transition between two equivalent elements—such as that from one animal profile to another. Rather, it implies a categorial gestalt change, a transition between seeing and reading. Mirrored, the letters Freude reflect the capacity of hybridizing a line and thus offering a new perspective and interpretation. But they also do more than that: this reperspectivation, this recursive reading of written forms, illustrates the room for maneuver, the space in which writing can play. And we can see this space of play (Spielraum): our perception keeps switching between two modes, playfully changing positions, reading and counterreading. This counterscript or ambigram writing shows that a fundamental reversal of a given (sign) order is possible. The different ways of reading this perverted configuration of Freude reveal the principal reversibility of that what writing refers to, as well as the hybridity of writing as a graphic arrangement to be seen and read. Mirrored writing divulges an essential characteristic of writing play: its potential for inversion, for the versatile manipulation of sign orders. Sybille Krämer has pointed out that play is first and foremost a motion based on genuine reversibility. According to her, the ontological ambivalence of play as a world between reality and “as-if ” is also rooted in this shifting: the “phenomenal characterization of play as a non-targeted . . . motion between poles finds its structural counterpart in the significant ambiguity of play, which is both real and not real, thus forming an area of reality sui generis.”37 Wittgenstein’s mirror writing demonstrates this ambivalence as a phenomenon of script. Proceeding from this ambivalence that unites play/games and writing, in the 1920s, cognitive psychology combined experiments in both areas attempting to grasp the nature of play in terms of writing and vice versa. Lev Vygotsky argues that the main aim of play is to establish a “specific relationship to reality” by creating an “imaginary situation” (mnimaia situatsia)38 in which the properties of objects are mutually transferable: “In child’s play,

37

Sybille Krämer, “Die Welt—ein Spiel? Über die Spielbewegung als Umkehrbarkeit,” in Spielen. Zwischen Rausch und Regel, ed. Deutsches Hygiene-Museum (Dresden and Ostfildern-Ruit, 2005), 11–19.

38

Lew Wygotski, “Das Kleinkindalter,” in his Ausgewählte Schriften in zwei Bänden, vol. 2: Arbeiten zur psychischen Entwicklung der Persönlichkeit (Cologne, 1987), 199–242, qt. 212f.

2. Language Games and Letter Play

anything can be anything.”39 A key reason for this is that an object only acquires its function and significance in play through the assigning gesture. Hence, “the meaning lies in the gesture, not in the object,” which in turn entails a degree of arbitrariness in the symbolic meaning of any given object: original forms of play are but the original gesture, the original sign language. In play, we find the aspect that leads to the emancipation of the object as sign and gesture. Long use transfers the value of the gesture to objects that, during play, begin to signify the agreed-upon objects and relationships even without the appropriate gestures.40

From a certain age onwards, a child can distinguish between a field of meaning and a field of vision when playing. For instance, a chair can signify a horse; but you can still pick up this chair and carry it around. To a large degree thanks to this differentiation, play serves as a practical activity that introduces a child to semiotic difference. Playing is mainly a matter of learning to distinguish between sign and thing while using things as signs. In play, the structure of a thing can be changed under the influence of a new sign.41 Play means the ability to “transform” an object, to change its name: hence, playing with things is playing with signs.42 Vygotsky reports that play can involve a kind of “object writing” (predmetnoe pisʹmo). This is proven by an experiment in which “individual items familiar to children began—conditionally [uslovno], in jest—to designate subjects and persons participating in play. For example, when a book is put aside it means ‘house,’ keys mean ‘children,’ a pencil means ‘nanny,’ a watch means ‘pharmacy,’ a knife means ‘doctor,’ an inkpot lid means ‘cabman,’ etc.”43 The term “writing” appears here as a metaphor, a language game of sorts. This metaphor leads to a central point: play involving “object writing” is only possible if there is both concrete reference to an object with its material properties—and abstraction capability. Any action involving an object 39

Lev Vygotskii, “Istoriia razvitiia vysshikh psikhicheskikh funktsii,” in his Sobranie sochinenii v 6-i tomakh, vol. 3 (Moscow, 1983), 5–328, qt. 182.

40

Ibid.

41

Ibid., 184.

42

Lev Vygotskii and Aleksandr Luriia, “Orudie i znak v razvitii rebenka,” in Lev Vygotskii, Sobranie sochinenii v 6-i tomakh, vol. 6 (Moscow, 1984), 5–90, qt. 69.

43

Vygotskii, “Istoriia razvitiia vysshikh psikhicheskikh funktsii,” 183.

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in play is a symbolic action as it produces an imaginary situation, an as-if, in which thing and sign enter into a volatile relationship. Here, terms are suspended, modified, and recreated; books can be houses and pencils can be nannies. Thus, the concept of “object writing” suggests how play sensitizes to aleatoric references and at the same time reveals the twinned nature of writing: it enables play that brings forth a cosmos of meaning, with the world of things open to infinite transformation. In play as “object writing,” thing and sign are continuously separated and recombined by gestures of naming and manipulation.

3. Play and Infantility in Artists’ Books Avant-garde literature and book art elaborate this aspect in very different forms. In the context of writing and playing, it is first of all the rich tradition of (cubo)futurist artist books with their playful reactivation of manuscript culture that comes to mind. The cacographical arabesques of their intentionally clumsy and disarranged letters enter into a complex interrelation with the illustrations. Not least because of their seemingly “illiterate” qualities, futurist artists’ books have often been received as children’s fare. Alexei Kruchenykh’s Little Duck Nest (Utinoe gnezdyshko, 1913, fig. 24) or Piglets (Porosiata, 1913; illustrated by Kazimir Malevich) are but two examples. The conceptual proximity of artists’ books and children’s books, sometimes underscored by the collaboration of artists with children, is part of a broad turn to infantile forms that characterizes the early avant-garde and finds its preferred field of application in play. Deliberate interest in playful forms of childlike aesthetic design also belongs to the intensive examination of so-called primitivist tendencies, since to the avant-garde, play promised a connection to an undisguised original language of art unspoiled by the deformations of civilization. It leads back to what Aleksandar Flaker called the “zero point of culture.”44 At this zero point, the regressive and un-forming qualities of play emerge in their striking formative and creative power. Art and literature stage this interplay of regression and expression in different ways but always as an antinormative gesture. It is the child and the 44

Aleksandar Flaker (ed.), Poetika osporavania (Zagreb, 1982), 45. For an overview of infantility in Russian avant-garde, see Zhiva Benchić, “Infantilismus,” in Glossarium der russischen Avantgarde, ed. Aleksandar Flaker (Vienna, 1989), 243–257.

3. Play and Infantility in Artists’ Books

Fig. 24. Aleksei Kruchenykh, The little duck’s nest . . . of bad words . . . (Utinoe gnezdyshko . . . durnykh slov . . . , 1913; designed by Olga Rozanova).

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primitive (dikarʹ), “who suddenly mixes up the hard ‘norms’ of the meter and the word,” as Tynyanov put it in a 1928 essay on Khlebnikov.45 And it is the child who is regarded by early futurism as the carrier of transmental language (zaumʹ), since in early language acquisition, detached from the referential function of representation, words are often joined in alogical syntagmas, frequently formed by pure assonance, intonational or rhythmic patterns. Kruchenykh in his zaumʹ study describes the language of the child with its pronounced phonetic sensitivity as prototypically transmental.46 Shklovsky also follows this associative chain in his study On Poetry and Zaumʹ Language (O poezii i zaumnom iazyke, 1916). In his 1912 essay “On the Question of Form” (“Über die Formfrage”), Vasily Kandinsky applies this idea to the fine arts: he uses children’s drawings as an example of an autonomous form, regarding infantile world perception as a genuinely artistic defamiliarized view. Significantly, Kandinsky proceeds to discuss writing: If the reader looks at any letter in these lines with unaccustomed eyes, that is to say, not as a familiar sign of a word part but only as a thing, he will see this letter not only as a practical and purposeful abstract human-made form, which constantly designates a particular sound— but also as a physical form, which makes a certain external and internal impression all by itself, that is to say, independently of the abstract form just mentioned. . . . Let us take another example: in the same book, we see a dash. This dash, when used in the right place—as I do here—is a line with a practical meaning. Let us extend this small line and yet leave it in the right place: the sense of the line remains, as does its meaning. However, this meaning receives indefinable additional coloration through the unusual extension. The reader wonders why this line is so long, and if this length has a practical purpose. Let’s put the same line in the wrong place (like I do it here). The practical and purposeful aspect is now lost and can no longer be found, and the usage becomes even more questionable.47

45

Iurii Tynianov, “O Khlebnikove,” in his Problema stikhotvornogo iazyka (Moscow, 1965), 283–299, qt. 289.

46

Aleksei Kruchenykh, Zaumnyi iazyk u Seifullinoi, Vs. Ivanova, L. Leonova, I. Babelia, I. Selʹvinskogo, A. Veselogo i dr. (Moscow, 1925), esp. 35ff.

47

Wassily Kandinsky, “Über die Formfrage,” in Essays über Kunst und Künstler, ed. Max Bill (Bern, 1955), 17–47, qt. 31ff.

4. Letter Play

In a progressive logic of ostranenie, displacement and dislocation, which turns signs into things, letters into bodies, and strokes into lines, the reader moves from a child’s to an artist’s gaze. Here, according to Kandinsky, the “line is freed from the goal of designating a thing and functions as a thing itself.”48 Here, texts are not only to be read in new ways; they are above all to be seen as graphemes. The triad “play—infantility—anti-utilitarianism” may aptly characterize many artistic (writing) practices of the prerevolutionary avant-garde. But how about the post-revolutionary counterpart? With its growing orientation toward utilitarianism, it paints a much more ambivalent picture. When artistic creation is managed and measured like industrial labor, when it is meant to become “production art,” when aesthetic objects must prove useful, the question of play can only arise in a greatly modified way, if at all. This change materializes in the altered relationship between writing and play, as well as in the design of books as objects.

4. Letter Play 4.1. Reversing Verses and Building Blocks (Petr Miturich and Velimir Khlebnikov) Several aspects of the early avant-garde chip away at the sacrosanct status of the book. First, there is a fundamental graphoclastic claim powerfully expressed in manifesto polemics: “Write nothing! Read nothing! Say nothing! Print nothing!”49 Moreover, book design is accordingly characterized by this negation, by an aesthetic of disposability. Rather than addressing an appropriately disciplined reading eye, the material and graphic aspects of books trigger a sensory reorientation, which involves a complex process of redefining textual and graphic formats as well as poetological concepts. Early avant-garde book art is characterized by an intense physical presence of the book, the corpus of the textual opus, especially in provocatively “unprofessional” written objects. Their technically imperfect design, evoca-

48

Ibid., 34.

49

“Dekret o nichevokakh poezii” [1920], in Literaturnye manifesty ot simvolizma do nashikh dnei, ed. S. B. Dzhimbinov (Moscow, 2000), 326–328, qt. 328.

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tive of the early phase of book history, reminds us: the book is an object held in the hand, grasped by the spine and haptically experienced in the turning of the pages. The ostentatious handmade quality and the plastic manuality of the material book body make the reader newly aware of the relationship between writing, body, and space—thus creating the basis for the sculptural objects of avant-garde book art. Comparable to painting that strives toward three-dimensionality, writing detaches itself from the surface to be perceived as spatial form. Image and writing meet in this dimensional transgression to enter into new configurations as spatial arts. This is the starting point for the work of Petr Miturich. He develops a multi-media art form based on painting, drawing and writing, which he calls “spatial graphics” or “spatial image architecture.”50 Like Lev Bruni, Karl Johansson, Vladimir Tatlin, El Lissitzky and Alexander Rodchenko, he works on dissolving the boundaries of two-dimensional art, projecting it into three-dimensional space. In contrast to these others, however, he concentrates on writing. Having intensively studied Khlebnikov’s work, Miturich abandons gravity-bound spatial sculpture in favor of free spatial graphics and creates sculptural forms with inserted pages of poetry, relief booklets of Khlebnikov’s verses, and inscriptions on wooden boards (figs. 25–27). In addition to these transgressive forms, which mediate not only between surface and space but also between image and writing, he also illustrates Khlebnikov’s poems for an intended book publication. Particularly striking is his verbal-visual mirror construction (figs. 28a–b) designed in 1921 for the palindrome poem “Razin” (1920). Each sheet reverses the 150 verses of “Razin” into ornamental-abstract lines in which graphic traces are preserved, continued calligraphically, or deleted cacographically. Miturich translates “Razin” into a written picture puzzle, a text-and-image palindrome with mirror writing around the central axis. The semantic double structure, expressed in the tilting figure of the palindrome as a sequentially thwarted order of signs, is here transformed into a medial double structure. Some readings of the “Razin” poem argue that its palindrome structure realizes the metaphors of historical reversion and revolution. After 50

On the concept of the spatial architectonics of the image, cf. Petr Miturich, “Bez nazvaniia,” in his Zapiski surovogo realista epokhi avangarda. Dnevniki, pisʹma, vospominaniia, statʹi, ed. M. Miturich, V. Rakitin, A. Sarabʹianov (Moscow, 1997), 117–121, qt. 119f.

4. Letter Play

Fig. 25. Petr Miturich, Spatial Graphics (1918–1920). A sculptural arrangement with Velimir Khlebnikov’s poem “Thickets” (“Trushchoby,” 1910).

Fig. 26. Petr Miturich, Spatial Graphics. Relief for Velimir Khlebnikov’s poem “Murmuring, whistling / the birds stopped flying up” (“S zhurchaniem, svistom / ptitsy vzletat' perestali,” 1908/1913).

Fig. 27. Petr Miturich, Spatial Graphics. Relief of an extract from Velimir Khlebnikov’s poem “The War in the Mousetrap” (“Voina v myshelovke,” 1916).

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Fig. 28a. Petr Miturich, illustration for Velimir Khlebnikov’s palindrome poem “Razin” (ink on paper, 1922–1923).

Fig. 28b. Petr Miturich, illustration for Velimir Khlebnikov’s palindrome poem “Razin.”

4. Letter Play

all, its form represents “the very idea of transformation and metamorphosis” through the inversion of the linear sequence of signs. In retrospect, Khlebnikov traces these reconfigurative procedures back to the early poem “Turnabout” (“Perevertenʹ,” 1912), in which retrograde sequential order (revolutio) is used in an attempt to return to the origin of all language beyond etymology: I wrote “Turnabout” in pure ignorance. Only after experiencing its lines—”Chin zvan mechem navznich”51 [lit. “rank is called by the sword face-up”]—and feeling how they became emptiness later—”Pal, a norov khud i dukh vorona lap [“fallen but character thin, the spirit of raven paws”]—did I understand them as mirrored rays of the future. . . . To find the philosopher’s stone of mutual transformation of all Slavic words without breaking the circles of roots, to melt Slavic words freely— this is the first thing I have to say about the word. This self-sufficient word stands outside of everyday life and usefulness. Seeing that the roots are just ghosts behind the strings of the alphabet, to find the unity of all world languages built from the units of the alphabet—this is the second thing I have to say about the word. The way to worldwide zaumʹ language.52

The search for “the philosopher’s stone of mutual transformation of all Slavic words,” the reversal of order, as it occurs in palindromes, anagrams or other figures of permutation, rearrangement, twist, rotation and division, is the central method of zaumʹ, transrational language that defies definite meaning. As Miturich’s spatial writing graphics show, however, zaumʹ is by no means exclusively a phonetic phenomenon, based on onomatopoietic or (pseudo-)etymological procedures, as usually proclaimed by the theorists of cubo-futurism. Rather, zaumʹ is also a graphic phenomenon, a form of transrational notation. The term “transrational writing” never appears in the programmatic publications of the Russian avant-garde, but it aptly characterizes both Khlebnikov’s poetry and Miturich’s “Razin.” It transposes the zaumʹ gesture of counter- and reordering in language games (Sprachspiel) into a sort of letter play (Schreibspiel). His palindromic letter images, their

51

“Ch” is one letter, ч, in Russian; both palindromes work.

52

Velimir Khlebnikov, “Svoiasi” [1919], in his Sobranie sochinenii v 3-kh tomakh, vol. 3 (St. Petersburg, 2001), 254–257, qt. 255f.

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markings and motions explore writing as “play [with] an alphabet that we have discovered, a new art at whose threshold we find ourselves.”53 For an even more far-reaching concept of letter play, Miturich drafts an alphabet of his own. Simultaneously with the exhibition “In memoriam V. Khlebnikov,” in 1923, he shows his Alphabet Cubes (Azbuka-kubiki, also known as Graphic Dictionary [Graficheskii slovarʹ], Alphabet-Cubes-Spaces [Azbuka-kubiki-prostranstva], and Star Alphabet [Zvezdnaia azbuka]) at the Petersburg Museum of Artistic Culture (fig. 29). Miturich later declared he had manufactured the building blocks of this alphabet around 1919 during his service in the Red Army. The surviving elements are cubes of vari-

Fig. 29. Petr Miturich, Cube Alphabet (Azbuka-Kubiki), also called Graphic Dictionary (Graficheskii Slovar') or Star Alphabet (Zvezdnaia Azbuka), cardboard and ink, ca. 1919.

ous sizes made of thin cardboard, whose sides are covered with geometric patterns, figurative drawings, and characters. Some display faces and abstract ornaments, others show letter sequences, punctuation marks, and numbers. Occasionally, a pictorial element continues over several surfaces; sometimes, a form is replicated on each side of a cube in a slightly altered

53

Ibid.

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arrangement. Most of the drawings are in black ink; some cubes are colored in red and blue. Some ornamental palindrome figures from the Razin poem reappear in the Alphabet Cubes, yet the palindromic concept itself is treated entirely differently. Instead of the permutations of zaumʹ and the Razin illustration puzzles, the cubes are sculptural volumes based on a multidimensional ars combinatoria. Here, palindromic inversion gives way to anagrammatic disorder. Instead of rigidly reversing words, the cubes offer random spatial graphic arrangements. Now largely forgotten, the Alphabet Cubes aroused great interest among contemporaries. Lapshin sees them as the primal elements of a growing, organic, natural art: “With this work, Miturich is trying to find the main elements of natural forms, the ‘seeds’ from which all forms grow. Miturich’s work on space is perfectly analogous to Velimir Khlebnikov’s work on time. This becomes apparent in the elements and forms of time— the sounds of language—which resulted in the ‘Star Language Alphabet’.”54 Punin, for his part, calls the cubes a key object for “the consolidation of a new ‘graphic’ consciousness in artistic culture.”55 This graphic consciousness refers to a new understanding of writing as an aesthetic object, to the dawn of an alternative writing culture that rediscovers letters as a visual art form apart from their phonographic function. The Alphabet Cubes with their substitution of identifiable, orderly letters by abstract and concrete pictorial elements support a claim that Lissitzky made in 1923: one should not listen to the letters of a printed sheet but look at them.56 However, they also aim at something else: in his multipart alphabetical sculpture, Miturich, whom Lapshin calls a successor of Khlebnikov’s work in optical art,57 develops “transrational writing” as an aleatoric art of spatial lettering that affects the eye, but above all the hand. 54

Nikolai Lapshin, “Vystavka ‘In memoriam V. Khlebnikov’,” Zhiznʹ iskusstva 27 (1923): 13.

55

Nikolai Punin, “Vystavka ‘In memoriam V. Khlebnikov’,” Zhiznʹ iskusstva 26 (1923): 14–16, qt. 14.

56

El Lissitzky, “Topographie der Typographie” [1923], in El Lissitzky. Maler Architekt Fotograf. Erinnerungen Briefe Schriften, coll. Sophie Lissitzky-Küppers (Dresden, 1967), 356. Cf. also Elʹ Lisitskii, “Kniga s tochki zreniia zritelʹnogo vospriiatiia— vizualʹnaia kniga,” Iskusstvo knigi 3 (1962): 164–168.

57

Nikolai Lapshin, “Khlebnikov—Miturich,” Russkoe iskusstvo 2–3 (1923): 99–101, qt. 100. See also idem, “Vystavka ‘In memoriam V. Khlebnikova’.”

93

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This becomes apparent, for one, in the specific tactile dimension of the objects. By designing letters as cubes that can be combined into threedimensional writing structures, the Alphabet addresses a different paradigm of textual perception. As a notational system, it realizes the architectural metaphor of letter blocks and text spaces. At the same time, it redefines the concept of sculpture in terms of combinatorics and mobility. Like Tatlin, Rodchenko, and Naum Gabo, Miturich was one of the first visual artists to use mainly flat materials and individual parts for abstract sculptures. This technique allowed for arbitrary assembly and disassembly, and thus genuinely flexible sculptures, objects with unpremeditated motion options. This combinatorial kinetics of contingency leads to a further characteristic of the Alphabet Cubes that concerns the relationship between writing and play. Despite their shape, the graphemes of this system hardly evoke architecture or any other kind of construction. They are not building blocks; rather, they evoke dice, the throw of chance. The cubic form of the alphabet is also reminiscent of Stéphane Mallarmé’s Un coup de dés (1897/1914), whose typographical design—an exploded linearity—became a trailblazer for the avant-garde (and beyond). The seemingly unintended scattering of letters on the surface of the sheet now establishes a pivotal aesthetic model of the poetic process and the graphic form it takes. Mallarmé’s poem compares verses to the accidental throw of dice, thus offering the surface of the page and the format of the book for dissociative word configurations. Conversely, the Alphabet Cubes are thrown out of the book, beyond its regulated, linear page sequence, and into the world. The unpredictable fall of graphemes, an unforeseeable anagrammatic event in an aleatoric dice game, transports letters into the open space. 4.2 Letters as Things (Sergei Tretyakov) Petr Miturich’s graphic sculptures indicate how the status, function, and form of the book changed in the avant-garde. Through their elementary ludism and their medial multidimensionality, these artworks redefine the role of writing and books as spatial arts. In the early twenties, stimulated by constructivist aesthetics, another transformation began: the book became an instrument of work, a tool designed for the operative claims of writing. The extent to which constructivist typography fostered the utilitarianizing of writing, especially in book and poster art, has been studied exten-

4. Letter Play

sively.58 However, a largely ignored aspect is the decisive role of children’s books and letter play in this endeavor.59 Lissitzky, for example, concludes his manifesto for a new book form as a way to functionally appropriate the world with the following vision: “our children [will learn] a new plastic language in the very act of reading; they will grow up with a different relationship to the world and space, to form and color. They will certainly create another [kind of] book.”60 Lissitzky designed a first harbinger of this change as early as 1920: his book object Suprematist Tale of 2 Squares in Constructions (Suprematicheskii skaz pro 2 kvadrata v postroikakh), conceived in Vitebsk and printed in Berlin in 1922, heralded a new stage of development in typeface design as well as in the integration of play into writing. In his Tale of 2 Squares, Lissitzky unfolds the metaphor of the book as a manufactured object, recurrent in the aesthetics and poetics of the avant-garde, into a tectonic principle of a book art that combines the demiurgical and the graphic principle. The tale of two squares that come from space, colonize Earth, and build a new world programmatically anticipates the performative imperative implied by a constructive understanding of writing: here, letters are replaced with images, and books with building blocks: “Don’t read, take paper, columns, wooden blocks, fold, paint, build,” says the first page (fig. 30). In his essay “Typographic Facts” (1925), Lissitzky explicates the principle of the book as a multimedia event situated between text, theater and film, which combines active and passive registers of reception: “In the fairy tale of the two squares, I set myself the task of designing an elementary idea with elementary means to create a stimulus to active play for children and 58

Leah Dickerman, “The Propagandizing of Things,” in Aleksandr Rodchenko, ed. Magdalena Dabrowski, Leah Dickerman, and Peter Galassi (New York, 1998), 62–99; John E. Bowlt and Béatrice Hernand (eds.), Aus vollem Halse. Russische Buchillustrationen und Typographie 1900–1930 (Munich and New York, 1993); Christina Kiaer, Imagine no Possessions. The Socialist Object of Russian Constructivism (Cambridge, Mass., 2005).

59

See Evgenii Shteiner, Avangard i postroenie novogo cheloveka. Iskusstvo sovetskoi detskoi knigi 1920 godov (Moscow, 2002); Vladimir Semenichin and Liubovʹ Ershova (eds.), Detskaia illiustrirovannaia kniga v istorii Rossii 1881–1939 (St. Petersburg, 1983 [reprint Moscow, 2009]).

60

El Lissitzky, “Unser Buch” [1926/1927], in El Lissitzky. Maler, Architekt, Typograf, Fotograf. Erinnerungen, Briefe, Schriften, coll. Sophie Lissitzky-Küppers (Dresden, 1967), 357–360, qt. 360.

95

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II. Writing. Letters at Play

Fig. 30.

a spectacle for adults. The action is cinematic. The words move within the force fields of the protagonists: the squares. The general and plastic aspects should be typographically designed.”61 Folding, painting and building as alternatives to reading categorically reformat the book as a medium but

61

El Lissitzky, “Typographische Tatsachen,” in Gutenberg-Festschrift, ed. Alois Ruppel (Mainz, 1925), 152–154, qt. 152.

4. Letter Play

they do not yet bid farewell to it—this, finally, happens in Lissitzky’s “electrolibrary,” which transcends space, time and matter.62 The idea of competition between book and building site, which Lissitzky uses to initiate into the plastic design of the book, shifts to purposeful, rational operation in constructivist production books for children. An influential initiator of this shift is Sergei Tretyakov, who wants to see every text transformed into a workbook (trudovaia knizhka) that would draw writers and readers alike from the cosmos of letters and literature into that of life and construction. As he succinctly puts it in “The Biography of My Verse” (1928), “Less lyricism—more utilitarianism.” It is precisely here that we find a sharp invective against illusion-bound children’s play: My first games—playing at home, making food from sand and from inedible berries on plates of maple leaves (a household beginning). Playing robbers. Killing with a sliver of wood, then tucking it back under the belt; after the robbery, a funeral rite is performed (the beginning of melodrama). In winter, I’d walk around the room with a basket and collect “imaginary mushrooms” under the chairs. This is how you look for them: pinch your fingers together and stretch them toward the chair leg, then bring them up to your lips, make a kissy mouth (though I hated making a kissy mouth), slurp, and swallow. One day, I grew tired of the game. I saw that mushrooms couldn’t grow on the floor, there were none and there never would be—the illusion burst, and I threw away the basket in disgust, nihilizing [sic] my playfellows: my sisters. Hurt, they moved to the next room and continued looking for mushrooms and berries there. (Beginning of the battle against the hypnotic, drug-like influence of illusory art. This is where LEF starts. This is where my agit-interests start.)63

Tretyakov often voiced his critical attitude toward play as a corrupting pastime, mere diversion, and aimless dissipation of productive energy. For instance, in an article on “The Aesthetic Decay of the Club” (1928) for the magazine Revolution and Culture, he lists everything that “distracts from work, from aspirations, from tension and leads to play, to illusion, to distraction,” as “passive” functions, which do not contribute anything to the

62

Lissitzky, “Topographie der Typographie,” 356.

63

Sergei Tretʹiakov, “Biografiia moego stikha,” in Aleksei Kruchenykh, 15 let russkogo futurizma (Moscow, 1928), 45–56, qt. 46.

97

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increase of “production qualifications.”64 To him, play is a degenerative disease that is opposed to the healthy vital energies of work and that corrodes art, production, and art as production. This critique of play fits the zeitgeist. In the twenties, media and institutions joined forces to develop the iconography of homo faber as a model for the playing child. From the founding of the Young Pioneers organization in 1922 to puppet theater propaganda plays and Makarenko’s work pedagogy, they have been working to raise a child who knows only rule- and result-oriented games (a zone of operative practices), and no free play. “Passionately interested in the world of work as opposed to the world of fantasy,”65 this child’s pastime does not involve the freedom of parallel worlds but competes with real production. This tendency is fostered by the developmental psychology of the cultural-historical school around Leontiev, which offers a materialistic-historical approach to theory of play. Here, play and work are placed in a dialectical relationship, even at a genetic level: work is regarded as the historical origin of play, not the other way around. Conversely, in ontogenetic development, play prepares for productive work.66 Thus, play and work are each other’s sources and prerequisites. An essential aspect of this concept is its focus on mastering reality: content of a play action must always be a real action that appropriates and reproduces social conditions. This pedagogical reality dogma corresponds to a fundamental taboo on artistic play, a disgust in regard to all illusions as articulated in Tretyakov’s “Biography of my verse.” Similarly, in an article about the role of fantasy in children’s theater, Nikolai Chuzhak demands complete “emancipation from magic.” In this, he follows a directive issued by the People’s Commissariat of Education in 1927: children’s literature should give up every form of fantasy, every trace of the fairy tale in favor of radical realism (while maintaining the technical procedures and structural patterns of the fairy

64

Idem, “Esteticheskoe zagnivanie kluba,” Revolutsiia i kulʹtura 11 (1928): 36–39, qt. 36.

65

Catriona Kelly, Children’s World. Growing up in Russia 1890–1991 (New Haven, 2007), 81.

66

L. A. Liashkevich and K. N. Sokolov (eds.), Igra i trud. Kniga dlia chteniia i raboty na 4-m godu obucheniia v gorodskoi shkole (Moscow and Leningrad, 1928).

4. Letter Play

tale, such as simplicity, schematic characters, rhythmical narration, and so forth). This, proclaims Chuzhak, is the “path to the real book.”67 Tretyakov takes this path without reservation in his fight against the pathological, hypno-narcotic effect of illusion-bound play. And yet this path leads him to book projects that subtly and playfully undermine the universally proclaimed production aesthetic. They shift the strict concept of literature as a workbook to hybrid book art that interlocks playful and operative handling of writing, oscillating between utilitarian fabrication and ludic exploration of interactive forms. A paradigmatic example of this approach is the children’s book Self(-made-)animals (Samozveri), on which Tretyakov cooperated with Varvara Stepanova and Alexander Rodchenko as co-editor of The New LEF (Novyi LEF). Even if the joint publication was never realized in Russian at the time, the Samozveri verses were published in two issues of Pioner in 1926, illustrated by Boris Pokrovsky (figs. 31a–b). Pokrovsky’s drawings accompany verses in which children dress up as animals. Horses, elephants, kangaroos, turtles, giraffes, crabs, and seals all meet for masked role play. Each poem sets the scene for a play situation in which the reading child receives instructions or suggestions for play, in rhyming form in the original: The seal is sleeping on an ice floe. The seal is too lazy to move. [. . .] But the seal is not too lazy to eat fish; Now, he grasps it with his teeth. He looks at the sky, at the bay, And eats the fish without salt. It is easy to become a seal: Just roll yourself into a blanket, Boldly swim along the floor, Catching fishes with your paw.68

67

Nikolai Chuzhak, “Fantastika na detskoi stsene. Ot knizhki k teatru,” Novyi zritelʹ 51 (1927): 2.

68

Sergei Tretʹiakov, “Samozveri,” Pioner 22 (1926): 6–7, and Pioner 23 (1926): 6–8, qt. 22: 7.

99

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Fig. 31a. Sergei Tretyakov’s “Self-Made Animals.”

4. Letter Play

Fig. 31b. Sergei Tretyakov’s “Self-Made Animals.”

101

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The ambiguous samozveri (sam—self; zveri—animals) alludes to other avant-garde neologisms such as samopisʹmo (self-writing) of cubo-futurist artist books, and also refers to the tradition of samodelki, self-made (play) things. Manuals for preschool education at the time develop a sophisticated system of such samodelki.69 Moreover, the samodelka is a key element in a special genre of the instructive children’s book, in which reading is an explicit guide to action, moving directly from the realm of play to that of work. With due straightforwardness, the introduction to the book Our Workshop. Self-made Toys (Nash tsekh. Igrushki-samodelki, 1935) announces: We, the authors and editors of this book, want to create a new workshop together with you, our young reader. This workshop for making new toys is itself not a toy but a real workshop for serious, instructive, and at the same time entertaining construction. In our workshop, you will be workers, and this book will instruct you via distant education.70

This declaration of intent leaves no doubt as to the productivity of play. Tretyakov’s Samozveri, however, goes beyond the handicraft books program, aiming at a playful productivity in writing. This is stated in a note by the Pioner editorial office, which concludes the first part of the Samozveri series: Dear children! We’ve published Samozveri not only for reading but also for you, Little Octobrists and Young Pioneers, to use them as material for your games. You can make up countless samozveri. They are easy to make, as you can see from the drawings. So, there you go: now you can play samozveri. Do write and tell us how you play and what new animals you’ve come up with.71

This instruction manual defines three steps of text reception: from the receptive act of reading, one should move on to the performative act of playing, and then to the productive act of writing. In this processual

69

I. D. Korshunov, Igrushki-samodelki (Moscow, 1935); E. A. Flerina, Kakaia igrushka nuzhna doshkolʹniku (Moscow, 1933). An overview of Russian children’s craft books of the 1920s and 1930s can be found in Mikhail Karasik’s Samozveri. Knizhki-samodelki 1929–1935 (St. Petersburg, 2012).

70

Nash tsekh. Igrushki-samodelki, book 1 (Moscow, 1935), 5.

71

Pioner 20–21 (1926): 10–11.

4. Letter Play

sequence of reading, playing, and writing, Samozveri present an elementary ABC of ludic-performative text reception: texts are play material; their reading releases play action, which in turn leads to writing action. Writing becomes play becomes writing. Along this transformative sequence, Samozveri stand at the threshold between two prototypes who handle signs and things differently: the productive homo faber and the lustful homo ludens. In the history of ideas, they embody antagonistic ideas, representing to a certain extent the cultural schism between ars and techné. While homo faber is an alter deus, an other God, who identifies via creating, homo ludens represents Schiller’s ideal: the human being is only fully human at play. This historical antagonism defines technology and play as mutually exclusive principles of creative power and capacity for action within the world of objects. Homo faber was hardly ever embodied in art history as clearly as in the figure of the constructivist. Naum Gabo named the characteristic attributes of the constructivist in 1920, in The Realistic Manifesto: “Holding a plumbing bob, eyes as precise as a ruler, spirit as sharp as a pair of compasses, we build [art] like the world builds its creations, like an engineer builds bridges, like a mathematician constructs formulas of orbits.”72 El Lissitzky’s self-portrait The Constructor (1924) has become emblematic of this artistic concept. Tretyakov also shapes his writing according to this image. And yet: writing play changes the view of his operative prose and scenarios. Amidst his radical constructivist oeuvre, Samozveri form a heterotopia. Unlike, say, a montage-based game in which Tretyakov asked children to describe what they find in their pockets,73 Samozveri create an almost illusionistic play situation as a writing impulse, whose aim is to imagine oneself as an (animal) figure in a certain scenery, using the text as a model. This evokes a model of play that Roger Caillois called mimicry—in differentiation to agôn, ilinx, and alea.74 Mimicry is defined as role play, masking, feigned existence. In contrast to the result-oriented competition of agôn, the self-forgetting intoxication of ilinx, and the gambling-like randomness of alea, mimicry play

72

Naum Gabo, “Das Realistische Manifest” [1920], in Naum Gabo. Sechzig Jahre Konstruktivismus, ed. Steven A. Nash and Jörn Merkert (Munich and New York, 1986), 203–204.

73

Sergei Tretʹiakov, “Pro karman,” Pioner 8 (1932): 14–16.

74

Caillois, Les jeux et les hommes, 39–45.

103

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conceals the playing subject via masked transfer into the figure of another. In this, illusion and imitation are crucial. Without doubt, mimicry play is essentially a process opposed to constructivist aesthetics. Tretyakov’s criticism of early childhood role play (mushroom hunting) joins this opposition. His own writing, however, relativizes the radical renunciation of mimeticism. One could also say: the mimetic flip side of constructivist poetics is revealed in letter play. 4.3. Letters as Images (Alexander Rodchenko and Varvara Stepanova) This reconfiguration of the relationship between mimesis and construction in letter play can be better grasped with a close look at Alexander Rodchenko’s and Varvara Stepanova’s photo art based on and intended for Tretyakov’s Samozveri. In 1927, they created and photographed a large number of paper figures for the joint book, and a year after the publication of the Samozveri poems in Pioner, the first volume of Novyi LEF, edited by Tretyakov, included some of their Samozveri photographs. They are described as “photo-animation illustrations for a children’s book by Tretyakov.” However, the planned publication did not materialize in full at the time. Though they usually appear in large catalogues of Rodchenko’s art and are exhibited with some frequency, the Samozveri photographs did not receive any significant reception as singular images. Still, Rodchenko himself attached great importance to them: out of the five pictures he sent to Stuttgart in 1929 for the International Exhibition of the Deutscher Werkbund Film und Foto, four were from the Samozveri series. And even if the book project remained unfinished, these images are highly revealing in two respects: firstly, they translate Tretyakov’s letter play into images; secondly, they illustrate Rodchenko’s visual concept. His and Stepanova’s photographs situate the Samozveri project in an interliminal space between literature, photography and film, where a childishly carnivalesque animal masquerade is used to playfully transgress media boundaries. In a late essay “On Composition” (“O kompozitsii,” ca. 1941/1942), Rodchenko contemplates aesthetical questions in human action in play, life and art through the lens of children’s play. Not unlike Tretyakov, Rodchenko starts out from the imaginary situation of a child’s play—in this case, drawing a line of demarcation between humans and animals—to identify mimetic illusionism of play as a structural principle of a certain aesthetical

4. Letter Play

program: “Man differs from every animal in that from early childhood he begins to play; that is, he configures and combines toys, games, building blocks; he imitates adults and builds his own life. It is curious to follow children’s play, the way it configures life.”75 For Rodchenko, pragmatic as well as aesthetic actions are rooted in imitation (podrazhanie), which emerges in childhood play and, as an anthropological constant, continues to influence the creative process. What is envisioned here could be called infinite epigonal realism. In this context, the avant-garde program of “life construction” (zhiznestroenie) seems to be replaced by “life imitation.” Rodchenko regards the essence of play as combinatorial and compositional emulation. Play thus always involves mimicry, difference-minimizing repetition of the given. But when something new is to be created, the symbolic order of imitation must be broken. When play frees itself from the dogma of imitation, composition turns into construction. Rodchenko never mentions the notion of construction as a conceptual alternative in this late text. Still, his argumentation leads back to the debate about forms of composition that he had been conducting since 1920 as a member of the working group for objective analysis at the Institute for Artistic Culture (InChuk). Here, the concept of composition entered an increasingly tense relationship with that of construction. Finally, in several discussions in the spring of 1921, the harmonic, organic concept of composition was programmatically replaced by the technological concept of construction.76 This concept initially concentrated on energetic questions—force generation, tension, spatial dynamics—but soon, economic aspects such as practicality and functional rationalization became crucial for the constructive “artist-engineer.” In this framework, construction is meant to constitute rather than mimic reality. The line as the basic element of any construction reveals, as Rodchenko put it in 1921, a new worldview—[the aim is] to construct real things and not to depict anything, be it concrete or abstract; to build new appropriate constructive structures in life, not away from or beyond life. A construction is a system

75

Aleksandr Rodchenko, “O kompozitsii,” in his Statʹi. Vospominaniia. Avtobiograficheskie zapiski. Pisʹma (Moscow, 1982), 110–112, qt. 110.

76

On this debate, cf. Selim Khan-Magomedov, Konstruktivizm. Kontseptsiia formoobrazovaniia (Moscow, 2003), 98ff.

105

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Fig. 32a. Alexander Rodchenko and Varvara Stepanova, photographs for Sergei Tretyakov’s children’s play verses Self-Made Animals (Samozveri, 1927)

that enables one to make a thing according to a predetermined task and using the material in a goal-oriented fashion.77

The Samozveri photographs illustrate the preoccupation with the principle of construction on several levels. The image in Novyi LEF shows a selection of photographs in which paper figures are arranged into small scenes, creating the impression of a puppet theater or a circus. Other preserved photographs vary these constellations (figs. 32 a–c) while retaining the effect of scenic performance. These images, which can hardly be described as illustrations, do something completely different from Pokrovsky’s drawings. Here, “illustration” and instrumentation work together to draft objects—beyond any concept of masquerade. These illustrations are operative: they lead from reading to photographic play, which consists in building toys and then performing a scene with them. Here, the child is no longer to turn into an animal—the idea is to read verses not as stage directions for mimetic zoomorphosis but as instructions for a figurative stage production. The translation of poetry into play now involves abstraction and construction.

77

Aleksandr Rodchenko, “Liniia” [1921], in his Opyty dlia budushchego. Dnevniki, stat’i, pis’ma, zapiski (Moscow, 1996), 95–98.

4. Letter Play

Fig. 32b. The ostrich.

Fig. 32c. The seal on the ice.

In their form as well as in their staging, the Samozveri photographs are rooted in Rodchenko’s and Stepanova’s sculptural, photographic, and typographic art, yet at the same time they gesture toward the development of a new type of animated film. This becomes clear in the construction of the Samozveri figures. These follow the principles of early abstract spatial objects, which were often made of flat materials such as so-called “Albertina cardboard” or plywood. Similar to Fig. 33. Alexander Rodchenko and Miturich’s graphic sculptures, they Varvara Stepanova, a bookmark use a flexible material suitable for for the publishing house Novost' both composition and decompo(1923). sition. At the same time, the figures bring to mind advertisement materials designed by Rodchenko and Stepanova for Rezinotrest or for the Novostʹ publishing house (fig. 33). Moreover, both nonconcrete graphic figures and the idea of dynamic

107

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writing characterize Rodchenko’s and Stepanova’s work in stage design. They appear in stage costumes, for example, for Tarelkin’s Death (Smertʹ Tarelkina; fig. 34) and the club performance Through Red and White Glasses (Cherez krasnye i belye ochki; fig. 35), which Stepanova created in 1923. An especially succinct example is the Book Evening (Vecher knigi) Fig. 34. Varvara Stepanova, design organized by Stepanova togethfor a figure of Tarelkin. er with Vitaly Zhemchuzhny in 1924 as an “experiment of artistic mass book propaganda” at the Academy for Communist Education. This event was intended as an introduction to the book as a medium: How are books produced? How do you handle them? How do you read them? The evening realized its biblio-educational mission through a sequence of scenes in which actors dressed up as letters and books. The show started with book production: “printers” represented the mechanics of the press through body motions, producing texts that were carried into the audience. A short interlude then exhibited “murdered books”: a show of “book corpses,” victims of careless readers who had sinned against the sensitive body of the book. After the break, an oversized book was set up on stage. Its wooden frames, covered with cardboard, showed title pages of works by John Reed, Upton Sinclair, Edgar Burroughs, and others (figs. 36–37). Their protagonists emerged from the open pages, stepped out of the book onto the stage and acted as letters. The entire Book Evening proceeds from the conviction that “there is life in every book.”78 But the living, performing body of the book only becomes readable when it leaves the surface of the page and enters the space of the stage. Even more: to read means to perform. This close relationship between performance and writing can also be found in other media formats of the 1920s, such as the “living newspaper” (zhivaia gazeta) of the Blue

78

Varvara Stepanova, Vecher knigi (Moscow, 1924), 36.

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Fig. 35. Costume designs by Varvara Stepanova for the agitation piece Through the Red and the White Glasses (Cherez krasnye i belye ochki, 1923).

Blouses or the Moscow Theater of the Reader (Moskovskii Teatr Chtetsa) founded by Vasily Serezhnikov in 1921.79 These projects are precursors and contexts for Rodchenko’s and Stepanova’s work. Still, Samozveri is not meant to stage writing as outlined above; rather, it is aimed at motion pictures. The proto-cinematographic experimental status of these photographs is suggested by a commentary accompanying the images in the Novyi LEF: Illustrating a children’s book by S. Tretyakov, Samozveri, Rodchenko and Stepanova for the first time used spatial photo-animation as opposed to flat film animation. This is doubly interesting. 1. By illustrating a children’s book, animation provides the child with a visual aid for independent work on the production and arrangement of figures and things constructed in the process of playing. The material and techniques are simple, flexible, and accessible for children. 2. Due to the rich light effects and compositional possibilities, volumetric photo-animation provides great flexibility and can be used for any plot or scene. By advancing into cinema, this method will enrich the existing toolbox of animation. Tretyakov, Rodchenko and Stepanova have already planned a corresponding series of short films for one of the film companies.80 79

Sergei Boguslavskii, “Teatr Chtetsa,” Zhiznʹ iskusstva 43 (1924): 7.

80

“O fotomulʹtiplikatsionnykh illiustratsiiakh Rodchenko-Stepanovoi,” LEF 1 (1927): n.p.

109

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II. Writing. Letters at Play

Fig. 36. Fight between Pinkerton, Sinclair, Tarzan, and Pathfinder.

Fig. 37. “Living reviewers” (Sinclair, Reed, and a worker) judge (in a rather hands-on way, but in the framework of a legal process) harmful literary figures: Pinkerton, God Zebaoth, Madame Verbitskaya, and Tarzan. The cover of the large set design book bears the title “An Evening of the Book” and names the organizing institution, the Academy for Communist Education.

4. Letter Play

Fig. 38. Illustration to Varvara Stepanova's note on Samozveri in Sovetskoe kino 1927.

While working on Samozveri, Rodchenko edits the “Photography in Film” section of the Soviet Cinema magazine (Sovetskoe kino). Here, he also publishes one of the Samozveri photographs, along with a note in which Stepanova describes the possibilities of this technique in cinema (fig. 38). She argues that with the Samozveri photographs, animation becomes more spatial, taking a step toward “cinematization.”81

81

Varvara Stepanova in Sovetskoe kino 1 (1927): 15, writes: “The spatial photo-cartoon illustrations by A. Rodchenko and V. Stepanova for the children’s book ‘Samozveri’ by S. Tretʹiakov are of special interest for cinema. For the first time, the figures of animals and people are three-dimensional, unlike flat animated figures, and also unlike the volumetric dolls used in animation so far. This gives more room for a versatile use of light. The problem of light in plane animation will stop the stagnation of the animated cartoon, enable it to capture a wider range of subjects; animation will be ‘cinefied,’ acquiring all the properties of filming. The spatial aspect of animation will also find much use in scientific films.”

111

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II. Writing. Letters at Play

During these years, Rodchenko simultaneously worked as a film architect on several productions: Boris Barnet’s Moscow in October (Moskva v oktiabre, 1927), Lev Kuleshov’s Your Acquaintance (Vasha znakomaya / Zhurnalistka, 1927) and Sergei Komarov’s The Doll with Millions (Kukla s millionami, 1928), in which toys play a prominent role.82 Despite this close cinematographic collaboration, none of the animated films announced in Novyi LEF would see the light of day. Still, the tendency toward animation remains relevant to the significance of the Samozveri project. It not only supports the emancipation of text-accompanying images from their function as mere illustrative elements, transferring them into a dynamic-media scenery in its own right, but also demonstrates the crucial role of play for media transgression in constructivist art and literature. Since Vladislav Starevich’s experiments of the 1910s, spatial animation was part of the toolbox (next to two-dimensional and mixed forms).83 In 1926, the animator and theorist Alexander Bushkin, who made the drawings for Dziga Vertov’s animated film Soviet Toys (Sovetskie igrushki, 1924) in collaboration with A. Ivanov, declared that animation was an experiment aimed at exploring photography, especially such aspects as multiple exposure variants. This has consequences for the spatiality of representation, and also for the time structure of a film.84 Barbara Wurm considers animation the most “markedly time-manipulative” type of film, whose experimental technique ostentatiously abandons the real in favor of images as constructions. The “ambivalent media technology” of animation “no longer uses image- and motion-generating processes of early cinema within a ‘culture of the spectacle’ or ‘cinema of attraction’ but rather as constructivist image-generating processes.”85 Arguably, this is precisely what fascinated Rodchenko and Stepanova about this genre. In animation, mimetic play action, as laid out in Tretya82

Photographs of the Your Acquaintance sets are printed in Novyi LEF 2 (1927) in the issue after the Samozveri photographs.

83

A. I. Bushkin, Triuk i mulʹtiplikatsiia (Moscow, 1926), esp. 15–16 (foreword by Lev Kuleshov).

84

Ibid., 27.

85

Barbara Wurm, “Heuschrecken & Buchstabentänze, Fieberkurven & Mikrobenwelten. Animiertes Wissen im frühen sowjetischen Kulturfilm,” in Wissenspopularisierung im medialen Wandel seit 1850, ed. Doris Boden and Dorit Müller (Berlin, 2009), 213–242, qt. 229 (italics in the original).

4. Letter Play

kov’s text, can unfold as a constructive event in two ways. Firstly, abstract play figures are constructed instead of similarity-bound play subjects. If playing is building, it reflects creative action in its poietic manipulation of materials and objects. Secondly, mimetic illusionism is transcended on the media level. Constructed play is presented as the animation of objects, not as the simulation of subjects. Here, the conceptual transition from mimesis to construction is combined with media transition: from writing to photography to film. Prefiguring film animation, Samozveri photographs thus suggest an aesthetic constellation in which the dynamization of writing triggers a transgression of both mimesis and medium.

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III. Pointing. Theater between Performance and Perception

1. The Pointing Gesture The pointing finger exemplifies a basic principle of gesture: it combines physical motor skills with symbolic action. In the interplay of hand movement, space and gaze, the act of pointing sets the scene for a gesture that performs designation.1 This indexical interrelation of showing and meaning is substantiated by rich cultural-historical evidence and further elaborated by paleoanthropology and neuroscience, which suggest that pointing and signing are cognitively connected.2 Arguably, this double structure of pointing is responsible for the fascination of the deictic act for both visual studies and linguistics. From a visual studies perspective, the habitus of showing “deictically empowers” humans, making one “appear as an iconophor or homo pictor: as a being whose basic endowment indispensably includes a capacity for the pictorial.”3 From a linguistic perspective, this

1

Cf. as an example, André Leroi-Gourhan, Le geste et la parole (Paris, 1964–1965); Frank R. Wilson, Die Hand — Geniestreich der Evolution. Ihr Einfluß auf Gehirn, Sprache und Kultur (Stuttgart, 2000); David Armstrong, William Stokoe, and Sherman Wilcox, Gesture and the Nature of Language (Cambridge, 1995).

2

The German zeigen means both “to show” and “to point,” and the author explores both meanings. While I pick the most context-appropriate translation in most cases, this implied double meaning should always be kept in mind. (Translator’s note.)

3

Gottfried Boehm, “Das Zeigen der Bilder,” in Zeigen. Die Rhetorik des Sichtbaren, ed. Gottfried Boehm, Sebastian Egenhofer, and Christian Spies (Munich, 2010), 19–54, qt. 39.

1. The Pointing Gesture

capacity is concretized in language, in the pivotal role of deictics in communicative processes. Etymologically, it is illustrated by the common root of “showing/pointing” and “saying” in Greek deiknymi. The search for a deictic origin of language draws attention to an irreducible syncretism of pointing and thus to the hybrid essence of the gesture as both communicative and representational. At the intersection of the visible and the sayable, it marks the point where saying can appear as pointing, where logos and ikon are joined, where the fleeting breath of the spoken word is realized as three-dimensional motion in space. The gestural sign can thus figuratively and literally stage language, or, as Fehrmann and Jäger put it, in the gesture, “the articulation space becomes a scene for the staging of speech.”4 Epistemology and language philosophy regard this syncretism as a key issue in the distinction between concept and vision. The nexus of linguistic and pictorial thought appears in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus as an almost unbridgeable difference between saying and showing. It is taken up by Bühler as a bifurcation of denominating signs vs. showing signs, and also runs through Heidegger’s idea of saying as pointing. But pointing does not set up a theater of language, neither is it confined to presenting by means of signs. In the spectrum of gestural actions, pointing is among the forms of articulation constitutive for the genesis of both language and image. This ambivalence of showing and pointing has led to considerable uncertainty in the history of concepts, which is not to say that there were no attempts at systematization. Communication studies and psychology have mapped and measured the pointing gesture precisely with regard to different hand positions—with or without the index finger, with the open or closed hand, and so on.5 Descriptive linguistics distinguishes between phantasmatic deixis, anaphoric deixis, and ante oculos ponere deixis. Even classical rhetoric offers a differentiation between indicatio, pointing, and ostensio, showing (for instance, by imitation) without pointing. This difference was taken up in particular by deconstructive semiotic criticism, 4

Gisela Fehrmann and Ludwig Jäger, “Sprachbewegung und Raumerinnerung. Zur topographischen Medialität der Gebärdensprachen,” in Kunst der Bewegung. Kinästhetische Wahrnehmung und Probehandeln in virtuellen Welten, ed. Christina Lechtermann and Carsten Morsch (Bern and Berlin, 2004), 311–342, qt. 327.

5

For instance, Adam Kendon, Gesture. Visible Action as Utterance (Cambridge, 2004), 199–224.

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and developed into the programmatics of non-referential self-pointing.6 But in the refusal to sign, this gesture is also apt to disappear or to turn into a negative showing, a pointing that negates that at which it points and borders on the uncanny semantics of monstrare.7 This self-contradictory tendency is overlaid by another conceptual difficulty, caused by the unstable relationship of pointing to the sign in cultural history. It neither consistently supports the primarily linguistic symbolism of pointing, that is, its verbal-communicative function, nor does it unambiguously promote the pictorial aspect of spatio-corporeal visibility. This uncertainty can be seen clearest in the controversy between Wilhelm Wundt and Ludwig Klages about the origin of the pointing gesture. Arguing against the background of the imaginative expression of affects, Wundt is concerned with pantomime, whose definition he wants to limit to the use of “the pantomimic muscles in the narrower meaning of the word.” This “narrow meaning” encompasses “the motion system of the arms and hands.”8 Within this boundary, Wundt discusses pointing, whose origin he locates in grasping: Indeed, the relation of these movements to the objects of our environment, to which our imagination always refers, is immediately evident. From earliest childhood, arms and hands are the organs for grasping and manipulating objects. From this initial use as gripping organs—in which the human being is only superior to the analogous activities of similar animals close to him in degree but not in kind—[hands] go through one of those gradual changes, which are regressive at first but form important components of progressive development in their effects. They proceed to the most primitive pantomimic motion: to the pointing gesture. From a genetic perspective, it is but the grasping motion, weakened to the point of mere suggestion.9

6

Cf. Dieter Mersch, Was sich zeigt. Materialität, Präsenz, Ereignis (Munich, 2002), 60.

7

Derrida’s Heidegger reading peaks in the monstrousness of the gesture of showing: “The hand, that would be the (de)monstrosity (monstrosité), human essence as the being of showing (monstration).” Jacques Derrida, “La main de Heidegger (Geschlecht II)” [1984–1985], in his Psyché. Inventions de l’autre (Paris, 1987), 415–451, qt. 424.

8

Wilhelm Wundt, Völkerpsychologie. Eine Untersuchung der Entwicklungsgesetze von Sprache, Mythus und Sitte, vol. 1: Die Sprache. Erster Teil (Leipzig, 1904), 126.

9

Wundt, Völkerpsychologie, vol. 1, 129.

2. Pointing and Showing on Stage

To Wundt, pointing is reduced, pantomimically encapsulated grasping. What pointing implies and refers to is ultimately the gesture that preceded it in evolution. Heidegger would later emphatically postulate that “the essence of the [human] hand” and thus also of the hand sign “can never be defined or explained in terms of a mere grasping bodily organ.”10 Klages, too, criticizes this regressive derivation of the prelinguistic pointing gesture from the grasping motion. Instead, he argues for a categorial distinction between grasping and pointing: while grasping is an act that moves concretely toward an object with the intention to grip and get hold of it, pointing introduces a physical and symbolic distance. This distancing suggests that even though pointing demands a physical gesture, it nevertheless points away from the body. In the image of the outstretched arm, Klages sees an extremity transformed into a line.11 It is this transformation that predefines the entire concept of the pointing gesture.

2. Pointing and Showing on Stage The optical optimism of the avant-garde leads to a powerful paradigm of showing. What early formalist literary theory called the “new seeing” (novoe zrenie) describes a poetics that does not only attract and confuse the reader’s eye but that also extends into almost all the arts and can be considered a key concept of avant-garde aesthetics.12 In the wake of a technically and theoretically upgraded visual culture, the avant-garde seems obsessed with showing; indeed, almost with ostentatious pointing. The pointing gesture comes to the fore, dominating the iconography of posters and pictures—the index (finger) of an exposed representation claim. At the same time, established “showrooms” are involved in processes of precarization. The predestined place for this process is the theater, the stage as the model of a highly differentiated dramatic dispositive of pointingly showing. Theater is the place to experience that pointing is a performative gesture in itself, an inherently theatrical act that creates 10

Martin Heidegger, Was heißt Denken? (Tübingen, 1997), 51.

11

Ludwig Klages, Ausdrucksbewegung und Gestaltungskraft. Grundlegung der Wissenschaft vom Ausdruck (Leipzig, 1923), 93f.

12

Cf., for example, Tomáš Glanc, Videnie russkikh avangardov (Prague, 1999).

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a performative space. Much as the 1920s are marked by a full-fledged theater mania, the theater of the avant-garde undergoes a profound metamorphosis, challenged by the radical demands of a new aesthetics and also by the rapid development of cinema.13 Everything changes, from stage design and auditorium to the repertoire and acting techniques. In addition, a multitude of innovative theatrical genres are pushing to redefine the nature and function of theater, among them collective mass productions celebrating Revolution Day or other anniversaries, theatric mock-trials known as agitsud, improvisation theater (mimodrama), Living Newspaper performances (zhivaia gazeta), Theater of the Book and Theater of the Reader (Teatr knigi, Teatr chtetsa), which oscillated between declamation and drama. All these institutions fuel a conflict troubling theater since its beginnings: what is the scenic relationship between word and image, the spoken and the shown, language and body, sound and gesture?

3. Theater of Gesture The reorganization of theater increases an already existing tension between verbal and non-verbal elements on stage. Not surprisingly, the deixis in avant-garde theater refreshes the rivalry between speaking and showing. “Down with the word at the theater!” Vadim Shershenevich proclaimed in 1914. “Yes! Down with the word, this vulgar way of influencing a basket full of useless paper, that is, the auditorium. Down with the word, the theater’s connection to literature! We take the word away from the actor, [like we’d take] the pole from a tightrope walker. Let him walk without it.” Convinced that the linguistic and literary bias degrades theater to the mere executive of a repertoire, Shershenevich demands an improvisational art whose essence lies in the inarticulate, affective use of voice and motions. “Everything may be said with a motion supported by a cry, which in itself is also a motion.”14 About ten years later, Sokolov, arguably the most radical advocate of the new gestural style, demands a farewell not only from the word but also

13

On the theater mania of the 1920s, cf. Nikolai A. Gorchakov, The Theater in Soviet Russia (New York, 1957), 418.

14

Vadim Shershenevich, “Deklaratsiia o futuristicheskom teatre,” in his Zelenaia ulitsa. Stat’i i zametki ob iskusstve (Moscow, 1916), 54–61, qt. 58ff.

3. Theater of Gesture

from the voice—in favor of gestures: “Salvini said theater needed only three things: ‘voice, voice, and more voice.’ But what we need today is: ‘gesture, gesture, and only gesture’.”15 These calls for the gesture are answered by a no less emphatic complaint about pseudo-pantomimic over-gesticulation, a “gesticulatory overload” onstage.16 If gestures are “the key to acting,” as Aleksey Tolstoy assumes, the need for their systematic collection and conceptual elaboration becomes all the more urgent.17 According to Benjamin, an actor’s “most important achievement” is to make their gestures “quotable.” Despite this demand, which Benjamin develops in the “Program of a Proletarian Children’s Theater” (1929), he does not refer to the readability of the gesture, which forms a leitmotif in dramaturgical gestology. Instead, he addresses the dictatorial gesture of children’s play. Here, he discovers the physical and linguistic caesura that subverts both verbal communication and theatrical representation.18 On the other side of the barricades, there are efforts to help the blurred gesture achieve clear articulation. Among the few publications devoted exclusively to the gesture are some short studies by the actor Vladimir Lakhinov. In The Art of Facial Expressions (1909), he dedicates several subchapters to hand motions, dividing the gesture into three types: the indexical gesture, the descriptive gesture, and finally the active gesture, which sketches a motion instead of an object. This system is still conceived entirely within the paradigm of linguistic images. Every hand motion is considered a visual replacement of a word: “A hand is pressed against the head, which is slightly tilted back; the other hand stretches away from the body. This says:

15

Ippolit Sokolov, “Teilorizirovannyi zhest,” Zrelishcha 2 (1922): 10–11, qt. 10f.

16

Sergei Eizenshtein and Sergei Tretʹiakov, “Vyrazitelʹnoe dvizhenie,” in Mnemozina. Dokumenty i fakty iz istorii otechestvennogo teatra XX veka, vol. 2 (Moscow, 2000), 292–305, qt. 302.

17

Tolstoi, “O dramaturgii,” 267.

18

Cf. Hans-Thies Lehmann, “Eine unterbrochene Darstellung. Walter Benjamins Idee des Kindertheaters,” in Szenarien von Theater (und) Wissenschaft. Festschrift für Erika Fischer-Lichte, ed. Christel Weiler and Hans-Thies Lehmann (Berlin, 2003), 181–203, qt. 191.

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Fig. 39. The skeleton of the gesture.

‘What shall I do, what will happen to me, my skull is about to burst, this is maddening, everything is lost’”19 (fig. 39). The idea of gestural language recedes somewhat into the background in Lakhinov’s 1921 brochure Gesticulation. The premise here is the classical primacy of sight as the sense responsible for apprehending reality most precisely. In addition to this traditional topos, the guiding principle of motion comes into play. “The gesture is the specialization of immediate motion.”20 As such, it is to be saved from the increased slackening and exhaustion of the body. Paradoxically, Lakhinov chooses to illustrate this with the pantomimic representation of death, which is “by its nature quiet, almost immobile.”21 The smallest rearrangements, microscopic nuances of fading motion, more hints than gestures, suggest that Lakhinov’s maximalist concept—a gestural dramaturgy—is realized in a minimalist program of the faint, imperceptible gesture, the “ghost gesture.”22 It ultimately begins where the gesture agonizes and freezes, where the subject becomes unable 19

Vladimir Lachinov, Iskusstvo mimiki, vol. 1 (St. Petersburg, 1909), 44.

20

Idem, Zhestikuliatsiia (n.p., 1921), 3.

21

Ibid.

22

Elizabeth Behnke, “Ghost Gestures. Phenomenological Investigations of Bodily Micromotions and Their Intercorporeal Implications,” Human Studies 20, no. 2 (1997): 181–201.

3. Theater of Gesture

to gesticulate intentionally. Yampolsky, who has studied primarily the gesture of the sleeping body, assumes that the immobility of the corpse loses its symbolic character along with intentionality—the symbolism inherent to the body can now only be performed through gestures of third parties.23 And yet Lakhinov chooses precisely this borderline case, in which the gesture is highly condensed but close to disappearance—or to an inverted, negative showing. Lakhinov’s second example are pathological gestures. This choice, too, addresses a gestural problem that is as deviant as it is relevant for everything that happens onstage. If the gesture is a nervous tic or “goes nowhere” (zhestikulirovatʹ popustu), it reveals an inability to use the body in a targeted and significant way but can also increase its expressiveness significantly. Agamben has read tic disorders as a syndrome of modern pathology— a symptom of an age that has lost its gestures.24 For Lakhinov, this loss paradoxically serves to generate a new gestural dramaturgy. After exploring its medical history, he only needs one and a half pages for his third category— “normal gestures,” whose core is the pointing gesture. Very briefly he systematizes the dramatic gesture into five categories: (1) action motions, that is, motions necessary to perform concrete actions such as drinking, eating, walking, and so forth; (2) characteristic motions (mainly poses); (3) instinctive motions (mainly face expressions); (4) descriptive and “speaking” motions, and (5) unspecific, “complementary” motions.25 The stage—a place of showing, pointing and play—unfolds its own dynamic of gestures, which can be subjected to this and other differentiations. However, apart from more or less detailed typologies of gestures that theater studies offer, we might also try to consult a broader (and, possibly, vaguer) understanding of gesture as an underlying concept of drama. Seldom has theater been so explicitly defined by the gesture of showing as in Brecht’s foundation of dramaturgy on the acting technique of Gestus. Brecht states programmatically that the actor’s gesture “shows the viewer that

23

Mikhail Iampolʹskii, “Zhest umershego i spiashchego ili Zhest do zhesta i posle zhesta,” in Ot slov k telu. Sbornik statei k 60-letiiu Iuriia Tsivʹiana (Moscow, 2010), 429–445.

24

Agamben, “Noten zur Geste.”

25

Lakhinov, Zhestikuliatsiia, 16f.

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[the actor] is showing a role” rather than embodying it.26 The actor ostentatiously, overtly addresses the audience, dedicating theater to optical dissection. The gesture of showing not only gets rid of “all things emotional”—by shaping feelings “into a gesture,”27 actors display themselves, thus transforming the performance into a performance of a performance, a display. Brecht’s principle of alienation (Verfremdung, V-effect) is essentially based on the gesture. The V-effect of the gesture can be divided into variations of showing, such as gestures “that describe the size of a cucumber or the curve of a racing car. Then the variety of gestures that demonstrate actions. Those of contempt, tension, perplexity, etc.” However, beyond these primarily illustrative particular gestures, Brecht aims more deeply at the principle of gestus. By this, he means a whole complex of individual gestures of various kinds, together with utterances, which form the basis of a particular interhuman process and concern the overall attitude of all those involved (condemnation of one person by others, consultation, fighting, and so forth), or a complex of gestures and utterances, which, occurring in an individual person, trigger certain processes (Hamlet’s hesitation, Galileo’s confessionalism, and so forth), or simply the basic attitude of a human being (such as contentment or waiting). The gestus characterizes relationships between people. A work activity, for example, is not a gestus if it does not contain a social relationship such as exploitation or cooperation.28

Brecht significantly expands the sphere of gesture. Detached from the narrow fixation on an expressive hand motion, it simultaneously becomes more difficult to identify. In the gestus, the whole structure of a piece is condensed. Since this overall gestus is “only vaguely determinable,”29 Brecht’s distinction between gestus and gesture ultimately remains permeable,

26

Bertolt Brecht, “Kurze Beschreibung einer neuen Technik der Schauspielkunst, die einen Verfremdungseffekt hervorbringt,” in his Schriften. Über Theater, ed. Werner Hecht (Berlin, 1977), 208–221. (Translator’s italics.)

27

Ibid., 212.

28

Bertolt Brecht, “Gestik” [1951], in his Werke. Schriften, vol. 3: 1942–1956, ed. Werner Hecht, Jan Knopf, Werner Mittenzwei, and Klaus-Detlef Müller (Berlin, Weimar, and Frankfurt/M., 1992), 187–188.

29

Ibid.

4. Performing/Perceiving: Gesture as Form and Feeling

their tertium comparationis being that both establish a distance between the subject and the object of showing. This distance in the gesture brings about a radical transformation of dramatic demonstration and allows for a new perspective on two fundamental questions of aesthetic theory that are closely linked to the theatrical gesture. The first concerns the nexus of gesture and form; the second involves the debate about gesture and feeling. Both boil down to the basic alternative of representation vs. experience in theater. If the theatrical act, and thus the theatrical gesture, is primarily concerned with showing, that is, representing, how does it reflect upon the gesture as, in Brechtian terms, “a showing of showing”? And if the aesthetics of alienation first of all affects the experience of a role, how does it integrate the gesture of estrangement? Or does the drama of alienated experience finally create the act of selfdistanced dramatic representation?

4. Performing/Perceiving: Gesture as Form and Feeling The close correlation of expression and affect is a basic assumption for gesture-based dramaturgy and the main reason for its lasting aesthetic double bind. Though classical dramaturgy claims the affect to be a reliable natural sign proceeding outwards, it has to admit that, semiotically speaking, every affect is only imperfectly controllable and highly unreliable. When dramaturgy treats and teaches the gesture as an iconic shape that gives form to feeling, increased expressiveness is attributed not least to gestures that elude a stable gestological codification as body signs. Between a random impulse and sophisticated form, the sign of affect evokes the basic paradox of gesture: it stands between instinctive self-expression and conscious body design. At the beginning of the twentieth century, this paradox was studied by a range of disciplines that made a crucial contribution to reconsidering the relationship between art and psychology, among them physiological and evolutionistic expression theory as well as cognitive psychology. With psychology and aesthetics in dialog, the gesture’s representational potential— and its oscillation between form and feeling—moves to the center of the debate on avant-garde theater. To a large extent, this debate circles around the concept of experiencing (perezhivanie, lit. “living through”), brought to the fore by Stanislavski’s school, which stays influential to the present day.

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According to Stanislavski, only “living” the role can create life-like characters onstage, an event he calls scenic birth. Reminiscent of Herder’s ecstatic “I’m feeling! I am!” Stanislavski postulates: “Once I believe, I feel. Once I feel, I am.”30 But Stanislavski’s model does not preclude the awareness of playing a role; on the contrary, it explicitly demands such awareness. Actors should neither show their own feelings nor give over uncontrollably to embodiment and empathy.31 Rather, Stanislavski calls for a specific treatment of gestures, “in order to carry out a living task with their help and to reveal an authentic interior experience.”32 A theatrical overabundance of gestures (mnogozhestie) hinders the fulfillment of this task, he writes. Here, Stanislavski updates the ancient opposition of gestus (a regulated gesture, in which the inner experience is perfectly translated into an external form) and gesticulatio (an irregular, exuberant, and hardly codifiable gestural surplus). Such over-gesticulation can only be avoided with certainty if “every gesture is banned from the stage.”33 This implies a radical dictum: “I state that the gesture as such is not only unnecessary but harmful onstage!”34 The violent radicalism of this position proves untenable in Stanislavski’s work. Still, he wants it to be practiced at least as a temporary stage in acting training. For instance, he has his students sit around the table and replace the words of a drama with arbitrary meaningless syllables, keeping their hands on the table.35 Thus, expressive complementary gestures “with whose help the actor hopes to stimulate experience and performance in difficult moments” are to be avoided. For Stanislavski, such gestures attempt to force an emotion from without, hindering the actor at developing it from within.

30

Konstantin Stanislavskii, “Uchebnye plany i programmy teatralʹnoi shkoly,” in his Rabota aktera nad soboi, part 2: Rabota nad soboi v tvorcheskom protsesse voploshcheniia (Moscow, 1990), 422–489, qt. 447.

31

Idem, Rabota aktera nad soboi, part 2: Rabota nad soboi v tvorcheskom protsesse voploshcheniia (Moscow, 1990), 251.

32

Ibid., part 2, 29.

33

Ibid., part 2, 253.

34

Ibid.

35

Cf. Stanislavskii, “Uchebnye plany,” 483.

4. Performing/Perceiving: Gesture as Form and Feeling

His strict prohibition is unmistakably directed at the reflex-like gesture. Mechanical gesticulation is to banished from stage; instead, he suggests a minimalist approach with well-dosed and disciplined gestures: If the motion and action of the person portrayed are not overloaded by exaggerated gestures, they are much more effective and plastic. Every unnecessary gesture not caused by the role only blurs them. . . . To take a step away from oneself and not to repeat oneself outwardly in every new role, the actor must be extremely economical with gestures. Every superfluous motion leads away from the figure and reminds the viewer of the actor.36

Stanislavski builds his theory of gesture upon two representational arguments—an economic one (greater effectiveness through targeted use of gesture) and a semiotic one (double stage presence of gesture). To him, the gesture reveals the duality of body and character, of actor and role, of the performer and the performed. Under these premises, Stanislavski sketches out the ideal gesture in three images: (1) the pictographic metaphor of the gesture as a drawing; (2) the musical metaphor of the actor gesturing like an orchestra conductor; and (3) the plastic metaphor of the gesture initiating a Pygmalion-like act of creation. While the musical metaphor only appears as a veiled hint,37 the images of drawing and sculpture are further elaborated. The first image depicts the defectiveness, comparing over-gesticulation to soiled paper: It is like having an artist draw a fine pencil portrait on dirty paper. Its random strokes and spots would merge with the lines of the drawing— and the portrait would be lost, shapeless amidst the chaos of dirty lines. To prevent this from happening, you must erase all dirt from paper before you start. The same happens in our work: an actor’s superfluous gestures are like those dirty strokes and spots. They blur the contours of the role. Its lines get lost in the chaos of unnecessary gestures and disappear. So you must eliminate over-gesticulation and use only those motions and actions that the role requires. . . . When your external apparatus is disciplined in this way, it will be a blank slate—a pure piece of paper on which you can clearly express the most complex roles. All great artists have gone through this struggle with the gesture during their creative

36

Stanislavskii, Rabota aktera nad soboi, part 2, 252.

37

Ibid., part 2, 262.

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growth, and this struggle has benefited them: instead of superfluous over-gesticulation, the actor develops other, more subtle and expressive means to reflect internal life onstage.38

When the gesture is attached to the actor’s body rather than proceeding from the role, it is dirt and ballast. To turn into contours standing out against the background of an acting body, a tabula rasa must be created. Only when the unmotivated, external gesture is eradicated, can the gestural kinetogram turn into expressive motions. These contours of pure gesture have a certain resemblance to the contours of a letter, a sign. This becomes clear when Stanislavski proceeds to yet another metaphor, that of a postman. As long as they remain external to the role, gestures are but meaningless entangled lines of motion in the air. They resemble “errand boys who deliver letters while completely indifferent to their contents.”39 Such gestures draw no distinct image, nor do they convey a decodable message. The problem of over-gesticulation is thus not only one of visual overload (which might be overlaid or concealed), it is also a semantic problem. Over-gesticulation implies a crisis or congestion of meaning, of what and how the gesture communicates. Proceeding from the image of a drawing to the image of a letter, this kinetogram explores the issues of both figurativeness and abstraction. Their limitation lies in gestural graphics: if the gesture shows nothing and says nothing, it becomes a dirty line, a smear, a scribble. The second scene unfolds this graphic paradigm into a Pygmalionic scene situated between experience (perezhivanie) and animation: Imagine you come to the workshop of a great, superhuman genius, an almost divine sculptor, and you say to him: “show me Venus!” This master, aware of the importance of what is about to happen, concentrates, stops noticing his surroundings. He takes a huge piece of clay and starts kneading it—calm, focused.40

Serenely the master creates the first parts of a statue, its limbs, the “most beautiful and perfect legs the world has ever seen,” and proceeds 38

Ibid., part 2, 251f.

39

Ibid., part 2, 28.

40

Ibid., part 2, 263f.

4. Performing/Perceiving: Gesture as Form and Feeling

to the torso. Now, “hard clay in his hands becomes softer and warmer,” it seems to the sculptor that the clay “moves up and down, breathes.” When the master works enthusiastically and extendedly to form the head, he is “truly excited and full of admiration. He smiles, and his eyes are the eyes of a young man in love.” Finally, the artwork is complete: “Venus lives!”41 This scene of plastic pneumatization compares the actor to a sculptor. Just as the hand forms the body of the beloved statue and sculpts life into it, “great actors model their character before the eyes of the audience” by using gestures. Like “a sculptor casting a dream in bronze,” acting a character is but forming a moving sculpture via hand gestures. In Stanislavski’s dramaturgy of the gesture, Pygmalion thus appears as an allegorical figure of the theater. Each performance is an animated body plastic; working on a role equals working on a sculpture, and its creation forms the core of production. To Stanislavski, the Pygmalionic scene of transfiguration—formation of inanimate matter, a worshiping gaze, a sculpturing touch and the final climax of coming alive—captures the essence of theater: the animation of dead material. Here, the stage becomes a workshop for creating and animating images, with the gesture of formative work taking effect in the work of art. 4.1. A Psychology of Gesture (Sergei Volkonsky) Stanislavski’s model was not only met with criticism from the leftist “machine body dramaturgy,” which, like Foregger or Sokolov, propagated mechanical movements as prototypes of stage motion. Striving for a synthesis in theater, Tairov, too, complained that Stanislavski was depriving the experience of every creative principle and transferring it “from the field of art to the field of psychopathology.” The ideal of experiencing, perezhivanie, “leads the actor away from art and makes him a sufferer, a neurasthenic set upon digging into his own soul and conducting home-made psychological experiments in it with the persistence of maniac.”42 Under these disastrous conditions, Tairov argues, the gesture suffers from a “dysentery of formlessness.” What he juxtaposes to the run-down, “completely expressionless, slovenly, stammering gesture” is the emotional gesture (emotsionalʹnyi 41

Ibid.

42

Aleksandr Tairov, Zapiski rezhissera. Statʹi, besedy, rechi, pisʹma (Moscow, 1970), 118.

127

128

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zhest): it “will give the key to true form; a form filled with creative meaning—an emotional form.”43 Such emotional gestures are “creatively transformed for the particular stage persona” and “will not smell of physiological sweat.” They are consciously created for an effect, and thus principally different from the “(in)famous perezhivanie.”44 While opposing Stanislavski, Tairov does not formulate a psychology of the gesture. Rather, he is skeptical about the idea of psychologizing acting, but adopts the notion of the emotional gesture as a bridging concept between art and psychology. In the 1910s, impetus for this psychological paradigm of the gesture was provided above all by Theodor Lipps’s ideas of esthetic sympathy45 in conjunction with Klages’s philosophical expressive studies. In addition to these, Jean d’Udine’s (Albert Cozanet’s) 1910 monograph L’art et le geste is an important point of reference when discussing the psychological foundations of any theory of acting. Sergei Volkonsky emphatically championed the psychology of the theatrical gesture. In 1912, he translated d’Udine into Russian, incorporating French haptocentric kinetic aesthetics into his own gestural expressive concept. At the same time, he published a monograph on the expressive gesture—arguably the first Russian attempt at a psychology of gesture in drama. In his study The Man on Stage (Chelovek na stsene, 1912), Volkonsky complains: “From all theater issues, [the gesture] is most often forgotten.”46 Opposing this “amnesia,” he proclaims that the gesture is “the art of all arts”: after all, it proceeds from the hand, which “begins an infinite radius whose end touches the invisible—and probably non-existent—circle of the universe.”47 From this apotheosis of the hand, which, in an almost chiromantic twist, extends from the visible world of the stage into cosmic invisibility, Volkonsky derives a typology that culminates in the psychological gesture, for: “The intimate self is in the hand.” It forms the point at which the subject “touches the outer world.”48 It is also the starting point for 43

Ibid., 91. For Tairov, the unfeigned emotional gesture can only be observed in the pantomime.

44

Ibid., 122.

45

Lipps’s writings were translated into Russian from 1902 onwards.

46

Sergei Volkonskii, Chelovek na stsene (St. Petersburg, 1912), 11.

47

Ibid., 16.

48

Ibid., 29.

4. Performing/Perceiving: Gesture as Form and Feeling

Volkonsky’s main concern: to free the gesture from its subservient, secondary function, making it the primary system of meaning onstage. Envisioning a gesture-based theory and practice of theater, Volkonsky conceived a system that he presented to German-speaking readers as early as 1910. The short text “The Main Thing” (“Die Hauptsache”), published in the December issue of the Stage magazine (Die Schaubühne), offers a brief sketch of dramatic gestology in the manner of a Platonic dialogue.49 Two years later, Volkonsky explores the topic in greater detail in The Person Onstage. The treatise explains why a wrong hand motion can spoil the overall impression and outlines a tripartite typology. Beginning with the mechanical gesture, it proceeds with the descriptive variety and culminates in the aforementioned psychological gesture. The mechanical gesture is purpose-bound and occurs when a specific hand motion is needed to perform an action, such as grasping an object or greeting. The descriptive gesture, to Volkonsky, is usually unnecessary; indeed, it is formless and out of place—the worst of all gestures, it is a veritable “ulcer of the stage” (iazva stseny). However, it still demands differentiation. It may have a pointing function, which can shade into drawing in the air and which “drags itself behind the word” as an illustration of sorts: “The actor says: ‘My heart, my head!’—and the hand is placed on the corresponding organ.”50 But this type of gesture also appears as a complement to the word. In these cases, it does not point to a visible object but describes an invisible one. To Volkonsky, this variety is certainly no better: such gestures interfere with the spoken word, tear off the narrative thread, divert attention away from meaning to a distant form and thus “kill” the word or at least exert a “destructive influence on the meaning of words.”51 From these pointing and illustrative gestures, he proceeds to a rule: “The gesture [should] illustrate not the fact, not the narrative, not the content—but my attitude toward these.”52

49

Sergei Wolkonsky, “Die Hauptsache,” Die Schaubühne 6, no. 52 (1910): 1339–1345, qt. 1340.

50

Ibid., 1341.

51

Ibid.

52

Volkonskii, Chelovek na stsene, 23. In “Die Hauptsache,” he says: “Is it not clear that the gesture illustrates not the fact but our attitude towards it?” (1343).

129

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While disqualifying the mechanical gesture as uninteresting, Volkonsky considers the descriptive variety downright dangerous, because “by its ease, it seduces the lazy actor to use it where a psychological gesture is needed.”53 This warning forms the transition to the third type—the psychological gesture as an “external expression of feeling.” This implies an essential semiotic constraint: the word to which the gesture refers must never be understood literally but always symbolically. “The psychological gesture coincides not with the spoken word but with some implicit one.”54 Only then can the gesture shed its illustrative character and break away from its slavish attachment to the pointing function. For this reason, the psychological gesture is not to illustrate action in the sense rejected above. Volkonsky points out that expressed emotions do not always coincide with words; indeed, they are often diametrically opposed to the script, following an immanent “law of opposites.” This dialectic of the gesture marks a clear contradiction to the traditional model rooted in Diderot’s conception of the correct gesture, that is, the correspondence of word and gesture. Volkonsky violates this iconicity of gesture. In his work, the gesture as a visible form of language always operates at the boundary of language proper. The “law of opposites” formulated by Volkonsky prevents the (psychological) gesture from absorption in language and maintains the tension that Vygotsky in his Psychology of Art (1925) claims for all arts, but especially for theater. According to Vygotsky, contradiction is the “main characteristic of artistic form and material,”55 both formally and semantically. It subjects the affect and its expression to a “law of bifurcation” (zakon razdvoeniia).56 Vygotsky finds this immanent antagonism of art in the cathartic destruction of opposing affects. One of the most important sources for his conflict-related catharsis theory is Darwin’s The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animal (1872), especially the assumption that expressive motions often contain an opposition, which suggests an antithetical principle. According to Darwin, this association of contradictory elements in affect and 53

Wolkonsky, “Die Hauptsache,” 1341f.

54

Volkonskii, Chelovek na stsene, 24. Cf. also: “the gesture is consistent with the thought, not with the word.” (ibid.)

55

Lev Vygotskii, Psikhologiia iskusstva [1925] (Moscow, 1965), 271.

56

Ibid., 278.

4. Performing/Perceiving: Gesture as Form and Feeling

motion renders movements particularly expressive. In other words, the expressive intensity of a gesture is essentially determined by its contrapuntal position in relation to the affect that triggers it. While hardly ever quoting the relevant contemporary theory on body language, Volkonsky repeatedly cites Darwin’s theses on the causal mechanism between nerve stimulus and emotional body expression—a reference that becomes easier to understand against the background of Vygotsky’s Psychology of Art with regard to the psychology of artistic gestures. Not only is bodily expression always envisioned as a gestural motion, this motion also has to contain a certain resistance: thus, expression is regarded not as a harmonic transmission of an inner content into an outer form but as a “principle of struggle and antinomy of several elements.”57 Drama proves to be the form in which this struggle is expressed on several levels: in the text material, in the relationship between text and staging and finally in the performance itself with its inherent contradictio. The “fundamental duplication of the actor’s emotion,” in which the real world diverges from the one portrayed, is shown in the law of the oppositional gesture.58 Here, a hidden connection opens up between Volkonsky’s gesture psychology and the concept of expressive motion as developed by Eisenstein and Tretyakov in their joint work at the Proletkult Theater. In a treatise entitled “Expressive Motion” (1923), which was only published in 2000, Eisenstein and Tretyakov reflect on the relationship between affect, expression, and conflict. These reflections also influence the articles on attraction montage published by Eisenstein in the same year; however, in “Expressive Motion” they are more specifically focused on the gesture. The central thesis of the short text is the conception of the affective expressive motion as a struggle between forces: “The mechanism of expression is the conflict of motives.” 59 Eisenstein and Tretyakov base much of their work on the biocentric writings by Rudolf Bode (especially Ausdrucksgymnastik [Expressive Gymnastics], 1922) and Klages (especially Ausdrucksbewegung und Gestaltungskraft [Expressive Movement and Creative Power], 1913) as well as Kleist’s work on puppet theater, whose argument regarding gravitational logic 57

Ibid., 275.

58

Ibid., 299.

59

Eizenshtein and Tretʹiakov, “Vyrazitelʹnoe dvizhenie,” 305.

131

132

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they combine with Bode’s weight technique and his pendulum exercises. Within this reading, the gesture no longer appears as a peripheral motion but results from the movement of the entire body. At the same time, the idea of countermotion, which is fundamental to Eisenstein’s bimechanics, is further elaborated as a conflict between conditional and unconditional reflexes (inhibitions), identifying a negative bimechanical resistant element in each gesture—the source of its expressive content and its infectious transference effect. Resistance, which can be realized through a system of so-called “refusals” or “brakes,” as in Meyerhold’s biomechanics, is the key to intensifying the expressive motion through obstructive, counteractive elements until it becomes an attraction motion. Eisenstein’s and Tretyakov’s concept of the expressive gesture is modeled around a “theatrical dualism” (teatralʹnyi dualizm), postulating that theater contains within itself an opposing element, an antagonistic “conflict of motives.”60 In fact, the realization of this conflict is the core of stage performance. It isolates the moment of experience and transfers it from the dramatic action to the audience. The goal is by no means to ban the practice of perezhivanie (experience, excitement) from the theater. Rather, perezhivanie is to shift from the stage to the auditorium: “Thanks to this design of stage motion, there is no need for the actor to experience a type, an image, a character, an emotion, a situation [emotionally], for the expressive motion of the actor transfers experience [perezhivanie] where it should be, namely, to the auditorium.”61 The motion of expression, which is always processual and never static, thus becomes a factor of emotional audience stimulation, the bearer of an affect physically experienced not on stage by the actor but in the auditorium by the viewer. In this constellation, the situational emotions of play are reduced to a minimum intended to release a maximum of “unused muscle energy in the spectator.” While the concept of gesture as countermotion forms an unexpected, almost self-contradictory tertium comparationis between Volkonsky’s 60

Among the three types of gestures distinguished by Eisenstein and Tretyakov—the “representational,” the “symbolic,” and the “speech-mechanical”—the latter category in particular realizes the conflicting concept of expressive motion by setting muscles to work. Speech-mechanical gestures are reflex waves spreading to the periphery of the body. Cf. ibid., 303.

61

Ibid., 301.

4. Performing/Perceiving: Gesture as Form and Feeling

“psychological gesture” and Eisenstein and Tretyakov’s “expressive motion,” Volkonsky’s ideas are far removed from any reflexological consequences. One year after The Man on Stage, Volkonsky’s The Expressive Man (Vyrazitelʹnyi chelovek, 1913) presents a textbook on “gestural scenic education,” which will become part of the theater-pedagogical curricula in the 1920s.62 Inspired primarily by François Delsarte’s anatomical classification of body and mind motions, Volkonsky dissects the gesture into a combinatorial system of shoulder, arm, and fingers, whose different syntactics each produce specific emotional effects. Diagrams illustrate this organic ars combinatoria of postures (cf. figs. 40–42).

Fig. 40.

Volkonsky’s model is not based on psychological premises, and his preferred type of gesture is not psychological in regard to the emotional state of the acting subject. Instead, he concentrates entirely on representation. Still, he does speak of a psychology of gesture, desiring the gestural action onstage to be psychologically justified. Thus, he sees gesture as a device to bring latent discrepancy to the surface, providing a dynamic effect in theatrical action. These dynamics are primarily focused on the speech-image ratio. The gesture is of such interest because it helps the body not merely illustrate the spoken text but show something different, thus opening up

62

Cf., for example, a sample curriculum in Boris Zakhava, “Teatralʹnyi tekhnikum. Programma akterskogo otdeleniia. Stsenicheskoe vospitanie aktera,” State Central Theater Museum (hereafter SCTM), f. 411, no. 316, 1r.

133

134

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Fig. 41. Deviatizvuchie ruki [The Ninefold Sound of the Hand]. This overview, strongly reminiscent of classical chirographies (such as Bulwer’s), shows possible variations of the theatrical hand gesture in the coordinate network of concentric, normal, and eccentric postures.

Fig. 42. This cubic model borrowed from Delsarte is also based on the number nine. It visualizes the possibilities of holding the six sides of a cube, with some sides graspable in different ways. The arrows indicate the directions of the fingers.

4. Performing/Perceiving: Gesture as Form and Feeling

an additional performative level. The psychological gesture acts most effectively where it contradicts the word, adding the tension between verbal and bodily language to other double codes of theater: tensions between the character and the body, between the role and the self. From this perspective, dramatic experience of an alien self requires the constant possibility of alienating words and gestures. 4.2. A Phenomenology of Gesture (Liubov Gurevich and Gustav Shpet) Ever since, in 1897, Alfred Binet presented nine French actors with questionnaires on whether a performer should only show the feelings of the character or also feel them, has the “paradox of the actor” belonged to the inventory of theater studies. The questionnaire, too, became part of its methodological treasure trove.63 However, both are highly controversial. In a short article entitled “On the question of the psychology of acting” (1932), Vygotsky questions the informative value of such questionnaires, arguing that latter variations remained stuck in a shallow empiricism like Binet’s original, elevating superficial observations to the rank of scientific data. Moreover, they isolated questions of stage experience, disregarding general psychological laws, while precisely this contextualization would enable them to understand the psychology of acting and experiencing not in abstract or absolute terms but as a concrete problem, culturally and historically variable depending on different dramaturgical schools or programs.64 Against this background, the statements of the actors themselves—despite their undisputedly great importance—must also be relativized, Vygotsky argues, as they are usually unaware of their own conditioning by social history and a theatrical formal language. Vygotsky presented the manuscript of his essay to the GAKhN theater section in 1928, shortly after it had conducted a series of surveys among Russian actors. With their questionnaires, the section attempted to sound out if acting practice assumed that real feelings were necessary to produce staged emotions. The most comprehensive of all the GAKhN

63

Alfred Binet, “Réfléxions sur le paradoxe de Diderot,” L’année psychologique 3 (1897): 279–295.

64

Lev Vygotskii, “K voprosu o psikhologii tvorchestva aktera,” in his Sobranie sochinenii v 6-i tomakh, vol. 6 (Moscow, 1984), 319–328.

135

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questionnaires, with more than 90 questions in its last edition, is devoted to the psychology of the actor’s art.65 It begins with the impulse of choosing a role, then deals with the material and the processes of finding and learning a role, proceeds to the influence of the director and then to personal experiences. Finally, it comes to the relationship between the stage and the real world, discussing techniques of acting “as if ” and possibilities of evoking emotions. This last series of questions is based, in modified form, on Binet’s grid but approaches the problem much more broadly. For example, the interrelationship between character and self is explored in several differently accentuated questions: Do you consider it necessary to have an emotional experience [perezhivanie] during every performance itself, as Salvini suggested, or only when preparing for a role? Does it happen that, while on stage, a part of your thinking abilities is absorbed by the role, but at the same time you are able to control yourself as an actor? Can you summon a state of mind required by the role when you wish? Do you use any techniques to evoke stage emotions? Do you ever find yourself “transformed” into the character you are to play in the evening already on the morning before the performance? During intermissions and after the performance, do you unwittingly retain the tone and posture of the character you are portraying? Do you think there is a difference between stage emotions and real life emotions? What is it, in your opinion? Did it ever happen to you that you felt unable to evoke the desired emotion in yourself and then caused this emotion by assuming an external expression (gestures, facial motions, intonations, and so forth) you remembered from playing other roles? To what extent do you experience the events onstage as real? 66

These questionnaires were distributed to the ensembles of various theaters—the Moscow Artistic Theater, the Chamber Theater, the Operetta Theater, the Revolutionary Theater, and the Travelling Theater. Among the interviewees were such prominent actors as Alisa Koonen, Maria Ermolova, and Mikhail Chekhov, many of whom also reflected on their acting

65

“Anketa po psikhologii akterskogo tvorchestva,” SCTM, f. 517, no. 99–113 (n.p.). Variants of the questionnaire can be found in SCTM, f. 517, no. 116–118.

66

Ibid.

4. Performing/Perceiving: Gesture as Form and Feeling

techniques in their own publications. Their answers to the questions are highly disparate, ranging from total identification with the role without any awareness of extra-scenic reality to differentiations between personal and impersonal consciousness on stage. Some of the interviewees state that they discard the role along with its body posture immediately after the performance, others say they retain it. When asked about the difference between scenic and real life feeling, N. A. Belentseva emphasizes the conditionality of the theatrical situation, the “scenic doubling or splitting.” N. A. Smirnova, too, speaks of a “double life” onstage, while Ermolova claims to experience the stage world as fully fledged reality. Chekhov answers the question about playing without feeling by saying that, in this case, “the creative extrapersonal experience does not merge with personal, real life experience.”67 He also stresses that the feelings experienced on stage are impersonal, unlike those in reality, and allow for an objective attitude.68 According to him, ideas that belong to the portrayed fictional world trigger emotions that are both real and intrinsically artistic, due to being aesthetically induced. In this context of relative awareness, the gesture comes up. Asked “do you prepare your gestures and facial expressions for a role beforehand, or do they occur to you spontaneously?”69 Chekhov answers that ninety percent of his gestures and facial expressions arise spontaneously, while the remaining ten percent result from the reflection and rationalization of spontaneous gestures with the aim of conserving the character of a gesture (but not the gesture itself). In her study The Actor’s Creativity (Tvorchestvo aktera, 1926), the theater critic and Stanislavski supporter Liubov Gurevich evaluates the questionnaire and the responses. Her investigation attempts to clarify “the paradox of the actor” by exploring “artistic experience.” After a detailed discussion of this concept’s aesthetic tradition, Gurevich concludes that the dramaturgical alternative is not, as previously assumed, to be sought between pretend emotions and authentic transformation—she wittily uses the

67

“Anketa po psikhologii akterskogo tvorchestva.” Mikhail Chekhov’s answers to some of the questions are published in Mikhail Chekhov, Literaturnoe nasledie v 2-kh tomakh, vol. 2: Ob iskusstve aktera (Moscow, 1986), 71–82.

68

Mikhail Chekhov, “Otvety na anketu GAKhN o psikhologii akterskogo tvorchestva,” SCTM, f. 517, no. 40, 6v–7r.

69

“Anketa po psikhologii akterskogo tvorchestva.”

137

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difference of merely one letter between feigning (pritvoriatsʹia) and transforming (pretvoriatʹsia)—but rather between artistic and real-life emotions: In other words, the actor is not to reveal their own mental state onstage while wearing the mask of a role and using its words. Rather, the actor is to artistically overcome and process this emotional state as raw material from which to create art. In this transformation, the actor must abandon their life real-life, empirical self.70

From this evaluation, Gurevich derives the image of the actor’s divided attention during the performance—and Vygotsky explicitly agrees with her on this point.71 This is a reason to abandon the simple model of experience [perezhivanie] as self-identification. Instead, following Theodor Lipps’s “esthetic sympathy,” the concept of “scenic experience” models the stimulation of affective memories both imaginatively and motorically. Gurevich speaks of the “process of creating, artistically, an emotional sphere of the actor,” which enables them to find a form of expression inscribed in the body’s “muscle memory.”72 At the same time, however, she argues that only authentic experience can find its expression in the body. The result is a concept of art that is as organic as artificial: the classical alternative of pretending vs. experiencing is supplemented by a third option—embodiment (perevoploshchenie). Gurevich closely bases her work on the concept of stage reality as an entity cut off from real life, as proposed by Gustav Shpet. Shpet has only published very few thoughts on the theater, though he moved intensely in theater circles, especially in the late 1920s and early 1930s. In December 1922, in a seminal essay “Theater as Art” (“Teatr kak iskusstvo”), written for the journal of Tairov’s Chamber Theater, he defined stage performance as a sphere in its own right. Galin Tihanov sees this essay as a difficult at-

70

Liubovʹ Gurevich, Tvorchestvo aktera. O prirode khudozhestvennykh perezhivanii aktera na stsene (Moscow, 1927), 44 and 49. Gurevich takes up a thesis that she had developed seven years earlier in a sketch about the actor. Here, she formulates the idea that the actor, unlike other artists, is not only a creator but also the material of their creation. See Liubovʹ Gurevich, “Akter. Tezisy dlia statʹi v slovare” [1920], SCTM, f. 82, no. 286, 1r.

71

Vygotskii, “K voprosu o psikhologii,” 327.

72

Gurevich, Tvorchestvo aktera, 53.

4. Performing/Perceiving: Gesture as Form and Feeling

tempt to integrate disparate avant-garde theater aesthetics.73 The very title of Shpet’s contribution positions it between Tairov’s exclusive aestheticism and Evreinov’s inclusive life theater, advocating theater as an art form. The starting point of Shpet’s reflections, in close reference to Husserl’s Logical Investigations, is an attempt to clarify how theater can illuminate empirical and eidetic reflections through the mutual mediation of representing and apprehending a present object. He begins with an argument on the phenomenological essence of theater, rejecting the idea of dramatic performance as a synthetic, spatio-temporal derivative of literature.74 To Shpet, this classical definition is misleading on several counts. Firstly, he argues, every art is “mixed” (a Mischkunst, as he puts it in German). Secondly, theater is not secondary or subordinate to literature, it is not “art once removed” (iskusstvo vtoroi stepeni). Rather, Shpet goes on to say, theater must completely emancipate itself from literature as a prescript(ion). The written play is not to function as an authoritative pretext or paratext, and the actor is not to merely interpret a literally prescribed role. Such work on the text, he argues, “occupies a modest place in the actor’s work. It is only relevant for the initial draft of a role and therefore has more to do with the preparation of a play than with the art of transformation, that is, with actual creative work onstage.”75 Here, Shpet is quite in line with Tairov’s thesis that literature-centered theater “can only be a good or bad mouthpiece of literature, a gramophone record conveying an author’s ideas.”76 Those who pursue stagecraft as the art of reading ultimately suggest that the best actors are merely good readers or literary critics. According to Tairov, such a suggestion ignores the entire history of theater, which rebels against 73

Galin Tihanov, “Gustav Shpet’s Literary and Theater Affiliations,” in Gustav Shpet’s Contribution to Philosophy and Cultural Theory, ed. Galin Tihanov (Lafayette, 2009), 56–80, qt. 73. On the study of theater at the GAKhN, see Violetta Gudkova, “Die Semantik der Theateraufführung. Die Theatertheorie der GAChN,” in Kunst als Sprache—Sprachen der Kunst? Russische Ästhetik und Kunsttheorie der 1920er Jahre in der europäischen Diskussion, ed. Nikolai Plotnikov (Hamburg, 2014), 309–321.

74

Gustav Shpet, “Teatr kak iskusstvo,” Masterstvo teatra. Vremennik kamernogo teatra 1 (1922): 31–55. A year before this extensive essay, Shpet had published a note on the historical differentiation of theatrical staging practices. See Gustav Shpet, “Differentsiatsiia postanovki teatralʹnogo predstavleniia,” Kulʹtura teatra 7–8 (1921): 31–33 [reprint in Sovremennaia dramaturgiia 5 (1991): 202–204].

75

Shpet, “Teatr kak iskusstvo,” 34.

76

Tairov, Zapiski rezhissera, 145.

139

140

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textual constrictions, demonstrating with every new production that interpretation is but the “naked, abstract axis,” which acquires a sensory and perceptible form only when creatively processed by the artist-actor (khudozhnik-akter). With this almost post-dramatic polemics against (pre)textual centrism, Shpet advocates the retheatricalization of theater, a position particularly characteristic of avant-garde drama. For Shpet, the second criterion often used to define the genre—the relevance of motion, including gestures, as an integral part of scenic action— can only adequately characterize theater when not considered as a merely external, formal phenomenon. The key element is not motion per se but the concrete “scenic act” in its specificity and sensory abundance, that is, every particular motion with its material essence, its sequential position, and its aesthetics. In a seeming tautology, Shpet writes: “The stage act of the theater is an act of the actor,” describing the perception of theater as an eidetic act, in which the apprehension of the events onstage oscillates between abstraction and concretization. The decisive factor here is not to confuse the moving body of the actor and the acting body of the persona in their duality.77 According to Shpet, the concept of motion can only be applied to both actor and persona as a homonym since the types of motion are categorically different, “moving” on separate ontological levels. A line could be drawn from the general, spatiotemporal motion of the actor to the motion of the act, which shows the very essence of movement “in its powerful tension, its carnality, its resistance, its mass, its weight, its intentionality.” At this point, Shpet cites the timbre as a material quality that, in his view, cannot be reduced to purely sensory data, to audible and visible characteristics. Rather, it has the ability “to evoke an experience that is qualitatively unique, immediately recognized by us in its wholeness as an aesthetic experience.”78 Just like motion, the concept of reality (deistvitelʹnostʹ) proves to be a homonym for Shpet. It mirrors a long tradition that regards theater as pseudo-realism, “the realism of lies” (lzherealizm), a view that unceremoniously equates empirical being with artistic existence, disregarding its conditional essence. Rather than speaking of any kind of “realism,” Shpet argues 77

In theater, Shpet always proceeds from this duality of the performing and the represented subject. See Gustav Špet, “Das Bewusstsein und sein Eigentümer (Notizen),” in Gesicht statt Maske. Philosophie der Person in Russland, ed. Alexander Haardt and Nikolai Plotnikov (Vienna, 2012), 159–206.

78

Shpet, “Teatr kak iskusstvo,” 36.

4. Performing/Perceiving: Gesture as Form and Feeling

that theater is based on a fundamental aesthetical principle of conditionality (uslovnostʹ), its world being aesthetically created as an “unreal reality,” which does not strive to mimetically copy the outer world, much less be absorbed by it. “Aesthetic art indifferently disassociates itself from naturalistic existence, enabling an undetermined series of realities; therefore, criteria and assessments of art are not fundamentally connected with the correspondence of the image to reality.”79 A year later, in Problems of Modern Aesthetics (1923), Shpet explores this disassociation as a phenomenological act of consciousness through which an empirical object is liberated from the pragmatic everyday environment and transformed into an aesthetic object.80 This object is detached, it floats in the “as if.” Shpet distances himself not only from the pseudo-realism of the external world but from the psycho-realism of an internal theater world as popularized by Stanislavski. For Shpet, the actor is an “impersonal personality,” cutting off all connections to the naturalism of experience (perezhivanie) in theater.81 Specifying this detachment, Shpet uses a term for “actor” that was archaic by his time, albeit revived by futurism: litsedei, a word fusing “face/ mask” (litso/lichina) and “action” (deistvie) not unlike the Greek prosopon poiein. To Shpet, the main material of theater is the body of the litsedei, not the text or the role: “The actor subjects his material to creative formation when he works on his voice, intonation, recitation, gestures, facial expressions, his figure—in a word, on his ‘mask-face’ (persona).”82 Shpet agrees with Tairov, who speaks of the actor’s body, breath, voice and “physical self ” as “material”83 that brings forth the theatrical artifact. What is commonly called “action” in theater is therefore, according to Shpet, the totality of the “palpably given motor-sympathetic forms of an actor’s expres-

79

Ibid., 41 and 52.

80

Gustav Shpet, “Problemy sovremennoi estetiki,” Iskusstvo 1 (1923): 43–78.

81

Alternatively, Shpet proposes the term “attunement” (nastroennostʹ). Attunement does not presuppose a specific emotional feeling as a condition of performing an expression; it is performance-related and requires the actor “to master the technique of the manifold expression of mental experience.”

82

Shpet, “Teatr kak iskusstvo,” 44.

83

Tairov, Zapiski rezhissera, 127.

141

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siveness.” Actors do not imitate anything, be it a role or a reality. Instead, they “create imaginary figures by means of themselves.”84 In Shpet’s work, theater appears as an artificial system in which bodily acts of showing transform real actions onstage into conditional events, exploiting the body of the actor in its twofold nature as both subject and object of aesthetic intentionality. The concept of disassociation marks the decisive point in this process: the act of showing is dissociation. As a mediated form, embodiment implies a differentiation between being a body and using the body as artistic material, that is, between being a body that experiences and a body that expresses. Shpet’s remarks on the modality of showing onstage are thus not as much an elaborated theory of gestures as reflections on the context of theatrical perception, which include the transition from a psychology to a phenomenology of gesture. As a “sensorially experienced motor-sympathetic form of acting expressivity,” the gesture locates the scenic act in the phenomenal world and yet remains a tool of the reductive motion, which, according to Husserl, isolates psychological phenomena from that “which gives them reality and thus a place in the real ‘world’.”85 The showing gesture becomes an object of perception and contemplation, while also marking the tension between the shown and the given. 4.3. A Physiology of Gesture (Ippolit Sokolov) In the early 1920s, the idea of experiencing (perezhivanie) gives rise to its arguably strongest opponent in avant-garde theater discourse: the paradigm of physiological mechanics. The machine as the model of the body, a Taylorist organization of stage events, reflexology as the basis of acting dynamics—these concepts now form the leitmotifs of the debate, marking a transition from the paradigm of (psycho-naturalistic) experience to that of (physio-constructivist) representation. Tairov sees a harbinger of this paradigm shift in Meyerhold’s early “Conditional Theater.” Here, “actors oh-so-carefully removed from their souls those ‘despicable feelings,’ strove 84

Shpet, “Teatr kak iskusstvo,” 31. He uses the instrumental case of “oneself ” here, soboiu.

85

Edmund Husserl, Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie, vol. 1: Allgemeine Einführung in die reine Phänomenologie (Halle/Saale, 1913), 4.

4. Performing/Perceiving: Gesture as Form and Feeling

never (God forbid!) to experience suffering, anger, love, hatred, or joy— but only to represent them coldly and calmly. The representational method became the main dogma of their stage faith and the main compass of their stage practice.”86 This remark from Tairov’s Director’s Notes (1921) on the opposed models of experiencing (perezhivanie) and representing (izobrazhenie) hits the very center of the discussion on theater aesthetics and dramaturgy. Still, it leaves the “representational method” largely open to definition. Tairov also connects “the theater of representation” with a specific type of gesture. For him, the shift from perezhivanie to izobrazhenie leads directly to the “mechanization of the actor” and the distanced objectivity of the “mechanical gesture.”87 Its precise mechanism, however, proves to be a complex phenomenon, which undergoes numerous metamorphoses triggered by biomechanics—the critical approach to initiate and drive the mechanistic turn. Meyerhold’s biomechanical foundation of stage motion radically reconstructs the concept of the theatrical showing gesture along with the entire idea of body language and actor’s techniques in theater. Based on physiological analysis of motion sequences, biomechanics defines the gesture as “resulting from the work of the whole body.”88 At this point at the latest, the gesture ceases to be a primary and privileged emotional expression or an instrument for shaping imaginary characters. “Resulting from the work of the whole body,” it becomes a labor gesture (trudovoi zhest). In keeping with the industrial management of workflows, the artist’s activity now resembles that of the engineer and is to be grounded on technical and scientific knowledge. It is in this spirit that Meyerhold writes: “The method of Taylorism suits the work of an actor just like any other work process striving to achieve maximum production.”89 Accordingly, biomechanics embodies the principle of “theatrical Taylorism,” and Meyerhold is regarded by contemporary critics as the “Taylor of theater” who does away with the “gesture for the sake of the gesture.” 90 86

Tairov, Zapiski rezhissera, 88 (italics in the original).

87

Ibid.

88

Vsevolod Meyerhold, “Die Prinzipien der Biomechanik,” ed. M. Korenev, in Jörg Bochow, Das Theater Meyerholds und die Biomechanik (Berlin, 1997), 82–88, qt. 84.

89

Vsevolod Meierkholʹd, “Akter budushchego,” Ermitazh 6 (1922): 10–11, qt. 11.

90

Arkadii Pozdnev, “Teilorizm na stsene,” Zrelishcha 5 (1922): 8–9, qt. 9.

143

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Meyerhold sums up the restructuring algorithm of acting according to the laws of labor organization in his formula “N=A1 + A2,” which quickly became prominent.91 In his formula, N is the actor, A1 is the constructor giving the instructions, and A2 is the body of the actor realizing these instructions. This rationalized play action is systematically supported by a separate discipline, “scenometry,” which uses a chronometer and a specially subdivided grid of the stage and the side walls to place the actor in a network of coordinates, conditioning them to move in space and time with great precision, accounting for every second and every centimeter (fig. 43).92 Legendary for this technique is Meyerhold’s staging of Fernand Crommelynck’s Le cocu magnfique (fig. 44). In a review of this production, Tretyakov celebrates Meyerhold’s technique as the catharsis of the gesture: “The human body is used in a variety of ways as expressive material set in motion and oriented toward action (deistvie) rather experience (perezhivanie). All gestural garbage is discarded; what is sought here the simplest, most economical, targeted gesture— the Taylorized gesture.”93 Ippolit Sokolov, a committed propagandist of the new theatrical gesture, is less enthusiastic than Tretyakov when it comes to Meyerhold’s directorial work. He openly criticizes Meyerhold’s insufficient orientation toward machines and mechanics, calling biomechanics a “curiosity,” a “joke,” Fig. 43. and, much worse, “a deliberate crippling of the

91

Meyerhold borrows this formula from Benoît Constant Coquelin. Cf. Meierkhol’d, “Akter budushchego,” 10.

92

On scenometry, see Andrei Miliakh, “Teorii novoi antropologii aktera i statʹia S. Eizenshteina i S. Tretʹiakova ‘Vyrazitel’noe dvizhenie’,” in Mnemozina. Dokumenty i fakty is istorii otechestvennogo teatra XX veka, vol. 2 (Moscow, 2000), 280–291, qt. 283.

93

Sergei Tretʹiakov, “Velikodushnyi rogonosets,” Zrelishcha 8 (1922): 12–13, qt. 12.

4. Performing/Perceiving: Gesture as Form and Feeling

Fig. 44. Scene from Meyerhold’s production of Fernand Crommelynck’s Le cocu magnifique (Velikodushnyi rogonosets, 1922).

human being under the guise of a pseudo-scientific theory.” For Sokolov, this theory has no connection to body culture.94 Sokolov had initially closely cooperated with Meyerhold and actively promoted biomechanics. When a commission for theatricalization of body culture (Tefizkult) began its work under the direction of Meyerhold in the summer of 1921, Sokolov acted as deputy director. Following the slogan “From the theater via theatrical body culture to the factory of qualified people,” a series of experiments were carried out under his supervision in different factory settings and teaching situations. Their aim was “the theatricalization of various sports, the artistic design of gymnastic exercises and the application of gymnastics to production processes by means of the theatrical-gymnastic refinement of the labor gesture.” This labor gesture was meant to serve as an intermediary between the theater and the production process: “Academic research on the creation of a system of labor gymnastics in the framework of the theatrical-gymnastic refinement of labor gestures, a process that—with the systematic application of cyclographic and time-

94

Cf. Ippolit Sokolov, “Biomekhanika po Meierkholʹdu,” Teatr 5 (1922): 149–151.

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keeping methods—can be broken down into the analytical study of types of labor movements as well as the creation of norms and models of Taylorized labor gestures.”95 Theatric body culture was thus intended to reconfigure both the labor motion and the expressive motion. Parallel to his work in the Tefizkult Commission, Sokolov conducted studies on the rhythmization of work processes as a research assistant at the laboratory of the State Institute for Rhythm (Nauchno-khudozhestvennaia Laboratoria Instituta Ritma). Also in 1921, immediately after Gastev founded the Central Institute of Labor (Tsentralʹnyi Institut Truda: TsIT), he became a research associate in anthropomechanics and occupational gymnastics, published his findings in the institute’s journal Work Organization (Organizatsia truda) and served as a secretary for literature at TsIT from 1925. From 1922 on, he also worked as a sports teacher in the military training system Vseobuch in Moscow and headed the sports (“physical culture”) department of the Proletkult.96 In addition to intensive journalistic activity, Sokolov taught courses on anthropomechanics, nerve and muscle gymnastics, as well as the reflexology of stage motions, finally founding the Laboratory of Expressionist Theater (Laboratoria teatra ekspressionizma) in the autumn of 1922, an institution dedicated to “the connection of sports and work in Taylorized theater.”97 Entrance examinations used psychotechnical procedures to test candidates for speed and precision of motion coordination as well as for attention, memory, and association skills. The lab’s curriculum was divided into four areas: (1) “agitvariety,” (2) rhythmic motion, (3) Taylorized gesture / reflexology of stage motion, and (4) facial expressions / the grotesque. With this curriculum, Sokolov hoped to distance himself not only from biomechanics but also from several other influential concepts and institutions, among them Dalcroze and his Russian followers teaching at the State Institute for Rhythmic Education (Gosudarstvennyi Institut Ritmicheskogo 95

Cf. a report in Ermitazh 7 (1922): 15. Cf. also the article “Front khudozhestvennogo teatra,” Ermitazh 19 (1922): 3–4.

96

For the chronology of Sokolov’s activities, see the handwritten curriculum vitae in the personal file of Ippolit Sokolov in RGALI, f. 941, op. 10, d. 583. Sokolov presents the Vseobuch tasks in the article “Industrial-rhythmic Gymnastics” (“Industrialʹnoritmicheskaia gimnastika,” in Organizatsiia truda, book 2 (Moscow, 1921), 114–118).

97

Ippolit Sokolov, “Laboratoriia teatra ekspressionizma,” in Russkii ekspressionizm. Teoriia. Praktika. Kritika, ed. V. N. Terekhina (Moscow, 2005), 432–433, qt. 432.

4. Performing/Perceiving: Gesture as Form and Feeling

Vospitaniia) in Moscow. Sokolov purported that Dalcroze’s rhythmic gymnastics caused bodily harm, proceeding as it does from a plastic rather than a gestural model.98 In particular, he argued, the harm lay in overstraining the nerve centers and dulling the activity of the mind, which would lead to the atrophy of memory, association and combinatorial abilities.99 Even if the aesthetic gesture demands rhythmicity, it should be based not on musical but on psycho-physiological and technical grounds, Sokolov believed. His experiments on mass gesticulation at TsIT, Tefizkult and the ScientificArtistic Laboratory lead him to a “neo-dalcrozeism” (neo-dalʹkrozizm)100 derived from the conviction that rhythm, the “skeleton” of every motion in space, should be “industrialized.”101 Sokolov’s second opponent was Foregger. Although his studio at the State Theater Institute (GITIS) focused on machine dances and training actors as mechanisms, Sokolov argued that the mechanical aspect remained a mere metaphor. He insisted that the actor was de facto a living machine: to realize this and to work accordingly was crucial.102 In concrete terms, this meant finding a form of “industrial gesticulation” that would transform the actor onstage into “an automaton, a mechanism, a machine.” Every actor was therefore required to reassess the body not from an organic point of view but from a mechanical engineering perspective.103 Describing the actor as a machine or automaton, Sokolov refers to a stable topos of the avant-garde. Alexei Gan, for example, demands “to abolish the actor and construct the human apparatus scientifically. The organic human being must become a machine.”104 This principle of machine imitation is more closely related to Foregger’s motto “Learn from the

98

Idem, “Teilorizirovannyi zhest,” 10.

99

Idem, “Dalʹkroz i fizkulʹtura,” Ermitazh 9 (1922): 13.

100 Idem, “Industrial’no-ritmicheskaia gimnastika,” 116. 101 More details about these experiments are not known. Sokolov mentions them in his essay “The Rhythmic Act” (“Ritmizirovannoe deistvie,” Vremennik kamernogo teatra 2 (1923): 57–61, qt. 61). 102 Idem, “Vospitanie aktera,” Zrelishcha 8 (1922): 11. 103 See idem, “Industrialʹnaia zhestikuliatsiia,” Ermitazh 10 (1922): 6–7. 104 Aleksei Gan, “Kino-tekhnikum,” Ermitazh 10 (1922): 10–11, qt. 11.

147

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machine!”105 than Sokolov admits in his strategic polemics. The curriculum of the Scientific-Artistic Laboratory, however, only partially implements the mechanic principle. Beneath the analogy of body and machine, which is postulated again and again, beneath the factory-, industry- and machinebound rhetoric, lies a level of argumentation that seeks to project a gesture oriented toward geometry. This becomes evident in retrospective distance from the memories of Nikolai Lvov, head of the Rhythm Movement Department at the Laboratory. Despite the blurred nature of the teaching program, his exercises, Lvov says, had a distinct contour: In 1922, the imagist poet Ippolit Sokolov opened his own studio. Its artistic profile was extremely vague. Expressionist theater, Taylorist theater, eccentric theater—these were the three formulas I. Sokolov proposed without filling them with any content. The directions of individual teachers (V. Zhemchuzny, N. Lvov, V. Parnakh, V. Stepanov) were not coordinated. Sokolov himself conducted a course based on some strange system, forcing students to move according to various geometric shapes—a circle, a spiral, a figure of eight, and so forth. The poster drew attention with its “incomprehensibility,” and several Proletkult students (including Strauch and Gieser) took the exam, apparently wishing to understand the profile of this incomprehensible theater. The school’s opening was very solemn, with one chair left empty for the expressionist [Ernst] Toller, who was in a Bavarian prison. The studio, having no orientation or position of its own, did not last long.106

What Lvov describes here only remotely evokes the mechanics of the machine. By leading his students in circles, letting them walk a figure of eight and run spirals, Sokolov experiments with a geometric organization of motion so as to abstract the physical vividness of playing onstage into the graphic kinetogram of a linear figure. Using the vectors of geometry, he guides the actor’s body toward a new structure of gestures (figs. 45–46). A basic outline of this gestural geometry is drawn in Sokolov’s manifesto “Stilʹ R.S.F.S.R.” (“Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic Style”). Published in 1922 in the January issue of the magazine Zrelishcha (Spec105 Nikolai Foregger, “Pʹesa. Siuzhet. Triuk,” Zrelishcha 7 (1922): 10–11, qt. 10. 106 N. I. Lʹvov, SCTM, f. 150, no. 88774, qtd. in M. N. Liubomudrova, “Teatry Moskvy. Po materialam arkhivov i periodicheskoi pechati,” in Sovetskii teatr. Documenty i materialy (1921–1926) (Leningrad, 1975), 353–360, qt. 355; on the work of the laboratory, see also Sokolov, “Laboratoriia teatra ekspressionizma,” 432f.

4. Performing/Perceiving: Gesture as Form and Feeling

tacles), the manifesto triggered a stormy discussion. It sketches out a brief history of style as a history of habitus, motion, and the “manner of posture, of walking and gesticulation,” featuring a new Soviet style: “If there have been baroque, rococo, empire and modernist styles, there must also be an RSFSR style.” While the rococo style, as modern instruments of chronometry prove, consisted from ellipses, spirals, and oval curves, resulting

Fig. 45–46. The Taylor gesture in the theater.

in a twitching “motion graphic” of convulsive curlicues, capriciously playful shell-like patterns full of “nervous restlessness,”107 the “RSFSR style” is marked by two parameters: (1) linearity and (2) the Taylorized gesture. These form the trajectories of “epochal muscle motions”: For now, our motions are amorphous, they look like children’s scribbles. But according to the principles of economy of effort, they should be carried out in straight lines. A straight line is the shortest distance between two points. The rationalized gesture is the perfect straight line. . . . The straightforwardness of our gestures will show the straight lines of our entire being. The linearity of our gesticulation is the style of our 107 Ippolit Sokolov, “Stilʹ R.S.F.S.R.,” Zrelishcha 1 (1922): 3. Tsivian demonstrates the Hegelian motives of this argumentation: Iurii Tsivʹian, “O Chapline v russkom avangarde i o zakonakh sluchainogo v iskusstve,” Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie 81, no. 5 (2006): 99–142.

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era. The geometry of our rationalized motions will be embodied in the engineering geometry of our era of monumentalism. The RSFSR style is the style of the straight line. And we need to physiologically feel the RSFSR style.108

Stanislavski’s metaphor of the formless gesture as “a dirty line, a smear, a scribble” makes a shadowy reappearance here, but now as a counterpoint to the unembellished, rationalized linear gesture of modernity. This simple, straightforward line in its “purely geometric regularity,” which Wilhelm Worringer believed to offer “the greatest possibility of happiness for people disturbed by the ambiguity and confusion of phenomena,”109 presently becomes the backbone of a new gestural model, linking it directly with the avant-garde “absolutization of the line.”110 The line most clearly illustrates the avant-garde conflict between composition vs. construction as an aesthetic procedure. To Rodchenko, the line is “the first and the last thing.” Not only did it “destroy all the citadels of painting,” it “revealed a new worldview—building the essence rather than depicting objects or non-objects; building new, goal-oriented constructive structures in life, not [away] from and beyond life.”111 Like Ariadne’s thread, the line leads out of the confinements of art and into life through its critique of representation. This transgressive impulse connects the line with kinetic art concepts. It not only forms the bare framework of abstract structure; it is not only a real construction factor—it is also infused with energy circuits, it vibrates; as Popova puts it, it forms an “image of force,”112 which “partici108 Sokolov, “Stilʹ R.S.F.S.R.,” 3. In the essay “Skrizhalʹ veka,” he further formulates his thesis: “The style of our century is that of straight lines and sharp angles.” Ippolit Sokolov, “Skrizhal’ veka,” in Russkii ekspressionizm. Teoriia. Praktika. Kritika, ed. V. N. Terekhina (Moscow, 2005), 446–447, qt. 446. 109 Wilhelm Worringer, Abstraktion und Einfühlung. Ein Beitrag zur Stilpsychologie (Dresden, 1996), 55. 110 On the line in the avant-garde, cf. Georg Witte, “Die Phänomenalität der Linie graphisch, graphematisch,” in Dimensionen der Linie. Zeichnung zwischen Expression und Experiment, ed. Werner Busch, Oliver Jehle, and Carolin Meister (Munich, 2006), 29–54, esp. 29–35. 111 Rodchenko, “Liniia,” 96. 112 Ljubov’ Popova, “Bericht über das Treffen der Kommission zu den Schlußfolgerungen aus der Diskussion am 1.3.1921,” in Europa, Europa: Das Jahrhundert der Avantgarde in Mittel- and Osteuropa, vol. 3, ed. Ryszard Stanislawski and Christoph Brockhaus (Ostfildern-Ruit, 1994), 192.

4. Performing/Perceiving: Gesture as Form and Feeling

pates in the forces of construction and directs them, being the contour and trace of a transverse surface.”113 Kandinsky for his part sees the line making a “leap from the static toward the dynamic.”114 These concepts of the line as non-figurative and vigorous become crucial for Sokolov’s geometry of gesture. Controversially and completely, he renunciates figurative representation by the line, advocating for its transformation into a diagram of forces, tensile stresses, statics, dynamics, and rhythms. Pozdnev—Sokolov’s opponent regarding the Taylorized gesture— relativizes the radicalism of this claim: the straight and right-angled gesture seems indeed “correct for the worker because the labor gesture is aimed at forming external material; the theatrical gesture, however, is both the tool and the product of theater labor.”115 Thus, the theatrical gesture—Pozdnev argues—demands fundamentally different performative criteria and cannot be smoothly “Taylorized.” Pozdnev explains this via the example of one of avant-garde’s most referenced actions: hammering. When driving a nail, a worker must only move his forearm, perhaps only his wrist, so as to save his strength. But when driving the same nail onstage, the actor must perform the blow as an open natural gesture, disregarding the issue of minimal trajectory, for this reason: in the first case, the goal is to hammer a nail; in the second case, it is to show (at a great distance) that the nail is being hammered.116

Pozdnev is not the only one who draws a distinct line between Taylor and theater, arguing against a gestural synthesis of Taylorized theater. Eisenstein and Tretyakov also differentiate between stage motion and labor motion in terms of both mechanics and intentions: stage motion, after all,

113 “10-ia Gos. vystavka ‘Bespretmetnoe tvorchestvo i suprematizm,’ Moscow 1919,” 29. Reprinted in Ivan Matsa, Sovetskoe iskusstvo za 15 let (Moscow, 1933), 112. 114 Wassily Kandinsky, Von Punkt und Linie zu Fläche (Bern, 1953), 99f. Kandinsky had published a first version of this article in Moscow in 1919. See Wassily Kandinsky, “Little Articles on Big Questions: One Point: On Line” [originally published in Iskusstvo (1919)], in Kandinsky: Complete Writings on Art, ed. Kenneth C. Lindsay and Peter Vergo, vol. 1: 1901–1921 (London, 1982), 421–427. 115 Pozdnev, “Teilorizm na stsene,” 8. 116 Ibid.

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needs to transfer excitement energy to the audience.117 But Pozdnev involves yet another aspect: for him, the gesture onstage is functionally defined not by working but by showing—and precisely this showing function is being abandoned when geometrically reorganized according to constructivist vectors. Rendered visible as a labor gesture, it becomes invisible as a showing gesture, and where it appears in economically standardized form, it disappears in theatrically designed one. Sokolov’s gestural geometrism thus theatrically reflects a crisis of representation. His apologia of the straight line gives rise to a dramaturgy that redefines the gesture (and the gestus) of showing in the theater as a tool, fusing the spheres of production and performance. While for Klages, the straight line of a showing gesture creates “a posture that, when all is said and done, is simply a line” pointing into a void, distancing the theatric gesture from its grasping cousins, Sokolov’s geometry anchors the gesture in the sphere of labor, subordinating the gesture of showing to the priorities of the hand at work.

117 Eizenshtein and Tretʹiakov, “Vyrazitelʹnoe dvizhenie,” 303.

IV. Working. The Word as a Tool

Tools are, well—tools. They may, in fact, be an integral part of the worker, as, say, the carpenter’s square is indeed part of the carpenter. Or the tools may be of flesh and bone like these (taking Hugh’s hands, patting each in turn, placing them on his palms for display or as if to begin some children’s game). —Vladimir Nabokov, Transparent Things, 1972.1

1. Poetics of the Tool The topos of the hand as instrumentum instrumentorum dates back to antiquity. Aristotle’s assumption that the human hand can become a claw, a hoof, a bow, a lance, a sword, indeed, any weapon or tool because it can grasp and hold anything2 has received a lively response from the fine arts and become an essential reference point for the negotiation of the artistic object at the interface between ars and techné. But what if the Aristotelian instrument-hand not only grasps and holds but also develops the skill of writing? How does the instrumental dimension of the hand change when

1

Vladimir Nabokov, Transparent Things [1972] (New York, 1989), 79.

2

Aristotle, On the Parts of Animals, ed. James G. Lennox (Oxford, 2001), IV, X, 687a [99].

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a writing implement is grasped? And what gestures belong into a poetics of the tool beyond the handling of pen and paper?3 A poetics of the tool inquires into the forms and functions of symbolic and material text genesis in their mutual entanglements. To speak of the tool from a poetological perspective therefore means above all to focus on aesthetic practices of creating and exploiting symbolic worlds. In other words, a poetics of the tool is a poetics of practice. Hence, it also considers apparatuses that are not, strictly speaking, writing implements: after all, the classical media and utensils of recording are not the only tools connected to literary work. A poetics of the tool also asks, for instance, if one can write with a goniometer, or if the lines drawn by a tape can become lines of a text. Apart from all those quills and pens, printing presses and computers—which the technical history of writing studies extensively—such appropriated tools of designing, constructing, measuring and modelling also shape the genesis of texts. Poetic concepts of creation are to a large degree fed by the operative, instrumental, and technical dimensions of such appropriations. Models of text genesis are inscribed in the use of files, clamps, cutters, and hammers no less than in the handling of quills or typewriters. A poetics of the tool thus refers to the classical media and materials of writing—but also to technical instruments made into writing implements. To explore the scope of such a poetics, one needs to take a step back, since even before the media and the metaphors of textual devices, we must consider the analogies of word and tool. It is not only at the moment of writing that tools intervene in the poetic business; the word itself has an instrumental dimension. Since antiquity, the notion of the tool has belonged to the standard repertoire of language philosophy. In Kratylos, Plato describes the word as “a kind of tool” (organon);4 in his philosophical history of technology, Ernst Kapp takes the Greek organon as the starting point for a theory of the tool as “organ projection,” to which language is also sub-

3

The following passage argues along the lines of considerations developed together with Jocelyn Holland. See Jocelyn Holland and Susanne Strätling, “Introduction. Aesthetics of the Tool—Technologies, Figures, and Instruments of Literature and Art,” Configurations. A Journal of Literature, Science, and Technology 18, no. 3 (2010): special issue Aesthetics of the Tool, 203–209.

4

Platon, “Kratylos,” in his Sämtliche Werke, trans. Friedrich Schleiermacher and Hieronymus Müller, ed. Walter F. Otto et. al., vol. 3 (Reinbek bei Hamburg, 1994), 11–89, qt. 388b.

1. Poetics of the Tool

ject.5 And when Karl Bühler defined the functions of communication, he used the term “organon model” in explicit reference to Plato: language “is related to the tool; it, too, is a device of life, an organon in the sense of a device, a material in-between that is alien to life; language, like the tool, is a shaped mediator.”6 While these approaches target a precise and apt functioning of the sign used as a tool, Wittgenstein, in his Philosophical Investigations, makes a comparison that leads right into the relationship between tools and language use, exploring its broader possibilities: “Consider the tools in a toolbox: there is a hammer, a pair of pliers, a saw, a screwdriver, a yardstick, a glue pot, some nails and screws. . . . The functions of words are just as different as the functions of these objects. (And some of these functions have certain similarities.)”7 In Wittgenstein’s model of the language game, “the variety of language tools” enables a wealth of linguistic actions ranging from describing an object to “making an object according to a description.”8 The metaphor of the tool thus not only proceeds from the momentous idea that speech is an act and that the word is a nomen agentis. The organon theory of language also draws on ideas of operativity and performativity that cannot be limited to specific verbal actions as classified by J. L. Austin. Indeed, it goes far beyond speech act theory, regarding tool use as the phylo- and ontogenetic origin of language. André Leroi-Gourhan traces the links between the formation of the human throat and mouth as an instrument of intentional sound generation—and the formation of the hand as an organ of production.9

5

Ernst Kapp, Grundlinien einer Philosophie der Technik. Zur Entstehungsgeschichte der Kultur aus neuen Gesichtspunkten (Brunswick, 1877), 278 and 294. Florensky uses Kapp’s theses for a speculation on the philosophy of tools, suggesting that biology receives impulses from technology. Cf. Pavel Florenskii, “Organoproektsiia,” Dekorativnoe iskusstvo 12, no. 145 (1969): 39–42.

6

Bühler, Sprachtheorie, XXIf.

7

Wittgenstein, Philosophische Untersuchungen, §11 [243]; on these and the following considerations, see the summary of this chapter in Susanne Strätling, “Poetics of the Tool. Word-Work in the Language Laboratories of the Russian Avant-Garde,” Configurations. A Journal of Literature, Science, and Technology 18, no. 3 (2010): special issue Aesthetics of the Tool, 309–325.

8

Wittgenstein, Philosophische Untersuchungen, §23 [250].

9

André Leroi-Gourhan, Le geste et la parole, vol. 1 (Paris, 1964), for example, 121.

155

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He concludes that “language is not only as characteristic of the human being . . . as the tool. . . . Language is also possible from the moment on when prehistory provides tools, because tool and language are neurologically interconnected.”10 If facial and manual motor skills are intertwined in the production of phonetic and graphic symbols, then all capacity to symbolize is founded in manual operations. What Leroi-Gourhan investigates in the field of paleoanthropology, paleolinguistics had suspected much earlier. Marr and several other scholars stated that language initially served productive rather than communicative purposes,11 an assumption that is phylogenetically confirmed by neuropsychology. From a study carried out together with Aleksandr Luria on “Tools and Signs in the Development of the Child” (1930), Vygotsky concludes that human material and symbolic activities are inextricably entwined in the “inner connection between sign and tool.” The field of symbolic action is first outlined in the material handling of tools and expanded with a growing toolbox. Thus, according to Vygotsky, the use of tools is the preliminary stage of human language: This intertwining of sign and tool, which found its concrete symbolic expression in a primitive hoeing stick, shows how early the sign (and later, its highest form, the word) begins to participate in the human use of tools and to fulfil a highly specific function, comparable with nothing else in the general structure of these operations that stand at the very beginning of human labor.12

Starting from this material, “external” activity, humans become capable of speech so as to construct and manipulate increasingly complex “internal” sign types. This progression from the tool to the word marks the decisive point of contact with the poetological designs of the avant-garde, which seeks to regain the tool in the word to arrive at a poetics of production.

10

Ibid., vol. 1, 162f.

11

Marr, “K semanticheskoi paleontologii v iazykakh neiafeticheskikh sistem,” 271.

12

Vygotskii and Luriia, “Orudie i znak v razvitii rebenka,” 58.

2. Literature in the Instrumental Case (Alexei Gastev)

2. Literature in the Instrumental Case (Alexei Gastev) One of the most radical attempts to turn the utensil in the writer’s hand and this hand itself into tools of labor was undertaken by Alexei Gastev. Throughout his life, Gastev worked to elevate the tool to the leading concept of aesthetic as well as technical activity, to propagate “a love for the tool,” a “tool cult,” a “serious new science about the laws of tool use.”13 In 1918, he published the anthology Poetry of the Worker’s Blow as the first volume of a literary series edited by the Petrograd Proletkult. “Here,” the author says in the preface, “I am trying to solve a verbal artistic problem: to develop a new kind of short artistic report dictated by modern life as a whole, a report subject to word economy.”14 Arguing against the formalist aesthetics of inhibition, deceleration and increased duration, he subordinates literature to the dogma of acceleration and efficiency: “In five minutes, you can present the most complex thought. Serve the main point in a short phrase first; take a minute to do that. Then, comments and figures. That [should take] four minutes.”15 The concept of economy would reappear in Gastev’s project of “scientific work organization” (nauchnaia organizatsiia truda, NOT), which he would develop and test from 1921 onward at the Central Institute of Labor (TsIT). The founding of the TsIT coincided with Gastev’s last literary publication: after the cycle A Batch of Decrees (Pachka orderov, 1921), the writer morphs into the head of an institute, a scientist studying work processes. Gastev would later describe this metamorphosis as a transition from supplementary occupation with literature to his actual work of art. At the TsIT, machine action and thinking merge with the technical apparatus, and everything in the behavior of the worker that had seemed a personal “trifle,” an intimate “secret” of this particular worker, is now put under the glass hood of strict analysis, of complete understandability, visibility, and accessibility. All these “secondary” things are now of decisive importance: all the maneuvers, the way one walks around the machine,

13

Aleksei Gastev: “Liubovʹ k trudovym orudiiam” [1921], in his Kak nado rabotatʹ. Prakticheskoe vvedenie v nauku organizatsii truda (Moscow, 1966), 40–41, qt. 41.

14

Idem, Poeziia rabochego udara (Moscow, 1971), 6.

15

Idem, Kak nado rabotatʹ. Prakticheskoe vvedenie v nauku organizatsii truda (Moscow, 1966), 61.

157

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IV. Working. The Word as a Tool

the concentration and distribution of attention, the hand movements, the body positions.16

Gastev embeds this process of mechanization in the history of the evolution from a single-celled organism to a technical complex. His book Work Positions / Attitudes (Trudovye ustanovki, 1924) is preceded by a motto that lists the main stages of this evolution: Let’s build a monument To the AMOEBA that created a reaction, To the DOG, the greatest friend who pushes us to practice, To the APE, a hurricane of live motion, To the HAND, a wonderful intuition of will and construction, To the WILD MAN hitting a stone, To the TOOL as a banner of will, To the MACHINE that has taught us exactness, And all the other BRAVE THINGS AND CREATURES calling out TO REMAKE HUMAN NATURE.17

This sequence of evolutionary stages idiosyncratically condenses phylogenetic and cultural-historical developments in consistence with Gastev’s anthropo-utopian model. He would keep returning to the basic principles of reaction (amoeba), motion (dog), and intuition (hand). The hand plays a key role in this sequence: if the human organism is to be transformed into an organic machine, the hand is the primary object of training, testing, and conditioning. As mentioned before, to guarantee a basic qualification of hand usage, Gastev argues that young people in the new Russia should take a special exam on movements, especially labor movements. If a person is not crippled, he must pass the exam on two types of motion—striking and exerting pressure. One must be able to strike correctly and to press correctly. Striking a blow is a labor movement mostly carried out outside the processed object, a fast, sharp motion; pressure is a movement exerted in continuous contact with the processed object, a smooth motion. For striking, the power load and agility should be tested. Regarding pressure, the exam should consider the finest redistribution of forces.18 16

Idem, “Novoe proizvodstvennoe povedenie,” in his Kak nado rabotatʹ. Prakticheskoe vvedenie v nauku organizatsii truda (Moscow, 1966), 187–190, qt. 189.

17

Idem, “Postavim pamiatnik” [1918], in his Poeziia rabochego udara (Moscow, 1971), 222.

18

Idem, “Trenazh,” 51f.

2. Literature in the Instrumental Case (Alexei Gastev)

One motion that Gastev keeps exploring in different experimental arrangements is that of hammering; he is fascinated by the psychological and physiological technique of the striking hand (figs. 47–49). The history of art and philosophy shares this fascination, having repeatedly explored hammering as a figure of thought and motion, scrutinizing the blows as a precise rhythm, comparable to a pulse or the pendulum of a clock. Rather than

Fig. 47. Observation of a hammer blow through a sighting telescope with coordinate frame at the Biomechanical Institute of the TsIT.

merely exercising strength, one must consider the material, use a chisel and a wedge to break its resistance and wrest a shape from it. Hammering is “not one-sided mastery but an interplay of forces between hand and tool.”19 The rhythm of this interplay forms a hinge between poetic and practical work. In the rhythmic motion of the striking hand, Gastev detects the kinetogram of a poetic concept that finally turns the word into a hammer blow (fig. 50). Gastev’s early texts revolve around the metallic rhythm of the hammer and the topos of replacing human language by the “iron word” (zheleznoe slovo) of action. In this process, hand, word and tool are assembled into a new structure.

19

Waldenfels, Sinnesschwellen, 100.

159

160

IV. Working. The Word as a Tool

Fig. 48. Kinetogram of stroke motion with hammer and chisel.

Fig. 49. Once you made a decision—act!

Fig. 50. Once you made a decision—act!  The “Call of the All-Ukrainian Literature Committee” (“Vozzvanie Vseukrainskogo Literaturnogo komiteta,” 1919), co-signed by Gastev, contains the slogan: “Comrades, bring your hammers to forge the new word!” Varvara Stepanova translated this formula into a poster design (ink on paper).

2. Literature in the Instrumental Case (Alexei Gastev)

161

162

IV. Working. The Word as a Tool

2.1 Speaking Tools. The Organon Model of the Text Though Gastev’s literary activity lasted barely a decade, his writing changed dramatically during this time. From a narrator who verbosely depicts the debates of strikers vs. strikebreakers and indulges in sound-intensive descriptions of factory work and construction sites, Gastev turns into a poet who creates performative words through minimalist conciseness and a reductionist elliptical syntax. In the language factory of the avant-garde, Gastev initially positions himself as a writer of panegyrics on metal and the machine, an “Ovid of engineers, miners, and metalworkers,” a “Prometheus of the robot age.”20 In a sketch “On ‘modern poetry’” (1922) Khlebnikov describes Gastev as a flame of the work fire in its purest essence—not a “you,” not a “he,” but the clear “I” spoken by the fire of the worker’s freedom; the factory horn that stretches out its hand from the flames to remove the wreath from Pushkin’s tired head, to take those cast iron leaves melted in the hand of fire. . . . Full of fire in a shining outfit the color of blood, [freedom] borrows decrepit dead words but manages to play the songs of the worker’s blow even on [their] dusty strings, formidable and sometimes majestic, [made up] of this triangle: 1) science, 2) the Earth star, 3) the muscles of the working hand.21

As disparagingly as Gastev himself will later look back onto his technoRomantic early phase, even his first stories and poems are marked by an operative linguistic quality of the tool. Here, instruments articulate the manipulative power of language; the word becomes the sound of the anvil, the scream of the factory siren, the groan of the shaft, the music of the machine. An early story by Gastev, “The Hammer” (“Molot”; from the cycle The Machine [Mashina], first published in 1918), shapes this linguistic image into an allegory. The narrative revolves around an uncanny animation of things, which is fundamentally different from the (cubo-)futurist revolt of things—the liberation of objects from their meaningful functions as it appears, for instance, in Khlebnikov’s poem “The Crane” (“Zhuravlʹ,” 1909) 20

The Ovid reference is taken from Nikolai Aseev’s poem “Gastev” (1923), in his Stikhotvoreniia i poemy (Leningrad, 1967), 130–131, the Prometheus reference from Richard Stites, Revolutionary Dreams. Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the Russian Revolution (New York, 1989), 151.

21

Velimir Khlebnikov, “O sovremennoi poezii,” Veshch’ 3 (1922): 7.

2. Literature in the Instrumental Case (Alexei Gastev)

or Mayakovsky’s “Cloud in Trousers” (“Oblako v shtanakh,” 1914–1915). In Gastev’s story, a melting furnace opens behind the closed doors of a workshop, a glowing steel column slides out of the flames and is transported by a crane through the hall toward a huge hammer, which had rested there unused for a decade. Now it stirs, gives an “inhuman groan,” and with powerful, “satanic” blows, in an “iron storm,” it begins to form the first steel beam of a gigantic future building. Rocked by the vibrations of the blows, the City Workers’ Palace, where the first New Year’s Day after the October Revolution is being celebrated, collapses, but a worker calls out from the hammer’s scaffolding to the horrified masses rushing by: “This hammer I’m standing on is one of the best tribunes in the world. I’ll explain to you, listen.”22 What follows is a history of the tool; the ultimate goal, however, is to give the floor to the tool itself: “But wait: let this orator here speak.”23 Once again, we hear hammer blows, the sparks fly. Against this backdrop, a utopian image arises: a festival of work, in whose midst thousands upon thousands of people raise their hands and shout: “A poet, a poet for our orator!”24 Then, the hammer falls silent, and the text ends with a cannon salvo. Like most of Gastev’s early stories, this one seamlessly combines the set pieces of avant-garde imagery of construction, unfolding the metaphor of forging as an allegory of building socialism. Within the narrative stereotypes of this socialist master plot, Gastev, however, subtly transfigures the word. Embedded in the unsophisticated metallurgical narrative, the blows of the hammer transform the word into an udarnoe slovo, “shock wor(d/k).”25 With the word transmitted from the worker to the tool to the poet, we witness the empowerment of the poetic word through the rhetoric of the tool. Initially unused and unusable, the hammer now turns out to be both an object and a medium of a speech sequence gradually leading from speaking about the tool via the speaking tool to speech as a tool. Gastev persistently returns to this mutual echo of human and machine speech, which gives rise to the utopia of a new linguistic form. In the prose 22

Ibid.

23

Ibid.

24

Ibid.

25

Slovo is Russian for word, and udarnoe is derived from udar, blow/strike, but also refers to udarnyi trud, shock work. (Translator’s note.)

163

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IV. Working. The Word as a Tool

miniature “Our Celebration,” a collective “we” of enthusiastic world builders keeps demanding “Songs! Music! An orator!” to see all these forms replaced by the “eternal iron word” of industrial artifacts: “No songs, no music!—the iron bridges and buildings howled. Our creatures—the towers, the rails, the viaducts—raised a rumble: We’re demanding new words, eternal, iron words.”26 The story “To the Orator” begins by silencing the speaker and proceeds with contrasting the “mere” words of purely rhetorical speech about things with the language of things themselves: We have come with news, reliable as iron, and cheerful as the sounds of an engine in the desert. Songs never sung before, stories never told before—this is what we want. We don’t want those sung and spoken human words. We’re aiming higher. The clang of a hammer, the flutter of drives and transmissions, the rattle of forging, the clatter of hammering, the whisper of sawing—[these are our] words and appeals. ................................................................. Be silent, you orator. Stand sill, you singing legends. Let’s listen: The blast furnaces we’ve built shall speak. The beams we’ve lifted shall speak.27

Gastev’s early prose abounds with variations of these transitions between word and tool. Celebrating speech surpassed by metallurgy, it ultimately poetizes Engels’s thesis that language was “born of work and with work.”28 This thesis has repeatedly been used when attempting a poetological and philosophical redesign of the word in terms of the tool. Looking for the limits of language, modernity encounters the tool that marks the alternatives of saying vs. doing or making. Here the tool appears as a mute but mighty antipode of the word, illuminating the discursive constraints of

26

Aleksei Gastev, “Nash prazdnik,” in his Poeziia rabochego udara (Moscow, 1971), 174–176.

27

Idem, “Oratoru,” in his Poeziia rabochego udara (Moscow, 1971), 178–179.

28

Friedrich Engels, “Dialektik der Natur. Der Anteil der Arbeit an der Menschwerdung des Affen,” in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Werke, vol. 20 (Berlin, 1962), 444–455, qt. 447.

2. Literature in the Instrumental Case (Alexei Gastev)

language and acting where the empty eloquence of the word remains without effect. At the same time, however, the tool functions as an analogue of the word, or as a performative sign of powerful speech acts. The formula of the word as a tool encapsulates the concept of a language not reduced to representation, an essentially transformational language—not a means of naming but an instrument for inventing and creating. This concept of language crystallizes in a specific mode of speech, a kind of “speaking in the instrumental case,” which characterizes operative Russian avant-garde poetics from constructivism to Proletkult. They call for the writer (just as the visual artist) to go into production in order to let “work itself . . . have its say,” as Walter Benjamin puts it.29 Tretyakov locates such a literary production scenario in the avant-garde leitmotif of the factory. Here, the poet is only a coworker, a word constructor, a master wordsmith in the factory of living life. Poems are but a word alloy laboratory, the workshop where the metal of the word is bent, cut, riveted, welded, and screwed together. After all, in the end the word will have to go beyond the poem and become part of real life, just like a swing of a pickaxe, a kiss, a slice of bread.30

Only for an uninitiated reader does the kiss seem an alien, incongruous element in this triad. As Lev Kuleshov observed, “kissing is a working process, since it contains a certain mechanics.”31 In the language workshop envisioned by Tretyakov, the word takes on a new shape under the blows of a hammer, which transforms it from an abstract sign into a vital form of existence. The tool thus holds a threefold promise for the word: the chance of effective production, the option of a material reality, and the conversion of symbolic forms into physical experience. The language factory is a frequent category of self-description in avant-garde literature. Mayakovsky’s “The Poet Worker” (“Poet rabochii”)

29

Walter Benjamin, “Der Autor als Produzent” [1934], in his Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser, vol. 1, part 2 (Frankfurt/M., 1991), 683–701, qt. 688. See also Osip Brik, “V proizvodstvo!,” LEF 1 (1923): 105–108, qt. 105.

30

Sergei Tretʹiakov, “Knige,” in his Jasnysh (Chita, 1922), 112.

31

Lev Kuleshov, Iskusstvo kino (Moscow, 1929), 53.

165

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comes to mind, or Andrei Platonov’s “Literature factory” (“Fabrika literatury”) with literary correspondents as “craftsmen at the machines,” national correspondents as “foremen,” fiction writers as “fitters,” and critics as “engineers.”32 What Platonov exaggerates ironically, other writers, among them the members of the proletarian poets’ association “The Forge” (“Kuznitsa,” 1920–1931), take very seriously indeed. In the poem “Word Factory” (“Zavod slova,” 1921), Aleksandr Bezymensky calls for new labor words (rabochie slova) able to operate workbenches and factories.33 The fact that these word factories produce nothing but literature is one of the aporia in the interrelation of word and tool.34 Gastev’s poetics of media manipulation occupies its own position on this spectrum. The premise of his last literary publication, the verse cycle A Batch of Decrees (1921), which Siegfried Zielinski called “the ten commandments of a new world,”35 expresses the wish to destroy speech so as to “force the machine to speak.” Following the example of Mayakovsky’s “Order to the Army of the Arts,” Gastev classifies his texts as directives. In the staccato style of a military command, all ten decrees by Gastev strictly follow the principle of one sentence per line, each sentence being as minimalist as possible, often consisting of a single word. Decree 02 obeys this imperative with particular conciseness: Timekeeper on duty. To the machines. Stand up. Pause. Charge of attention. Serve. Switch on. 32

Andrei Platonov, “Fabrika literatury. (O korennom uluchshenii sposobov literaturnogo tvorchestva)” [1926], in his Literaturnaia kritika, publitsistika (Moscow, 2011), 45–55.

33

Aleksandr Bezymenskii, “Zavod slova,” in Antologiia russkoi liriki pervoi chetverti XX veka, ed. I. S. Ezhov and A. I. Shamurin (Moscow, 1991), 527.

34

Accordingly, “Kuznitsa” has often been accused of aporia. Cf., for example, Tretʹiakov’s harsh polemic against the Deklaratsiia proletarskikh pisatelei “Kuznitsa.” Sergei Tretʹiakov, “Iskusniki iz Kuznitsy,” LEF 11 (1928): 144–147.

35

Siegfried Zielinski, Archäologie der Medien. Zur Tiefenzeit des technologischen Hörens und Sehens (Reinbek bei Hamburg, 2002), 266. Aleksei Gastev, “Pachka orderov,” in his Poeziia rabochego udara (Moscow, 1971), 215–220. Cf. also review by Arvatov in LEF 1 (1923): 243–245.

2. Literature in the Instrumental Case (Alexei Gastev)

Self-feed. Stop. Half a minute’s exposure. Over. Operation B. Runoff two, runoff four. Seven. Series 20, on to production.36

This sequence follows a speech rhythm analogous to that of the working process. Gastev’s preliminary remarks on the recitative intonation state that the cycle should be read “in equal measured parts, as if fed into a machine”: There should be no expression, pathos, false classical enthusiasm, or poetic stresses in the reading. Words and phrases follow each other at the same speed. A formidable action takes place, and the batch is presented to the listener as a libretto of material events.37

The mechanical metric of Gastev’s verse opposes the poetic sound structures of syllabo-tonic parallelism in favor of measured, machine-like rhythm. Verses become phases of production; language a series of signals that determine the course of motion in the mechanical process. Switching on, switching over and switching off are the key devices of this process. “Decree 05” demands Phrases in the decimal system. Boiler house of speeches. Destroy literature. Turn tunnels into throats. Make them speak.38

This anthropomorphic speech factory is the place where tools gain language. Tools, as Bernhard Waldenfels puts it, are “things with which one

36

Gastev, “Pachka orderov,” 217.

37

Idem, “Slovo pod pressom. Predislovie. Technicheskaia instruktsiia,” in his Poeziia rabochego udara (Moscow, 1971), 215.

38

Gastev, “Pachka orderov,” 219.

167

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can do something,”39 and what Gastev wants to do with them is: speak. For him, tools are first and foremost language tools, technical organs of poetic articulation. In a subtle interplay of rhetoric, instrumentalization, and embodiment, the word can only materialize as a tool when the tool has become a word. 2.2 Showing Tools. The Evidence Model of the Text The concept of speech production in language factories tries not only to broaden the boundaries of the word but also to revise the idea of representability in literature, using the term “tool” to explore the mediality of literary evidence (evidentia). Apart from ways in which words can act and be used, it employs the tool to look into new forms of verbal visibility, for texts that work and are worked can hardly be adequately understood or described in terms of readability. Instead, they raise a claim to be seen rather than read. In a 1919 sketch about the “Tendencies of Proletarian Culture,” Gastev calls for the “mechanization of the word,” a possibility that he saw at that time in collective montage art: We cannot predefine what form the technicalization of the word will take, but it will certainly be not merely a sound effort; the word will gradually separate from its living host, the human being. Here, we are approaching some really new combined art, where purely human performances— all this pitiful modern play-acting and chamber music—will fall back. We will achieve an unprecedentedly objective demonstration of things, mechanized crowds and stunning open grandeur that knows nothing intimate or lyrical.40

The concept of the technified word, still vague in 1919, took on a clearer shape a few years later in the experimental set-ups at the Central Institute of Labor. Here, the term “technified word” targeted, firstly, the stenographic recording of a new objectivity, and secondly, diagrammatic reasoning in literature. Both obey the same commandment: “the need for accurate visualization (displaying, reflecting, representing).” The core of this lan-

39

Waldenfels, Sinnesschwellen, 91.

40

Aleksei Gastev, “O tendentsiiakh proletarskoi kultury,” in Literaturnye manifesty ot simvolizma do nashikh dnei, ed. S. B. Dzhimbinov (Moscow, 2000), 423–428, qt. 428.

2. Literature in the Instrumental Case (Alexei Gastev)

guage is formed by “all words that are born under time and space shortage,” such as “the hard and unambiguous speech of trade letters, the language of telegrams, the dialogue of business people when meeting at a bank or a train station, the phrases exchanged by conductors when a train pulls of.” Their dogma is immediacy and evidence: “The word must be short, precise, categorical.”41 The same applies to (hand)writing. If not everyone can master the art of shorthand, Gastev argues, then at least all people “who call themselves cultured” must learn not only to write “clearly and distinctly” but “at the same time to increase the speed of writing to thirty words per minute.” And maybe writing exercises to achieve this speed, combined with short verbal expressions, would be much better training than, say, writing complex historical or literary works. The very method of verbal and written representation should be seasoned with precise measure. Folk language, stupid and confusing with its sayings and metaphors but still officially admired, should be discarded.42

Even more emphatically than in Gastev’s philosophy, the extent to which the tachygraphic principle must be understood as part of operative literature is devised in Nikolai Fedorov’s Philosophy of Joint Action: “Since the coming period will be an epoch not of words but mostly of deeds, it is hoped that mankind will perfect the telegraphic style and shorthand writing, thus facilitating recording.”43 Quite in keeping with Gastev’s idea of “shorthanding” literature, Nikolai Chuzhak asks: “the art/work transcripts of our party-discussion sessions—don’t they make you turn the pages like no novel ever did?”44

41

Idem, “Programma kulʹturnoi ustanovki” [1921], in his Kak nado rabotatʹ. Prakticheskoe vvedenie v nauku organizatsii truda (Moscow, 1966), 92–100, qt. 93f.

42

Ibid.

43

Nikolai F. Fedorov, Filosofiia obshcheago dela. Statʹi, mysli i pisʹma Nikolaia Fedorovicha Fedorova, vol. 1, ed. V. A. Kozhevnikov and N. P. Peterson (Verny, 1906 [reprint Farnborough, 1970]), 351.

44

Nikolai Chuzhak, “Literatura zhiznestroeniia,” Novyi LEF 10 (1928): 2–17, and Novyi LEF 11 (1928): 15–19 [reprint in Literatura fakta. Pervyi sbornik materialov rabotnikov LEFa, ed. N. Chuzhak (Moscow, 1929 [reprint Moscow, 2000]), 34–67, qt. 62].

169

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IV. Working. The Word as a Tool

Still further condensing notational conventions, Gastev increasingly approaches a model of textuality that detaches itself from the word, switching to alternative, non-verbal forms of representation. All notes that we give to someone should consist mainly of numbers— plus a short precise text. The sense of saving time and space should be a dedicated goal of our cultural education. It is clear that modern school practice with its effete literariness should be crossed out and replaced by the technical drawing, the sketch, and the graph. . . . Everything must be drawn, measured, expressed in concrete numbers.45

This recoding of writing into numbers and technical drawings builds upon a numerical understanding of the world, which demands calculability from the arts. Under the rule of a numerical order, texts become operative units exclusively intended as objects of knowledge. In a 1928 essay on the principles of standardization and their transfer to the “organization of literary production,” Gastev explicates this as “the transformation of the literary work into the table, the plan, the map.”46 In spite of their heterogeneous visualization modalities and epistemic structures, the three forms mentioned by Gastev make similar claims: immediacy, simultaneity, overview. Transforming writing into images—tableaus, charts, and tables—establishes a poetics of statistically ordered representability. Using the principles of registering, reducing, and diagrammatizing, literature is reorganized as (and finally replaced with) production. 2.3. Writing Tools. The Media Model of the Text In accordance with this emancipation of the text from the word and its turn to diagrammatic writing, Gastev also revises the inventory of writing implements, aiming to redefine the relationship between writing utensils and production tools. In the fifth preface to the anthology Poetry of the Worker’s Blow, Gastev announces an age in which “the artistic construction of the word will be a new kind of arena, to be entered not only with an arsenal of various poetic metaphors but also with a constructor’s chisel,

45

Gastev, “Programma kulʹturnoi ustanovki,” 93f.

46

Idem, “TsIT kak izyskatelʹnoe sooruzhenie,” in his Kak nado rabotatʹ. Prakticheskoe vvedenie v nauku organizatsii truda (Moscow, 1966), 198–215, qt. 204ff.

2. Literature in the Instrumental Case (Alexei Gastev)

a wrench and a chronometer.”47 In this vision, literature once again appears as a setting in which rhetoric competes with technology. At this point at the latest, Gastev makes it unmistakably clear that his concept of the tool is not metaphoric: “Word artworks are things designed, calculated, constructed, built with hand tools.” The spectrum here ranges from precise measuring instruments to shaping and processing tools, each with its own cultural semantics. The evolutionarily oldest tool mentioned, the chisel, has a history spanning thousands of years, in which it served as an (archaic) writing implement and a device for various kinds of work. It both calls to mind the past culture of cuneiform writing and anticipates a future literary utopia, in which writing will no longer consist of letters but use “the alphabet of work” (azbuka raboty; fig. 51). The chronometer, on the other hand, represents the desire for quantifiability, standardization, and unification. Unlike the chisel, it is not a crude instrument that merely reproduces and reinforces the work of the human hand. With the chronometer (and the watch/clock in general), the tool has mutated away from a limb extension into a device intended not for making but for measuring and controlling. Back in the nineteenth century, Kapp had called the watch an anthropological master tool that had enabled man to evolve from an animal laborans to an animal rationale. “A primitive tool, the pliers, serves to grasp and hold on to things: the animal claw does the same, albeit perhaps not quite as well—but with a measuring and numbering mechanism in his hand and his gaze directed at the watch to record distances in time and space, man reaches his highest task. According to its Sanskrit root, the very word for the human being, Mensch, is cognate to measuring, rendering him a surveyor and thus a thinker!”48 For Gastev’s efficiency-oriented theory of work, the watch embodies chronometrical normalization and control: it is the watch that organizes movement studies to rationalize work processes. The stopwatch,

47

Idem, “Predislovie k piatomy izdaniiu” [1924], in his Poeziia rabochego udara (Moscow, 1971), 11–14, qt. 14. Cf. El Lissitzky’s similar consideration regarding the visual arts: the artist “must leave the old little instruments, all these quills, brushes, palettes and such, to take up the chisel, the lead army of the typesetter, the rotary machine–and all this will obediently start working in [the artist’s] hands.” Elʹ Lisitskii, “Novaia kulʹtura,” Shkola i revoliutsiia 24–25 (1919): 11.

48

Kapp, Grundlinien einer Philosophie der Technik, 75.

171

172

IV. Working. The Word as a Tool

Fig. 51.

2. Literature in the Instrumental Case (Alexei Gastev)

the high-speed watch and the timer render economical and rationalized sequences of movement readable and writable as numbers.49 This makes the watch a “meta-machine,”50 a key medium for the cyclographic recording of motion sequences as curves in time and for the restructuring of processes in organization charts. This, in turn, enables a new graphic system, since the principle of chronometric measurability forms the basis of diagrammatic representation, the linearity of writing replaced with the curve of the temporal diagram. The watch is the poietic tool of literature remodelled into a motion curve. From chronometry, the chrono-diagram emerges as a literary form. The wrench—the third tool listed by Gastev—has no history as a cultural tool comparable to those of the chisel (the prototypical working instrument) and the watch (the prototypical measuring device). It represents construction tools; but above all, it stands for something that could, in reference to Sennet, be called invention tools. Almost like the screwdriver, the wrench belongs to the “sublime” tools, objects “very simple in form that seemingly can do anything.” Unlike the “frustrating,” as he considers, “fit-for-purpose tools,” which remain within the limited scope of direct, unambiguous application, the all-purpose tool contains countless possibilities for improvising and expanding our skills as well as imagination.51 Although Sennett’s definition of the sublime remains somewhat schematic and ultimately focuses on “large intuitive leaps into the unknown,” it convincingly conveys a key idea: in designing and using tools to control objects we open up spaces of inventio that contain a surplus, a potential to challenge and transcend the established patterns of use.52 From this perspective, the wrench occupies a key position in Gastev’s literary triad of tools. One could call it—by analogy with the roman-à-clef—an outil-à-clef: while a roman-àclef explores the options of fictional narration at the boundary between literature and life, the wrench—gaechnyi kliuch in Russian, with kliuch meaning “key,”—operates in the transition zone between production and art.

49

On the use of the stopwatch and cyclography in Russia, see Osip A. Ermanski, Wissenschaftliche Betriebsorganisation und Taylor-System (Berlin, 1925), 133–173.

50

See Siegfried Zielinski in the Gastev chapter of his Archäologie der Medien, 274.

51

Richard Sennett, The Craftsman (London, 2008), 194f.

52

Cf. ibid., 20ff.

173

174

IV. Working. The Word as a Tool

In the ensemble of chisel, watch and wrench, Gastev combines the techniques of processing, measuring, and constructing to form the foundation of an operative poetics, thus rewriting poetics as poietics. For Gastev, a tool is not only an instrumental hinge but a switching point for the change of medium, which transforms the written line into a curve in a graph, a stroke in a sketch or an abstractly calculable x in an algorithm. As integrals of an operative poetics, tools thus restructure the literary field with regard to two core paradigms of modernity. The poetics move from reproduction and representation toward production and presentation. The extent to which this paradigm shift is negotiated in terms of new writing utensils is illustrated by El Lissitzky’s position.

Fig. 52. El Lissitzky, MERZ letter to Ivan Tschichold.

2. Literature in the Instrumental Case (Alexei Gastev)

In 1923, Lissitzky drafted the program of a revolution in type media in his manifesto “Topography of Typography,” which envisioned the transition from analogue to digital forms of literature and sketched out a project of an electronic library. By declaring the printing press a media anachronism, Lissitzky also revised the production of literature: “The new book demands the new writer; the goose quill and the inkwell are dead.”53 The consequences of writing technologies for the technique of representation were explained in a manifesto by Lissitzky, typewritten in March 1925 and addressed to Ivan Tschichold (fig. 52) as a “MERZ letter”: “It would, at the least, be an unproductive waste of time to prove that one does not have to write with one’s own blood and a goose quill when the typewriter exists. Proving today that the task of every production, and thus also of art, is not representation (Darstellen) but presentation (Dastellen) is an equally unproductive waste of time.”54 Unlike Lissitzky, however, Gastev does not argue according to the logic of technological developments and their aesthetic implications. Instead, he abandons the register of traditional writing implements and fundamentally redefines the concept of (literary) writing. Though the tool is fitted into an aesthetical dogma of normalized, controlled and standardized operation in Gastev’s poetics, it still is far from a mere means. As an instrument of literary transformation, it is itself exposed to trans- and reformations. “A tool is not only set in motion; it begins to move and keeps moving.”55 If tools realize the poietic metaphor of production, then all of them—hammer and chisel, press and prism, watch and wrench—enter the processes of aesthetic transformation. Words as tools of action, texts as tools of showing—they bring forth a poetics of practice that is productive but does not have to exhaust itself in production alone. In his Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, Cassirer has pointed out that “the tool never simply served to control and master the outside world—in which case it would have to be regarded as a finished, given material. Rather, its use creates an image of this outside world, its spiritual-ideal form, in human

53

Lissitzky, “Topographie der Typographie,” 356.

54

El Lissitzky, “Merz-Brief an Ivan Tschichold,” typographische mitteilungen (October 1925): special issue elementare typographie [reprint Mainz, 1986], 205 (underlining by El Lissitzky).

55

Bernhard Waldenfels, Der Stachel des Fremden (Frankfurt/M., 1990), 145.

175

176

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perception.”56 From the perspective of a phenomenology of gesture, Flusser assigned the tool not to the principle of control but to that of freedom: The concept of a tool can be defined in such a way as to encompass everything that moves in a gesture and, accordingly, everything that is an expression of some freedom. Calling tools extensions of body parts, and body parts, tools of freedom, could, of course, render the proposed boundary unclear. But this would not be a good approach, for it conflates rather than articulates. For methodologically, it is exactly the difference between the gesture of moving fingers and the gesture of the moving pen that is of interest in determining the essential in each of the two gestures. For by seeing tools as instruments of freedom, it is possible to approach them from two different angles: from one standpoint, the pen may be regarded as a finger prosthesis (a lengthening outward, so a “finger extension”) but, from another standpoint, as an “epithesis” of the pen (an inward extension of the pen, a “pen-internalization”).57

Though purpose-oriented, Gastev’s poetics of the tool also explores this potential of forming, imagining and remodeling, in which the tool obstinately resists comprehensive linguistic and material control. In this resistance, the tool’s own dynamics opens up spaces in which technofacts become artifacts. Even if the tool gives rise to human speech, even if language contains the action of the tool, and even if writing involves the handling of tools—still, not every speech act and not every writing scene is functionally limited to technical performance or purpose-driven technological rationality in the name of utilitarian instrumentalism. Rather, they are to expand the options and to transform the world. Gastev’s poetic practice of “the worker’s blow” reveals this ambiguous nature of any textualization as a poetic and poietic process. His poetics of the tool centers around this very ambiguity, revealing homo poeticus as homo significans, and homo significans as homo faber.

56

Ernst Cassirer, Philosophie der symbolischen Formen, vol. 2: Das mythische Denken (Darmstadt, 1953), 253.

57

Flusser, Gesten, 222. English translation: Vilém Flusser, Gestures, trans. Nancy Ann Roth (London, 2014), 166.

V. Acting. Poetics of Operativity

1. Word and Deed The gesture gives symbolic meaning to physical motion. This physiosemiotic duality has been considered above all as the key to oratorical actio as a specific form of verbal action. Yet, rhetoric of staged speech makes only one example from the many ways the word can evolve into motion. The narrow realm of oratory practice is transcended by the possibility of building worlds with language. By putting the word into action, the gesture is no longer bound by the body of the speaker but must be understood in the domain of the deed. The conjunction of acting and speaking is closely associated with speech act theory. It is useful to remember, though, that the basic differentiation between “saying something” vs. “doing something” underlying Austin’s initial definition of the performative was later considerably modified. Firstly, Austin himself extended the concept of performativity from institutionally regulated special cases to a principal dimension of all speech. Secondly, it has been argued later that speech which demands to be an act is even more violently authoritarian than had been considered in the early phase of speech act theory.1

1

Judith Butler, Excitable Speech. A Politics of the Performative (London, 1997).

178

V. Acting. Poetics of Operativity

This powerful and potentially violent agency of speech forms the telos of political but also poetic utopias and practices to which modernity is extremely susceptible. However, attempts to explore the tangible impact of language have been made long before the twentieth century. In Russian culture in particular, the operative coupling of hand and word has a long history. Conceptually formulated, it appears here first in church and legal history: the syntagma “word and deed” (slovo i delo) becomes part of theological and juridical vocabulary and proceedings. The corresponding institutional framework was created in 1649 by the first Russian legal code, the Sobornoe Ulozhenie by Tsar Alexei I, which remained in force until 1832. According to the Ulozhenie, verbal abuse of the tsar or any other state or ecclesiastical dignitary was tantamount to an assault on that person and thus was to be punished just as severely.2 The historian N. Novombergsky collected over 400 trial records of slovo i delo accusations as early as in the sixteenth century, that is, even before the legal regulation by the Sobornoe Ulozhenie.3 Though the formulation slovo i delo gosudarevy (royal word and deed) was banned by Catherine II in 1762, this practice remained common until the late eighteenth century, finding a legal basis in the lèse-majesté laws introduced by Peter I. These assumed that every verbal attack on the tsar amounted to an attack on his life and was accordingly to be punished by death. The reach of the lèse-majesté laws was very broad, as can be seen from the numerous cases that Mikhail Semevsky edited in 1883 under the title Slovo i delo—a compilation of files from the secret chancellery of Peter I.4 These documents suggest that the crimen laesae majestatis attempted to reaffirm the unity of speech and action, which had been disintegrating since

2

Claude Sergio Ingerflom, “Entre le mythe et la parole: L’action. Naissance de la conception politique du pouvoir en Russie,” Annales. Histoire. Sciences sociales 51, no. 4 (1996): 733–757, qt. 740.

3

Nikolai Novombergskii (ed.), Slovo i delo gosudarevy, vol. 1: Protsessy do izdaniia Ulozheniia Alekseia Mikhailovicha 1649 goda, and vol. 2: Prilozhenie. Koldovstvo v Moskovskoi Rusi XVII-go stoletiia (Moscow, 2004); on linguistic-historical and sociolinguistic aspects, see Vladimir V. Kolesov, Slovo i delo. Iz istorii russkikh slov (St. Petersburg, 2004).

4

Semevskii, Slovo i delo.

1. Word and Deed

the Middle Ages.5 And it is precisely this precarious unity that makes these documents so fascinating for some members of the avant-garde. We have seen in Aleksey Tolstoy’s literary historiography how he proceeded from reading testimonies of torture to a violent gesture-based theory of language and literature, bridging the gap between past and present as well as between word and deed. As has been mentioned before, in a poetological testimony for the anthology The Way We Write (1930), Tolstoy reports how reading Slovo i delo was a seminal event for him: “I saw, I felt the Russian language. . . . In court (torture) acts, there was the language of the deed.” 6 This reference to court records as a regained “language of the deed” (iazyk dela) demonstrate an interest in the discourse of jurisprudence, primarily focused on how the law violently welds together slovo i delo, statement and action. This relates especially to the avant-garde poetics of lifebuilding (zhiznestroenie): if the word is powerful enough to be punished by death, it can also promise a new life. Tretyakov’s operative sketches (operativnye ocherki) are a case in point. Connecting the avant-garde topos of life-building literature with the concept known as “literature of fact,” they seek to create a word-based reality. In doing so, the sketches fuse poetic and juridical discourse.

1.1 Literary Liability A short autobiographical note by Tretyakov from 1934 states the juridical claim of is poetics. In it, Tretyakov sums up his poetic credo, tracing the evolution of his literary work as a paradigm shift from observation to construction: Before the first five-year plan, I wrote my works as an observer, a traveler passing by, a representative of an artistic arbitration court, so to speak. But the five-year plan drew me into the construction processes and taught me not to “narrate” but to be an equal in the ranks of the builders, a person who keeps a logbook of the five-year plan. The direct result is the operative character of my works. . . . The field in which the writer

5

Iurii Lotman, “Slovo i delo,” in his Nepredskazuemye mekhanizmy kultury (Tallinn, 2010), 125–133.

6

Tolstoi, Kak my pishem, 130.

179

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works becomes, to a certain extent, the work of his hands, and the writer himself, transformed by the five-year plan, becomes its product.7

In order “not merely to depict life but to form it anew,”8 the writer must turn from a passive observer at the margin of things into an agent of social change. This transfiguration should be accompanied by a redefinition of prose aimed to extend or indeed replace the classical narratological alternatives of “telling” vs. “showing” by a third concept: “doing.” Here, literature does not record facts but produces them; it creates rather than recreates a reality. One could thus speak of a three-step concept of literature, the text proceeding from description to prescription and finally findig its actual purpose in operation. The poetics of operativity involves the liability of the word, as inherent in the tradition of slovo i delo. Tretyakov takes his own, legally marked position here, as suggested by his credo cited above. He refers to “an artistic arbitration court,” whose times, he says, are over. Instead of judging, the writer now officiates as a witness; instead of presiding over aesthetic truths and lies, the goal is to protocol life processes in real time. But this does not mean that jurisdiction has abandoned literature. Rather, Tretyakov replaces the artistic arbitration court with a criminal court. The above-cited autobiographical note continues as follows: “I no longer simply described people; I was liable for my characters.”9 Under the pressure of denunciations and purges, other writers in the mid-1930s also voiced their adherence to a concept of law and duty in literature, which had come to replace the neutral observing function. When Pilnyak is called upon to give an account of how he evolved as a writer at a board meeting of the Soviet Writers’ Union in October 1936, he chooses a formulation very close to Tretyakov’s: “And now let me say what I felt very clearly when I gave up the position of an eyewitness: it was a kind of com-

7

Sergej Tretjakov, “S. Tretjakov,” in his Die Arbeit des Schriftstellers. Aufsätze, Reportagen, Porträts, ed. Heiner Boehncke (Reinbek bei Hamburg, 1972), 141–143, qt. 141. The Russian original is not published; the text was first published in German in Illustrierte Sammelbände WOKS 7–8 (1934): 135–137, qt. 135.

8

Sergei Tretʹiakov, “Raport pisatelia-kolkhoznika,” in his Mesiats v derevne (iiunʹ–iiulʹ 1930). Operativnye ocherki (Moscow, 1931), 3–15, qt. 15.

9

Tretjakov, “S. Tretjakov,” 141.

1. Word and Deed

radeship between rights and duties.”10 For Tretyakov, the ethical position of responsibility and obligation becomes a justiciable way of being answerable for others. Its formulation makes clear how the imperative to act is overlaid by a liability principle, and that implies: how literatura fakta always understands the fact as a (potentially criminal) act. In other words, literatura fakta is not documentary non-fiction—it is a legally binding statement. Each text is thus subject to a principle that, following Philippe Lejeune, could be called a “juridical pact.” Lejeune filtered out the scheme of the autobiographical text from a wealth of auto- and heterodiegetic narrative forms: to him, the law of autobiography lies in the identity of author, narrator and protagonist.11 From this “autobiographical pact,” Lejeune derives a second contract, the “reference pact,” which states that the truth of a claim about external reality made by (autobiographical) writing should be testable. The formula of the autobiographical pact is “I [am] the undersigned”; that of the reference pact: “I swear to tell the truth and nothing but the truth.”12 What we have here are two legal formulas, one of which identifies the status of a statement as a link between person and speech, while the other certifies the factual status of a text as a link to reality. Here lies the decisive challenge for Tretyakov’s literary liability law. With the formula “I am liable for my characters,” the author submits to the law as a legal subject, while also certifying his poetic speech act as a legal act that establishes non-literary existence. The formula here could be phrased as: “I, the author, swear to produce reality and nothing but reality.” With this form of contract between author and figure, literary writing is institutionally anchored as the execution of real, justiciable actions. In his passages between law and literature, Tretyakov embodies a habitus that appeared to Gottfried Benn as a “literary Cheka type who interrogates, condemns and punishes all dissenters in Russia.” Benn had met Tretyakov in Berlin in the spring of 1931, where he gave an enthusiastically 10

Boris Pilʹniak, “Zasedanie Prezidiuma Pravleniia SSR po obsuzhdeniiu tvorcheskogo otcheta B.A. Pilʹniaka,” RGALI, f. 631, op. 15, d. 75.

11

Philippe Lejeune, Der autobiographische Pakt (Frankfurt/M., 1974), 27. On this and the following, cf. also Susanne Strätling, “Wort und Tat. Sergej Tret’jakovs juridischer Pakt mit der Literatur,” in Ereignis Literatur. Institutionelle Dispositive der Performativität von Literatur, ed. Csongor Lőrincz (Bielefeld, 2011), 307–330.

12

Lejeune, Der autobiographische Pakt, 39f.

181

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received, “refined and polemically captivating lecture.” The evening was a literary and political event. Among the guests, there were not only Benn and numerous other writers, but also Kracauer and Marcuse. They shared Benn’s impressions to a great degree.13 In the course of the lecture, Tretyakov described how he had summoned a psychologizing writer for an interrogation. Benn retells this passage as follows: “Where did you experience this, comrade?” he [Tretyakov] asked [the other writer]. “What city, what street?” “I didn’t experience it at all,” the author replied, “this is a novel, after all.” “That’s not an answer,” Tretyakov replied, “you must have taken it from reality somehow. Why didn’t you report to the relevant Soviet authorities that one of their officials, as a result of drinking, was disorderly in his work and that the citizen who owned the house could move back into his rooms?” Again, the author replied: “I didn’t see it in reality; I dreamed it up, put it together—it’s a novel, as I said.” Tretyakov: “That’s Western European ‘individualism idiotism.’ You have acted irresponsibly, vainly, and counter-revolutionarily. Your book will be destroyed, and you’ll go work in a factory.”14

Thus arises a pragmatic literature of the collective and the plan, with titles like “The ventilation of the factory refectory” or “How can we get the material to the workplaces even faster,” as Benn ruminates with notable irony. However, something else emerges here, too: a performative poetology, which makes the text an act—potentially a criminal one. Contemporaries viewed this development primarily from the perspective of aesthetic heteronomy: the author no longer a free artist but a mere executive of social interests. As early as 1927, Walter Benjamin wrote in an essay on “New Literature in Russia”: “If we add to this the fact that, in Russia, the free writer is a near-extinct animal, that the great majority of writers is in some way linked to the state apparatus and controlled by it (as a civil servant or otherwise), then we’ll have some idea of the prevailing

13

Siegfried Kracauer, “Instruktionsstunde in Literatur. Zu einem Vortrag des Russen Tretjakow,” in Russen in Berlin 1918-1933. Eine kulturelle Begegnung, ed. Fritz Mierau (Weinheim and Berlin, 1988), 544–548, qt. 545.

14

Gottfried Benn, “Die neue literarische Saison,” in his Gesammelte Werke in acht Bänden, vol. 4, ed. Dieter Wellershoff (Wiesbaden, 1968), 983–995, qt. 986f.

1. Word and Deed

conditions.”15 What we can clearly see emerging here is a change that Hans Günther summed up as “nationalization of literature.”16 But the often diagnosed political instrumentalization of art does by no means conclusively explain the institutional redefinition of late avant-garde literature. For the writer is transformed not just into a civil servant but into a public prosecutor, with poetic procedures participating in legal issues with increased aggressiveness. Such active involvement with lawsuits, evidence, testimony, confession, judgement and punishment is not new to Russian literature (one might think of the cross-examinations in Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment or Tolstoy’s jury epic Resurrection). Here, however, we are dealing not so much with literary jurisdiction as with the principle of poetic justice. Mikhail Bakhtin dedicated his first considerations in aesthetic theory to the validity of this principle even before his Dostoevsky study, in a brief note on “Art and Responsibility” (1919). In just a few sentences, he describes the interdependence of art and life: For what I have experienced and realized in art, I have to answer with my life, so that all these experiences and realizations are not left without an effect on living. But responsibility is connected with guilt. If life and art bear mutual responsibility, they are also to blame for each other.17

Overcoming the hiatus between art and the world, which also means a dissociation of subject and object, becomes the leitmotif of Bakhtin’s entire work. A more detailed elaboration appears in the 1920s in a manuscript, now unfortunately lost, entitled “The Subject of Morality and the Subject of Law” (“Sub”ekt nravstvennosti i sub”ekt prava,” ca. 1921) and in the study “On the Philosophy of the Deed.”18 These fragments reflect how

15

Walter Benjamin, “Neue Dichtung in Rußland” [1927], in his Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser, vol. 2, part 2 (Frankfurt/M., 1989), 755–762, qt. 757. A similar (in some passages identical) text appears in “Die politische Gruppierung der russischen Schriftsteller,” in his Angelus Novus. Ausgewählte Schriften, vol. 2 (Frankfurt/M., 1988), 190–194.

16

Hans Günther, Die Verstaatlichung der Literatur (Stuttgart, 1984); cf. also Klaus Städtke, Welt hinter dem Spiegel. Zum Status des Autors in der russischen Literatur der 1920er bis 1950er Jahre (Berlin, 1998), 20.

17

Mikhail Bakhtin, “Iskusstvo i otvetstvennostʹ,” Den’ iskusstva, September 13, 1919, 3–4.

18

Idem, “K filosofii postupka,” in his Raboty 20-kh godov (Kiev, 1994), 9–68. The text was titled by the first editor, Sergei Bocharov.

183

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life and art can overtake each other, and how their division is mirrored in the separation of judging from doing. Bakhtin develops the concept of the deed (postupok)—combined and supplemented with that of the “twofaced, Janus-faced”19 act (akt)—into a paradigmatic ethical aesthetic, as focused on event as it is on responsibility. Sergei Averintsev considers Bakhtin’s choice of the term postupok to be motivated by everyday language (and therefore situated in the paradigm of practical life).20 But there seem to be additional aspects that make the context of guilt and responsibility an authoritative frame for the nexus of art and life: the ability to move from the abstract and universal sphere of law into the concrete and current world of being; the ability to feel empathy and participate, so that “the deed and its result are not separated but related to each other.”21 In the late 1920s, a crucial shift creeps into this relationship. While Bakhtin’s poetics still proclaims the validity of poetic justice, a kind of legal textuality now emerges that could be called poetic justiciability. It characterizes a literature that places author and text into a binding judicial relationship. Thus, the ethical model of responsibility and justice is replaced with the legal principle of obligation and justiciability. This adjustment is also a reaction to the changes in copyright law in the young Soviet Union. Only in the second quarter of the nineteenth century did Russia see a legal regulation of author rights, closely linked to censorship legislation. From 1816 on, to receive the imprimatur from the censors, publishers had to enclose documents proving their right to print the text. Authors’ rights were first legally codified in 1828, in an annex to a new censorship law. Now, authors were guaranteed a lifelong right to their texts, albeit a right subject to censorship: “whoever prints a book without following the orders of the censorship law loses all rights to it.”22 It was not until 1877 that authors’ rights were transferred from the Censorship Act to the Civil Code, where they were listed as an appendix to Article 420 on the right of ownership. In 1911, a fundamental revision of the law considerably 19

Ibid., 12.

20

Sergei Averintsev, “Postranichnye primechaniia (1),” in Mikhail Bakhtin, Sobranie sochinenii v 7-i tomakh, vol. 1, ed. Sergei Bocharov (Moscow, 2003), 438–456, qt. 440.

21

Bakhtin, “K filosofii postupka,” 24.

22

On the historical development of copyright in Russia, see Alexander Sergeev, Pravo intellektual’noi sobstvennosti v Rossiiskoi Federatsii (Moscow, 2006), 34–40, qt. 35.

1. Word and Deed

extended authors’ rights—but only a few years later, the October Revolution curtailed them again. On January 26, 1918, a Decree by the Council of People’s Commissars came into force, which declared “scientific, literary, musical and artistic works to be state property” (“O priznanii nauchnykh, literaturnykh, muzykalʹnykh i khudozhestvennykh proizvedenii gosudarstvennym dostoianiem,” SU RSFSR, 1918, no. 86, art. 900). At the same time, the decree “On the Abolition of Inheritance” (“Ob otmene nasledovaniia,” SU RSFSR, 1918, no. 34, art. 456) limited the claims of descendants. In October 1919, contracts between authors and publishers on the transfer of property rights were also declared invalid (“O prekrashchenii sily dogovorov na priobretenie v polnuiu sobstvennostʹ proizvedenii literatury i iskusstva,” SU RSFSR, 1919, no. 51, art. 492). On the basis of these laws, the People’s Commissariat of Education (Narkompros) declared the works of forty-seven writers and seventeen composers state property. In 1928, though, things changed again: the law “On copyright” (“Ob avtorskom prave,” SU RSFSR, 1928, no. 132, art. 861) guaranteed authors lifelong rights to their works, which could now only be used on the basis of contracts. Unsurprisingly, the new law was widely discussed in the press. Its text was published in the Izvestiia on May 17, 1928 and commented upon in just about every medium. The September issue of the magazine Novyi zritelʹ served up an exegesis of individual paragraphs, which summarized the law as follows: “The author is a spokesman of the dominant ideas and sentiments; his work serves as a tool to influence the masses; as the creator of this work, he is responsible before society.”23 While returning a lifelong right of ownership, the new law centers above all on the idea of responsibility, thus reformulating a nineteenth-century copyright law as a law of literary liability. 1.2 Bearing Words and Bearing Witness: Operative Procreation Even before claiming the justiciability of literature, Tretyakov explores the legal dimension of the word via the similarities of creating and witnessing. For this exploration, he chooses the theater—a location predestined for the entanglement of poetics and justice. Legal proceedings profoundly shape drama from ancient tragedies to modern mock trials. Nikolai Evreinov,

23

I. Borts, “O reforme avtorskogo prava,” Novyi zritel’ 37–38 (1928): 8.

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lawyer, playwright and theater scholar, mapped out this entanglement in both his juridical and artistic work. While in his dissertation on legal history, Evreinov suggests the origin of several Russian phrases in torture practices (for example, dobitʹsia, “achieve,” could also be read as “beat [something out of somebody”]),24 his historical studies led him to conclude that the theater and the scaffold are analogous institutions, sharing the same origin in bloody rites from ancient sacrifices to modern executions.25 In his other writings on drama theory, such as the study Theater for Its Own Sake (1916), Evreinov takes up the Aristotelian category of dramatic catharsis, deducing from it that the transgressive nature of theater is per se illegal and criminal: I would gladly proceed with this extensive interpretation of a passage in “Poetics” until we reach a page saying that—by seducing the viewer into perfect complicity in the presented crimes, by enticing his passionate soul into the very whirlpool of the staged atrocity—tragic theater is, in Aristotle’s understanding, a crime in itself (heh!). Indeed, is theater not always criminal, always illegal (always ill, needing gall)? Is not the essence of theater primarily to transcend the norms established by nature, state, and society? Is not the joy and raison d’être of theater in this overstepping of boundaries? Aren’t the means that theater uses not truly “criminal” even from the narrowly legal perspective of modern European codes, namely: deception, pretense (simulation), the use of someone else’s or fictitious name (with some [actors] going so far as to use a pseudonym in real life), immoral and indecent gestures (hugs, kisses) and debauched “flirtations” right before the public eye . . . ?26

Evreinov suggests that transgressing the ontological boundary of being and appearance, of reality and fiction, of truth and lie means transgressing

24

Cf. Nikolai Evreinov, Istoriia telesnykh nakazanii v Rossii (St. Petersburg, 1917), 6. Evreinov refers, inter alia, to Semevsky’s volume Slovo i delo.

25

Idem, “Teatr i eshafot. K voprosu o proiskhozhdenii teatra kak publichnogo instituta,” in Mnemozina. Dokumenty i fakty iz istorii russkogo teatra XX veka, vol. 1 (Moscow, 1996), 14–44.

26

Idem, “Prestuplenie kak atribut teatra,” in his Teatr dlia sebia, part 1 (Petrograd, 1916), 56–64, qt. 63 and 59f. The translation attempts to recreate the facetiousness of Evreinov’s deriving protivozakonie (lawlessness) not from protiv zakona (against law) but from za kona (beyond the game, the “kitty”), hence “illegal” constructed as “ill, needing gall.” (Translator’s note.)

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a legal boundary of right and wrong, of legitimacy and illegitimacy. From this logic, it follows not only that the stage is where the law is permanently being broken but also that the legal system is where a sort of theater is permanently being staged. Evreinov’s total theater thus adds a further area to the theatricalization of life. Tretyakov pursues a different approach. He, too, connects acting and legal procedures—but not because of any interest in the overlap between dramatic fiction and real fraud. He is not stimulated by the legal practice of slovo i delo, much less does he share A. Tolstoy’s dubious fascination with the violent language of law enforcement. Instead, Tretyakov aims to close the gap between words and deeds through a poetics of operativity. His first attempt in this field leads him into drama: a genre legitimized as a forensic form since antiquity. In the early 1920s, Tretyakov cooperated with Eisenstein on the principle of attraction, which the latter defined in 1923 as “any aggressive element of the theater, that is, any element exposing the viewer to sensory or psychological influence, experimentally verified and mathematically calculated to produce a certain emotional shock so as to make processable the idea behind that which is shown—the final ideological conclusion.”27 As late as 1922, Tretyakov had still described himself as anything but a theater lover. Reviewing Meyerhold’s production of Crommelynck’s Le Cocu Magnifique, he said: “I don’t like the theater and rarely see a play.” In the same review, however, Tretyakov also characterized himself as a spectator among others who form a ring around “the workplace of the stage,” following the events like a “clash between a policeman and a pickpocket,” in which “a moment of compassion can happen at any time.”28 This emotional energy will go on to occupy him during his collaboration with Eisenstein at the First Proletkult Workers’ Theater. Tretyakov’s theater experiments are directed toward three strategies for the “immediate processing of the audience”:29

27

Sergei Eizenshtein, “Montazh attraktsionov,” LEF 3 (1923): 70–75, qt. 71.

28

Tretʹiakov, “Velikodushnyi rogonosets,” 12.

29

Idem, “Teatr attraktsionov. Postanovki ‘Na vsiakogo mudretsa dovolʹno prostoty’ i ‘Slyshishʹ, Moskva?!’ v 1-om rabochem teatre Proletkulʹta.” Oktiabrʹ mysli 1 (1924): 53–56.

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(1) The theater as agitator. (2) The theater as a sports play, in which “complicated competitive processes” are performed “as tests” but at the same time “taken seriously.” In them, “the victory of one or the other team determines the respective variant of the continuation.” (3) The theater as an “exhibition showing the standard human under difficult conditions.”30

As Tretyakov states in his essay “The Theater of Attractions” (1924), all three aim to transform the “theater show” into a “theater command.”31 In 1926/1927, Tretyakov wrote the production piece I Want a Baby (Khochu rebenka), which combines features of all three concepts: competition, exhibition, and propaganda. In this play, the unmarried agronomist Milda Grignau defends her right to seek a sperm donor according to the biopolitical guidelines of socialist productivity and hygiene. Moreover, she wants to have this child raised not in the Freudian triangle of the bourgeois family but in the public collective of a children’s home.32 In the “100% proletarian” Iakov, Milda finally finds the ideal potent, eugenically flawless donor. But when she invites him to her room, presents him with a notarially certified waiver of financial claims and offers a reproductive contract without any legal consequences for him, Iakov initially refuses with the words: “Well, people get into hanky-panky, sure, you know. When everything’s just right, jokes and music and everything. But here, it’s like in court. . . .”33 Still, with the help of cosmetic camouflage, Milda makes Iakov change his mind. She gets pregnant, and at the end of the play we see her—in future, after producing the second result of this reproductive contract—receiving an award from a medical growth commission at a “baby exhibition” of a model orphanage.34

30

Idem, “Dramaturgovy zametki,” Zhiznʹ iskusstva 44 (1927): 7.

31

Idem, “Teatr attraktsionov,” 69.

32

Cf. Fritz Mierau, “Sergej Tret’jakov und Bertold Brecht. Das Produktionsstück ‘Khochu rebenka’,” Zeitschrift für Slawistik 20 (1975): 226–241.

33

Sergei Tretʹiakov, “Khochu rebenka. Obsuzhdenie pʹesy v Glavrepertkome,” Sovremennaia dramaturgiia 2 (1988): 238–243.

34

The play exists in two different versions, from 1926 and 1927. The latter is the result of revision after the reading of the first version at the Meyerhold Theater and the discussions with the director, actors, and the repertoire commission.

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Fig. 53. Tretyakov’s I Want a Baby with its awards for exemplary children stages the eugenic debate of the 1920s.

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The play was never performed in Tretyakov’s lifetime. It was not until 1990 that it had its Russian premiere in Robert Leach’s production at the Moscow Nikitsky Gate Theater; a year earlier, it had been performed at the Berliner Ensemble. This “tragedy of an unrealized masterpiece,” which, according to Leach, contains everything required for “the highest achievements of revolutionary theater,”35 had various reasons. Part of the problem was the venue. El Lissitzky, who was commissioned to design the stage set, submitted several drafts, but their realization would have required extensive alterations, so that it was decided to wait for Meyerhold’s new theater building, whose construction kept being delayed. The conceptual disagreements between Meyerhold and Tretyakov were of even greater importance; the play led to bitter disputes between the author and director. Moreover, there was resistance from censorship. On November 29, 1926, Meyerhold informed the Artistic Department of Glavpolitprosvet that he wished to stage I Want a Baby. But the Supreme Repertoire Commission (Glavrepertkom) intervened, demanding profound reworking of the piece. It was not until two years later, on December 4, 1928, that Glavrepertkom met again with Meyerhold and Tretyakov to listen to the revised version of the play. In addition to other playwrights, scenarists and theater critics, there was also a doctor present so as to take a stand on the medical side of the play. At this meeting, there was again massive criticism from some participants, who regarded the play as schematic, vulgar, primitive, coarse, and propagating onanism. Meyerhold countered with an invective against neo-bourgeois tendencies. While at this first hearing there was still a chance of the play being allowed, albeit after massive corrections, as a kind of didactic piece on sexual hygiene allied with Health Education (Sanprosvet), the second internal meeting agreed on a rather paradox compromise suggested by Meyerhold. The play itself would be banned, but the Meyerhold Theater would nevertheless be allowed to stage a production as a “highly valuable and instructive theater experiment”36 closely supervised by the repertoire commission. Tretyakov’s piece blatantly transfers the ideology of constructivist production from the object to the subject and to biological reproduction. The issue at stake is no longer the fusion of production and art but that of pro35

Robert Leach, Revolutionary Theatre (London and New York, 1994), 182.

36

Tretʹiakov, “Khochu rebenka. Obsuzhdenie pʹesy v Glavrepertkome,” 243.

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Fig. 54. El Lissitzky’s viewing platform for Tretyakov’s discussion play I Want a Baby (1926/1927) to be produced by Vsevolod Meyerhold. Lissitzky designs a fundamentally new model of stage and theater construction here.

duction and life, that is, procreative eugenics (fig. 54). Christina Kiaer reads I Want a Baby as a late parable on the constructivist dream of a “comradely object.” As the final measure of a socialist production program—bioproduction—it envisions “the eugenic child itself as a collective socialist object” before this dream is finally destroyed.37 This eugenic dimension is recurrent as a warning in the censorship debates surrounding the play, which resulted in a partial ban—not least because it aroused an “unhealthy interest” for “physiological elements,” especially for sexual practices, beyond all necessary medical education work. In their comments on the play, Tretyakov and Meyerhold accentuate the proximity of the stage to the operating theater: the play is supposed to

37

Kiaer, Imagine no Possessions, 245.

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provide a sterile, dispassionate vivisection of love as a biological phenomenon.38 Thus, Meyerhold compares actors both to objects and to pathologists dissecting corpses.39 In the script for a film adaptation, written in 1928 and never realized,40 Tretyakov uses the visual metaphor of the microscopic gaze, choosing the following opening shot: There are millions of fibers moving in the frame, and the motion resembles a ripe wind-blown field. Upon this swaying, a huge translucent ball shimmering with radial threads from a glowing core in its center appears. This ball rolls over the swaying field. Thin ropes with thickened heads, rapidly wriggling, move toward the ball. They surround it as trembling rays from all sides. One of them pierces the shell of the ball. Immediately after the puncture, this shell becomes glassy, less transparent; still, you can see how the head of the rope moves toward the core and enters it. Then, with a sharp motion, the whole image is pulled out of the frame. Now we see Milda, an agronomist specializing in animal husbandry, looking through a microscope at a breeding ground. She is heavy, unsmiling, with pedantic habits. She writes on a card: “The semen is healthy; the egg has been fertilized.”41

Milda’s own fertilization scene in the script also essentially follows the macroscopic pattern of the drama text. When she proposes to Iakov that they should conceive a child, a close-up of his astonished face is followed by a scene in which she takes from her desk her health certificate and a prepared declaration of alimony renunciation, presenting both to Iakov. We are supposed to read or see the text of the waiver on the screen—as the script specifies: “In the event of a child resulting from cohabitation, there will be

38

Cf. Tretʹiakov, “Khochu rebenka. Obsuzhdenie pʹesy v Glavrepertkome.”

39

As Tretyakov explained, “In the play I Want a Baby, love is placed on the operating table and examined for its socially significant effects.” Cf. idem, “Chto pishut dramaturgi,” Rabis 11 (1929): 7; and Vsevolod Meierkholʹd, “Doklad o plane postanovki pʹesy S. M. Tretʹiakova ‘Khochu rebenka’,” in his Stat’i, pis’ma, rechi, besedy, vol. 2: 1917–1939 (Moscow, 1968), 494–495.

40

The script essentially follows the drama text. Tretyakov had originally planned a film adaptation by Abram Room, but the scenario was not approved by the censorship. The invitation to the decisive meeting on July 29, 1929 is to be found in the file just before the libretto. RGALI, f. 645, op.1, d. 536, 28–55.

41

RGALI, f. 645, op.1, d. 536, 35.

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no claim for alimony from Milda Grignau to Iakov Kichkin.”42 After Iakov reads this, the legal formula of the document is translated into a concise intertitle: “When pregnancy arises, we go our own ways, and that’s that.”43 In this context, it is especially striking that Iakov chooses the comparison with a courtroom. And indeed, Milda’s room is a sober setting for an objectively prepared and legally secured act of procreation. More importantly still, the comparison illuminates the dramaturgical form. Tretyakov calls I Want a Baby a discussion piece, that is, a conversation with the audience about the biopolitical theses of the play should be part of the drama or its staging. The stage should be a springboard, a “spiral that screws itself into the extra-theatrical practice of the audience.”44 Also, after the final act, the audience was supposed to come on stage and inspect the “baby exhibition.” Meyerhold’s staging project actively helps transgress the stage and audience space. However, it sees an essential challenge in Tretyakov’s drama: the absence of tangible characters; his protagonists, Meyerhold argues, are flat schemata. The initial staging plans were aimed entirely at imbuing these dead schemata with life, but this strategy failed. Then, a new goal was set: to stage a consciously schematic discussion piece, with actors representing not persons but genetic specimens, so as unfold a debate, a dialectically structured exchange of opinions that would proceed to involve the audience. However, there was little room for a real open discussion or improvisation: “reliable” persons would be chosen as discussants to ensure a “correct view” by the audience and to dispel the repertoire commission’s fear that the debate could slip away.45 El Lissitzky, whom Meyerhold commissioned to design the stage set in March 1929, implemented these specifications in his panoptic design. A transparent pane was to be inserted in the center of a circular, columnar construction. The stage was to be connected to all levels of the theater building via a spiral staircase and several ramps. Above the stage, a system 42

RGALI, f. 645, op.1, d. 536, 44.

43

Ibid.

44

Tretʹiakov, “Chto pishut dramaturgi.”

45

Cf. the shorthand of Meyerhold’s lecture at the meeting of the Repertoire Commission of December 15, 1928, reprinted in Sovremennaia dramaturgiia 2 (1988): 241–243. (“We’ll make people like that, people we can rely on, to speakers.”)

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Fig. 55. Outline of the stage construction for I Want a Baby.

Fig. 56. This perspective offers a view of the transparent stage floor, intended for the illumination of the stage from below.

Fig. 57. Assembled test construction of the viewing platform for I Want a Baby; original size. In the foreground, you see the central play area with a spiral staircase and a ramp, in the background, benches for the audience on the stage.

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Fig. 58. El Lissitzky presenting his stage design for I Want a Baby. On the left is a figurine of Milda Grignau.

Fig. 59. El Lissitzky, photomontage using a photograph of Lissitzky’s son Jen and a spread from Pravda (1930).

of rope hoists and connecting wires, very much like a material transport system for factory buildings, would enable speedy rearrangement (figs. 55–61). In an article for the Das neue Frankfurt, Lissitzky explains his stage design: After Meyerhold’s renunciation of the curtain and the abolished separation of stage and auditorium, the next step was to completely overcome the stage. It shall merge with the auditorium by means of an amphitheater. For the performance, a new location is created in the theater space, a “ring” rising from the orchestra pit. The actors rise up from the depths of the orchestra and come down from above, from the gallery and

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from the sides across bridges:—they have nothing more to do with the stage. Props roll down the ropes and disappear in the depth after each performance. Light sources move together with the actors who perform on a transparent floor. This new arrangement brings the actor closer to all spectators, wherever they seat, thus devaluating the first rows of the parterre.46

A couple of years before, in 1926, Lissitzky had advocated the redesign of the peep-box stage in his essay “Our Book.” Even if the classical “peepbox” of the stage has not yet been replaced, he argues, at least within it, a “three-dimensional physical space has been born that enables maximum deployment of the fourth dimension, the living motion.”47 The design for this space, which was to manifest itself in Tretyakov’s I Want a Baby, follows the conceptual ideas Lissitzky had gained from designing the futurist opera Victory over the Sun (Pobeda nad solntsem, 1913). The foreword to the opera’s figurine portfolio says: “We build a scaffolding that is accessible and open from all sides: the showing machinery. This framework offers the playing bodies all motion possibilities. Therefore, its individual parts must be movable, rotatable, expandable, etc. The different heights must be adjustable quickly. It is a rib design that would leave visible the bodies involved in the play”48 (fig. 61). In addition to Meyerhold’s plan, there was a competing potential adaptation by the Leningrad director Igor Terentiev, whom Tretyakov had initially favored. Terentiev also participated in both of the above-mentioned sessions and presented his staging project. The two concepts differed considerably. Meyerhold intended to extend the auditorium, to sell seats onstage and to have the performance interrupted by provocative questions in a partly planned, partly improvised manner, “so as expose the opponents of the play.”49 Terentiev, on the other hand, wanted to stage the entire play

46

El Lissitzky, “Der Innen-Aufbau des Theaters Meyerhold Moskau für Tretjakows ‘Ich will ein Kind’,” Das neue Frankfurt 10 (1930): 226.

47

Idem, “Unser Buch,” 360.

48

El Lissitzky, “Die plastische Gestaltung der elektromechanischen Schau ‘Sieg über die Sonne.’ Vorwort zur Figurinen-Mappe, Hannover 1923,” in El Lissitzky. Maler, Architekt, Typograf, Fotograf. Erinnerungen, Briefe, Schriften, coll. Sophie LissitzkyKüppers (Dresden, 1967), 349.

49

Meierkholʹd, “Doklad o plane postanovki pʹesy.”

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Fig. 60. El Lissitzky’s costume design for Milda Grignau, the protagonist of I Want a Baby. Milda’s figure in work clothes is positioned among a collective of children, flanked by an individual image of a naked baby.

Fig. 61. El Lissitzky, title page of the figurine portfolio Victory over the Sun (Pobeda nad solntsem, 1923). At the top left of the image is the figure of the radio speaker.

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as a rigorous debate. Its core piece was to be a glass booth suspended above the stage and housing a “theater staff ”: a typographer, a stenographer, and a narrator, who would receive and answer questions from the audience by radio.50 This plan is also reminiscent of Lissitzky’s design for the electromechanical show Victory over the Sun, where the idea was to position the “show designer” in the center of a variable viewing platform, from where he ’ d coordinate motion, sound and lighting via “switchboards of all energies” while speaking the voices of the “bodies on show” into a telephone.51 In the end, Terentiev could not prevail against Meyerhold. He was accused of insufficient willingness to improvise: Meyerhold’s conception of a “real discussion,” it was claimed, convinced by its “lively, active, effective thinking.” Still, both staging projects transferred the procedures and demands of attraction theater into new formal laws in similar fashions. Both adapt the dramaturgical forms of so-called agitsud—theatrical propaganda in the form of mock-trials, which have been contributing to the education of homo sovieticus in political, agronomic, hygienic and other issues since 1917.52 Beyond their educational function, these propaganda trials reinstated the ancient conception of drama as a juridical genre. In The Enemy on Trial, Julie Cassiday argues that the reorganization of the legal system in the young Soviet Union was accompanied by a redefinition of the theater: drama returned to the ancient unity of tragedy and jurisprudence so as to implement new legislation via theatric propaganda trials.53 Elizabeth Wood, on the other hand, ascribes an action-oriented function to these trials. Agit theaters, she argues, taught a large part of the Soviet population to “act Bolshevik”: “this acting Bolshevik involved not only speech acts but also whole practices of judging and being judged.”54 But what does it mean to theatrize the concept of legally binding acts and actions? 50

Igor Terentʹev, “‘Khochu rebenka.’ Plan postanovki,” Novyi LEF 12 (1928): 32–36.

51

Lissitzky, “Die plastische Gestaltung,” 349.

52

Elizabeth A. Wood, Performing Justice. Agitation Trials in Early Soviet Russia (Ithaca, NY, 2005), 17–21.

53

Julie Cassiday, The Enemy on Trial. Early Soviet Courts on Stage and Screen (DeKalb, Ill., 2000), 9f. Cassiday provides evidence of texts for about 130 agitsudy of the 1920s. A model for the staging of agitsudy is designed by B. Vetrov and L. Petrov in Agitsud i zhivaia gazeta v derevne (Moscow, 1926); and A. Vilenkin, Kak postavit’ agitsud v izbechitalʹne (Leningrad, 1926).

54

Wood, Performing Justice, 10.

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Well over 100 agitsud scenarios have been preserved from the 1920s.55 Walter Benjamin witnessed an agitsud during his stay in Moscow in the winter of 1926/1927. In his Moscow Diary, he reports on his visit to a “court hearing” on December 28, 1926, at the Peasants Club, where a woman was accused of quackery with fatal consequences: We entered a hall draped in red in which there were some three hundred people. It was filled to capacity, many people were standing. A bust of Lenin in a niche. The proceedings were taking place on the stage platform, flanked on the right and left by two painted proletarian figures, a peasant and a factory worker. Above the proscenium, the Soviet emblem. The hearing of evidence had already taken place by the time we arrived, an expert was now testifying. He sat at a small table with his assistant, opposite the table of the defense attorney, both facing sideways on the stage. The college of judges occupied a table that faced the public directly, in front of which sat the accused, a peasant woman dressed in black, holding a thick stick in her hands. . . . The expert’s testimony maintained: the death of the woman was directly attributable to the medical interference of the defendant. The defense pleaded: there was no evil intention, sanitary measures and medical expertise were not available in her part of the country. The prosecution demanded the death penalty. The peasant woman’s summation: people always die. Then the presiding judge turned to the assembly: any questions? A member of the Komsomol appeared on stage and made a plea for the harshest possible punishment. Then the court retired for deliberation—a pause ensued. Everybody stood to hear the verdict read. Two years’ imprisonment with recognition of mitigating circumstances. Solitary confinement is thus ruled out. The presiding judge concluded by pointing out the necessity of establishing centers for medical care and education in rural areas. Everybody then dispersed.56

The play seen by Benjamin is also part of the discourse on sexual and reproductive health. Discussing an abortion with fatal consequences, it could well be entitled I Don’t Want a Baby. But Tretyakov’s play is not an agitsud in the strict sense of the term. It only rudimentarily follows the 55

A compilation of the published pieces can be found in the appendix to Wood, Performing Justice.

56

Walter Benjamin, Moskauer Tagebuch (Frankfurt/M., 1980), 73f. Translation by Richard Sieburth in Walter Benjamin, “Moscow Diary,” October 35 (1985): 9–135, qt. 49.

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somewhat lifeless theater courtroom procedure as recorded by Benjamin. Tretyakov is not concerned with the structural analogy of dramaturgical and juridical form, of tribune and trial, of forensics and dramatics. There are no explicit categories of prosecution, defense, testimony, and jurisdiction, nor is the action structured according to procedural law. But he does make the stage resemble a courtroom—so as to call the audience to the witness stand to testify regarding procreation. Sylvia Sasse has pointed out how the fusion of aesthetical and legal judgment in similar dramaturgical constellations enables a “catharsis of action,” which “turns watching or participating into moments of crime or punishment.”57 In Meyerhold’s production, the dialogue between stage and hall, actor and spectator is to be regulated and documented directly; according to Terentiev’s plan, it is mediated via the glass cabin. In both cases, the intersection of theater and trial creates a hybrid space in which spectators become actors, the speaking and acting protagonists of a play that they both watch and stage. Dissolving the boundaries of aesthetic experience in this way is a further a step toward the activation of the spectator, on which Meyerhold had been working for decades. In an early essay “On the History and Techniques of Theater” (1907), Meyerhold lamented the passivity of the audience and tried to turn the spectator into the fourth operating part of the theater event alongside the author, the director, and the actors. In that essay, the central theme was abolishing “that border between spectator and actor, . . . the ramp that today divides the theater into two worlds,” creating a network of veins to “provide these two separate bodies with a shared bloodstream.”58 On various levels, the envisioned staging of I Want a Baby tries to connect to this circulation, suggesting that action on stage generates a reality off stage. While Meyerhold’s “blood circulation” allows for productions in which “the audience creatively completes in imagination what the stage only hints at,”59 the appropriate trope here would be one of an umbilical cord connecting the stage to the real world. I Want a Baby does not only

57

Sylvia Sasse, “Gerichtsspiele. Fiktive Schuld und reale Strafe im Theater und vor Gericht,” in Kunst als Strafe. Zur Ästhetik der Disziplinierung, ed. Gertrud Koch, Sylvia Sasse, and Ludger Schwarte (Munich, 2003), 123–148, qt. 127.

58

Wsewolod E. Meyerhold, “Zur Geschichte und Technik des Theaters” [1907], in his Schriften, vol. 1 (Berlin [Ost], 1979), 97–136, qt. 131f.

59

Ibid., 135.

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transform the aseptic scene of a courtroom into the vital nucleus of new life—it also transgresses theatric speech by making the staged courtroom into a scene of (pro)creation. The equally imperative and performative speech of I Want a Baby embodies a biological act. Milda’s juridical pact with Iakov thus generates two results: it forms the legal basis for fulfilling her wish and merges dramatic events with real-life experience. 1.3 The (Criminal) Speech Act After the extensive censorship of the play and the difficult discussions with Meyerhold about the staging, Tretyakov turned increasingly to prose, especially to the operative sketch. In his second anthology of kolkhoz sketches, The Challenge (Vyzov, 1930), Tretyakov explores the options of literary operativity and the performative potential of language, conceptualizing the violent power of speech. One of the sketches, entitled “The Purge” (“Chistka”), plays out this potential in yet another courtroom setting. In 1929–1930, when the sketch was written, the second of the great Soviet purges took place (in conjunction with the so-called “dekulakization” in agriculture). This was the first purge led by Stalin himself. Tretyakov participated in the trials as a cultural functionary and municipal council member of the kolkhoz Vyzov. In the “Report of a Kolkhoz Member and Writer” (1930), he gives an account of his legal function: “What was I doing on the collective farm? . . . I spoke at meetings where the kolkhoz was purged from kulak and anti-kolkhoz elements.”60 The short prose text begins by documenting the work of the kolkhoz director Markov, who organizes the exchange from ordinary to first-class seed in the district town with great zeal and then hurries to a Baptist village to supervise the resettlement of large farmers. Finally, after nightfall, he arrives at the Novaia Zhizn’ (“New Life”) kolkhoz to chair a meeting of the dekulakization commission, at which five large farmers are to be expelled from the kolkhoz. People gather in a small school building. Following the procedure of a court case, the accusations are first presented by the commission’s chairman; then the accused may comment on the points raised, and finally kolkhoz members take the floor. The purpose of the procedure

60

Tretʹiakov, “Raport pisatelia-kolkhoznika,” 9f. On this sketch, see also Strätling, “Wort und Tat.”

201

202

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is formulated in advance: “The purge teaches [people] to break their old, familiar silence at the sight of affluence.”61 The phases of this process demonstrate how speech is censored, how the terms used by the prosecution are reinterpreted by the defense, and how the amorphous silent mass gradually takes the floor to articulate itself as a collective subject. Four times each, the accused took the floor before the poor finally broke their silence. Their unbelieving, almost mocking voices beat back the plaintive intonations of the fat cats. What seems trivial and picky to the accused, achieves the heavy and formidable size of great guilt in the speeches of the poor.62

Gradually, the arguments of the prosecution shift from the acts allegedly committed by the accused to an incrimination of their rhetoric. Increasingly, the trial centers on how the accused verbally relate to the prosecution, how they interpret the concept of the purge, and how their speech evades legal discourse. Their crime is thus to be found in language. They now become guilty by the very act of speaking in their own defense. By attempting to mitigate the fault of a past deed, the accused commit a new crime, an even worse violation of the order of speech. The rhetoric of the (criminal) speech act for which the accused will have to answer is narratively filtered through a perspective situated between that of a judge and a reporter. Only for a brief moment is there a significant break in this mode: when, after being admonished, Melnikov disrupts the proceedings and pleads guilty in anticipatory obedience: I’m a nervous person. I might do a bad thing. I might not be able to resist. You gave me a warning. You suspect me. You said you’d kick me out (shout from the crowd “And so they will!”). Well then, (shouting:) kick me out now! (Screaming:) kick me out along with them! Why wait? All at once!63

At this point, the forced discourse of court speech gets out of control. In a scene reminiscent both of drama and of a court transcript, the proc61

Idem, “Chistka,” in his Vyzov. Kolkhoznye ocherki (Moscow, 1930), 293–302, qt. 294.

62

Ibid., 297.

63

Ibid.

1. Word and Deed

ess dynamic leads the accused to confessing a possible crime even before it happens, treating a potential misstep as an actual fact. Melnikov’s anticipation of impending judgment shows that he has fully internalized the principle of the purge as self-denunciation. Moreover, it illustrates the violence of juridical speech, in which the sheer articulation of suspicion creates a crime. In his study of the force of law, Derrida suggests that the performative speech act or legal act “always maintains within itself some interruptive violence” and “no longer responds to the demands of theoretical rationality.”64 This very (a)logic is manifest here. Even without the threat of violence being realized, Melnikov performs an act of self-judgement. At the same time, however, his self-accusation is a desperate attempt to regain authority over his own speaking and acting, to reinstitutionalize himself in a paradoxical act of subjugation as a sovereign subject, though he cannot oppose the court by legal means. Affirming a judgment that has not yet been pronounced, the suspect covertly objects to the violent legal discourse of the purge. He overfulfils its norms in a way that threatens to thwart its disciplining imperative. This leads to a situation that Butler called a “constitutive failure of the performative”: the performative utterance always does more than it bargains for, generating a surplus, a “slippage between the discursive command and the effects.”65 This situation is the moment when the repressive voice of the narrator is heard for the first time. In a final plea, in his function as judge, he calls the defendants’ statements a lie, and Melnikov’s testimony is excluded from the proceedings as hysterical.66 A vote is taken, judgment is passed, the proceedings are closed. The equivalence of word and deed, which Tretyakov wants to reactivate through his juridical pact with literature, appears here in violent tension between authorization and erosion. The powerful word seems referentially emptied and threatened; arguably, only the repressive ritualization of the speech act keeps it from falling apart. Tretyakov’s reconceptualization of the slovo i delo model as operative language ultimately negotiates precarious speech acts in which discursive practice pretends to project language 64

Jacques Derrida, “Force of Law,” trans. Mary Quaintance, Cardozo Law Review 11, nos. 5–6 (1989–1990): 919–1045, qt. 966.

65

Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter. Discursive Limits of “Sex” (London, 1993), 122.

66

Tretʹiakov, “Chistka,” 298f.

203

204

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Fig. 62. Sergei Tret' iakov, “Chistka” [1930], in his Vyzov.

into reality but de facto withdraws into an intralingual space, reopening the gap between world and word. A photograph that Tretyakov took of the commune Kommunisticheskii maiak (“Communist Lighthouse”) around 1930 hints at this. Calling for a purge, it shows a padlocked mailbox, whose function is explained by a sign underneath: “for cleaning the commune’s apparatus.” Coming from the right, a hand reaches into the picture to insert a folded piece of paper into the box (fig. 62). Oscillating between showing and hiding, opening and closing, the photo stages the denunciation as the key scene in both the compositional and the criminal process. The anonymous hand protrudes into the image space, presenting a suspicion without revealing the document’s content. The gesture of ostentatious blaming thus remains framed by multiple invisibility. Not only does the denunciator remain faceless, withdrawing beyond the frame; the accusation, too, remains invisible: it disappears inside the image, in the box that is supposed to bring light into the darkness of the party apparatus. The illegible letter presents a sharp contrast to the overly clear, almost tautological inscription of the box and sign. This way, the proceedings start from a black box. In terms of photographic deictics, this black (letter)box both contains and conceals the denunciation. Illustrating the literary sketch “The Purge,”

2. Word and Image

the photo suggests a form of literature that stages its own operativity as part of a court case, a file used in a trial, a document with legal consequences. The juridical pact between law and literature forms the discursive framework of writing as a—potentially criminal—act. In 1929, Osip Brik attested to the aesthetically unenlightened pre-avant-garde Russian intelligentsia an inability to distinguish between literature and life, between fiction and fact: “People went to criminal trials as if to the theater, forgetting that they are looking not at an actor but at a living person. And vice versa: there were trials of novel characters . . . and they forgot that it wasn’t a living person but a fictional figure.”67 Tretyakov reacts to this problematic fusion of juridical and aesthetic judgement with a poetics that aims to enact the word in the world, yet his attempt to give the operative power of speech the force of law marks the beginning of a new wave of trials, in which writing can no longer remain innocent—not even if it tries to protect or regulate itself by a legal pact.

2. Word and Image 2.1 Operative optics I: Photography The Purge emerges from Tretyakov’s extensive photographic work as part of his operative poetics and aesthetics. This branch is systematically developed during Tretyakov’s working stays at the agricultural commune “Communist Lighthouse.” When in July 1928, Tretyakov followed the call “writers, off to the kolkhoz!” and, full of enthusiasm, set off for the Northern Caucasus to visit the “Communist Lighthouse,” his first stay was sobering. On the one hand, the kolkhoz community distanced itself from the cohorts of tiresome literary tourists; on the other hand, Tretyakov himself remained at distance as a visitor. Looking back, he summed up these weeks as a “strong commune” meeting a “weak writer.”68 It remains a phase of pure observation, a time of sketches, which “naturally only reproduce what I was able to catch hastily with an untrained eye.”

67

Osip Brik, “Blizhe k faktu,” in Literatura Fakta. Pervyi sbornik materialov rabotnikov LEFa, ed. N. Chuzhak (Moscow, 1929 [reprint Moscow, 2000]), 80–85, qt. 83.

68

Sergei Tretʹiakov, Vyzov. Kolkhoznye ocherki (Moscow, 1930), 5.

205

206

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Fig. 63. Alexander Rodchenko, front and back cover of the magazine Zhurnalist 4 (1930).

Along with his notebook, Tretyakov always carries his camera, so that “hardly anybody knows him as a writer” at the kolkhoz—instead, he is that “guy who takes pictures.”69 The negative strip becomes a “photo diary”70 for him, with the images serving both as a form of and a prerequisite to writing. “I don’t know what would be worse on a writing trip: losing my pen and notebook or my camera? My Leica film is my visual diary, without which it would be much harder to process the material I collected.”71 Alexander Rodchenko places an emblem of this entanglement of manualmechanical writing implements on the cover of the Zhurnalist magazine from January 1930, the issue in which Tretyakov’s comment on his photo 69

Idem, “Diadʹka, kotoryi snimaet,” in his Mesiats v derevne (iiunʹ–iiulʹ 1930). Operativnye ocherki (Moscow, 1931), 195–204, qt. 195. First published in Zhurnalist 19 (1930).

70

Ibid., 197.

71

Sergei Tretʹiakov, “Moi zritelʹnyi dnevnik,” Sovetskoe foto 2 (1934): 24. This is the first note in the series “Fotoapparat v rukakh pisatelia,” Sovetskoe foto 2 (1934): 24–27. Cf. similarly also in “Diadʹka, kotoryi snimaet”: “The developed Leica films enable me to reconstruct my path with its episodes and meetings—often better than my scattered notes” (198).

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diary appears (fig. 63).72 Just as the writer can hardly write without a camera anymore, the published text appears incomplete without images. The image becomes the center of the text, with verbal elements increasingly seeming dispensable: “The newest Russian prose has enlisted the photograph as a device and cannot survive without it anymore. In the new prose, the photo replaces the [literary] image. . . . Without the photo, the newest prose would have to be different, just as speech would be transformed if all nouns or verbs were abolished.”73 In 1931, Tretyakov estimated that he had made about two thousand kolkhoz photographs. From this extensive collection, only relatively few images escaped the confiscation of his archive in 1937. These were the pictures published in the kolkhoz books A Month in the Country (Mesiats v derevne, 1931) and The Challenge (Vyzov, 1930, 2nd edition 1932), as well as in photo essays in various magazines.74 Tretyakov used a Leica “no bigger than a pair of binoculars, which is often helpful.”75 His photographs show diagrams, bulletin-boards, posters—“I now no longer write down [these texts] but photograph them”—mostly, though, they depict kolkhozniki at work, during training or meetings, sometimes in series of individual portraits according to the principles of “long-term observation” and “photo biography.”76 Tretyakov himself, too, is a frequent subject. Among the few surviving images, one strikingly captures the first phase of an ignorant outsider’s view described above: here, Tretyakov appears in shining white clothes between 72

Cf. Erika Wolf, “The Author as Photographer. Tret’iakov’s, Erenburg’s and Ilf ’s Images of the West,” Configurations. A Journal of Literature, Science, and Technology 18, no. 3 (2010): special issue Aesthetics of the Tool, 385–406.

73

Viktor Pertsov, “Noveishaia proza,” LEF 12 (1928): 15–21, qt. 17f. On the identification of photography with factography, cf. Leah Dickerman, “The Fact and the Photograph,” October 118 (2006): 132–152, esp. 134.

74

An overview of Tretʹiakov’s photojournalistic work is provided in Wolf, “The Author as Photographer.” On Tretʹiakov’s photographs at the “Communist Lighthouse,” see Maria Gough, “Radical Tourism. Sergei Tret’iakov at the Communist Lighthouse,” October 118 (Fall 2006): 159–178.

75

Tretʹiakov, “Diadʹka,” 197. On the expansion of the Leica in Russia, cf. Erika Wolf, “From Belly to Brain. Conceptualizing the Photographic Image through the Leica,” conference paper, Fourth Fitzwilliam Colloquium on Russian History and Culture, Cambridge, England, August 27–29, 2008.

76

Tretʹiakov, “Diadʹka,” 198 and 200f.

207

208

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Fig. 64. The tourist Tretyakov with two kolkhozniki (ca. 1930).

two kolkhoz workers (fig. 64). While both workers rather hesitatingly face the camera, Tretyakov adjusts the cap of one of them with a jovial gesture, apparently to make him more presentable. This reveals not only the staged character of this document but above all the ambivalent position of the photo-tourist Tretyakov, who stands between the kolkhozniki but at the same time arranges the scene. Since there was someone else behind the camera, taking the picture, the image does not seamlessly reflect Tretyakov’s own photographic techniques. Rather, it shows the limits of an operative text and image concept.77 A picture entitled “The son is for the kolkhoz, the father against it” (fig. 65) stages this in an almost theatrical manner; indeed, it was possibly taken during an agit play. The photograph captures the abyss between generations and ideologies in a schematic mixture of gestures, gazes and sharp light effects with a split in the center of the image. Unlike the clumsy kolkhozniki who let Tretyakov fumble with their headwear, the young man here looks challengingly into the lens, his straight gaze emphasized by the backward orientation of the old man. The framing of the picture intensifies this ef-

77

Cf. also Gough, “Radical Tourism”: “the medium of this shift from factography to operativism was the camera” (161).

2. Word and Image

Fig. 65. Sergei Tret' iakov, “The Son Is for the Kolkhoz” (ca. 1930).

fect by transforming the body of the young kolkhoznik into a bust, a sort of monument to himself. During his stays at “Communist Lighthouse,” Tretyakov increasingly shifts from documentary to staged photography, calling these images “preorganized.” Rather than merely recording life as it is, they serve as a means of instruction and appeal.78 It is precisely this manipulation, the organization of the portrayed, the gesture of adjusting the scene—be it subtle or authoritarian—which marks the shift of photographic documentarism as an “optical diary” to the optics of operativity. 2.2 Operative Optics II: Diagrammatics Tretyakov’s first journey to the kolkhoz “Communist Lighthouse” leads him right into the middle of a literary topos. Time and again, the Caucasus has been a place of poetic transformation, a backdrop for aesthetic reorientation. Most often, it served as a projection field for colonialist narratives 78

Tretʹiakov, Diadʹka, 201. (“For a while, I made only documentary photographs, catching moments of reality as it was. Now, in addition to such ‘documentary’ photos, I also take pictures organized in advance. These show not how the work is actually done but how it should be done.”)

209

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of encounters with an untamed Other, a scene for geopoetic adventures of futile violent appropriation, unquenched longing, and painful separation. Tretyakov is setting out with a different goal in mind. He wants to transform the Caucasus into a place of production. Where Pushkin, Lermontov, and Tolstoy created sceneries of a semi-dissident “imperial sublime,”79 Tretyakov pursues the project of a plan-compatible construction literature in which the writer “keeps a logbook of the five-year plan.” In this logbook, Tretyakov first lists the costs of the proceedings. “46 rubles and several kopecks,” he pays for his plane ticket from Moscow to Mineralʹnye Vody; as much as a ticket for “the padded class of the express train” and thus a “quarter of its real cost price.”80 However, a train would have been more comfortable. Strapped to his seat by heavy rubber straps, plagued by heartburn when the plane loses height, befuddled by the smell of gasoline and the screeching of the engine, the passenger embarks on a confusing expedition of the senses, not least vision. The world appears from a strange perspective as the altitude rises. On the small plane, the windows can be opened, and when Tretyakov overcomes “both the fear and the idiotic desire to jump down” and be transformed into “bloody jelly,” he slides his fingers through a narrow gap in the opening. “Sticking out of the window, the outstretched palm feels like a ten-pound cast gutta-percha ball when flying at the speed of 130 kilometers per hour. The air breaks through between your fingers, shaking your hand.”81 These windblown fingers hardly know what and how to write anymore. The sublime experience of flying, which pervades the avant-garde from Vasily Kamensky’s aero experiments to Vladimir Tatlin’s Dedalusstyle flying machine, has repeatedly fueled both artistic crisis and creativity. Conquering airspace, experiencing inspiration and intellectual flights of fancy, one strives for “excendence” (Levinas), overrides firmly established poetic formulas, and calls for a language and recording system that can do justice to this uprooting. “There is no aesthetic habit for this perspective,”

79

Harsha Ram, The Imperial Sublime. A Russian Poetics of Empire (Wisconsin, 2003). On the “imaginative geography” of the Caucasus, see also Susan Layton, Russian Literature and Empire. Conquest of the Caucasus from Pushkin to Tolstoy (Cambridge, 1994).

80

Sergei Tretʹiakov, “Skvozʹ neprotertye ochki,” in his Vyzov. Kolkhoznye ocherki (Moscow, 1930), 7–16, qt. 7.

81

Ibid., 11.

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writes Shklovsky after his first flight to the Don. Flying reminds him of the motions of an injured beetle.82 The advent of aviation itself demands a new language. Marinetti, circling over Milan, derives from the ecstatic experience of motorized flying the liberated flight of words, the parole in libertà. The Soviet magazine Aero, on the other hand, says: “Automobility has given us a mass of new expressions. Now, mechanical apparatuses for flying will necessitate a mass of special definitions, indispensable for mutual understanding and for the exchange of impressions connected with airship flying.”83 Accordingly, Nikolai Aseev describes the revolutionary “word work” of the left front as “attempting a verbal flight into the future.”84 Tretyakov is not concerned with specific aeronautical terminology or the innovation of linguistic material in the aviation paradigm. Beyond neologisms and word flights, he aims at a shift in concepts of representation. The very title of the essay, “Through Uncleaned Spectacles,” signals a critical reformulation of the avant-garde demand for a “new way of seeing,” which Tretyakov attempts at an altitude of 500 meters between Moscow and Kharkov. The experience of flight seems to him like a film dynamically realizing the formalist principle of ostranenie. He begins by rejecting various approaches to depicting nature from a bird’s eye view and transforming it into a poetic landscape: The horizon expands at speed. In harmony with the rapidly turning propeller, turns of phrase swell up. You feel like writing: having climbed the air stairs, the plane is running on a smooth transparent plateau. Or maybe: the fields, villages, roads, forests are dumped into view, like vegetables into a kitchen maid’s apron. You could say: the field strips resemble a patchwork quilt [very bad writing]. You could say: ink blotches of ploughed fallow plots [wrong, because no blotch has such clear contours]. The tongue stretches toward the phrase—the grass ceases to be grass and seems to be mold, or mud at the bottom of an aquarium: the eye

82

Viktor Shklovskii, “Tretʹia fabrika,” in his Gamburgskii schet (St. Petersburg, 2000), 83–150, qt. 142.

83

“Aviatsiia,” Aero 1 (1909): 4.

84

Quoted in V. Maiakovskii and O. Brik, “Nasha slovesnaia rabota,” LEF 1 (1923): 41.

211

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is unable to see the blades of grass, though it still catches the chalky droplets of daisies. Immediately, comparisons crop up: potato fields as checkered green cloth. The brain casts them off with disgust.85

Flying over the landscape, the Apollonian eye explores the possibilities of ekphrasis. From the kitchen apron to the patchwork quilt to the checkered cloth, the gaze glides over the texture of the world. One by one, things fit themselves into a poetic pictorial grid, only to be immediately replaced by another image. From above, unlimited by a horizon, language clings to worn patterns of literary topography. Yet it finds no foothold in the oncoming stream of metaphors but staggers in the vacuum of missing words. How can one describe nature without forcing it into the idealistically codified form of a “landscape”? While aviation optics opens up a new way of seeing, the Earth from above becomes the projection field for a new way of speaking. In 1929, a year after publishing his travel sketches on Svanetia, in a short contribution for the last issue of Novyi LEF, Tretyakov polemicizes against texts that are all about visuality. Though entitled “Obrazoborchestvo” (translatable as “Iconoclasm”), the article by no means renounces imagery entirely. Rather, it negotiates a new form of the poetic image as a visual form of knowledge. Again, it is the bird’s eye view from which Tretyakov proceeds: Once I was told in an argument: you argue against images but use them yourself! Here is an example from your book Svanetia, comparing the province with a tree leaf. The comparison is as follows: “Svanetia, if you look from above, resembles a tree leaf, whose main vein is the river Ingur, and the smaller veins are streams branching off, with the green flesh of the leaf squeezed between them by ridges and passes. The tip of this leaf rises above sea level by a kilometer and a half, and the water in the rivers of Svanetia does not flow but careers down the slope.” The image of the leaf with its veins is essentially a model, with the structure of the leaf exactly following the geographical structure of Svanetia. This model is entirely addressed to the intellect. It provides a pattern to

85

Tretʹiakov, “Skvozʹ neprotertye ochki,” 10. On this travel sketch in the context of the aeropoetics of Russian and Italian Futurism, see Khans Giunter, “Mir s vysoty ptič’ego poleta. Ital’janskii i russkii futurizm v sravnitel’nom aspekte,” in Sine Arte, nihil. Noveishie issledovaniia russkoi kul’tury, vol. 1 (Belgrad and Moscow, 2002), 101–108.

2. Word and Image

crystallize our knowledge. . . . An image as a scheme—a plan, qualitative and quantitative analysis through comparison—this is what we need.86

The image as a model, scheme, and number rationalizes the poetics of “new seeing.” Only in a diagrammatic way does the image become operative, only as a geometric drawing can it mediate between (rationally) conceptualizing and (visually) conceiving.87 Along the structural isomorphs of a relief map, the metaphorical image of Svanetia is transformed into an instrument of iconic reason. The scheme is situated on the threshold between visualization and abstraction. Cassirer has observed this intermediate position of the scheme regarding the transition of language concepts away from representation and toward cognition. Here, “physical being is subject to a fixed geometric scheme within which all natural processes are to be classified”88 and within which material things tend to become pure symbols in systems of classification. Above all, geometrical schemes are repeatedly used as ideal-typical modes of diagrammatic reasoning. “The flight unfolds below the amazing geometry of human labor, which had drawn its lines all over the earth, painting parallelograms, rectangles, and trapezes with different crops. This [technical] drawing is textured by the harrow and plough.”89 Geometric forms, drawings, and diagrams—graphic representations of data—reduce the concept of visual imaginability to abstract and calculable planar arrangement. If imagery is allowed at all, then only as “operative

86

Sergei Tretʹiakov, “Obrazoborchestvo,” Novyi LEF 12 (1928): 43. He changes his original metaphor of a leaf considerably here. In the original of the book on Svanetia, the passage is as follows: “Upper Svanetia, if you look from above, is a tree leaf; Ingur in the middle is a vein with streams branching off. The tip of this leaf rises above sea level by 1½ kilometers, and the water in the rivers of Svanetia does not flow but careers down the slope.”

87

Cf. Sybille Krämer, “Operative Bildlichkeit. Von der ‘Grammatologie’ zu einer ‘Diagrammatologie’? Reflexionen über erkennendes ‘Sehen’,” in Logik des Bildlichen. Zur Kritik der ikonischen Vernunft, ed. Martina Hessler and Dieter Mersch (Bielefeld, 2009), 94–123.

88

Ernst Cassirer, “Das Symbolproblem und seine Stellung im System der Philosophie” [1927], in his Symbol, Technik, Sprache (Hamburg, 1995), 1–21, qt. 14 (italics in the original).

89

Tretʹiakov, “Skvozʹ neprotertye ochki,” 14.

213

214

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Fig. 66. Map of the “Challenge” plant, which was formed around the “Communist Lighthouse” commune (ca. 1930).

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imagery,”90 that is, a visuality that creates knowledge, not reflections of the world: “We don’t like still lives; it is the graph that speaks to us.”91 Moreover, operative optics “combines doing and operating with observing.”92 The grids and schemas of maps and geometric shapes make it possible to redesign the “literary” text as a form of notation that transforms things into lines so as render the world manageable. As operative visuals, maps and schemas work towards what Tretyakov calls the “operative sketch” (operativnyi ocherk). Traditionally, the “intermediate genre”93 of the ocherk has been discussed primarily in opposition to fiction—as a genre of authentic everyday material, critical journalism, or fact-oriented scientific prose. Beyond this (constantly blurred) dichotomy of fact and fiction, however, lies a nexus with the visual arts that draws on the etymology of the genre. The sketch addresses this media ambivalence between writing and drawing so persistently and aggressively that Gorky demanded: a theory of the ocherk should proceed from the verbs chertitʹ (to draw) and ocherchivatʹ (to outline).94 In sketch writing and drawing, the discursive and the iconic enter an interrelation. Not least for this reason, the imagery of the operative sketch, its schemes, plans and charts, persistently refer to the line as an element shared by letters and graphics. For Tretyakov, the “inkblots of ploughed fallow fields” gradually turn into a writing surface; the strokes and lines are grouped into individual letters: “Black stripes of ploughing on a yellowgreen background of the fields begin to form letters. Usually, an O, a T, a Ш. Less often, an Р or an Ф. The font is rectangular, like on a poster.

90

Krämer, “Operative Bildlichkeit.”

91

Sergei Tretʹiakov, “Literaturnoe mnogopolʹe,” Novyi LEF 12 (1928): 43–44, qt. 43. Cf. also Chuzhak’s attack against imagery: “Not imagery but exactness.” Nikolai Chuzhak, “Pisatelʹskaia pamiatka,” in Literatura Fakta. Pervyi sbornik materialov rabotnikov LEFa, ed. N. Chuzhak (Moscow, 1929 [reprint Moscow, 2000]), 9–28, qt. 18.

92

Cf. Krämer, “Operative Bildlichkeit,” 102.

93

Ivan Zhiga, “Promezhutochnyi zhanr,” Literaturnaia gazeta, July 15, 1930.

94

According to Gorky, the sketch is “somewhere between a scientific treatise and a narrative”: Maksim Gorʹkii, “Letter to Ivan Zhiga,” August 15, 1929, printed in Zhurnal dlia vsekh. “Talking about the ocherk (sketch) as a lit. form, Aramilev had to proceed from the verb cherchitʹ, ochertivatʹ (to draw, to outline). The ocherk is tantamount and equivalent to a sketch, a first draft,” Maksim Gorʹkii, Sobranie sochinenii v 30-i tomakh, vol. 30 (Moscow, 1955), 146.

215

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Fig. 67. Diagram of cultural work conducted at the plant.

3. Word and Thing

An O means they’ve started plowing the field, but the middle is not done yet.”95 Shklovsky, too, uses the metaphor of writing in the abovementioned description of his first flight: “From above, the river looks like a sweeping signature. Nothing is written in the margins. The Moskva river left its signature all over the sheet.”96 Once the geometric structure of the Earth surface is freed from the obscure language of literary imagery and translated into the script of nature, it becomes a book, a “code of geology, agronomy, botany, and land management.”97 At this point, the diagrammatic reasoning of operative literature reconnects with one of the most influential metaphors of intellectual history: the book of the world. Even if its code remains illegible for the untrained reader, and even if as a metaphor “the book of the world” defies concise conceptualization, it still assumes the option of semiotically rationalized intelligibility.98 Tretyakov’s reading of Socialist alphabetic signs cited above shares this expectation, yet his use of this metaphor is not exclusively determined by epistemological interests. Instead, it endeavors to elaborate an optics that introduces script as a figure of speech into the realm of literary imagination. It is the optics of image as writing that is supposed to grant any text not only legibility, but manageability as a cognitive-diagrammatic form (fig. 67).

3. Word and Thing Back in Moscow, Tretyakov decides to make his next trips not as a visitor to the commune but as its member. During his second stay, in October 1929, “the writer turns into a kolkhoznik.” Then, from January to October 1930, Tretyakov works at the Vyzov collective combine affiliated with the commune as a council member, education official and newspaper editor, documenting his work and that of the combine in notes, protocols, and photographs. He also recruits a camera team from Mezhrabpomfilm for 95

Tretʹiakov, “Skvozʹ neprotertye ochki,” 13.

96

Shklovskii, “Tretʹia fabrika,” 142.

97

Tretʹiakov, “Skvozʹ neprotertye ochki,” 14.

98

Hans Blumenberg retraces the history of this metaphor as part of his larger project on the theory of the non-conceptual in Die Lesbarkeit der Welt (Frankfurt/M., 1981).

217

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a long-term film study and writes sketches that gradually “change from reports of an observer into the workbook of a participant.”99 Conducting this shift, Tretyakov hopes that his sketches “become operational rather than informational. They do not just list facts but see these facts in their development and demand immediate intervention.”100 More than that, they are an intervention. The development from a sketch informer (ocherkist-informator) to a sketch operator (ocherkist-operativnik) is rooted in the contemporary debate about the status of the fictional in literature. Hardly any other dichotomy is so prominent in the literary theory of the 1920s and early 1930s as that of fact vs. fiction. The anthology Literature of Fact (Literatura fakta), published in 1929 by Chuzhak, collects these polemics, summing them up as the equation of factuality and operability: “Literature of fact is envisioned as a stimulus to action.”101 The poetological significance of Tretyakov’s kolkhoz sketches lies in how they approach this program by not just taking precise stock of a world under construction but by testing the genre of the protocol so as to turn from distanced diegesis to present performance. Though by no means universally observed, the present tense is one of the most striking features of sketch literature. Hennig and Avanessian see this choice as a signal by the factographically oriented avant-garde that a programmatic breach of fiction is intended, since the present tense is directed both against fictionality and against the story (fabula) as its carrier.102 Sketches do not narrate a world but describe and discuss it. Indeed, by actualizing the “present” in “presentation,” they claim not only to describe and discuss but also to involve with und intrude into reality, turning a narrated remote location from a projection surface into a space for action. The a priori of presence—of the textual “here and now”—establishes a literary structure of presentation, which renders the events described or debated evident in their performative execution.

99

Tretʹiakov, “Raport pisatelia-kolkhoznika,” 8.

100 Ibid., 12f. 101 Chuzhak, “Pisatelʹskaia pamiatka,” 19. 102 Armen Avanessian and Anke Hennig, Präsens. Poetik eines Tempus (Zürich, 2012), esp. 35–42.

3. Word and Thing

Using the present tense, Tretyakov refers to the protocol as a genre that connects co-presence with strictly standardized procedures yet transcends mere chronographic inventory, claiming to transcribe events in real time as well as to prescribe them in future.103 Primarily a legal genre, the protocol derives its authority not only from its functions (recording, witnessing, and authenticating) but above all from its “presentist structure,” which explores the “double meaning of acta as action and (criminal) file,” an ambiguity that “combines to form a third meaning in acta facere, the Latin for protocolling.”104 Tretyakov falls back on this structure in order to confirm genuineness and truth—but above all in order to make the recording seem situational, updatable.105 Protocol-like present tense precision is arguably an extreme case of what literary texts intend. However, it has received considerable attention in documentary poetics as a device to evoke a here and now that is subject to reactualization and that invites the reader to enter the event, switching from distanced reception to active participation. Tretyakov’s sketch “The Kolkhoznik Speaking” (1930) is structured as a protocol almost throughout. Reporting on a politpropaganda meeting at which Yakovlev’s theses106 are to be “worked through” with the kolkhozniki, it presents the political debate as a dispute on possibilities to act. The question of the act as deed shifts here to negotiating potentiality, the scope of action, the compulsion to act and the practical constraints. Among others, the sketch involves the following dialogue between kolkhoz members, arising from the question if specialists should be brought in from the city:

103 On the protocol, see Michael Niehaus and Hans-Walter Schmidt-Hannisa, “Textsorte Protokoll,” in Das Protokoll. Kulturelle Funktionen einer Textsorte, ed. Michael Niehaus and Hans-Walter Schmidt-Hannisa (Frankfurt/M., 2005), 7–25, qt. 16. 104 Cornelia Vismann, Akten. Medientechnik und Recht (Frankfurt/M., 2000), 86. 105 Brik claims that facts are only of use in a protocol or a proclamation. A literary text, he argues, has not in the least the aim of registering facts. Brik, “Blizhe k faktu,” 81. 106 Yakov Yakovlev was the People’s Commissar for Agriculture of the USSR from 1929 to 1934. He was responsible for forced collectivization, which caused famine in large parts of the USSR in 1932–1933, especially in Ukraine (Holodomor), the steppe regions, and the Northern Caucasus. For the Sixteenth Party Congress in 1930, Yakovlev presented his theses The Kolkhoz Movement and the Upturn of the Kolkhoz Economy, which were printed by the State Publishing House with a circulation of 50,000 copies and distributed throughout the country.

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—Well then, so who ’ d be the agronomist? You or what? —Why not me! —And if you were the agronomist, would you sow wheat? —Sure. —And soybeans? —Nope. —And sunflowers? —No, no sunflowers, either. —Well then, how is the state supposed to fulfil its plan with such an agronomist?107

A speculative “What if . . .” thought experiment with the parameters of economic planning is unfolding here, leading us away from the rigid schematism of fiction vs. fact, and instead proceeding to a subjunctive mood, where the compulsion to act can be explored hypothetically in simulated situations and states. At the same time, the meticulous parataxis of the protocol principle contains a tendency toward reification. The sketch’s protocol mode requires that Tretyakov himself “records the answers precisely” and “even retains the original style,”108 but dispenses with all narrative elaboration, neutralizing the narrator into a mere recording medium that preserves the chain of events but is transformed from a subject into an object. While “literature of fact” searches for a genre that implies a dual structure of discursivity and objecthood, Tretyakov explores writing as a temporal and material process, considering the status of the text between sign and thing and evaluating the shifts between subjects and objects of textuality. Among the most pressing questions here arises a poetics that makes the thing an author—and at the same time renders the writing process visible in its materiality. In his project The Pocket, Tretyakov shares his thoughts about this: For a while it seemed to me that a thing you follow on its journey through the hands of people and their relationships could tell more about an epoch than a psychological novel. This is how I came up with the idea of telling people’s stories by talking about the things they use.109 107 Sergei Tretʹiakov, “Slovo kolkhozniku,” in his Mesiats v derevne (iiunʹ–iiulʹ 1930). Operativnye ocherki (Moscow, 1931), 110–119, qt. 117f. 108 Ibid., 111. 109 Idem, “Pro karman.”

3. Word and Thing

The structural substitution of the subject by the object as the gravitational center of literature promises to simultaneously overcome the dogma of genre as well as the dogma of narration. The turn away from biography and toward factography has crucial consequences for both the “what” and the “how” of writing. For the “new objecthood” of literature does not only imply talking about things. Rather, the things themselves should talk: “Everything you see or hold in your hands has had its own long and interesting life. In this life, the thing had passed from hand to hand, met many people, had different experiences. All we have to do is: get it to tell us its story. Let’s make things talk.”110 Tretyakov remodels the role of narration by the principle of material manipulation. That which I touch, handle, and use begins to speak—in this way, the operative idea of intertwining words and deeds is realized as a syntagma of telling and handling. Only that which has been manipulated and touched by human hands can tell its story: precisely because it has been manufactured, produced, and used. You can only relate to what you can touch and shape. The mute thing enters the discursive sphere via the manual one. This concept of auctorial objecthood in literature is in part a reaction to the discussion about the loss of the “living human” on paper, which began in the 1920s and continued into the epoch of social realism as a problem of “type.” In 1929, Tretyakov demands “that writers write not a ‘human being’ made from paper but a real human being.”111 Paradoxically, the autobiography of the thing suggests that a dead object stands for literary animation and offers a new perspective on the materiality of literature. If the manipulation of things grants life to literature, and if biographies are factographies, then recording these biographies merges writing with the processing and making of products. Tretyakov sees an apt way of handling this writing practice in collective text work, i.e. writing in production cooperatives, since “the book is already a product of many hands, and it is only by old habit that the hand of

110 Ibid., 14. 111 Idem, “Zhivoe i bumazhnoe,” in Literatura fakta. Pervyi sbornik materialov rabotnikov LEFa, ed. N. Chuzhak (Moscow, 1929 [reprint Moscow, 2000]), 149.

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the master-composer obscures the others.”112 In a far-reaching comparison, Tretyakov parallelizes text construction and object production in a factorylike setting of an assembly line: The compositional structure of the “biography of a thing” is a conveyor belt, along which a raw material unit moves, turning into a useful product thanks to human effort. . . . People approach the thing [veshch’] at the cross-sections of the conveyor belt. . . . It is their social side and their production skills that are involved in engaging with the thing; the consumer aspect is only the final part of this conveyor.113

It is not least the analogy of text production with manufacturing engineering that suggests subsuming Tretyakov’s prose under the category of “utility literature.” Indeed, the montage of books along an assembly line largely corresponds with utilitarian aesthetics. Yet a too narrow focus on the industrial framing of text work as functional object production fails to account for the subtle dynamic between materiality and textuality, between thing and text. All the books that Tretyakov believed would be created according to conveyor belt composition methods—books with titles such as Bread, Coal, Cotton, Paper—would not only testify to the processing of books into commodities but above all document the transformation of raw materiality into literary material. Things that speak of themselves thus primarily reveal how they became text.

112 Idem, “Prodolzhenie sleduet,” in Literatura Fakta. Pervyi sbornik materialov rabotnikov LEFa, ed. N. Chuzhak (Moscow, 1929 [reprint Moscow, 2000]), 276–283, qt. 279. 113 Idem, “Biografiia veshchi,” in Literatura Fakta. Pervyi sbornik materialov rabotnikov LEFa, ed. N. Chuzhak (Moscow, 1929 [reprint Moscow, 2000]), 68–72, qt. 71.

VI. Giving. Poetics of Life

1. The Gift of Language Of all the gestures performed by the hand, the gesture of giving arguably reaches furthest into cultural history, given its close connections with economic, social, and ethical concerns. Since Marcel Mauss published his seminal Essai sur le don (1923/1924) at the latest, reflections on gift-giving have extended far beyond the boundaries of ethnology, reaching from the philosophy of alterity and responsiveness to socio-economic analysis of goods traffic, from anthropological meditations on presents and the present to reflections on fetish objects in art history and psychoanalysis. There is no discipline in the humanities not fascinated by the “riddle of the gift,”1 and the highly symbolic structure of giving and taking, by the gift as a key object and by giving as a key gesture of archaic as well as modern cultures. Mauss’s model of the gift as a “total social phenomenon” represents giving and taking as gestures intertwining religious, legal, moral, economic, social, and aesthetic factors. Above all, however, the model explores the mutually binding structure in which giving and receiving obey a “perennial form of contractual morality.”2 The spectrum of gifts—from luxurious overspending to moderately dosed donations—follows a subtly graded set of rules, balancing the right amount of wastefulness and generosity, modesty and overbidding. Selflessness and self-interest enter into a complex relationship here. They are parameters of an incessant permutation, in which

1

Maurice Godelier, L’enigme du don (Paris, 1996).

2

Marcel Mauss, “Essai sur le don. Forme et raison de l’échange dans les sociétés archaïques,” L ’ Année Sociologique 1 (1923–1924): 30–186, qt. 33.

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things, deed and gestures are caught up in the conditional structure of gift and counter-gift, in “constant economic excitement, which is only marginally materialist.”3 From a cultural-historical point of view, the gift stands between sacrifice and trade. It mediates the threatening encounter with the enemy and lays the ground for the economic utilization of the Other; it makes it possible “to face each other without killing each other and to give without sacrificing oneself;”4 it conquers by forcing to give a counter-gift. Derrida has pursued this inextricable mutuality in the etymology of the English word gift, cognate to the German Gift—poison—while attempting to separate gift-giving from ethical-economic cycles. [The gift] must not circulate, it must not be exchanged, it must not in any case be exhausted, as a gift, by the process of exchange, by the movement of circulation of the circle in the form of return to the point of departure. If the figure of the circle is essential to economics, the gift must remain aneconomic. Not that it remains foreign to the circle, but it must keep a relation of foreignness to the circle, a relation without relation of familiar foreignness. It is perhaps in this sense that the gift is the impossible. Not impossible but the impossible. The very figure of the impossible.5

Where the gift makes the Other a debtor, it becomes a poison, Gift.6 But if the gift is trapped in the constellation of “A intends to give B to C,” how can object B be envisioned beyond the calculus of gift and counter-gift, of debt and repayment? How can the gift become an expenditure without return, interrupting the logic of exchange trade that turns every gift into a concealed commodity? Not ever providing a counter-gift would imply a lack of appreciation and remembrance, a negation of the initial gift. “The gift as gift ought not appear as gift: either to the donee or to the donor. It

3

Ibid., 171; on the aspect of luxury, cf. Georges Bataille, Œuvres completes, vol. 7 (Paris, 1976).

4

Mauss, “Essai sur le don,” 185.

5

Jacques Derrida, Given Time. Counterfeit Money, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Chicago, 1994), 7.

6

Derrida, Given Time, 37. On the ambivalence of gift and the German Gift (poison), see also Jean Starobinski, Gute Gaben, schlimme Gaben. Die Ambivalenz sozialer Gesten (Frankfurt/M., 1994).

1. The Gift of Language

cannot be gift as gift except by not being present as gift.”7 When the very recognition of the gift as a gift annuls it, transferring it into the sphere of economic contracts or ritual sacrificial commitments, then the gift falls into the realm of impossibility. It remains conceivable, however—as an incalculable, unexpected event beyond reciprocity, as an “impossible non-thing.”8 The gift involves, indeed drives the institutional conditions of symbolic and economic exchange without quite being part of them. And yet: even if the gift may be rejected as a corrupt mechanism of subtle commitment and exchange, an intersubjective aporia of reciprocity, it can also be a genuine gesture expressing and co-creating a reciprocal relationship.9 In exchange-based relationships, people and things are apt to blend into each other. The relation between the gift (a thing) and the word is somewhat different, though. Giving and taking involve an interaction that implies the immediate recognition of the other. The gift both submits itself to the receiver and imposes itself upon them; it is hard to reject and demands reciprocity. While speaking can remain intransitive, giving is bound to transitivity. And yet, giving and speaking are closely connected—linguistically and historically, for one. In a study on “gift and exchange in IndoEuropean vocabulary,” Émile Benveniste observes that in Hittite, the root *dō- means “to take.” Does this suggest, he wonders, that in Indo-European languages the concepts of taking and giving “are rejoined in the gesture” (“se rejoignent dans le geste”)?10 Benveniste convincingly bases his etymological considerations on concrete bodily gestures. Thus, when arguing that the Goth niman and the Latin emo, both of which belong to the semantic field of “taking,” are not related, he says that this is suggested, “in a primitive way,” by gestures: Clearly, emo means above all “to take, to draw to oneself ”; it affirms a possession, which is expressed by the gesture of the man who takes the object, who draws it to himself. The meaning “to buy” must have been applied first to human beings who were about to be sold for a price.

7

Derrida, Given Time, 14 (italics in the original).

8

Ibid., 42.

9

Marcel Hénaff, Die Gabe der Philosophen. Gegenseitigkeit neu denken (Bielefeld, 2014).

10

Émile Benveniste, Le vocabulaire des institutions indo-européennes, vol. 1: Économie, parenté, société (Paris, 1969), 63–122.

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The notion of buying has its origin in the gesture that concludes the buying (emo)—and not in the gesture of payment, of ascribing value.11

This look at the hybrid semantics of giving reminds us that the connection between language and gift is not limited to individual linguistic systems or levels. Rather, it is inherent, speech itself being a phenomenon of give and take. Consider such concepts as the gift of speech, the revelation of the word or, even more fundamentally, the word as a precondition for any gift. According to Heidegger, language itself is a gift even before it can become a sign.12 Literary texts often present themselves as gifts. In this way, they attempt to transcend the textual barter of writing and reading, the trade relations between author and reader. Such self-dramatization has manifold manifestations: for instance, the aura of a gift can be evoked paratextually by a dedication or an address; or it can be communicated in motifs of giving, revealing, and presenting. A text may take care of its afterlife by assigning itself the status of an heirloom. A suggestion of gift-giving can be embedded in the way the reader is addressed and made to own the text. It can be articulated in the temporal arrangement, the present tense serving as a present. What all these phenomena have in common is the evocation of a responsive bond, an attempt at a successful exchange—improbable as it may be—that is constantly symbolically mediatized and transgressed in the motif of the gift. Among all textual forms, this motif seems most frequent in letters. Though Derrida does not deal with this genre explicitly, it is still significant that his study Given Time opens with a letter “from a woman to a woman,” in which the gift of the letter is combined with a complaint about the missing gift of time. As a “paper gift,” the letter celebrates the act of writing and sending, both conceptually and materially, as a transfer of the word from one hand to the other.13 What other text is given like a letter? What

11

Ibid., 81 and 86.

12

Martin Heidegger, Unterwegs zur Sprache [1959] (Pfullingen, 1990).

13

Heike Winkel, “Papiergeschenke. Zur Codierung von Intimität in Briefwechseln des frühen 20. Jahrhunderts,” in Schriften—Dinge—Phantasmen. Literatur und Kultur der russischen Moderne, vol. 1, ed. Miriam Goller and Susanne Strätling (Munich, 2002), 13–38.

1. The Gift of Language

other text is received quite like one? A letter’s address is more than a mere “to”; it always implies a “for.” Marina Tsvetaeva was acutely aware of this, especially in her correspondence with Rainer Maria Rilke. She writes that she experiences the most intense joy of receiving a gift as soon as she holds a letter from him in her hands, even before reading it: Do you know how I got your [books] today (the 10th)? The children were still asleep (7 in the morning) and I suddenly got up and ran to the door. At the same moment—I already had my hand on the doorknob—the postman knocked—straight into my hand. // I only had to end my gesture at the door and receive the books with the same, still throbbing hand. I haven’t opened them yet, because then my letter wouldn’t go out today—and it must fly.14

The exceptional moment of the handover is stylized in this way not only in the letters of lovers and close friends. Like no other genre or medium, the letter is in constant danger: it could be lost on the way, the handover might fail. This renders the verbal exchange less predictable; even in high-frequency correspondence, the letter always remains a singular event. The similarity of letters and gifts is obvious: the letter, too, demands an answer and remains incomplete without the counter-letter. And yet it is also shaped by the knowledge and fear that it might remain unrequited, fall out of the grid of give-and-take. A medium of circulated words, goods, and feelings, the letter rhetorically and conceptually affirms the paradox of staging correspondence between the concepts of exchange and gift. The gift structure inherent in the letter has contributed significantly to its literary adaptation, to the formation of hybrid genres such as the epistolary novel. Poetry, too, feeds on the structure of give and take. The motifs and rhetoric of gift-giving, which permeate poetry, are formed in the resonating body of the lyrical subject, in the devotion, dedication and abandon implied by addressing an Other.15 This structure becomes particularly pronounced where the avant-gardes reject the given, preferring 14

Marina Tsvetaeva to Rainer Maria Rilke, May 10, 1926. Quoted after: Ilma Rakusa and Felix Philipp Ingold, “M.I. Cvetaeva im Briefwechsel mit R.M. Rilke,” Zeitschrift für Slavische Philologie 41, no. 1 (1980): 127–173, qt. 151.

15

Cf. Jean-Claude Lanne, “Dar i zhertva v tvorchestve Velimira Khlebnikova,” in Gabe und Opfer in der russischen Literatur und Kultur der Moderne, ed. Rainer Grübel and Gun-Britt Kohler (Oldenburg, 2006), 249–261, qt. 253.

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the annihilation of a modern tabula rasa to the gift of cultural heritage. Stéphane Mallarmé’s “The Gift of the Poem” (“Don du poème,” 1865), for instance, speaks of the poem’s birth from emptiness, while Velimir Khlebnikov depicts the verse as a place of self-sacrifice. In Russian culture, Rainer Grübel observes a shift from the paradigm of sacrifice to that of the gift in the 1920s.16 From Soloviev’s apocalyptical sacrificial motifs to Zoshchenko’s fight against Stalinism with its very real victims, Grübel traces the “ontodology”17 of modernity between Apollonian and Dionysian influences. In this context, Mandelstam represents a poetics of the negative gift, in which “nothingness undoes the giving.”18 Mandelstam has made the nexus of letter-writing and poetry a dominant feature of his work, hereby subtly changing both genres. As early as in 1913, in his essay “On the Interlocutor,” Mandelstam discusses the act of transfer—handing over a letter, exchanging gifts—as a lyrical genre. The essay proceeds from a “very simple starting point: if we had no acquaintances, we would write no letters.” But while a letter always has a concrete addressee, the poet writes to an unexpected, hoped-for but unknown person. Mandelstam speaks of a message in a bottle, found in the sand after years of wandering: “I read the letter, I learn the date of the event, the last will of the deceased. I was entitled to do that. I didn’t open a letter addressed to someone else. The letter in a bottle is addressed to whoever finds it. I found it. So I am the mysterious addressee.” Mandelstam develops this image citing a poem by Baratynsky, which presents itself as such a gift to find: My gift is scant, my voice lacks force behind it, and yet I live and my existence here to somebody perhaps is counted dear: some far descendant possibly may find it.19

16

Rainer Grübel, “Gabe und Opfer. Axiologische Perspektiven in der russischen Kultur der Moderne,” in Gabe und Opfer in der russischen Literatur und Kultur der Moderne, ed. Rainer Grübel and Gun-Britt Kohler (Oldenburg, 2006), 1–82, qt. 56.

17

Claude Bruaire, L’être et l’esprit (Paris, 1983).

18

Ibid., 58f.

19

Osip Mandelʹshtam, “O sobesednike,” in his Sobranie sochinenii v 4-kh tomakh, vol. 2: Proza (Moscow, 1992), 233–240, qt. 235. Poem cited in translation by Alan Myers: E. A. Baratynsky, “My Gift is Scant,” in An Age Ago. A Selection of Nineteenth-Century Russian Poetry (New York, 1988), 54.

1. The Gift of Language

Mandelstam’s metaphor of a message in a bottle subverts classical literary models of communication in many ways. The figure of the secret addressee introduces incalculability; the poem is a letter whose paths and destinations cannot be determined or controlled. Every text has a discursive space, but this space cannot be mapped. You cannot easily traverse it via the shortest route to deliver the postal gift of the text safely, unaltered and unharmed. The point of departure and the stations of the journey blur and merge, and you never know how, when, and where it will arrive. The message in a bottle as a metaphor of poetry entering the world replaces the regulated framework of postal delivery with a situation of maximum contingency, in which an unknown writer relates to an unknown reader. Moreover, this relationship is one-directional—and this, too, breaks the logic of letter-writing. A message in a bottle always remains unanswered. And this is precisely why Mandelstam chooses Baratynsky’s verses about the gift. For the poem as a message in a bottle is indeed this impossible thing—a real gift that expects no counter-gift, an acte gratuit and thus a coup de don (Derrida) par excellence. For Mandelstam, only poetry can be such an unexpected gift for a reader provided by providence. Prose, he argues, is supposed to instruct contemporaries: it has its dedicated addressees. The reader of poetry, on the contrary, is a fuzzy figure somewhere in the distance, whose hand may never reach out for the poem, never grasp and hold it. “The sight of a hand reaching out for alms is disgusting,” says Mandelstam about Pushkin’s dealings with his devoted listeners.20 This commandment of freedom creates a distance between such “alms” and the gift—a quite concrete spatio-temporal distance. It is only from elsewhere or “elsewhen” that the poem can be realized as an unexpected event, an unhoped-for present. At the same time, however, Mandelstam subverts the idea of unpredictability through the theological aspect of providence. The paradoxical figure of “unpredictable providence” once again illustrates the impossibility of the gift as observed by Derrida. As an event, the gift is not plannable and yet requires a belief in its meaningfulness. After all, the image of the message in a bottle does not only suggest chance—the text itself is looking for its finder; postal correspondence here is realized as predestinated co-respondence. At this point, the formula of a secret addressee reveals all

20

Mandelʹshtam, “O sobesednike,” 239.

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its ambivalence. It insists that the text is intended as a gift for someone— without revealing for whom. The secret addressee is the mystery of a text on its way to a recipient, but only the moment of unprepared reading makes clear—ad hoc—who the recipient had to be. Paul Celan, who translated Mandelstam, repeatedly returned to this image of a conversation over impossible distances, particularly in his essay “The Meridian” (1961): “The poem is lonely. It is lonely and on its way. Whoever writes it remains with it. But does this very fact not place it—already here, right in the encounter—in the mystery of the encounter?” From giving away, Celan proceeds toward the figure of alterity: lonely and on its way, the poem aims toward some personal human “other.”21 But Celan’s image is less hopeful than Mandelstam’s. He speaks of a “desperate conversation,” in which the poem’s “unique, punctual presence” is constituted by the other as well as by the person addressed. Through their otherness, this reader “that has become the [poem’s] ‘you’ by being named” leads the poem out into the open, empty space.22 Cautiously moving between images of the poem as a conversation and as silence, Celan provides a new perspective for Mandelstam’s poetic premises and for the resistance encountered by the apostrophe, in which the rhetoric of address overlaps with giving (oneself). The gift of conversation thus appears in a larger framework, which includes the gift of life and death. Ultimately, the time-travelling message in a bottle constitutes “a last will,” imposing the legacy of a dead poet on the reader. Apostrophes, especially when wearing the mask of prosopopoeia, tend to speak with the voice of death and yet promise life. This has not remained unmentioned in literary studies. Jonathan Culler and William Waters, for instance, have explored the implicit symbolism of giving in the poetic address, embedding the question of the gift in the context of textuality and liveliness. In addressing a “you,” they argue, texts shape intimate scenes of reading in which “you find, disbelieving, the elision of history in the poet’s unseeing nearness to your own reading hands.”23 These never stable mo-

21

Paul Celan, “Der Meridian,” in his Der Meridian und andere Prosa (Frankfurt/M., 1983), 40–62, qt. 55 (italics in the original).

22

Ibid., 56f.

23

William Waters, “Poetic Address and Intimate Reading. The Offered Hand,” Literary Imagination 2, no. 2 (2000): 188–220, qt. 220. Cf. also Jonathan Culler, “Apostrophe,”

2. Giving and Living: The Vital Gift of the Word

ments “suggest . . . a readerly reach through history, a gesture of touch, everywhere attended but nowhere held fast, by the play of time.”24 The act of writing as well as that of reading thus appear as gestures of giving and taking, in which the gift of the text is a gift of presence and liveliness, something close to an epiphany. In a fleeting touch, through space and time, the text places itself in the hands of its reader who is to feel the pulse of the verse. In the history of the genre, this conceptual fusion of giving and living in lyrical speech is canonically exemplified in Pushkin’s poem “Dar naprasnyi,” which asks of life: “You useless, accidental gift, why were you given to me?” (1828). This lyrical apostrophe, addressed to life itself, speaks above all of death. In this way, it prefigures a poetic discourse in which the gesture of giving life, of lyrical animation, evokes loss.

2. Giving and Living: The Vital Gift of the Word As much as avant-garde poetics is eager to couple life with literature, it is haunted by the ideas of dead art and the dead word. At a time when post-revolutionary Russia is being perceived as a huge cemetery, the playwright Vladimir Mass in an essay on the “de-aestheticization of art” (1922) describes a landscape in which architecture, humanity, and language lie in ruins: “Russia is filled with rubble, grit, and ash. The skeletons of destroyed trains and rotten tracks are scattered on the railways for hundreds of versts. Human brains are just as giant a cemetery of decaying fetishes, masks, religions, and words.”25 Ruins of words, capitals as necropolises—in this deadly setting, there unfolds a powerful “salvation myth of abolishing death”26 that merges scientific experiments in reanimation and rejuvenation with religioin his The Pursuit of Signs. Semiotics, Literature, Deconstruction (Ithaca, NY, 1982), 135–154. 24

Waters, “Poetic Address and Intimate Reading,” 189.

25

Vladimir Mass, “Deestetizatsiia iskusstva,” Zrelishcha 5 (1922): 7–8.

26

Irene Masing-Delic, Abolishing Death. A Salvation Myth of Russian TwentiethCentury Literature (Stanford, 1992). On the life poetics of the avant-garde, see, here and in the following, also Susanne Strätling, “‘Die Auferstehung des Wortes.’ Poetik des Überlebens in der russischen Moderne,” in Zwischen Pygmalion und Gorgo. Die Gegenwart des Bildes in der Sprache, ed. Csongor Lőrincz (Berlin, 2013), 221–243.

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philosophical concepts of resurrection, that combines thanatological studies with projects of creating a genetically optimized vital homo sovieticus. The poetical contribution to this experiment was by no means unambiguous. In 1920, Anatoly Marienhof described art as a deadly force and the poet as “the most terrible executioner of the living”: after all, “with one touch of the poetic word, the blood and feelings both grow cold.”27 Vasily Rozanov, too, alludes to it in Fallen Leaves (1913): “(human, bodily) temperature has fallen because of the word,”28 and Viktor Shklovsky opens his essay on the “Resurrection of the Word” with the statement: “The most ancient human poetic creation was the creation of words. Today, words are dead, and language resembles a graveyard.” Shklovsky’s lecture begins as a funeral eulogy on language, proceeds to all the arts and finally spans the whole of life: Nowadays, old art has already died, new art has not yet been born, and things have died—having lost our awareness of the world, we resemble a violinist who has ceased to feel the bow and strings; we have ceased being artists in everyday life, we do not love our houses and our clothes, and we easily part with life, for we do not feel life. Only the creation of new art forms can restore to man the experience of the world, can resurrect things and kill pessimism.29

Time and again, formalists explore this graveyard of words, especially of written words. “Written language is not authentic living language,” as Boris Eikhenbaum puts it, “abstract written culture influences and deadens the living word.”30 When literature and literary studies forget that words are not made up of letters but are “a living, moving activity formed by the voice, articulation and intonation, complemented by gestures and facial expressions,” then the “organic forces” of the word wither away. “Our abstract culture has so accustomed us to the printed word that we do not hear or

27

Anatolii Mariengof, “Imazhinizm [1920],” in Literaturnye manifesty ot simvolizma do nashikh dnei, ed. S. B. Dzhimbinov (Moscow, 2000), 221–236, qt. 222.

28

Rozanov, “Opavshie listʹia. Korob pervyi,” 79.

29

Viktor Shklovskii, “Voskreshenie slova,” in Texte der russischen Formalisten, ed. WolfDieter Stempel, vol. 2 (Munich, 1972), 2–17, qt. 2 and 12.

30

Eikhenbaum, “O khudozhestvennom slove,” 515f.

2. Giving and Living: The Vital Gift of the Word

feel the living, the sensory word.”31 Written down, the word is subjected to gradual museumization, which ultimately ends in mummification.32 While letters are mere markings, the word is an organism: “With a light touch of the words, the poet can imbue worn-out signs with a spark of new life.”33 This phonocentric diagnosis is shared by contemporary research on declamation techniques. Early Soviet Russia witnessed a remarkable boom of institutions dedicated to the spoken word: in 1918, Vsevolod Vsevolodsky-Gerngross founded the Institute for the Living Word, closed in 1924 but partially replaced by a commission for the research of the living word at the GAKhN. At the same time, research of artistic speech was conducted by the KIKhR (Kabinet izucheniia khudozhestvennoi rechi) at the Petrograd Institute of Art History under Sergei Bernstein. From 1923 onwards, a commission for the research of artistic speech was devoted to the topoi and technology of animated speaking.34 Both Shklovsky’s formula of resurrection calling for the revival of the dead word, atrophied into an expressionless fossil, and Eikhenbaum’s hope that this “crazy but creative time” is ready for a “return to the living word” share a belief in vital verbality that resonates with seemingly distant poetics such as that of biocosmists-immortalists. In 1921, Alexander Sviatogor (Agienko), a co-founder of this group, drafted a poetics that proclaimed the poet a “fighter and singer in the camp of those who rise up against death.” The poet, “pregnant with new words,” uses expressive verb modes to create the “living cells” of an “artistic organism” that “pulsates and breathes, smiles and laughs like the most perfect creature.” “Some words,” he goes on to say, “are dead, some weakly flash with life, and only rarely do you see a ruddy-cheeked one. We love vigorous (iadrenye) words and bring dead words back to life.”35

31

Ibid., 528.

32

Idem, “Illiuziia skaza,” 160 and 166.

33

Idem, “O khudozhestvennom slove,” 524.

34

Vitalii Shmidt and Valerii Zolotukhin, “‘Khripeli v KIKhRe golosa . . .’ Opyt rekonstruktsii issledovanii zvuchashchei khudozhestvennoi rechi v Gosudarstvennom Institute istorii iskusstv (1920–1930),” Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie 129, no. 5 (2014): 236–252.

35

Aleksandr Sviatogor, “Biokosmicheskaia poetika,” in Aleksandr Sviatogor and Pavel Ivanitskii, Biokosmizm (Materialy No. 1) (Moscow, 1921), 3–11, qt. 7.

233

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VI. Giving. Poetics of Life

Like Shklovsky, Sviatogor speaks of resurrecting the word. Both use the religiously imbued metaphor of resurrection to conceptualize a change in the shape of words, their grammatical and rhetorical transfiguration. At a more concrete level, though, divergences between the two concepts become apparent. Sviatogor opposes the image to the organism. “For a poet, to concentrate on the image means to follow the path of regression, to go back, not forward. . . . The resurrection of the word does not lie in revealing its primary image.”36 And there, where images become visible, they are no more than the “mask” of a “shape-shifting” word.37 Early formalism argues differently: it sees animation above all in the illustration of language. Here, resurrectio verbi aims at a concept of verbal imagery oscillating between life and death. Shklovsky presents the dying of language as a process of de-imaging. To him, the dead word is dull, not visualizable, unlike the “newly born word,” which was “alive with images.”38 Its death means the extinction and darkening of the verbal imago. Formalist thought keeps revolving around the linguistic analogy of life and image, attempting to cast the image in the role of the demiurge in literature. It is thus very far removed from Marienhof ’s thesis that imagery kills poetry, resembling instead the symbolist concept of “life creation” (zhiznetvorchestvo). As Bely puts in “The Magic of Words” (1909), “An ordinary prosaic word—that is, a word that has lost its phonetic and visual expressiveness but has not yet become an ideal term—is a stinking decaying corpse.” The figurative word is a “flowering organism,” and the exact term a “sublime lifeless crystal”; but the imageless and imprecise word, situated between the two, infects the speaker with its cadaverous poison.39 In this triad of speech states ranging from the organic to the inorganic, vitality implies visuality.

36

Ibid., 6f.

37

Ibid.

38

Shklovskii, “Voskreshenie slova,” 2f.

39

Andrei Belyi, “Magiia slov,” in his Kritika. Estetika. Teoriia simvolizma, vol. 1 (Moscow, 1994), 226–244, qt. 233.

3. The Gift of the Poem: Apostrophes and Presence (Osip Mandelstam)

3. The Gift of the Poem: Apostrophes and Presence (Osip Mandelstam) In hardly any other poetics does the giving and taking of life merge as seamlessly as in acmeism, especially in its symbolist early phase. In an essay published in 1910, “The Life of the Verse,” Nikolai Gumilev asks what qualities a poem must have so as to live—not to vegetate but to live in the most emphatic and vital sense of the word. A living poem must be an “imprint of the sublime human body” as the perfect form of being. Only when art enters into a close relationship with life, with the living body, can it participate in human existence as a “living being” rather than forming a mere analogy of human life.40 Strikingly, however, Gumilev illustrates this concept of liveliness with a poem that speaks of death: Valery Bryusov’s “In the Crypt” (V sklepe, 1905). Gumilev does not discuss the paradox of this example; for him, the poet’s kiss upon his muse’s lifeless lips is a gesture of enlivenment. This is not to imply a Pygmalionic transformation; rather, this death mask enables one to experience (life-)likeness by touch. Distancing himself from these early roots in symbolism, in 1922, Mandelstam formulated the first acmeist principle in terms of a strong commitment to life in literature: “Away with symbolism; long live the living rose.”41 Instead of empty symbolist rhetoric with its figurative exaltation beyond the concrete world of things, there should be a “living poetry of the word-object,” created by a “craftsman”—a figure akin to a maker of material things.42 This allegory of word art as work art lays the foundation for an architectural metaphor, in which the word is a building block and the text a building. Later, Mandelstam tried to grasp the specific imagery of language via an anatomical analogy of corpus and opus: “Images can be seen . . . as human organs, just like the liver, the heart. Applied to the word, this understanding of verbal notions opens wide new perspectives and allows envisioning an organic poetics whose laws are not legalistic but biological, a poetics that would destroy the canon in the name of the internal

40

Gumilev, “Zhiznʹ stikha.”

41

Osip Mandelʹshtam, “O prirode slova,” in his Sobranie sochinenii v 4-kh tomakh, vol. 2: Proza (Moscow 1991), 241–259, qt. 256f.

42

Ibid., 259.

235

236

VI. Giving. Poetics of Life

motion/development of an organism, a poetics possessing all features of biological science.”43 This poetological bio-image reveals the stark difference to Gumilev’s lyrical metaphor of body and life. Mandelstam is virtually vivisecting the body of poetry—but at the same time, he warns against too rigid a concept of physiological organopoetics, because ultimately “a biological canon can be just as oppressive and intolerable as the pseudo-Symbolist one.”44 Nevertheless, Mandelstam uses this analogy to elaborate the idea of an organic linguistic body. Mandelstam’s vision of an organopoetics finds its incarnation in the Russian language, in its “fecund flesh that gives birth to events.”45 In this corpus, Mandelstam’s poetry achieves a plastic texture, a sensory resistance, which led Toporov to speak of the psychophysical anthropopeia of acmeism, where mute senses, especially touch, are privileged over eloquence and enlightenment, i.e. over speech and gaze.46 Language itself, then, seems to operate as a sensory organ. The word that is flesh claims not only imminent embodiment, a visible, tangible form of the signa as substantia. Mandelstam envisions a word made flesh, a hypostasis of the logos. At the same time, this vital body with its excitable senses appears peculiarly broken and vulnerable, in transition between this world and the next. This is particularly evident in Mandelstam’s metaphor of the poem as a ship of the dead. In his study “On the Nature of the Word” (1922), he describes the poem as an “Egyptian barque of the dead” storing all things necessary for the afterlife.47 As a vehicle of passage between the worlds, on its inevitable way to the necropolis, the barque eternally oscillates between life and death. This image sharply contrasts with that of living flesh, yet in all its ambiguity the metaphor is symptomatic of the modernist love for all things Egyptian, such as symbolist “Egyptology,” occultist Egyptomania and Fe-

43

Ibid., 256.

44

Ibid., 259.

45

Ibid., 245f.

46

See Viktor Toporov, “O ‘psikhofiziologicheskom’ komponente poezii Mandelʹshtama,” in his Mif. Ritual. Simvol. Obraz. Issledovaniia v oblasti mifopoeticheskogo (Moscow, 1995), 428–445.

47

Mandelʹshtam, “O prirode slova,” 259.

3. The Gift of the Poem: Apostrophes and Presence (Osip Mandelstam)

dorov’s fascination with ancient resurrection rites.48 In Egyptian death ceremonies, in the techniques of embalming and mummification, and the rite of forming a double of the dead, Fedorov saw a precursor of his immortality fantasy.49 Juxtaposing mimesis to genesis, this aesthetics of resurrection finds a correspondence in a philology dedicated to the revival of dead languages and writings. For Fedorov, the Egyptian hieroglyph is the ideal dead notation system of animation; he argues that one “needs to turn from the so-called living languages to the dead ones, even the oldest dead languages, like Sanskrit, Zend, etc., so that the words we speak can come alive and become understandable.” The telos of this “philological resurrection” (filologicheskoe voskreshenie) is the prophetic exploration of the assumed common roots of all language.50 Fifteen years lie between Mandelstam’s metaphors of a message in a bottle and the Egyptian barque of the dead. Silently drifting, this barque superimposes an iconography of afterlife upon that of life—an iconography that involves crossing the stream of time and an ontological border. In its restrained motion, the trope looks for a transition between withdrawal and vivid fulfilment. Both preserving and concealing the dead body, the barque of the dead opens up the distance between the imaginability and the visual availability of that which is not present. Thus, the journey of the necromancer leads to absolute absence, to an empty proliferation of transmissions. Mandelstam drives this image of the unseen even further into the beyond. “What a horror it is that human being (the eternal philologist) has found a word for it—’death.’ Is this really something you can find a word for? Does

48

On the Egyptomania of Russian Modernism, cf. Lada G. Panova, Russkii Egipet (Moscow, 2006).

49

Nikolai F. Fedorov, “Iskusstvo, ego smysl i znachenie,” in his Filosofiia obshchago dela. Stat’i, mysli i pis’ma Nikolaia Fedorovicha Fedorova, ed. V. A. Kozhevnikov and N. P. Peterson, vol. 2 (Verny, 1906 [reprint Farnborough, 1970]), 224–238, qt. 230. (“Thus, the statue, defined by the inscription and the likeness of the face, served to continue a phantom life, which might dissolve and evaporate any minute if it did not find material support, support to which it could cling, which it could grasp. . . . The relatives’ awe and love infinitely multiplied the images of the deceased, and the sheer number of these immortal doppelgangers provided the deceased with something akin to immortality.”)

50

Idem, Filosofiia obshchago dela. Stat’i, mysli i pis’ma Nikolaia Fedorovicha Fedorova, ed. V. A. Kozhevnikov and N. P. Peterson, vol. 1 (Verny, 1906 [reprint Farnborough, 1970]), 349.

237

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it have a name?”51 Here, Mandelstam is quoting from the First Basket of Rozanov’s Fallen Leaves, albeit without referencing the citation: What a horror it is that human being (the eternal philologist) has found a word for it—”death.” Is this really something you can find a word for? Does it have a name? The name is in itself a definition, it suggests that we know something. But we don’t know anything about this. Saying “death” in our conversations is like dancing in a blancmange or asking, “How many hours in a bowl of soup?” It is cynical. It is nonsense.52

Where Rozanov finds absurd comparisons, Mandelstam turns to the unspeakable. Captivated and driven by its horror, he becomes a philologist of the Apophatic, searching a name for the nameless, an image for the unimaginable. This search leads him in a direction quite different from Fedorov’s enthusiastic program of “philological resurrection.” In view of the inexpressibility of death, his poetry follows the traces of that which cannot be named or shown. Mandelstam’s essay “On the Nature of the Word” uses an epitaph as epigraph, the final verse of Gumilev’s poem “The Word” (“Slovo,” 1921): “Like bees in an emptied hive, / Dead words smell bad.”53 Gumilev, in his turn, had borrowed the entomological metaphor for silenced voices from Mandelstam’s own poem “Take from my palms some honey” (1920), which expresses the difficult relationship between vividness and rigor mortis in the image of a gift from dead bees: Take from my palms some honey, if you please, some honey and some sunshine for your pleasure, just as instructed by Persephone’s bees. You can’t cast off a boat that is unmoored, You can’t perceive the fur-clad steps of shadows, You cannot conquer fear in deepest life. All that remains for us are little kisses, as furry as a swarm of tiny bees that die as soon as they give up their hive.

51

Mandelʹshtam, “O prirode slova,” 249.

52

Rozanov, “Opavshie listʹia. Korob pervyi,” 94 (italics in the original).

53

Mandelʹshtam, “O prirode slova,” 241.

3. The Gift of the Poem: Apostrophes and Presence (Osip Mandelstam)

They rustle in the blackness of the night, their homeland is Taygetos’ deepest wood, their food is time, and honeywort, and mint. So please do take my present for your pleasure, a modest necklace made from furry corpses, from bees whose honey has been turned to sunshine.54

From these verses, a hand stretches out to offer its gift in the here and now. This gesture places the text in the present tense of an encounter, a deictic situation whose affective intensity Émile Benveniste describes with the concept of the “paroxystic extreme”: something is not only “there” (ce qui est là) but directly and undeniably “in front of me” (ce qui est à l’avant de moi).55 The gesturally framed address evokes a presence of speaking and giving, which promises to close the gap between text and reader, to make the text-object graspable.56 Mandelstam circles this contact figure in a sequence of delayed images. With cautious restraint, this poem gives itself to someone. Sun, honey, bees and kisses bring forth each other in a series of material metamorphoses, proceeding from the gesture of giving, to finally intertwine in the necklace as an ornament of poetic transfiguration. This change of figures involves both obscuration and disfigurement. Out of light-filled sweetness, the gift of love transforms into a gift of lifeless drought—after all, there is only “a little” (nemnogo) sunshine and honey in the original text; the memory of life is but a weak trace. Thus, the impenetrable Taygetos becomes the mythical scene of gift-giving that is as urgent as it is impossible, that inextricably entangles life and death, abundance and loss. Beginning and ending with the intimate gesture of palms bearing a gift, the verses slowly move from giving life to the final offering of death. Even if the sun has the last word, even if the end of the poem still reminds us of its radiant beginning, the pleasure of the gift is overshad-

54

Osip Mandelʹshtam, “Vozʹmi na radostʹ iz moikh ladonei,” in his Sobranie sochinenii v 4-kh tomakh, vol. 1: Stikhotvoreniia (Moscow, 1991), 84. Translation by Alexandra Berlina.

55

Émile Benveniste, “Le système sublogique des prépositions en latin,” in his Problèmes de linguistique générale (Paris, 1966), 132–139, qt. 138.

56

Culler, “Apostrophe,” 138f.

239

240

VI. Giving. Poetics of Life

owed by sadness. In vain does it protest. It is disfigured, turned into the ruin of life. From the symbolic cluster of bees and honey, whose origins lie deep in Greek and Egyptian antiquity, Mandelstam chooses the moment of passage, when an emblem of abundance and wisdom withers into a narrow band of dried insect bodies. In this way, he both recalls and negates the powerful topos of poets as bees fluttering abound, “collecting honey from the gardens and valleys of the muses and thus bringing us their songs” (Plato). The same double effect is contained in the erotic insect metaphor of honey-sweet bee kisses promised and withheld. Fet’s verses are another prominent example of this topos: Don’t take it to be coldness, lack of passion That I am looking at you silently; ........................ My kiss, as flaming as it is pure Doesn’t rush to the lips or cheek all at once: The buzzing of the bees above the fragrant apple tree Is dearer to me than their silence in the flower.57

Persephone—goddess of fertility and death, of life and afterlife, of becoming and passing, sends her bees to bring life, honey and sunshine—and yet even when flying from the dark cavity of the mouth as a kiss, they are doomed. They end up as a dead ornament, a necklace fit only for dispassionate contemplation. From the Apollonian space of warmth and light, the gift wanders into the Dionysian sphere of night and shadows.58 As Persephone’s messengers, bees are close to the underworld. This idea surfaces, for instance, in the myth that bees are born from animal carcasses, as in Virgil’s description of a begonia. The topos of birth from death is still alive when Maurice Maeterlinck casts his gaze into a beehive: “The first time you open a beehive, you feel almost as if you were violating an unknown object that might be full of dreadful surprises, such as a tomb.”59 The bee has a specific thanatological function—which is made especially clear

57

Afanasii Fet, “Ne otnesi k kholodnomu besstrastiiu . . .” [1892], in his Polnoe sobranie stikhotvorenii (Leningrad, 1959), 328.

58

See also Kiril Taranovsky, “Bees and Wasps. Mandel’štam and Vjačeslav Ivanov,” in his Essays on Mandel’štam (Cambridge, Mass., 1976), 83–114.

59

Maurice Maeterlinck, La vie des abeilles (Paris, 1914), 17.

3. The Gift of the Poem: Apostrophes and Presence (Osip Mandelstam)

in comparison with the fly, usually evoking Dionysian images of death and decay. Mandelstam reverses this classical association, assigning the fly to light, life and immortality: “Poetic speech is never quite ‘at peace,’ and after many centuries, it reveals old discords. It is amber, in which a fly is buzzing, though it had been covered with resin a long time ago, an alien body still alive in a fossil.”60 This view forms a clear counterpoint to the bee image. The poetic is ennobled but not killed off by petrifaction, it keeps pulsating—and jewelry made from dead bees/words adorns the throat, the source of sound. Resin and honey, two semitransparent golden-yellow viscous liquids, are worlds apart here. Mandelstam elevates the fly—a prosaic insect feeding on carcasses—to a metaphor for poetry itself, as it continues to sound enclosed in resin, alive in rigid amber. His bees, on the other hand, are flying toward a different poetology: that of speech grown silent. In the fragile necklace of lifeless bee bodies, their flight becomes a rigid dead ornatus. Moreover, the image of (speech as) jewelry itself seeks to take back any decorative vividness potentially implied. An ornamental chain of dead insects is not only an unsightly (nevzrachnoe) gift, it is a gift that suggests the erasure of an image as figurative transformation. The gift of the poem can only be given—shown, demonstrated—as a monstrous sign of death. Precisely because of this, the gift of dead bees is a gift in Derrida ’ s sense: unrecognizable, not perceptible as a gift, released from both the economies and the symbolism of gift-giving. The chain of cadavers is a gift “that cannot make itself (a) present” (“un don qui ne peut pas se faire present”).61 But if so, why is the gift itself an order or something that obeys an order? “Just as instructed by Persephone’s bees,” it says about the gift of honey and a little sunshine, which the bees embody. Here, we enter an atmosphere of obligation. There is a compulsion to rejoice in the gift, a feeling of mythological credit taken—especially in the following verses, which use oxymorons to describe the impossible—“cast[ing] off a boat that is unmoored,” “perceiv[ing] the fur-clad steps of shadows.” The insurmountable “fear in deepest life” (lit. “in the thicket of life,” “dremuchei zhizni strakha”) foreshadows “Taygetos’ deepest wood” (“dremuchii les Taigeta”), the mythical

60

Osip Mandelʹshtam, “Zametki o poezii,” in his Sobranie sochinenii v 4-kh tomakh, vol. 2: Proza (Moscow, 1991), 260–265.

61

Derrida, Given Time, 29 (italics in the original).

241

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home of the bees. “All that remains” is another gift, that of a kiss. It takes up the motif of furriness (mekh; mokhnatyi) and at the same time prefigures the gift of the bee necklace: the kiss is as furry as “tiny bees / that die as soon as they give up their hive.” And if this hive is the mouth, then words are dead as soon as they leave it. Apart from honeywort and mint, the poem’s bees feed on time. While the plants are a material part of honey changing into sunshine, the food of time brings about a different transformation. It mediates between antique-mythological prehistory and a derailed present—which is suggested by the temporal verbal structure of the poem and embedded in its metamorphoses. Here, the perception of time intertwines gift and loss. Derrida suggests that time and gifts share an “aporetic paralysis,” a paradox of being. Since time has no physical existence, it, too, is a gift that can never be given.62 Mandelstam’s verses seem to concur with this basic finding, however, offering a modification regarding asynchrony. With the gift of the bees, the poem does not step out of time and existence. Woven into the beeline of death, which once gave life and light, are all the times in which the gift itself undergoes metamorphoses—a continuous becoming and passing, a present tense or a tense present. The imperative “take” stands firmly in the here and now, but it is framed by an appeal from the past, “just as instructed,” and followed by the temporal openness of the infinitive (“cast off,” “perceive,” “conquer”), along with verbal ellipses. This openness envelops the gesture of giving, which gains its own past within the poem as the first line is repeated in several variations. The gift becomes more urging—“do take” (“vozʹmi zh”); the outstretched hand forms a request, enters a present of being via a series of repetitions and transformations—and finally suggests a past (perfect): “whose honey has/had been turned to sunshine” (“med prevrativshikh v solntse”). While bees and images travel between the worlds and times (past, present and impossible future), the spoken word seems to lie dying. If the gift of the dead bees is a gift of the word, then this gift arguably fails. The Hebrew word for “bee” (dvora, ‫ )דבורה‬contains the root of an old expression for “word” (davar, ‫)דבר‬. In this root, Mandelstam, the “eternal philologist” of the inexpressible, tracks down the word that names death and thus

62

“If neither the gift nor time exist as such, then the gift that there can be [qu’il peut y avoir] cannot in any case give time, since it is nothing.” Ibid., 28.

3. The Gift of the Poem: Apostrophes and Presence (Osip Mandelstam)

denotes his own dying. The poem’s synesthetic intensity—the sweetness of honey, the smell of mint, the softness of kissing and the fragile furriness of bees—is broken by the dead silence of the text. Neither the soft footsteps of shadows nor the buzzing of the bees at night can be heard—in this silence, the insect song dies; with it, the voice of the poem makes itself into a blurry burial gift. Silently resting on the palm of the outstretched hand, the “unsightly” dead bees now form another figure. The chain of furry bodies is a line of black characters on a white surface, which indicates another transition—that from living, pneumatic speech to fixed, dead marks of writing.63 These fragile lines suggest a reading of sêma as a tombstone and a sign, a grave and a monument. Derrida’s analysis shows the deep interconnection between gift and grief, indeed between gift and death. In its irreversibility, the gift foreshadows death as a form of dispossession, of loss. But something remains. In Mandelstam’s poem, it remains right there in the palm. Aage Hansen-Löve has read the gesture of this poem as a hand motion “that (for)gives (itself) nothing, and does not take anything away from the other, either.” It presents giving as “allowing to be taken,” while taking appears as “receiving something already taken.”64 Arguably, the material variety of this particular gift in its transformations, as outlined above, also plays into this interweaving of give and take. On various occasions, Mandelstam has rebelled against the demand for “thingishness [veshchnostʹ], specificity, materiality” in poetry. “This is revolutionary hunger all over again. Thomas’s doubt. Why touch everything with your fingers?”65 This theological reference to touching the resurrected radiates in several directions. On the one hand, it is directed against the fetters of always assigning an object to a word. “Is the thing really the master of the word?” asks Mandelstam and resolves this “enslavement” in the image of the word

63

On this medial implication of the text, see Miriam Goller, “Mandel’štams musikalischer Megatext. ‘Vozʹmi na radostʹ ’’ als intermediales Textereignis,” Wiener Slawistischer Almanach 47 (2001): 207–235.

64

Aage Hansen-Löve, “Die ‘Gabe’ des Glaubens / ‘Opfer’ des Verstandes. Daniil Kharms’ Geschenkartikel,” in Gabe und Opfer in der russischen Literatur und Kultur der Moderne, ed. Rainer Grübel and Gun-Britt Kohler (Oldenburg, 2006), 263–282, qt. 280.

65

Osip Mandelʹshtam, “Slovo i kulʹtura” [1921], in his Sobranie sochinenii v 4-kh tomakh, vol. 2: Proza (Moscow, 1991), 222–227, qt. 226.

243

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that “freely errs around the thing.” On the other hand, the invective against the hunger for touch is directed against the avant-garde fixation on things, both in its futuristic-formalist variant (the exposure of text and image to tactile stimulants) and in the constructivist one (functionalization of the thing as such). Neither the present-emphatic sensualization of the artwork nor its pragmatic economizations do justice to the gift of these verses.66 Mandelstam’s essays explore both a sensory and a utilitarian dimension of words as objects, which brings to mind the poetics of Hellenism. For Mandelstam, it is the great “oven” that “warms” the Russian language, “consciously surrounding us with devices instead of indifferent objects” or even “transforming objects into devices.”67 The symbol, too, is such a device, embedded in a context of use (which is not the same as purpose).68 Situated between the object (predmet) and the thing (veshchʹ), the word as a device (utvarʹ) belongs to the human sphere but is not tied down to the realism of the merely physical. It can travel to other worlds, albeit not without changing existentially. Like the word, Mandelstam’s gift is not a thing that you could hold, use, or touch. When touching and giving come together in his poem, they turn into a band of bees around the throat, not in the hand. This fragile structure has no material or figurative consistency; rather, it suggests a possible, promised, stalled existence. The hand reaches something that yearns to be taken, to be felt—and yet keeps withdrawing into its own uncertainty, negating itself in the very act of giving. The gift remains untouchable. The opened palm closes, concealing life, and reopens, revealing death. The un(re)presentable—death—paradoxically becomes the only thing to be presented.

66

On the context of gift and thing in the avant-garde, see Georg Witte, “Das Geschenk als Ding, das Ding als Geschenk. Daniil Сharms’ Überholung des funktionalen Gegenstandes,” in Gabe und Opfer in der russischen Literatur und Kultur der Moderne, ed. Rainer Grübel and Gun-Britt Kohler (Oldenburg, 2006), 283–303.

67

Mandelʹshtam, “O prirode slova.” The word rendered as “device” here is utvarʹ, alternatively translatable as “utensil” or “homeware,” with strong suggestions of warmth and living creatureliness (tvarʹ means “creature”). (Translator’s note.)

68

For the difference between use and device in Mandelstam, see Witte, “Das Geschenk als Ding.”

4. Burial Gifts

4. Burial Gifts Imagine: that came toward me, awake to the name, awake to the hand, forever, from what cannot be buried. Paul Celan, Threadsuns, 1965–196769

In the image of the gift, Mandelstam superimposes text and death, representation and mortification. This image conceives the interrelationship of writing and reading, giving and taking as a gesture that extends, via the hand, into the artwork and beyond it. In a famous letter, Celan coined a formula of poetry as a craft: “Handicraft—this means, a matter of the hands. And these hands, in turn, belong to only one person, that is, a unique and mortal being, who has a soul and seeks a way with both voice and muteness.”70 In the struggle of the voice against silence, in the hand-wringing search for the word that has passed through the “thousand darknesses of deadly speech”71 and dares to assert itself, poems meet the other and are given to this other as “gifts that carry fate.”72 The image of the poem as a gift, as (handi)work between voice and muteness, probes the precarious place of the poem “at the edge of itself ” between “not-anymore” and “still,”73 between the insistent daring and the sheer impossibility of its own existence. Along this boundary, Celan sees the poem as a “place where all tropes and metaphors want to be taken ad absurdum.”74 It is here that Mandelstam’s poetics reveal themselves in their ambivalence between metamorphic metaphors and lifeless loneliness, 69

Paul Celan, Selections, ed. and trans. Pierre Joris (Berkeley, 2005), 119.

70

Paul Celan, “Brief an Hans Bender (18. Mai 1960),” in his Der Meridian und andere Prosa (Frankfurt/M., 1983), 31–32, qt. 31.

71

Paul Celan, “Ansprache anläßlich der Entgegennahme des Literaturpreises der Freien Hansestadt Bremen,” in his Der Meridian und andere Prosa (Frankfurt/M., 1983), 37–39.

72

Celan, “Brief an Hans Bender,” 32.

73

Celan, “Der Meridian,” 54.

74

Ibid., 57.

245

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which draws the “jagged demarcation line of death” (Benjamin) over all evocations of the linguistic image. In the gift that the verses offer, the image of their communio is inherently subordinated to rigor mortis. Against all thanato-poetic disavowals of the modernist aesthetics of revival, the triad of literature, image and life proves extremely tenacious in theory. In 1927, the Academy of Art Sciences (GAKhN) published a study by Mikhail Stoliarov on “The Problem of the Poetic Image.” Its a priori is: “Poetry knows nothing dead.”75 From whatever perspective one may consider poetry, “the all-encompassing tertium comparationis of poetry is life.”76 Stoliarov locates this kinship of literature and living in imagery: “Every word of the poet is an organ of (super)sensory, (super)sensual contemplation, revealing the formation of life in the ‘poetic’ world. This organ is the image.”77 This literary vitality gains subtlety where it lets the imago “fade away,” allowing images of “negative phenomena.” Here, Stoliarov approaches a mode of imagery that he characterizes as “otherness.” He does not go as far as to include the shapelessness of non-being; still, the very insistence on the formula of a poetry sub specie vivi suggests a degree of skepticism toward the idea of living language. Towards the end of the avant-garde revivalist project, this skepticism condenses into a premonition of death. After a tenacious debate about the aesthetics of “building life,” about the representation of a truly “living human being” on paper and about the tautological potentiation of the subject into a “living ‘living’ human being,” any literary vitalism becomes increasingly questionable. Indeed, in 1929, Shklovsky ironically remarks that the word “living” had been so spoiled by compulsive invocation that one would soon have to speak of the “breathing human being.”78 As a logical reaction, the literary critic Viktor Pertsov opens his collection of essays on the Literature of Tomorrow (Literatura zavtrashnego dnia) in the same year with a chapter on obituaries. Nowadays, Pertsov complains, there is

75

Mikhail Stoliarov, “K probleme poeticheskogo obraza,” in Ars poetica I. Sbornik statei, ed. M. Petrovskii (Moscow, 1927), 101–126, qt. 118.

76

Ibid., 120.

77

Ibid., 122.

78

Viktor Shklovskii, “Liudi i borody,” in Literatura fakta. Pervyi sbornik materialov rabotnikov LEFa, ed. N. Chuzhak (Moscow, 1929 [reprint Moscow, 2000]), 271–273, qt. 272.

4. Burial Gifts

no art of portraiture; every image of the living human being has atrophied into a minimal template. Therefore, the laudatio funebris, an “extraordinarily strict genre,” should receive most esteem: obituaries, graveside speeches and funeral sermons teach how to write a precise and characteristic individual biography. Pertsov’s necropoetics does not only render the parameters of vividness schematic—it turns the idea of vividness upside down. Death, the central paradox of representation, becomes a model of concise portraiture, passing the status of a paradox onto life. Frozen into a death mask, the poetic image thus gains an afterlife. By the time a new poetics of the image is gained from burial rites, “the fact of death is elevated to the dominant intrapoetic phenomenon” (Jakobson). The stylization of the poet as eulogist announces that death is about to make its way from literature into life. Pertsov’s obituary poetics seems to anticipate that soon, poets would be dying on an unprecedented scale. In the Soviet Union from 1930 on, the graveyard of language (where Shklovsky had buried the word in 1914) was turning into a graveyard of poets. Shaken by Vladimir Mayakovsky’s suicide, even before Mandelstam’s death in a transit camp near Vladivostok in 1938, Jakobson asks in “On a Generation that Has Squandered Its Poets”: “But how can one write about . . . poetry now, when not the poet’s rhythm but his death becomes the dominant factor?”79

79

Roman Iakobson, “O pokolenii, rastrativshem svoikh poetov” [1931], in R. Iakobson and D. Sviatopolk-Mirskii, Smertʹ Vladimira Maiakovskogo (The Hague, 1975), 8–34, qt. 8.

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Up to the present day, the avant-garde image of the hand is dominated by the energetic hands-on style of a worker’s grip. Its operative and productive functions stand for the spectrum of instrumental dexterity that distinguishes homo sovieticus as homo faber. In comparison, the hand’s perceptive abilities—gestures of touching, sensing, feeling—often recede into the background. And yet every operative action of the hand is preceded by a tactile approach, be it straightforward or hesitant. By focusing on these gestures of manual perception, we face a paradigm of the hand as an organ not of production but of recognition, exploration, and experience. However, a closer look at these processes reveals considerable inconsistencies. Firstly, there is the differentiation of touch into a broad spectrum of subforms. A problem already addressed by Aristotle, who had asked what the sense of touch actually is—a single perception or several?1 The modern age has brought about extensive research into tactility; nevertheless, knowledge about the human sense of touch seems so weakly developed that Max Raphael attests it a “meagre, almost homeless existence in our time,” since “most people are barbarians of touch.”2 Secondly, the cultural history of the sense of touch is above all a history of crisis and conflict regarding the delicate demarcations between seeing and touching. Any definition of touch inevitably gets caught up in border disputes: where does tactile ter-

1

Aristotle: De anima, ed. and trans. Christopher Shields (Oxford, 2016), 422b [44].

2

Max Raphael, “Der Tastsinn in der Kunst,” in his Aufbruch in die Gegenwart. Begegnungen mit der Kunst und den Künstlern des 20. Jahrhunderts, ed. Hans-Jörg Heinrichs (Frankfurt/M., 1989), 121–130, qt. 123.

1. Aesthetic Experience between Optics and Haptics

ritory end, where does the domain of optics begin? This dispute continues to engage thinkers—even though conceptualizing the eye and the hand as antagonists does not appear promising, since their perceptions are far too deeply intertwined for that. Merleau-Ponty has discussed this entanglement in terms of a “chiasm” or a mutual “inscription of the touching in the visible, of the seeing in the tangible—and the converse.”3 It is also clear, however, that these transitions between the senses suggest a desire for evidence, which constantly oscillates in the field of tension between touching and seeing. Does one come closer to reality by touch? Or does the more distanced eye win with its suggestions of overview and insight? Undeniably, the touch provides a uniquely intimate experience. While history of sight has a long record of optical delusions, the sense of touch suggests authentic contact with reality—what can be touched is doubtlessly there. And this assurance of existence also extends to the person who touches. Herder’s jubilant invective against Cartesian rationalism bears witness to this evidence-giving power of touch: “I feel myself! I am!”4

1. Aesthetic Experience between Optics and Haptics To modernism as well, touch appears as a guarantee of that most precarious thing—experience of reality. Georg Simmel’s lectures on Kant read in 1904 are but one illustration of this. In his anthropological fragments, Kant calls seeing the “noblest” of all senses, and touch the “coarsest” one, quite in tune with the established hierarchy. But at the same time he argues that touch is the only sense enabling “immediate external perception, and therefore the most important and most reliably instructive one.”5 Simmel proceeds from here to find in the sense of touch the “only bridge to reality,” indeed, to

3

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible. Followed by Working Notes, ed. Claude Lefort, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston, Ill., 1975), 143.

4

Johann Gottfried Herder, “Zum Sinn des Gefühls” [1769], in his Werke in 10 Bänden, ed. Jürgen Brummack and Martin Bollacher, vol. 4 (Frankfurt/M., 1994), 233–242, qt. 236.

5

Immanuel Kant, Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht, ed. Reinhard Brandt (Hamburg, 2000), part 1, §17 [section IV, 48f.].

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define touch as the “actual sense of reality,” for “only what we can or could grasp seems to us fully real.”6 Nevertheless, Simmel agrees with Kant that the sense of touch, material as it is, should be excluded from the field of aesthetics as the “feeling of beauty as a pleasure without any interest in reality.” In a short study on “The Nature of Aesthetic Experience” (1926), George H. Mead argued against this exclusion, explicitly applying the pragmatic dimension of haptics to aesthetic experience. Mead introduces his reflections by combining the symbolic and the manipulable: Man lives in a world of Meaning. What he sees and hears means what he will or might handle. The proximate goal of all perception is what we can get our hands upon. If we traverse the distance that separates us from that which we see or hear and find nothing for the hand to manipulate, the experience is an illusion or a hallucination. The world of perceptual reality, the world of physical things is the world of our contacts and our manipulations.7

If only the graspable has meaning, the sense of touch becomes the epistemic primary sense, the guarantee of being in the world and making sense. Mead, Simmel, and Raphael are by no means alone with their hand philosophies. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the discourse of touch became unprecedentedly topical and intense, with studies in physiology, philosophy, and theory of art seeking to ennoble the hand, to wrest the status of the central organ from the eye. In an investigation into the Structure of the Tactile World (1925) from a physiological perspective, David Katz revises the classical order of the senses. After many years of experiments on the psychotechnical performance of the sense of touch, he aims to construct a tactile world model that grants it “epistemological precedence over all other senses” because its perceptions have the most viable character of reality. Touch plays a far greater role than the other senses in developing a belief in the reality of the external world. Nothing convinces us as much of the world’s existence, as well as the reality of our own body, as the (often painful) 6

Georg Simmel, Kant. Sechzehn Vorlesungen gehalten an der Berliner Universität (Leipzig, 1905), 175.

7

Mead, “The Nature of Aesthetic Experience,” International Journal of Ethics 36, no. 4 (1926): 382–392.

1. Aesthetic Experience between Optics and Haptics

collisions that occur between the body and its environment. What has been touched is the true reality that leads to perception; the eye, on the other hand, can be addressed by the mirror image, the mirage with no correspondence in reality.8

To support his thesis, Katz conducts a broad series of experiments on the sensations of pressure, temperature and vibration to introduce the impressive “polymorphism of the tactile world”:9 When I let my hand glide over the writing paper, the blotting paper, the desk pad, and the cloth cover of my desk with my eyes closed, I experience four clearly differentiated sensations in succession. I feel the hard smoothness of the writing paper, the fibrous softness of the blotting paper, the leathery roughness of the desk pad and the soft texture of the cloth cover. Once aware of these different impressions, I can examine the tactile impressions made by other things that I can reach from my seat. I notice that I not only recognize the metal of the paperweight as metal, the glass of the inkwell as glass, the wood of the penholder as wood, but that I am even able—still with my eyes closed—to distinguish between different types of paper according to their surface texture, something I could not do by sight.10

The experience provided by the “lowest” of all senses is thus not only richer but also more precise and nuanced than seeing. What is not reflected on the retina but impressed on the epidermis, what is grasped and felt by papillary lines in direct contact with the object, provides a microstructural idea of things that is denser and more saturated than any visual representation. Katz’s experiments on tactile perception suit an image of a predominantly tactile modernity, as attested, for instance, by Walter Benjamin. But when Benjamin speaks of “the tactile,”11 he has in mind something quite different than the philosophy and physiology of the senses with their praise of the hand. Benjamin’s diagnosis focuses on the violent aspects of 8

David Katz, Der Aufbau der Tastwelt (Leipzig, 1925), 255f.

9

Ibid., 24.

10

Ibid., 1.

11

Walter Benjamin, Das Passagenwerk, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, vol. 1 (Frankfurt/M., 1983), 274.

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a tactile aesthetic, the injuries of the inevitable collision with things, the excessive demands of the perceptive faculty. The weakness of the optical system, which he discusses in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, gives way to an aesthetic exposure that comes close to injury. This is exemplified by the Dadaist transformation of the artwork from a “luring appearance or a persuasive sound structure” to a “projectile”: “It struck the viewer. It took on a tactile quality.”12 The “physical shock effect” of tactility as a projectile brings to the fore the violent, manipulative dimension of haptic experience. Here, the paradigm of touch is reversed: it no longer stands for a subtle ability to approach but overtaxes experience by coming too close. Instead of the tactile experimenter attentively registering differences in grain size with his eyes closed, there is a defenseless subject facing tactile (over)stimulation. Against this background, the abundance of aggression and militaristic scenarios of touch is hardly surprising. For Filippo Marinetti, a tactile aesthetics is born in the trenches of World War I: One night in the winter of 1917 I crawled on all fours to my bunk in the darkness of an artillery ditch. No matter how hard I tried to avoid it, I kept bumping into bayonets, mess tins and the heads of sleeping soldiers. I lay down but could not sleep, so much was I occupied with the tactile sensations I had felt and classified. That night, I thought of tactile art for the first time.13

In the following, Marinetti develops an “antipsychological” theory of tactile values that links psychosensory experiments with an aesthetic of tactile shock. He subjects himself to prolonged tactile exercises reminiscent of Katz’s experiments. For days, Marinetti wears gloves to sensitize his fingers to more intense tactile stimuli; at night, he gropes his way through his bedroom to blindly identify objects in the dark. The result of these experiments

12

Walter Benjamin, “Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit,” in his Illuminationen. Ausgewählte Schriften, vol. 1 (Frankfurt/M., 1977), 136–169, qt. 164.

13

Filippo Marinetti, “Il Tattilismo,” in his Teoria e invenzione futurista. A cura di Luciano Di Maria (Milan, 1983), 174–184, qt. 175. (On Marinetti’s tactile aspects, see also Susanne Strätling, “Philologie der Hand,” Komparatistik Online 1 [2019]: Berühren. Relationen des Taktilen in Literatur, Philosophie und Theater, ed. Andrea Erwig and Sandra Fluhrer, 8–33.)

1. Aesthetic Experience between Optics and Haptics

is a system of “tactile values” (valori tattili), which Marinetti first presents at a reading in Paris and publishes in January 1921 as the manifesto Il Tattilismo. The spectrum of sensory arousal qualities recorded here ranges from the “cold, abstract” roughness of sandpaper to the “arousing, warm, yearning” texture of sheep’s wool and the “sensual” surface of rough iron. These categories form the basis of Marinetti’s tactile art. Onto his “touch panels” (tavole tattile), he attaches various materials such as pieces of metal or wood, feathers, sponges, and so forth, whose haptic qualities are decipherable according to the abovementioned sensory codes. In addition to these simple haptic boards, in which the tactile scales are systematically demonstrated for teaching purposes, more complex panels appear, which translate landscapes into tactile values, inviting to “hand journeys” (viaggi di mani). One of these panels, entitled Sudan-Parigi, aims to evoke “African visions in the spirit of the tactile” in its Sudan section through “rough, sharp, burning” materials.14 The touch panels are the starting format for the transformation of the world into a tactile installation. In a next step, Marinetti aims at tactile interiors (camere tattili), in which furniture and clothing are specially shaped for haptic purposes, and the walls are covered with touch panels. Then he moves on to tactile streets (vie tattili) and tactile theaters (teatri tattili), where either the spectators would slide long bands with different textures and rhythms through their hands, or the bands would run on small rolls to the accompaniment of music and light effects. The visitors could choose whether they would rather be blindfolded or—an option preferred by Marinetti, “because darkness brings with it the inconvenience of concentrating too much sensitivity on excessive abstraction”—blinded by the glaring light of a projector.15 A few years later, László Moholy-Nagy, conducting a preliminary course at the Weimar Bauhaus, refers to Marinetti’s tactilism and also experiments with touch panels. In preparatory exercises, the students are blindfolded and must determine materials by touch. These exercises are inspired by Moholy-Nagy’s observation that optical stimulation also triggers tactile interests. Thus, unexpectedly, “the appearance of photography . . . has promoted the culture of touch.” This is especially true of photographic 14

Marinetti, “Il Tattilismo.”

15

Ibid., 165.

253

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enlargements or shots taken from perspectives that show the texture of an object. “The documentarily exact photographs of material (tactile) values, their enlarged, hitherto hardly perceived forms of appearance encourage almost everyone . . . to test their tactile function.” Three terms form hinges between the senses of sight and touch: Struktur as “the material build,” Textur as “the organically created surface” and Faktur as “the externally changed surface of the material”16 (figs. 68–69).

Fig. 68. Gerda Marx, paper patterns (one material, different tools).

But Marinetti does not only situate tactility in the (competing) zone of hand and eye; the voice, too, is tactile to him. As the culmination of his exploration of things, spaces and arts, Marinetti conceives of “tactile panels for free-word [parole in libertà] reproduction.” Here, the touching person “expresses, in a loud voice, various sensations received through the journey of his hands. His rendition will be wordless, that is, free of all rhythm,

16

László Moholy-Nagy, Vom Material zur Architektur (Weimar, 1929), 33.

1. Aesthetic Experience between Optics and Haptics

Fig. 69. Walter Zierath, two-line tactile ladder and optical translation (1927).

syntax, and prosody, as synthetic as possible, not too human.”17 If so, the search for the perceptive quality of image and touch is also a search for the preceptive quality of the word. This search may, as in Marinetti’s case, lead to the speechless noise of expressive voicing. Alternatively, it may be articulated in a declamatory technique, as in Mikhail Voloshin’s poetry readings, which rendered each word “as palpable as a sculpture.”18 Or it may, as in Vasilisk Gnedov’s case, lead to the tactile analysis of metrics and phonetics. Gnedov identifies the intensity of touch not in materials but in words. In his debut Death to Art (Smertʹ iskusstvu, 1913), he propagates “tactile rhymes” (osiazatelʹnye rifmy), such as steel rhyming with glass, “rhymes of roughness, of smoothness.”19 As different as these positions may be, all of them revise poetics to hapto-poetics.

17

Marinetti, “Il Tattilismo,” 183.

18

Emilii Mindlin, Neobyknovennye sobesedniki (Moscow, 1968), 21.

19

Vasilisk Gnedov, “Glas o soglase i zloglase,” in his Russkii futurizm. Teoriia. Praktika. Kritika. Vospominaniia, ed. V. N. Terekhnina and A. P. Zimenkov (Moscow, 1999), 139–140, qt. 140.

255

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2. Hapto-Poetics: Image Criticism and Touch Hapto-poetics offers a critique of the image as an elementary poetic category. It is worth remembering that the most embittered fights of avantgarde poetic theory are fought over the concept of the image, questioning all its traditional functions—be it iconic conceivability, visual evocation, mimetic representation, or, more generally, the role of literary imagination. This iconoclastic agenda is spelled out mostly clearly in formalism. In his essay “On the Artistic Word” (“O khudozhestvennom slove,” 1922), Boris Eikhenbaum concedes: “there may be people whose visual imagination is so advanced that they ‘see’ words, that is, easily reproduce different images by means of inner vision. But this is a psychological feature, in itself unrelated to poetry. . . . Verbal representation is not the same as visual representation.”20 In “Art as Device” (“Iskusstvo kak priem,” 1916), Shklovsky proceeds from Alexander Potebnja’s (abbreviated) thesis— ”Without image there is no art, especially no poetry”—to fundamentally deconstruct contemporary poetology.21 Arguing against the formula “art is thinking in images,” he distinguishes between images “as a practical means of thinking, a means of grouping objects” on the one hand, and “as a means of intensifying an impression” on the other. This critique culminates in the neologism nobraz, a contraction of novyi obraz (new image) and ne-obraz (non-image).22 The focus here is no longer on the image as visualization of thought or as eidetic abbreviation but on the means of breaking with clichéd and merely illustrative figuration. The formalistic nobraz paradoxically combines image skepticism and pictorial desire. For even in its most violent attacks on the image, the avantgarde still attempted to regain it as a suggestive poetic form. Despite all polemics against lyrical “showing” or figurativeness, the avant-garde is still trying to save the image—and it does so by handing it over to the sense of touch. Concentrating on how figures of speech intensify perception, avant-garde poetics explores the tactile spectrum from caress to injury

20

Eikhenbaum, “O khudozhestvennom slove,” 526.

21

Viktor Shklovskii, “Iskusstvo kak priem” [1916], in Texte der russischen Formalisten, ed. Jurij Striedter, vol. 1 (Munich, 1969), 5–35, qt. 5 und 15.

22

Viktor Shklovskii, “O poezii i zaumnom iazyke,” in his Gamburgskii schet. Statʹi— vospominaniia—esse (1914–1933) (Moscow, 1990), 45–58, qt. 54.

2. Hapto-Poetics: Image Criticism and Touch

as, for example, in the Russian Imagists’ concept of the image as a “splinter” (zanoza), “driven as deeply as possible into the hands of the reader’s perception.”23 With the metaphor (almost a metonymy) of the splinter, the poem appears not as a smooth and seamless word painting but as a fragment to be painfully felt. In this, the word manifests a resistant materiality, injuring the reader’s hands. It appeals to the senses, to a sensualistic mode of experiencing poetry, which turns reading from serene contemplation into a piercing act. Outsourcing verbal vividness to the sense of touch crosses a boundary that has been repeatedly renegotiated in the poetological experiments of the avant-garde. These transgressions are particularly evident in regard to writing and books, where poetry offers itself to the reader as an object of haptic perception. (Cali)graphic experiments, artistic letter arrangements, distortions of legible lines to zaumʹ—all these present writing as linear design elements that set in motion a “semiotic implosion.”24 Literature on the margins of legibility and visibility seeks to present itself as a three-dimensional, haptically perceptible letter sculpture. This is vividly illustrated by Kruchenykh’s and Khlebnikov’s appeal to the poets to have their works designed as handwriting by visual artists. They argue that this is the only way to create “alphabetic characters that are visible, or—as for the hand of the blind—tactile,” characters that “make you kiss your fingertips.”25 Kruchenykh also produces a system of artistic notation characterized by a specific use of the hand, orthography, typeface, drawing, ornament, and also “multiplied writing,”26 which strives for a tangible proximity to the text, with the body of the letter becoming the object of touch. “Multiplied writing” does not settle for the word to appear as a graphic image but advances it to sculpture. The early avant-garde, especially futurism, had tested this plasticity of writing primarily in book artifacts that presented the “hard” materiality of the significant as a sensorially perceptible graphemic texture. In the late avant-garde, this procedure gave way to concepts that sensualized writing without adhering quite as tightly to graphemics. 23

Mariengof, “Imazhinizm,” 224.

24

Cf. Verena Krieger, Von der Ikone zur Utopie. Kunstkonzepte der russischen Avantgarde (Cologne, Weimar, and Vienna, 1998), 141f.

25

Khlebnikov and Kruchenykh, “Bukva kak takovaia,” 49.

26

Aleksei Kruchenykh, Faktura slova (Moscow, 1923).

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At the center of the following considerations are such late avant-garde positions of hapto-poetic image criticism. Decidedly dedicated to the problem of non-representation and reification, they see the poem as a medium that can make an object appear without turning it into a pictura. Here lies a particularly challenging interface between image and touch, for if poetic texts can be touched, the image finds itself balancing on the very margins of its evocative capacity.

3. Tactile Texts (Oberiu) When the Oberiu first caught the public eye (in 1929 in St. Petersburg), the members introduced themselves as creators not only of a “new poetic language” but also of a “new perception of life and its objects.” As a concretist leitmotif, this object focus runs through the entire aesthetic program of the Oberiu, right down to the derivation of its name: People of the concrete world, the concrete word and the concrete object—it is here that we see our social meaning. To feel the world with the movement of a hand, to cleanse an object from the rubbish of ancient rotten cultures: is that not a real need of our time? That is why our association is called OBERIU, the Association of Real Art.27

The hygienic impetus of these lines makes extensive use of the avantgarde manifesto aesthetic: one need only recall the futuristic calls to wash the hands smeared by bourgeois books. Somewhat confusingly, the “working movement of the hand” also refers to the iconography of constructivist poster art with its motifs of the building, producing, working fist. This coupling of productive work with cleaning focuses on an ambivalent aesthetic object: In our creative work, we expand and deepen the meaning of the object and the word, but we do not destroy it. The concrete object, cleared of literary and everyday husks, becomes art. In poetry, the collision of verbal meanings expresses this object with the accuracy of mechanics.

27

“Manifest Oberiu,” 479.

3. Tactile Texts (Oberiu)

What: are you going to say this is not an object that you see in life? Come closer and touch it with your fingers.28

In avant-garde aesthetics, the tactile encounter with the world of objects encompasses a wide variety of forms. It can follow the claim of the world’s potential malleability or turn things into utility objects; it can seek sensual stimulation through a confrontation with rough materiality or cause epistemic alarm in conflict with resistant reification. Arguably, all of these options are involved here. Ultimately, however, Oberiu aesthetics is not covered by any of them. Instead, the “confrontation of the words’ meanings” gives rise to objects that reject the discerning eye while offering themselves to the groping fingers, thus subjecting the visual obsession of modernism to a haptic experiment of aesthetic production and experience. Previously, the rather diverse avant-garde movements had appeared united under the dogma of the new seeing—Shklovsky’s ostranenie. Now, Oberiu calls for the hand to become the primary organ of poetic perception, for a philology of the hand to be introduced alongside a “philology of the eye” (Stiegler).29 In its capacity for perspective innovation, the principle of touch functionally recalls the theorem of new seeing while shifting its impulse from the eye to the fingertip. It reorganizes the approach to (art) work genesis and perception, modifying the oculocentric system of aesthetics so as to integrate tactile experience. Under this premise, not only the concept of the image falls under the spell of touch. Denying sculpture its privilege of touch by presenting the poetic texture as palpable, the poetics of tactility demands a new definition of textuality, a definition shaped by the haptics of verbal structures. Among Oberiu poets, this emphasis on touch is consistently formulated as an effect of ostentatious textual concreteness. Nikolay Zabolotsky, for instance, called himself a “poet of naked concrete figures,” in whose work the object “is so compressed and condensed that it comes to meet the touching hand of the observer, as it were.”30 If the object of poetry demands to be touched in its nakedness, then poetic imagery of figurative 28

Ibid.

29

On the new way of seeing as a universal artistic principle of the Russian avant-garde, see Glanc, Videnie russkikh avangardov.

30

“Manifest Oberiu,” 478.

259

260

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adornment (ornatus) has exhausted its capacity. Arguably, Daniil Kharms developed the most striking poetics in which image and touch both meet and limit textual objectivity. The tactile encounters in his work neither fall back on touch to ascertain the reality of the object nor do they engage in stripping the image of its privileged position. Instead, they reach out for a hapto-poetics of the untouchable.

4. Phenomenology of the Text Body (Daniil Kharms) Kharms’s texts abound with scenes prominently involving the hand, its gestures, images, and signs. Mostly, they are exposed to profound, often destructive, manipulations. For this reason, Burenina assigns Kharms to modern organopoetics, in which the dismembered body corresponds to a fragmented experience of reality.31 The spectrum of this shapeshifting includes the loss of the hand. Thus, in 1929, a year after the publication of the Oberiu manifesto, Kharms montages a series of mutilations caused by a severed hand in the dramolet The Story [of] Sdygr Appr. In the course of the play, many attempts are made to reintegrate the hand into a complete body scheme—all fail.32 Here and in other texts, the missing hand is sometimes substituted by other entities, but these rarely restore the ability to act. In Kharms’s late story “The Old Woman” (“Starukha,” 1939), the first-person narrator dreams of losing his hands and having them prosthetically replaced by cutlery: “I incline my head, so as to get a better look, to see whether I have any hands, and I see that on one side, instead of a hand, a knife is sticking out and, on the other side, a fork.”33 Supplements like these obey the (a)logic of semiotic subversion. They articulate Kharms’s interest in the way an object

31

Olga Burenina, “Organopoetika. Reprezentatsiia anatomicheskikh anomalii ruki v literature i kulture 1900–1930-kh gg.,” Wiener Slawistischer Almanach 51 (2003): 205–226.

32

Daniil Kharms, “Istoriia sdygr appr.,” in his Sobranie sochinenii v 3-kh tomakh, vol. 2 (St. Petersburg, 2000), 18–26.

33

Idem, “Starukha,” in his Sobranie sochinenii v 3-kh tomakh, vol. 2 (St. Petersburg, 2000), 243–272, qt. 250.

4. Phenomenology of the Text Body (Daniil Kharms)

can step out of its context or transform itself into another object or sign.34 Unattached and isolated, the hand can neither point to anything nor be pointed at; it is neither a signified nor a signifier. However, this is only one aspect of Kharms’s manipulations. The restrictions of this reading become clear if one considers these hand gestures not only in terms of pointing but also in terms of touching. In November 1929, within a few days, Kharms composed a cycle of verse and prose miniatures, which he called “The Sabre.” Divided into nine “paragraphs,” the cycle deals with the possibilities of “registering the world.” At its core, the text is constituted via the drawing and crossing of borders, the merging of body and text boundaries. In the first paragraph, this merging is realized in the sharp blade of the sabre meeting the boundaries of rhythmized verse: We listen to the howling horns. And our body suddenly feels lighter and becomes a beautiful wind; we suddenly become a double: an arm to the right—an arm to the left, a leg to the right— a leg to the left, sides and ears and eyes and shoulders make our borders to the rest. Like rhymes, our borders shine with steely tips.35

Carved out from tonal texture with a sabre, the text asserts somatic presence in its own body. Yet this self-manifestation, born from airy “lightness,” remains undefined despite its clear-cut edges. The howling horn (or pipe, or tube, or chimney: truba is a highly polysemantic word) proves to be an empty resonating space.36 Even the metallic flash of a body contour

34

See Mikhail Iampolʹskii, Bespamiatsvtvo kak istok. Chitaia Kharmsa (Moscow, 1998), 184.

35

Daniil Kharms, “Sablia,” in his Sobranie sochinenii v 3-kh tomakh, vol. 2 (St. Petersburg, 2000), 278–284, qt. 278. On this cycle, see also Susanne Strätling, “Bild und Berührung. Annäherungen an die Grenzen des Gedichts in Daniil Charms’ Zyklus Der Säbel,” in Das lyrische Bild, ed. Ralf Simon, Csongor Lőrincz, and Nina Herres (Munich, 2010), 44–65.

36

On emptiness in Oberiu, see Aage Hansen-Löve, “Im Namen des Todes. Endspiele und Nullformen der russischen Avantgarde,” in Am Nullpunkt. Positionen der russischen

261

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contributes to this floating state, for what the blade reveals is the doubled boundary of verse and body form, in which incisions mark the metric structure: sablia (saber) / mera (measure).37 Along these boundaries, the corpus leaves behind its flesh and enters the order of language. In the next paragraph, Kharms refers to this language game as “a new generation of speech parts growing up”: Self-sufficiently existing objects are no longer bound by the laws of logical series and jump about in space any way they want, as we do. Following the objects, nouns also start hopping about. Nouns bear verbs and give these verbs free choice. Objects follow nouns and perform various actions, as free as the new verb. . . . Free from logical directions, speech runs along new paths, separated from other speech. The boundaries of this free speech shine a little brighter so that we can see the end and the beginning, or we’d get completely lost. These edges fly into the empty horn [truba] of the line like little winds. The horn starts to sound, and we hear a rhyme.38

Released from the constraints of syntax and logic, word and object enter relationships that can hardly be read as references anymore. Rather, they trigger mutual metamorphoses, transformations of a word form into another, transfigurations of objects—and finally turn speech into the resounding “horn” of poetry. The empty cavity forms a resonance space in which the phonetic profile of verse is shaped, and versification sets a frame for this uprising of the linguistic and material world. Within the poem’s meter and rhymes, language gains the contours of an object, albeit empty and hollow. In August 1927, Kharms wrote a treatise “On Objects and Figures.” Its premise is that objects inescapably contain diverse meanings: “If we abolish all meanings but one, we make the given object impossible.” Each object can be assigned five meanings, he argues, four of them “functional” (rabochie) and one “essential” (sushchee). This “essential” fifth meaning aims at

Avantgarde, ed. Boris Groys and Aage Hansen-Löve (Frankfurt/M., 2005), 700–748, qt. 734. 37

Kharms, “Sablia,” 284. Measuring with a sabre also crops up in the dialogue poem “Izmerenie veshchei” (October 17–21, 1929), written shortly before the cycle “Sablia.” In his Sobranie sochinenii v 3‑kh tomakh, vol. 2 (St. Petersburg, 2000), 275–278, qt. 276.

38

Kharms, “Sablia,” 279.

4. Phenomenology of the Text Body (Daniil Kharms)

enforcing the “free will of the object” and the “free will of the word” beyond all (human) contexts of existence and signification, enabling a state Kharms calls “floating.” In this floating state outside the logic of being, meaning becomes tauto-logic: “The fifth meaning of the closet is the closet.”39 Tautological statements circle in self-identical “meaningless” repetitions—but in “floating” they open up to what necessarily remains unsaid within endless reiteration and doubling. The next paragraphs of the cycle exercise this doubling effect. In metaphorical transformation, the first poem shows how each modality of appearance occurs through the physical. But at the borders of the human body to the Other, the textual body itself appears as its Other. The fifth paragraph sums up this fragile structure of versified bodily existence in pairs: Here are three pairs of our boundaries: 1. hand—hand. 2. shoulder—shoulder. 3. head—heels.40

The “three pairs of our boundaries” are a minimalist body form— and also the backbone of this paragraph’s verse structure. In elliptical conciseness, the paragraph draws a body diagram, yet the duplicated extremities of this body of poetry form a text whose center remains empty. The edges of this elliptical hollow form constitute the boundaries of a body whose middle is literally barred. Between hand and hand, shoulder and shoulder, head and heel, each verse appears to attempt creating a full figure—and each new attempt is negated. Instead, the marked caesura stresses the dissociation of the parts. The graphemic form of this paragraph with its overstretched dash pointedly presents itself as a poetic artifact. The poem can be perceived as a surface whose syntax is supposed to visualize an object. But this object remains without image, be it pictorial or figurative. By literally drawing a line between itself and the “other,” the text establishes its ability to present itself as a zero form. In the fourth paragraph of the cycle, this poetic skeleton of text and figure is placed into a scene of phenomenal bodily orientation:

39

Daniil Kharms, “Predmety i figury, otkrytye Daniilom Ivanovichem Kharmsom,” in his Sobranie sochinenii v 3-kh tomakh, vol. 2 (St. Petersburg, 2000), 285–286.

40

Kharms, “Sablia,” 281.

263

264

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Here we stand and say: now I’ve stretched out one hand in front of me, and the other hand behind me. And now, in front, I end where my hand ends, and in back I also end where my hand ends. At the top, I end with the top of my head, at the bottom with my feet, and at the sides with my shoulders. Now, this is all of me, and whatever is outside me, is not me anymore. Now that we’re so special, let’s clean our boundaries so that we can see better where something starts that is not us. We shall clean the lower point—the boots. The upper point—the top of the head—we shall mark with a hat; we shall put shiny cuffs on our hands, and epaulets on our shoulders. Now, we can immediately see where we end and everything else begins.41

Using a basic inventory of exploratory movements along the opposition I—Other, Kharms draws a symmetrical position diagram of the subject in space. From the spatial dimension emerges the uniform, “whole” physical here and now, which provides the distinct framework for the configuration of a stereometric body image. In this way, blurred boundaries appear concise, and that which had been suspected of contingency is subject to a law of analogous structures.42 It is with precisely this elementary repertoire of gestural moves that phenomenology has declared the sense of touch to be the privileged form of access to the world.43 Through the tactile motion of the outstretched hand, whose primary motif Straus defined as “reciprocity,” 44 Katz as “bipolarity,”45 and Merleau-Ponty as the proprioceptive “chiasm” of “touching and being touched,”46 the active body is anchored in a concrete world. Hereby, recip-

41

Ibid., 280f.

42

For this reading of the text and subsequent considerations, see also Susanne Strätling, “Contact, Contiguity, and Contingency: Yakov Druskin’s Philosophy of Touch,” arcadia 56, no. 2 (2021: forthcoming).

43

Cf. Bernhard Waldenfels. Das leibliche Selbst. Vorlesungen zur Phänomenologie des Leibes (Frankfurt/M., 2000), and idem, Bruchlinien der Erfahrung. Phänomenologie, Psychoanalyse, Phänomenotechnik (Frankfurt/M., 2002).

44

Erwin W. Straus, Vom Sinn der Sinne (Berlin, 1935), 402.

45

Katz, Aufbau der Tastwelt, 261.

46

Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 214.

4. Phenomenology of the Text Body (Daniil Kharms)

rocal and reversible contact with the outside takes place, enabling the subject to build up their body schema as “being-in-the-world.”47 Straus has reminded us that this interplay of touch is necessarily accompanied by a caesura: “The psychology of touch is not feasible without the concept of boundaries.”48 Kharms operates along this boundary. By consistently regarding presence as difference, he rejects the concept of responsive corporeality with its intentional focus on a concrete world and the vital vividness it promises to the touching hand. From the very start, the movement study forms an image of exclusion. Kharms goes on to use an isocolonic scheme, but even its distributive detailing does not add up to the kind of concreteness claimed by the rhetoric of evidentia. It forms no background against which an object could appear as a figure. The text subverts both visualizable formations and the hope of creating a phenomenal body space in the text by reaching out. “A human body is present,” says Merleau-Ponty, “when, between the see-er and the visible, between touching and touched, between one eye and the other, between hand and hand, a kind of crossover occurs.”49 In contrast, Kharms contours the self in non-being—noth-I-ngness—using the gestural markings of a uniform(ed) model. In over-precisely marked figurative profile, the shape of the subject is lost, revealing only the inaccessibility and discrepancy of consistent imagery. The hand that ventures out to constitute a figure and a space of representation is not eager to touch or to be touched—instead, it traces a detached correlative of the figurative. Its tactile movement “comes from the emptiness and ends by reaching back into emptiness.”50 Stretched over the gap between the self and the other, the hand assures itself of the divergence between identity and alienation, which suspects and seeks the untouchable in the touchable, the invisible in the visible. Instead of chiastic entanglement, touch appears as a breach, as an interruption of continuity and closeness that introduces decisive deviations into the programmatically evoked gesture of tactile textuality. Just as the 47

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London, 1962), 94. On the reciprocity of touch, see also Katz, Aufbau der Tastwelt, 19.

48

Straus, Vom Sinn der Sinne, 407.

49

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader, ed. and trans. Michael B. Smith (Evanston, Ill. 1993), 125.

50

Straus, Vom Sinn der Sinne, 406.

265

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“new seeing” gets lost in defamiliarized vistas, the “new touch” by no means promises reliable access to a palpable presence. Like ostranenie, this kind of strange-making works against automatic recognition; at the same time, the finger offers as little in the way of phenomenal certainty as the eye. Touch establishes no stable connection, neither physically nor symbolically; rather, it implies an experience of absence or separation. In Oberiu poetics, tactile pleasure is undermined by a profound distrust of touch, which introduces a sense of distance or even disgust into the search for proximity and immediacy. Hands, the very organs that had determined the sensitivity and functionality of the body, are now perceived as alien, partial objects. Whenever they stretch out to make contact, they encounter a mechanism of displacement, of not belonging. Kharms thus inverts the aesthetical premise of Oberiu: the impulse to render art tactile. While the Oberiu manifesto seemed a homage to the hand as the primary organ of intense aesthetic experience, in most of Kharms’s work, the sense of touch leads right into a vacuum. Drawing the reader in with a poetics of haptic access to the world, suggesting the contact with “real” reference, his oeuvre then proceeds into vexing zones of world/word oscillation. Kharms’s touch is uneasy, almost uncanny, evoking a despair of the sort described by Canetti: “There is nothing people fear more than the touch of the unknown.”51

5. Noli Me Tangere. Touch Between Doubt, Desire, and Disgust (Yakov Druskin) Kharms’s ambivalent poetics of perception reminds us that the history of touch in art and culture can be retraced along a double axis of desire for touching and taboo on touch. Kolesch considers the interrelation of these modalities a crucial catalyst of cultural evolution and a prerequisite for the “creation of something new.”52 While the joyful and intimate emphasis on touch creates culture, she argues, so does the avoidance, suppression and sublimation of touch as in “no touching” signs in museums, which sanction

51

Elias Canetti, Masse und Macht (Reinbek bei Hamburg, 1999), 4.

52

Doris Kolesch, “Die Geste der Berührung,” in Gesten. Inszenierung, Aufführung, Praxis, ed. Christoph Wulf and Erika Fischer-Lichte (Munich, 2010), 225–241, qt. 227.

5. Noli Me Tangere. Touch Between Doubt, Desire, and Disgust (Yakov Druskin)

direct physical contact in aesthetical discourse and maximize the distance between subject and aesthetic object. Kolesch situates the gesture of touching between grasping and pointing, between tactile reassurance and optical orientation. In this in-between, touch brings forth a zone in which dissociation and connection (not necessarily physical) have their place; within this spatium, “the condition of possibility as well as the limit of touch” is realized.53 One of the key scenes in the cultural history of touch, especially with regard to the conflict between seeing and feeling, between touch and the untouchable, is to be found in the Gospel of John. Doubting Thomas’s desire to touch Christ’s hands and wound is fulfilled—but at the same time repressed as inappropriate, for faith is supposed to transcend the senses. This combination of haptic reassurance with the explicit defamation of touch has become the keystone for a powerful, if almost unstudied, tradition of using the hand to navigate our interaction with the world as well as our awareness of it between gaze and touch. The avant-garde continues this debate in its struggle for an aesthetics and poetics of perception; indeed, it explicitly chooses the figure of Thomas as a point of reference. In the essay “Word and Culture” (1921), for example, Mandelstam argues that “the word is Psyche” (“slovo — Psikheia”) in need of defense against the “revolutionary hunger” for “thingishness, concreteness, materiality.” This object fetishism, he argues, is like “Thomas’s doubt. Why do you have to touch everything with your fingers?”54 Comparably, in a text on the synthetic realism of Yury Annenkov written in 1922, Yevgeny Zamyatin criticizes Thomas as an extra-aesthetic figure looking for the verifiable and unambiguous. Art, Zamyatin argues, generates many potential worlds, which keep changing and modifying according to the idea of estrangement (ostranenie): We know: Thomas was the only of the twelve apostles not to be an artist, only he could not see beyond the immediately touchable. We, who are familiar with Schopenhauer, Kant, idealism, symbolism, we know: the world, the thing in itself, reality—all this is not what Thomases see.

53

Ibid., 230.

54

Mandelʹshtam, “Slovo i kulʹtura,” 226.

267

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Let’s take something seemingly real and undeniable: your hand. You see smooth, pink skin, covered with the lightest fluff. So simple and undeniable. And now—a piece of skin in the cruel ironic light of the microscope: ditches, pits, furrows; thick stems of unknown plants, which once had been hair; a huge gray lump of earth, which had been a dust mote—perhaps a meteorite fallen from the infinitely distant sky that is the ceiling; a whole fantastic world—maybe a plain somewhere on Mars. But it is still your hand. And who can say that the “real” one is the familiar smooth one, which every Thomas can see, and not this fantastic Martian plain? Realism saw the world with a simple eye; symbolism saw a skeleton shine through the surface of the world—and symbolism turned away from the world. These are the thesis and the antithesis. The synthesis approached a world with a complex set of lenses—and many grotesque, strange worlds were revealed. It was revealed that the human being is a universe whose sun is the atom, whose planets are the molecules, and the hand—of course, it is The Hand, a shining, immense constellation.55

Zamyatin rejects touch as physical adherence to the idea of one-dimensional, fixed realities. For him, the hand as a tool is not intended to provide empirical proof of reality but to witness the phantasmatic. In the microscopic view of the epidermis and papillary lines, the observer gains a novel perspective on the hand and its functions. From the organ of vital entanglement, of intimate closeness, of blind touch, it is transformed and transported into a Martian landscape and further still, an unreachable constellation. In this technological and cosmic image of the hand, the avantgarde seems to have completely abandoned touch as an anachronism of perception and imagination. Hands, one might conclude, are not tactile organs for close-ups of the here and now but visionary telescopes of distant worlds. The poetic and aesthetic potential of Doubting Thomas has by no means been exhausted or settled with Zamyatin’s expulsion of the apostle from the collective of artists. Yakov Druskin, whose positions Kharms partially takes up in his careful approach to touch, also delves into Thomas’s urgent need for tactile proof. Most of Druskin’s own recently published writings are devoted to theological questions, selectively linked to aesthetic topics. This link is particularly acute in his analysis of touch and

55

Evgenii Zamiatin, “O sintetizme,” in his Sochineniia (Moscow, 1988), 412–420, qt. 415.

5. Noli Me Tangere. Touch Between Doubt, Desire, and Disgust (Yakov Druskin)

the untouchable. For him, the (un)touchable is less a question of poetological imagery than one of existential experience. At least since 1928, Druskin kept a diary, proceeding until 1962 with some interruptions (especially in the first and final years). Here, he sketches down (and sometimes explores in detail) basic concepts of his philosophical thought, which remain only implicit in his other writings. An entry dated August 20, 1936, lists thoughts after a nighttime conversation with Kharms: Why is touch interesting? Christ healed by touching. Doubting Thomas had to touch the wounds of Christ. One wishes to feel the petals of a flower, that is to touch them. Touching a woman. A moment like touch. I imagine the creation of the world as touch. . . . Touch is a connection with something. Touch is a criterion of existence. Possessing something is touching it.56

Druskin conceives of the sense of touch as a vital need for evidence in which the sense of reality mates with the sense of possibility. The spectrum of tactile experience presented here exceeds the literal meaning of touching as perceiving external objects through physical contact. Instead, the sense of touch in all its variations is presented as the foundation, if not the origin, of all human existence and feeling. The hand touches upon bodily perception, cognitive and emotional experience, religious deeds and epistemological questions, erotic desire, and, finally, time and creation. Caressing and probing, approaching tenderly and grasping harshly, the hand explores sensomotoric modes of touch in their symbolic dimensions. At this point, Druskin’s diaristic reflections seem to correspond to the empathetic “nearing” as Straus describes it: “More than any other sensory sphere, the sense of touch conveys the communicative content of nearing. A soft touch, a silent handshake can do more to assure me of another person’s ‘nearness’ than a look or a word. Hence the longing for the tangible, the desire for touch, but also the shrinking away from touch.” Yet Straus remains aware of possible distancing even within this intrinsic interlinking. “Touching means nearing; but it could not mean this if it were not to come from afar and if nearing did not contain the possibility of distancing, specifically, of letting go, slipping, losing.”57 This skepticism also surfaces 56

Iakov Druskin, Dnevniki (St. Petersburg, 1999), 75.

57

Straus, Vom Sinn der Sinne, 407.

269

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in Druskin’s notes. Far from affirming togetherness in touch, he derives a “law of heterogeneity” from the different forms of tactile reference, which he drafts in the same diary entry: The law of heterogeneity. An investigation shouldn’t have a continuous line. The analysis has to be interrupted from time to time, the chain of conclusions has to break off at a certain point. The thought shouldn’t be finished, it shouldn’t become quite clear. The system mustn’t explain everything, something has to remain outside of the system—some last remainder. Such a system will be heterogenous. A homogenous system— an indefinite system that explains everything—is an empty system and has no relation to touch. Touch is the beginning. Where investigation breaks off, where that remainder is felt, obstructing the system—there, we find touch.58

For Druskin, touch is significant as a system of the unsystematic, of the singular. His philosophy of touch leads him to a critique of universalist thought systems, to a reflection on rifts and ruptures, which turn the basics of all touch—the closeness, the mutual permeation (wechselseitiges Durchdrungensein)59 of touching and being touched—into an experience of the unconnected, the dissociative. If touch is the principle of every beginning par excellence, then every beginning bears a break. Touch has the genuine ability to come close and connect, but what it provides are connections of the unconnected, in which stable structures tend to turn out contingent and split apart. In a diary entry from November 9, 1939, Druskin provides a literary example of this idea taken from Gogol’s The Overcoat (1842). There, right at the bed of the sick Akaki Akakievich, the doctor says: “Go order a spruce coffin for him right now because an oak coffin would be too expensive for him.” Druskin spots the heterogeneity of this sentence in a “change of direction”: the expectation of a logical sequence (“order a spruce coffin for him right now because he is dying”) is subverted.60

58

Druskin, Dnevniki, 77. On the law of heterogeneity, see also Kharms, “About time, about space, about being” (“O vremeni, o prostranstve, o sushchestvovanii” [1930], Cahiers du monde russe et soviétique 26 (1985): 304–307).

59

Katz, Aufbau der Tastwelt, 262.

60

See Druskin, Dnevniki, 89.

5. Noli Me Tangere. Touch Between Doubt, Desire, and Disgust (Yakov Druskin)

In his musings, Druskin indirectly follows Tynyanov’s considerations on the interval. The interval characterizes an intermediate phase, a time in which the regular allocation of phenomena is suspended, leaving them in a state of contingent mutual openness and without any ordered merging or emerging. This contradictory state of the interval is similar to the empty spaces explored by Druskin: “A system should not be completely sealed, that is, entirely rationalized and consistent. That goes for life, too: there must be hiatuses—gaps, crevices.”61 Before him, Straus has hinted at this nuance when he elevated the fragmentary nature of touch to a necessary condition of haptic restlessness, of continuous tactile mobility: When touching, only one piece is grasped at a time; the horizon is only there as a void, as the undetermined-determinable. . . . Emptiness in touching is the Undetermined-Determinable of the There. In touching, I grasp only a piece—as a piece. Touching the edge of the armrest, I move piece by piece along it, grasping farther from moment to moment. The momentary is part of each tactile impression, “moment” hereby referring both to time and to movement. . . . The world of touch has no closed, completed horizon; there are only moments, hence the urge to move from moment to moment. Thus, the touching motion becomes an expression of a restless and endless, never quite completed approach.62

The piece-by-piece experience of touch proves here in many ways to refract the full sense of reality. Each tactile impression occurs in moments that cannot be synthesized into a gradient, a surface or an object. Each remains a particular, isolated fragment, which enables no coherent image of the whole. In this way, each tactile datum is framed by an emptiness that remains unrecognized, unreached—indeed, untouched. Touch as the privileged sense of nearness becomes a sense of distance. In this discontinuity, Straus and Druskin see the most sensitive facet of touch: its outside and its Other—the untouchable. Through this discontinuity, we also approach the center of Druskin’s philosophy: the examination of the biblical noli me tangere. The verses from the Gospel of John, in which Jesus calls upon Mary by name but rejects her tactile impulse with the words “Touch me not!”

61

Iakov Druskin, Pered prinadlezhnostiami chego-libo. (St. Petersburg, 2001), 270 [entry from May 1967].

62

Straus, Vom Sinn der Sinne, 361.

Dnevniki

1963–1979

271

272

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(Jn 20:17), comprise a complex structure of inversions. Starting from negative visibility (Mary sees the empty tomb), the scene leads to non-recognition of the resurrected dead to culminate in renewed seeing that is accompanied by a loss of touch. The Risen One appears, yet no tangible presence is connected with this visibility; untouchable, this appearance prefigures a powerful constellation of the sublime and auratic. A distinct transposition of this taboo on touch takes place in the encounter with Doubting Thomas, which follows Jesus’s appearance only a few verses later. To Thomas’s “If I don’t see the mark of the nails in his hands, put my finger into the mark of the nails, and put my hand into his side, I will not believe” (Jn 20:25), Jesus responds: “Reach out your finger, and see my hands; and reach out your hand, and put it into my side” (Jn 20:27). This scene is the exegetical culmination of the nexus between seeing and believing, harking back to the commandment of faith without seeing in Jn 20:17–19. While faith without authentication by sight is praised here, a further aspect is also involved: the conflict between seeing and touching. For beyond optical proof, Thomas demands tactile authentication; he wants to touch the wound he sees. In these two post-resurrection scenes, Jean-Luc Nancy sees a “theological hapax” intensifying the ambivalence of Christianity “in an oxymoronic or paradoxical mode.”63 The paradox consists in the unconditional corporeality of hoc est corpus meum combined with the strict negation of the body in noli me tangere. There is an invitation not only to touch the body of Christ but even to eat and drink it, to absorb it completely—but also a taboo on touch, a skepticism that bans, eclipses, and transcends the body. Jean-Luc Marion resolves this contradiction by ascribing a revelatory function to touch: “touch ultimately transforms the body into flesh. . . : it consists in passing one’s hand over the surface of inanimate bodies, groping to

63

Jean-Luc Nancy, Noli me tangere. Essai sur la levée du corps (Paris, 2003), 27. Nancy points out that the formulation of the Greek original (Mè mou haptou) also carries the meaning “Don’t hold me back.” The presence of Christ here is a vanishing, disappearing presence. Cf. also: “To put it in words—which is difficult to avoid—, ‘don’t touch me’ is a sentence that touches, that cannot fail to touch, even when isolated from any context. It says something about touch in general, or it touches the sensitive point of touch: that sensitive point that it constitutes par excellence . . . and that forms sensitivity. Now this point is precisely the point where touch does not touch, must not touch in order to exercise its touch (its art, its tact, its grace).” Nancy, Noli me tangere, 25.

5. Noli Me Tangere. Touch Between Doubt, Desire, and Disgust (Yakov Druskin)

see if flesh might not reveal itself there.”64 Both Augustine and Bonaventure, in their exegesis of the Gospel of John, avoided this paradox by rejecting the view that Thomas had touched the corpus mysticum in the flesh. In this theological perspective, Thomas’s searching finger has a deictic rather than a tactile function. Moreover, the feeling hand does not solve the question of seeing the unseeable but merely replaces it by touching the untouchable. In its deep ambivalence between desiring and rejecting touch, the spiritual tactile experience of Doubting Thomas has become a crucial reference point for rebelling against the cultural and historical downgrading of the sense of touch—but also for the institutionalization of ever new taboos. Thomas’s doubt may be read as denied tactile experience or as an example of false faith—still, it contains the wish to transform the symbolic representation of the invisible into something tangible and comprehensible as a sensory event. Florensky therefore makes the “astonished apostle Thomas” the “symbolic figure of philosophy.” Thomas, argues Florensky, was not a skeptic; his desire for touch came from a desire not for rebuttal but for affirmation; he wished to be astonished by proof. According to Florensky, this astonishment (thauma, as mirrored in Thomas’s name) rendered the corporeality of the resurrection fully real.65 The tension between “Reach out your hand” and “Do not touch me” prefigures a theological and philosophical discussion about the possibilities and limits of touch—a discussion that ranges from the correlations of the inner and outer senses to the (negative) proofs of reality of the twentieth century. However, Druskin enters the philosophical debate on noli me tangere by pointedly excluding the classical exegesis of the formula. The motif of Thomas’s doubt and tangible proof of existence began to occupy Druskin increasingly in 1963, after the death of his mother. In October 1963, he first mentioned the touching of Christ’s wound as a “sensory sign.” He imagined himself as a new Thomas begging for a “second Thomas sign.”66 Hardly a single diary entry in this or the following year left this topos unmentioned.

64

Jean-Luc Marion, “Le dernier toucher,” in “Le toucher,” in Colloques “Les cinq sens,” 87–96 (Montpellier: Conseil général de l’Hérault, 1993).

65

Pavel Florenskii, “Dialektika,” in his Sobranie sochinenii v 4-kh tomakh, vol. 3, part 1 (Moscow, 1999), 118–141, qt. 131.

66

Druskin, Dnevniki, 12ff.

273

274

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Fig. 70. “Noli me tangere,” manuscript sheet (first draft) from Yakov Druskin’s diaries: Pered prinadlezhnostiami chego-libo. Dnevniki 1963–1979 (St. Petersburg, 2001), 190f. [entries from May 8 and 11, 1966].

5. Noli Me Tangere. Touch Between Doubt, Desire, and Disgust (Yakov Druskin)

“And once again I ask you: give me a Thomas sign,”67 he kept writing. Then, in December 1965, he determined three themes on which his thinking centered: firstly, “acosmism”; secondly, the “noumenal relationship I—You”; and thirdly, the “Thomas sign.”68 From then on, he mentioned this sign less often, and from 1966 onwards, the begging was gradually replaced by an examination of noli me tangere, which led to a short study entitled “Noli me tangere—on shamelessness” (1966; fig. 70). In this essay Druskin distinguishes between four modes of the taboo on touch as forms of physical, social and psychological distancing. They exemplify how the symbolic overdetermination of touch leads to a compulsion to touch, accompanied by pronounced sensitivity and vulnerability of the self. As the first form of noli me tangere, Druskin describes the perceived obtrusiveness of his own body: “Touch me not”—is that good or bad? 1. I suffer from hypochondria: I wear collars and trousers one or two sizes larger so that they don’t touch my neck or belly. I also have analurethral hypochondria: constantly, I feel that I have a stomach, a bladder, which have to be emptied again and again. Due to the constant feeling of a full stomach and a full bladder, I’ve been going to the toilet frequently for as long as I can remember. Always (except when drunk) I feel that I have a body. This feeling is unpleasant, the collar touches and presses the neck, the digested food touches and presses the walls of the stomach, the urine presses the walls of the bladder.69

This confession of hypochondria seems to express an experience that Benjamin describes in “Einbahnstraße” in a fragment dedicated to gloves: “All disgust is originally disgust at touch.”70 In Druskin’s case, haptic sensitivity is intensified to the point of traumatic haphephobia. Pressure from the inside and intrusiveness from the outside climax in a neurotic excess of emptying, with which “touch me not” reacts to the inevitability of permanent touch (by oneself and others). Everything comes too close—the body itself and clothing, too: that which envelops it, which could protect it but 67

Ibid., 24.

68

Druskin, Pered prinadlezhnostiami, 160 [entry from December 16, 1965].

69

Iakov Druskin, “Noli me tangere — o besstydstve,” in his Lestnitsa Iakova. Esse, traktaty, pisʹma (St. Petersburg, 2004), 309–314, qt. 309.

70

Benjamin, “Einbahnstraße”, 91.

275

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ends up as yet another pressure. The permanent cathartic cleansing from touch and physical proximity both negates and reinforces the perception of the body. This defense against the self, against one’s own corporeality, radicalized into a desire for nakedness and excretion, is also reflected in the rejection of the Other: 2. But there is a second noli me tangere. Fallen in Adam, I am separated by my own self from my neighbor and from God. Separation from my neighbor. I converse with my neighbor. The conversation, on his part, becomes personal, intimate, noumenal: he talks about himself, about me. Suppose he talks about himself, he talks seriously and well, he cares about something, he asks me to help him, to resolve his doubts. I had thought about the same thing, too, but as soon as my interlocutor asks me about it, I draw a line between him and myself, put myself in a circle and tell him: noli me tangere.71

This second reading of noli me tangere explicates the fear of the contagious stimulus as an inability to contact and communicate, unfolding the ethical dimension of a physical borderline experience. The painful and sensitive body boundaries of the hypochondriac, a libidinal sensitivity to touch, is reexpressed in the Adamite man as social vulnerability. The noli me tangere of the sinful man interprets self-distance as distance from others and couples the desire for self-emptying with the desire for self-closure. In this way, the inaccessibility of the Other is combined with the inaccessibility of the self to form a figure of subjective isolation. Here, awareness of the fall and expulsion from paradise leads to absolute—inner and outer—exile. Once a limit set by God is crossed, all psychic and physical togetherness and cooperation is reversed.72 The formula “touch me not” thus suggests a dimension of guilty untouchability, the tabooing of a faulty ego. Didier Anzieu drew a revealing analogy between Christ’s noli me tangere and compulsive neuroses (also suggested by Freud), and, more importantly, pointed to a structural connection (concealed by Freud) between

71

Druskin, “Noli me tangere,” 309f. In other texts, Druskin takes up this motif, for example in “Death” (“Smertʹ”), a reflection on the death of his father. Iakov Druskin, “Smertʹ,” in Nezamechennaia zemlia. Literaturno-khudozhestvennyi alʹmanakh, ed. V. Shubinskii and I. Vishnevetskii (Moscow and St. Petersburg, 1991), 61–71, qt. 67.

72

Cf. also the diary entry of February 19, 1966. Druskin, Pered prinadlezhnostiami, 171f.

5. Noli Me Tangere. Touch Between Doubt, Desire, and Disgust (Yakov Druskin)

the taboo on touch and psychoanalysis.73 Subtly reconstructing the connections between tactually stimulating the body surface and creating an interand intrasubjective interface, Anzieu assumes a “skin-ego” (moi-peau) grounded in sensory perception. This skin-ego is significantly restructured through the taboo on touch, which is deeply rooted in cultural history and further endorsed by psychoanalysis as a talking cure. Still, the skin-ego also requires a symbolic language abolishing this taboo. His preoccupation with Doubting Thomas and the existential meaning of touch leads Druskin to consider such symbolic language. In the first draft of the Noli me tangere study, sketched in his diary in May 1966, he concludes his idiosyncratic exegesis with a renewed plea to send him a “Thomas sign”: “Forgive me, Lord, break my seclusion, give me a Thomas sign, give, Lord, that which I ask you for.”74 The “Thomas sign” here stands for a hybrid semiotic mode between indexicality and iconicity. As tactile authentication of appearance, this indexical sign suggests presence—just as the index finger seeks to touch and feel, establishing a tangible, evident proximity to the corpus mysticum. Yet as an index, this finger is confronted with the chasm between showing and touching. The “Thomas sign” is an indexical double sign that seeks the physical proximity of touch in the distanced pointing gesture. It strives to close the gap between abstract symbolization and concrete materiality of the sign, all the while relating to the law of untouchability. According to Druskin, this very duplicity also characterizes an archaic sign: the hieroglyph. The concept of the hieroglyph appeared in the discourse of the chinari (an informal group around Kharms and Vvedensky) thanks to Lipavsky. He defines things as “hieroglyphs of the elements”: in his view, things embody elements (or forces of nature: stikhii). Lipavsky planned to write a dictionary of hieroglyphs, finding words for the original elementary states so as to fathom the essence (“soul”) of things. In the conversations of the chinari recorded by Lipavsky, he briefly explains his plan for this dictionary: Words first denote the basics—the elements; only then do they become the names of objects, actions, and properties. The indeterminate

73

Didier Anzieu, Das Haut-Ich (Frankfurt/M., 1996), 186ff.

74

Druskin, Pered prinadlezhnostiami, 191.

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declination names an element, not an action. There are elements such as heaviness, viscosity, dissolution, and others. They are born one of the other. And they are embodied in things like courage in a lion; thus, things are hieroglyphs of elements. I mean that the facial expression comes before the face; the face is but a frozen facial expression. I wanted to find the elements through words, to expose the souls of things in this way, to learn their hierarchy. I would like to make a deck of hieroglyphs, like a deck of cards.75

Druskin himself distinguishes “primarily between material and abstract hieroglyphs,” the former assigned to sensory perception, the latter to pure mathematics. He reads the verb “to touch” as well as the adverb “near” as material hieroglyphs, which “get in touch with reality through sensory perception.”76 Unlike the symbol, the hieroglyph is not a sign referring to something outside itself but a sign that is split in itself. As a sensory sign, it refers to material touch and yet thwarts any form of direct sensory (re) presentation. In it, the sign becomes a figure of otherness. In a brief essay on the chinari, Druskin speaks of the hieroglyph oscillating between inherent (sobstvennyi: also “own,” “proper,” “actual”) and non-inherent meaning. While the inherent meaning refers to a biological, physical, material phenomenon, its semantics can only be expressed poetically (in metaphors) or oxymoronically (in antinomies). A hieroglyph is a certain material phenomenon that I directly feel, sense, perceive; which tells me more than what it directly expresses. The hieroglyph is ambiguous, it has its inherent meaning and a noninherent one. The hieroglyph’s inherent meaning is its definition as a material phenomenon—physical, biological, psychophysiological. Its non-inherent meaning cannot be defined precisely and unambiguously; it can only be conveyed metaphorically, poetically, sometimes via the combination of logically incompatible concepts, that is, antinomy, contradiction, nonsense. A hieroglyph can be understood as the intangible, that is, the spiritual or super-sensory, directly speaking to me through the material or sensory.77

75

Leonid Lipavskii, “Razgovory,” Logos 4 (1993): 7–75.

76

Druskin, Dnevniki, 164 [entry dated July 31, 1943].

77

Iakov Druskin, “Chinari,” Avrora 6 (1989): 103–115, qt. 109. On the “transformation of the word into an object,” see also B. M. Meilakh, “Shkap i kolpak. Fragment

5. Noli Me Tangere. Touch Between Doubt, Desire, and Disgust (Yakov Druskin)

If the Thomas sign is a hieroglyph combining sensory phenomenality and extrasensory abstraction, then touch, in all its asserted immediacy, suggests difference. The association of similarity is inherent in the indexical understanding of touch—in its foundation in the body; here, it shifts, becomes divergence. As a sign that opposes the formation of meaning and resists symbolization, it marks self-dissimilarity, self-distance, detachment from the paradigm of semantic proximity. As a pictograph, the hieroglyph is located between writing and image. Reducible neither to iconicity nor to naked graphic abstraction, it enables a differentiated view of the way the Oberiu envisioned touch. In consideration of the hieroglyphic Thomas sign, the Oberiu poetic phenomenology of tactile experience can be read as the written image of the imageless, as the untouchability of touch. Oberiu poetics began under the auspices of concretist poetry, whose object cult evoked a haptic approach. Gradually, it proceeded to the concept of a boundary where touch and image mutually support the self-assertion of the poetic text as an object. Here, representation does not feed on the ability of poetic speech to transform the absent into the virtually present. Rather, it always marks the threshold where an encounter with the incommensurable takes place, where contact tilts into interrupted interaction, where the text offers itself to the finger of a reading Thomas, making him doubt his haptic experience. Following a “law of heterogeneity,” this poetic phenomenology of tactile experience conceives of touch as an unpredictable event, a punctual state of intensity that dissimulates verbal expression and pathic experience.

oberiutovskoi poetiki,” in Tynianovskii sbornik. Chetvertye Tynianovskie chteniia (Riga, 1990), 181–193, qt. 190.

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The gesture presents itself to me as a question, bringing certain perceptible bits of the world to my notice, and inviting my concurrence. —Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 19451

Merleau-Ponty’s encounter with the gesture can be read as a leitmotif of the present book. Each of its chapters is devoted to a gesture and guided by examining its form. Each chapter seeks out the intersection of bodily and symbolic actions, following the physical entanglements of poetological concepts. Each retraces how processes of creative poiesis, production and reception dynamics are modeled in their latent or manifest orientation toward manipulation. With its many facets, these explorations into the handwork of literature and the arts form a gestological poetics of poiesis. But while Merleau-Ponty places gesticulation in a harmonic setting of mutual understanding, contemplating every gesture embraced by the “reciprocity of my intentions and the gestures of others,”2 the preceding readings encountered striking incongruities and intentional derailments. These fault lines testify to the analytical and empirical problems arising from the discursive suppression of the gesture and the hand—the dominant (but by no means exclusive) gestural actor. 1

Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 215.

2

Ibid.

VIII. Toward a Philology of the Hand

A metaphor from Benjamin’s The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction illuminates this suppression. Highlighting the work of a cameraman and the way it penetrates reality, Benjamin contrasts two gestures: the magician’s hand laid onto the body surface to heal and the surgeon’s hand penetrating deep under the skin into the organs. He argues that film is a surgical medium, an edited sequence of cut frames that penetrate the “event’s tissue.” What they show are micro-perspectives of hand motions, which Benjamin observes through the prism of the grasping gesture: “While roughly familiar with grasping a lighter or a spoon, we hardly know what actually happens in this interplay of hand and metal.”3 Benjamin’s concept of an “optical unconscious,” which replaces a “space interwoven with consciousness,” is evidenced by this cinematographic close-up of a grasping gesture. In dissecting individual moments of motion, in concentrating on the liminal space traversed by movement, Benjamin shines a light on familiar but unnoticed motifs of gestures as crystallized movements. The observations in the present book, too, are close-ups of seemingly familiar gestures that accompany us daily, that we perform habitually—and that are yet largely unstudied from an aesthetic and poetic perspective. In their own way, they explore an unconscious aesthetic or poetics. What do we know about the interplay of hand and (art)work in the gestures of playing and touching, writing and working, giving and showing? And how can we gain a glimpse of this interplay? The gestural performances and scenes considered here illustrate the blind spot in our knowledge, which Benjamin observes from a phenomenal, operative and communicative perspective. Gestures, hand movements and manual maneuvers prove an intricate category to study. First, the rather narrow models of expressive gestures or non-verbal communication need to be heuristically expanded so as capture a much broader spectrum of gestural designs. Moreover, avant-garde arts provide manifold concepts of the gesture, which demands corresponding conceptual flexibility. Just consider the notions discussed in the present book: the sound gesture (Zelinsky/ Polivanov), the rhythmic gesture (Bely), the glossogenetic gesture (Marr), the tongue gesture (Bely again), the word gesture (Tretyakov), the speechmechanical gesture (Eisenstein/Tretyakov), and others. The avant-garde discourse on theater and dramaturgy adds to this complex constellation

3

Benjamin, “Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit,” 162.

281

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when introducing the mechanical gesture (Foregger), differentiating between the biomechanical and the bimechanical gesture (Meyerhold/Eisenstein respectively), proposing the geometric gesture (Sokolov) instead of the plastic or the psychological gesture (Stanislavski/Volkonsky), or when, finally, reducing action on stage to the minimal gesture (Lakhinov). At the same time, the readings in this book encountered a significant systematic challenge: under the pressure of detailed classifications, the gesture proved to some degree resistant to consistent typologization and conceptualization—even before its specification as a gesture of performance or communication. Moreover, in its position between language and action, the gesture proves to be a “practice of suspending the conceptual.”4 Thus, it beckons us onto a path leading toward a theory of the non-conceptual, which does not, however, imply absolute metaphorical unavailability. Even when the gesture performs evasive maneuvers against terminological appropriation in its “piercing indeterminacy,”5 it remains a figure of thought and a form of motion that lets us explore the classical topoi of the hand and its workings. This becomes particularly evident in five postulates traditionally derived from the hand and its gestures: vividness, organicism, presence, experience of reality, and operational effectiveness. The first postulate reads the gesture as a language speaking to the eyes, a bodily stage, incorporated deixis. It sees hand and gesture in the service of visibility, assimilating them into the optical dispositive. The second postulate is connected with satisfying a desire for vividness through the gestural staging of the word as a body sculpture in motion. It stands for an emphatic discourse of corporeality in which the hand is an interface and medium able to embody and incorporate the symbolic, to (re)naturalize artificial signification processes. Hand and gesture are thus not only at the origin of language—they are also the telos of physiognomic utopias. The third postulate, which ties the gesture and its appearance to the presence of a corporeal being, is also derived from this thought: the a priori presence of the body in gesture seems to suspend

4

Lehmann, “Eine unterbrochene Darstellung,” 197.

5

Hans Blumenberg, “Ausblicke auf eine Theorie der Unbegrifflichkeit,” in his Schiffbruch mit Zuschauer (Frankfurt/M., 1979), 85–106, qt. 94.

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the representational doubling of the world6 for the moment in which the gesture is executed. The fourth postulate couples this experience of presence with proof of the real: the dense sensory experience of the hand is intended to compensate for the weakened sense of reality in modernity as well as to prevent an escape into noncommittal fictional parallel worlds. This “revolutionary hunger” (Mandelstam) for sensory reassurance is articulated in an euphoric celebration of touch as proof of existence as well as in the epistemic connection between the extended hand and the res extensa, and also in scientific touch experiments to test the phenomenal essence of appearance. With the fifth postulate, reality is defined as a sphere of efficacy. It strives for the conjunction of hand and deed: here, the hiatus between the semiotic and the somatic, between the poetic and the pragmatic is to be closed; here, the hand is a tool, “ready-at-hand” to help the word to act. All five postulates have been massively disputed in the preceding examinations of selected gestures. Neither the claim to evidence could be maintained nor was the desire for reality fulfilled; neither did the gesture grant return to original bodily expression nor did it help in the search for universal intuitive communication. Neither the promise of presence nor that of performance proved stable; neither could the hand be instrumentalized without loss nor was it able to bridge the gap between the word and the world. Instead, what we saw in considering the rhetorical and philosophical, linguistic and poetic constellations of the hand was a dissolution of the gesture’s verbal and bodily vividness. Far from guaranteeing a sense of reality grasping the here and now, the hand tentatively explores a sense of possibility. With the modus of the gesture changed from the modality of the realis to the potentialis, the body’s obligation to be present is relaxed. Arguably, the hand does not fulfil the tasks imposed on it because it is doubled. Indeed, the hand’s duality is more prominently coded than that of most other twinned body parts and sensory organs. The left eye or ear rarely differs from the right one in cultural terms, and its functional differences are very subtle. In contrast, the difference between the left and the right hand has received much more attention, for example, in sign language systems, which assign the two hands separate morphological and syntactical functions. Moreover, certain gestures require or forbid the use 6

Sybille Krämer, “Zur Kinästhesie der verkörperten Sprache,” in Kunst der Bewegung. Kinästhetische Wahrnehmung und Probehandeln in virtuellen Welten, ed. Christina Lechtermann and Carsten Morsch (Bern and Berlin, 2004), 343–356.

283

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of the right or left hand to be understood or to succeed as performative acts. Sometimes, hands interlock in complementary actions and mutual reference; sometimes, one hand acts in contradiction to the other or “does not know what the other is doing.” The disparity between hand and word, hand and image, hand and world revealed by most gestures is mirrored in the disparity between the two hands. And where the second hand is missing, the uncanny emerges, according to Freud. Indeed, the uncanny and frightening repeatedly surfaced in the present readings. Right at the beginning, it broke out of the violent fantasies in which the gesture was forced to talk under torture. Aleksey Tolstoy hoped to resurrect dead history as res gestae using protocols of confessions extracted under duress—and at the same time to ecstatically revive literary language blunted by rhetoric. The uncanny also appeared incognito in the neurotic use of writing utensils and in the reversals, disguises and transgressions of letter play. We encountered it in lyrical funeral gifts, such as Mandelstam’s poem offering the reader a palm full of literary life in death. The uncanny resonated in the austerity of geometrically inclined theater directors trying to straighten out all impulsive motion scribbles, to drive out the unruly inwardness of the gesture. And it showed itself in the cruel fear of losing palpable body contours, which led the poetic phenomenology of the haptic into the unknown, ultimately transforming it into a “treatise on horror” (Lipavsky). Here, the hand—one’s own hand—becomes the figure of the Other, enabling the encounter with otherness. In this otherness, the hand and its gestures are hardly the refuge of sensory saturation, epistemic reassurance and deictic immediacy envisioned by modernity. Rather, the gesturing hand can be understood as a heterotopia, a conceptual area or a figure of thought with which the avant-garde negotiates the possibilities, conditions and limitations of literature and art. This is what happens in the playful-manipulative transformations of utilitarian disciplined writing, in the contagious animations of literary corpses, and also in the theatrical debates seeking the place of the gesture between abstract linearity and pneumatic-Pygmalionic sculpture. But why do all these openings and closings of the aesthetic space refer to the hand? The answer can hardly be found in a single primal scene. Apart from the interrelation of ars and techné, of art and craft, of work and tools, of homo significans and homo faber negotiated before, another long-standing discussion in cultural and art history provides a clue: the dispute over the aesthetic legitimacy of the hand, which dates back to the theology of

VIII. Toward a Philology of the Hand

the late antiquity with its controversy over whether the icon as a man-made image could claim the status of a sacred object. The acheiropoieton, the icon made without hands, is the most authoritative image type that translates this theological controversy into a paradoxical mode of miraculous selfcreation. It marks the extreme of a distrust in the human hand, of an attempt to scrutinize it and exclude manual interference, or, more generally, manipulations from the realm where the sacred meets the aesthetic. This is the source of an art history that—hesitatingly at first but with increasing persistence—leaves a trace of the artist’s hand. The more evident this trace, the more scope is there for the feasibility and formability of the image, be it sacred or secular. Where the creating and generating human hand is programmatically concealed or exposed, where the position of the acheiropoieton as an artifact must be determined—this is where theory of art begins. For the avant-garde, unlike for the Romantic period, the acheiropoieton seems no longer an option. In unmistakable polemics against Pushkin’s auto-epitaph—“I’ve reared a monument not made by human hands [nerukotvorny]”7 (1836)—Malevich rejects every work of art and at the same time every artist’s body that seeks proximity to acheiropoiesis: “If you don’t have the skill, if you are not sharpened into a chisel, if your forehead cannot be a hammer, if your chest cannot be an anvil, if your hands cannot be floodlights, then don’t try yourself at monuments, for they will be not made by human hands [nerukotvorny].”8 This commitment to tool art testifies ex negativo to the significance of the acheiropoieton as a reference point for the modern concept of art. Even objects that leave the sphere of the hand in favor of technology have to be measured against the discursive dominance of images “not made by hand.” The long-lasting tradition of mutual demarcation and usurpation between manufact, artifact and technofact can be understood as a history of conflict between manual and medial manipulation. Up to the present day, it remains a highly relevant category in art theory and art policy, where the artwork is situated in the continuum between the consciously formed, designed, made, on the one hand, and the (seemingly) spontaneously self7

“Ia pamiatnik sebe vozdvig nerukotvornyi,” cited in translation by A. Z. Foreman: Alexander Pushkin, “Exegi Monumentum,” https://ruverses.com/alexander-pushkin/ exegi-monumentum/1946/, accessed December 20, 2020.

8

Kazimir Malevich, “Nerukotvornye pamiatniki” [1919], in his Sobranie sochinenii v 5-i tomakh, vol. 1 (Moscow, 1995), 129–131, qt. 131.

285

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generated on the other. Poiesis and autopoiesis mark the extreme poles of the discourse evolving around the question “What is art?” The status of the manual is often precarious precisely because it stands at a crossroads between art and non-art. Regardless of whether the hand is actually involved in creation or construction, the question is how it is used to conceptualize aesthetic programs and objects. The hand is the figure employed to (trans) form concepts of representation, affectivity, contact, form, plasticity, and expressivity. These fragmentary reflections on art theory from antiquity and the present open up the analytical reference area both historically and systematically. Guided by the gesture, they transcend the phenomena of a given epoch with its specific context, reaching the overarching dimensions of a poetics of poiesis. While focusing on the Russian avant-garde around 1910-1930, the investigations of this book were concerned with a broader question: how the hand at work in its poietic practices not only breaks open the narrow solidified topos of the avant-garde as the alleged heyday of optocentrism but also helps explore the dense discursive network of poiesis— stretched out between poetics, rhetoric, linguistics, psychology, ergonomics, history of law, philosophy, and the visual arts. What comes into sight at the intersections of this network is the concept of philology in the history of knowledge. Up to now, the avant-garde had been regarded as seminal for elaborating an alternative between a philology of the eye and a philology of the ear. Formalist literary theory has spelled out this antagonism particularly clearly in its polemics with Sievers’s sound analysis. Is a text to be understood as written (to be read with the eyes) or as spoken (to be heard with the ears)? This question sparked a fundamental methodological and medial controversy that profoundly changed the program of philology. Its repercussions can still be felt in more recent discussions on a pictorial turn in literary studies and in the growing influence of intermedia philology.9 The preceding readings let a third player subvert this disciplinary antagonism: despite its obvious interest in the eye and ear, the poetics of the avant-garde also lays the conceptual foundation for a not so obvious philology of the hand. If the hand is taken into consideration, all relations between writing and voice, letter and image, eye

9

Bernd Stiegler, Philologie des Auges. Die photographische Entdeckung der Welt im 19. Jahrhundert (Munich, 2001).

VIII. Toward a Philology of the Hand

and ear have to be remapped. And this urges us to rethink the parameters, subjects, and methodologies of philology. Once the perspective is thus expanded, other gestures of analysis come into view. One might consider the gesture of thinking and understanding, in which the hand—often envisioned as a proxy organ of cognition in the history of science—reconnects the mind to the body. There are the gestures of ripping or caressing books, or the gesture of throwing that casts a light on the way some texts are catapulted into being. Finally, there is the unspecific gesture that does not originate from any identifiable intention—the involuntary, ambiguous motion that has no object of reference and that Alexei Kruchenykh has named “the absurd gesture.”10 No doubt these gestures— and others more—deserve studies of their own.

10

Aleksei Kruchenykh, “Sdvigologiia russkogo iazyka,” in his Kukish proshliakam (Moscow, 1992), 33–80, qt. 52.

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Captions Captions Chapter I Fig. 1. Ry Nikonova, “Gesture—hyphen” (“Zhest — defis”). From Crispin Brooks, “On One Ancestor. Vasilisk Gnedov in the Work of Sergei Sigej and Ry Nikonova,” Russian Literature 59 (2006): 177–223. Fig. 2. Vasilisk Gnedov, “The Poem of the End” (“Poema kontsa”). From his Smertʹ iskusstvu. Piatnadtsatʹ (15) poem (St. Petersburg, 1913), 8. Fig. 3. Jacob Linzbach’s “multi-finger writing.” From Iakov I. Lintsbakh, Printsipy filosofskogo iazyka. Opyt tochnogo iazykoznaniia [1916] (Moscow, 2008), 28. Fig. 4. Lintsbakh, Printsipy filosofskogo iazyka, 28. Fig. 5. Notation of a movement sequence. From Lintsbakh, Printsipy filosofskogo iazyka, 71. Fig. 6. From Lintsbakh, Printsipy filosofskogo iazyka, 165. Fig. 7. From Lintsbakh, Printsipy filosofskogo iazyka, 165. Fig. 8. From Lintsbakh, Printsipy filosofskogo iazyka, 166. Fig. 9. Linzbach’s notation system depicting the journey of a man who lives in a hut on a mountain slope. On a winter morning at sunrise, he sets off for the town in a sledge. A part of the way leads him through the forest, where he meets a hunter whom he takes onboard. A blizzard comes up, they get lost and are pursued by wolves. They manage to drive the wolves away by shooting and eventually reach the hut they had been looking for, have dinner there and stay overnight, although the blizzard subsides. From Lintsbakh, Printsipy filosofskogo iazyka, 92. Florensky mocks this example as proof that Linzbach’s artistic language can hardly present anything halfway complex. (Pavel Florenskii, “Antinomiia iazyka,” in his U vodorazdelov mysli, vol. 2 (Moscow, 1990), 152–199, qt. 198.) Fig. 10. From Lintsbakh, Printsipy filosofskogo iazyka, 122. See also Fig. 5.

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Fig. 11. Visual representation of linear language as the root of further developments in individual languages and their ramifications. From Nikolai Marr, “O proiskhozhdenii iazyka,” in his Izbrannye raboty v 5-i tomakh, vol. 2: Osnovnye voprosy iazykoznaniia (Leningrad, 1936), 179–209, qt. 195. Fig. 12a. From Andrei Belyi, Masterstvo Gogolia [1934] (Moscow, 1996), 346. Fig. 12b. Preliminary drawing for Fig. 12a from the manuscript of Bely’s Gogol study. Russian Archive for Literature and Art [RGALI], f. 53, op. 6, d. 9. Fig. 13. From Andrei Belyi, Glossolaliia. Poema o zvuke (Moscow, 2002), 53. Fig. 14. “All this happens in the mouth.” Belyi, Glossolaliia, 114. Fig. 15. From Eduard Sievers, “Ziele und Wege der Schallanalyse. Zwei Vorträge,” in Stand und Aufgaben der Sprachwissenschaft. Festschrift für Wilhelm Streitberg (Heidelberg, 1924), 65–111, qt. 73. Sievers bases his illustration on Gustav Becking’s “Historical Table of Conducting Curves,” in Becking’s Der musikalische Rhythmus als Erkenntnisquelle (Augsburg, 1928). Fig. 16. Sketch from Andrei Bely’s drafts for Glossolaliia. The six sketches illustrate the first sentence of the Genesis in Cyrillic transcription (cf. chapter 15 of Glossolaliia). From Andrei Belyi, Glossolalie. Poem über den Laut / Glossolalia. A Poem about Sound, ed. Taia Gut (Rastatt, 2003), 260. Fig. 17. Andrei Bely’s drawing of the oral cavity. From Belyi, Glossolalie, 261. Fig. 18. Vocal gesture for “Rrrr!” From Belyi, Glossolalie, 11.

24

40 41 43 45 45

46

47 48

Captions Chapter II Fig. 19. From “Kak rabotatʹ s knigoi,” Pioner 20 (1926): 21. Fig. 20. Showcase “Times and books” (“Vremena i knigi”) at a Soviet children’s book exhibition. From Pioner 13–14 (1931): 19. Fig. 21. The sequence of images shows an experiment testing the adjustment to writing in different settings. From Organizatsiia truda 1 (1925): 71. Fig. 22. The test person must draw these figures after getting up. From Organizatsiia truda 1 (1925): 73. Fig. 23. From Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophische Untersuchungen, in his Werkausgabe in 8 Bänden, vol. 1 (Frankfurt/M., 1984), 527.

73 74 76 76 81

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Fig. 24. Aleksei Kruchenykh, The little duck’s nest . . . of bad words . . . (Utinoe gnezdyshko . . . durnykh slov . . . , 1913; designed by Olga Rozanova). From The Russian Avant-Garde Book, 1910–1934, ed. Margit Rowell and Deborah Wye (New York, 2002), 76–77. Fig. 25. Petr Miturich, Spatial Graphics (1918–1920). A sculptural arrangement with Velimir Khlebnikov’s poem “Thickets” (“Trushchoby,” 1910). From Jewgenij Kowtun, Sangesi. Chlebnikow und seine Maler (Zürich, 1993), 117. Fig. 26. Petr Miturich, Spatial Graphics. Relief for Velimir Chlebnikov’s poem “Murmuring, whistling / the birds stopped flying up” (“S zhurchaniem, svistom / ptitsy vzletat’ perestali,” 1908/1913). From Petr Miturich, Zapiski surovogo realista epokhi avangarda. Dnevniki, pis’ma, vospominaniia, stat’i, ed. M. Miturich, V. Rakitin, A. Sarab’ianov (Moscow, 1997), 208. Fig. 27. Petr Miturich, Spatial Graphics. Relief of an extract from Velimir Khlebnikov’s poem “The War in the Mousetrap” (“Voina v myshelovke,” 1916). From Miturich, Zapiski surovogo realista, 210. Fig. 28a. Petr Miturich, illustration for Velimir Khlebnikov’s palindrome poem “Razin” (ink on paper, 1922–1923). From Kowtun, Sangesi, 108–109. Fig. 28b. Petr Miturich, illustration for Velimir Khlebnikov’s palindrome poem “Razin.” Fig. 29. Petr Miturich, Cube Alphabet (Azbuka-Kubiki), also called Graphic Dictionary (Graficheskii Slovarʹ) or Star Alphabet (Zvezdnaia Azbuka), cardboard and ink, ca. 1919. From Kowtun, Sangesi, 104. Fig. 30. From El Lissitzky’s Suprematicheskii skaz pro 2 kvadrata v postroikakh (Berlin, 1922). Fig. 31a. Sergei Tretyakov’s “Self-Made Animals.” From Pioner 22 (1926): 6; drawings by Boris Pokrovsky. Fig. 31b. Sergei Tretyakov’s “Self-Made Animals.” From Pioner 22 (1926): 7. Fig. 32a. Alexander Rodchenko and Varvara Stepanova, photographs for Sergei Tretyakov’s children’s play verses Self-Made Animals (Samozveri, 1927). From Alexandre Rodtchenko and Serge Tretiakov, Samozveri / Animaux à mimer (Bouaye, 2010), n.p. Fig. 32b. The ostrich. From Rodtchenko and Tretiakov, Samozveri / Animaux à mimer, n.p. Fig. 32c. The seal on the ice. From Rodtchenko and Tretiakov, Samozveri / Animaux à mimer, n.p.

85

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90 90 92

96 100 101 106

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Captions

Fig. 33. Alexander Rodchenko and Varvara Stepanova, a bookmark for the publishing house Novost’ (1923). From A. M. Rodtschenko, Aufsätze, autobiographische Notizen, Briefe, Erinnerungen (Dresden, 1993), 243. Fig. 34. Varvara Stepanova, design for a figure of Tarelkin. From Aleksandr Rodchenko and Varvara Stepanova, Budushchee— edinstvennaia nasha tselʹ, ed. Peter Never (Munich, 1991), 204. Fig. 35. Costume designs by Varvara Stepanova for the agitation piece Through the Red and the White Glasses (Cherez krasnye i belye ochki, 1923). From Rodchenko and Stepanova, Budushchee—edinstvennaia nasha tselʹ, 207. Fig. 36. Fight between Pinkerton, Sinclair, Tarzan, and Pathfinder. From Varvara Stepanova, Vecher knigi (Moscow, 1924), 56. Fig. 37. “Living reviewers” (Sinclair, Reed, and a worker) judge (in a rather hands-on way, but in the framework of a legal process) harmful literary figures: Pinkerton, God Zebaoth, Madame Verbitskaya, and Tarzan. The cover of the large set design book bears the title “An Evening of the Book” and names the organizing institution, the Academy for Communist Education. From Stepanova, Vecher knigi, 60. Fig. 38. Varvara Stepanova’s note on Samozveri. From Sovetskoe kino 1 (1927): 15.

107

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111

Captions Chapter III Fig. 39. The skeleton of the gesture. From Vladimir Lachinov: Zhestikuliatsiia (n.p., 1921), 29. Fig. 40. From Sergei Volkonskii, Vyrazitelʹnyi chelovek. Stsenicheskoe vospitanie zhesta [The Expressive Man. Stage Education of the Gesture] (St. Petersburg, 1913), 92. Fig. 41. Deviatizvuchie ruki [The Ninefold Sound of the Hand]. This overview, strongly reminiscent of classical chirographies (such as Bulwer’s), shows possible variations of the theatrical hand gesture in the coordinate network of concentric, normal, and eccentric postures. From Volkonskii, Vyrazitelʹnyi chelovek, 106. Fig. 42. This cubic model borrowed from Delsarte is also based on the number nine. It visualizes the possibilities of holding the six sides of a cube, with some sides graspable in different ways. The arrows indicate the directions of the fingers. From Volkonskii, Vyrazitelʹnyi chelovek, 101. Fig. 43. From Vsevolod Meierkholʹd, “Akter budushchego,” Ermitazh 6 (1922): 10–11, qt. 11.

120 133 134

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Captions

Fig. 44. Scene from Meyerhold’s production of Fernand Crommelynck’s Le cocu magnifique (Velikodushnyi rogonosets, 1922). From Jonathan Pitches, Vsevolod Meyerhold (London and New York, 2003), 36. Fig. 45. The Taylor gesture in the theater. From Ippolit Sokolov, “Teilorizirovannyi zhest,” Zrelishcha 2 (1922): 10–11, qt. 11. The drawings are by Vladimir Liutse, who co-designed the stage set for Le cocu magnifique with Liubov Popova. Fig. 46. From Sokolov, “Teilorizirovannyi zhest,” 10.

145

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Captions Chapter IV Fig. 47. Observation of a hammer blow through a sighting telescope with coordinate frame at the Biomechanical Institute of the TsIT. From René Fülöp-Miller, Geist und Gesicht des Bolschewismus. Darstellung und Kritik des kulturellen Lebens in Sowjet-Rußland (Zürich, Leipzig, and Vienna, 1928), 285. Fig. 48. Kinetogram of a hammer blow. From Siegfried Zielinski, Archäologie der Medien. Zur Tiefenzeit des technologischen Hörens und Sehens (Reinbek bei Hamburg, 2002), 281. Fig. 49. From Fülöp-Miller, Geist und Gesicht des Bolschewismus, 276. Fig. 50. The “Call of the All-Ukrainian Literature Committee” (“Vozzvanie Vseukrainskogo Literaturnogo komiteta,” 1919), co-signed by Gastev, contains the slogan: “Comrades, bring your hammers to forge the new word!” Varvara Stepanova translated this formula into a poster design (ink on paper). From Rodchenko and Stepanova, Budushchee— edinstvennaia nasha tselʹ, plate 40. Fig. 51. From Aleksei Gastev, Poeziia rabochego udara (Moscow, 1971), frontispiece. Fig. 52. El Lissitzky, “Merz-Brief an Ivan Tschichold” (MERZ letter). From typographische mitteilungen (October 1925): special issue elementare typographie, [reprint Mainz, 1986] 205.

159

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172 174

Captions Chapter V Fig. 53. Tretyakov’s I Want a Baby with its awards for exemplary children stages the eugenic debate of the 1920s. From Prozhektor 8 (1927): 30. Fig. 54. El Lissitzky’s viewing platform for Tretyakov’s discussion play I Want a Baby (1926/1927) to be produced by Vsevolod

189 191

Captions

Meyerhold. Lissitzky designs a fundamentally new model of stage and theater construction here. Reconstruction by N. Kustov in Richard Andrews and Milena Kalinovska, Art into Life. Russian constructivism 1914–1932 (Seattle, 1990), 155. Fig. 55. Outline of the stage construction for I Want a Baby. From: “Kunst in die Produktion.” Sowjetische Kunst während der Phase der Kollektivierung und Industrialisierung 1927–1933, ed. Neue Gesellschaft für Bildende Kunst Berlin (West) (Berlin, 1977), 67. Fig. 56. This perspective offers a view of the transparent stage floor, intended for the illumination of the stage from below. From Christina Kiaer, Imagine no Possessions. The Socialist Objects of Russian Constructivism (Cambridge, Mass., 2005), 242. Fig. 57. Assembled test construction of the viewing platform for I Want a Baby; original size. In the foreground, you see the central play area with a spiral staircase and a ramp, in the background, benches for the audience on the stage. From Meierkholʹd i khudozhniki, ed. A. A. Mikhailova (Moscow, 1995), 280. Fig. 58. El Lissitzky presenting his stage design for I Want a Baby. On the left is a figurine of Milda Grignau. From El Lissitzky. Jenseits der Abstraktion, ed. Margarita Tupitsyn (Hanover, 1999), 28. Fig. 59. El Lissitzky, photomontage using a photograph of Lissitzky’s son Yen and a page from Pravda (1930). From El Lissitzky. Jenseits der Abstraktion, 215. Fig. 60. El Lissitzky’s costume design for Milda Grignau, the protagonist of I Want a Baby. Milda’s figure in work clothes is positioned among a collective of children, flanked by an individual image of a naked baby. From Kiaer, Imagine no Possessions, 262. Fig. 61. El Lissitzky, title page of the figurine portfolio Victory over the Sun (Pobeda nad solntsem, 1923). At the top left of the image you can see the figure of the radio speaker. From Khudozhniki russkogo teatra 1880–1930 (Moscow, 1990), 106. Fig. 62. Sergei Tretʹiakov, “Chistka” [1930], in his Vyzov. Kolkhoznye ocherki (Moscow, 1930), n.p. Fig. 63. Alexander Rodchenko, front and back cover of the magazine Zhurnalist 4 (1930). From Aleksandr Rodchenko, ed. Magdalena Dabrowski, Leah Dickerman, and Peter Galassi (New York, 1998), 273.

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195 197

197

204 206

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Captions

Fig. 64. The tourist Tretyakov with some kolkhozniki (ca. 1930). From Tretʹiakov, Vyzov, n.p. Fig. 65. Sergei Tretʹiakov, “The Son Is for the Kolkhoz” (ca. 1930). From Tretʹiakov, Vyzov, n.p. Fig. 66. Map of the “Challenge” plant, which was formed around the “Communist Lighthouse” commune (ca. 1930). From Tretʹiakov, Vyzov, n.p. Fig. 67. Diagram of cultural work conducted at the plant. From Tretʹiakov, Vyzov, n.p.

208 209 214 216

Captions Chapter VII Fig. 68. Gerda Marx, paper patterns (one material, different tools). From László Moholy-Nagy, Vom Material zur Architektur (Weimar, 1929), 57. Fig. 69. Walter Zierath, two-line tactile ladder and optical translation (1927). From Moholy-Nagy, Vom Material zur Architektur, 26. Fig. 70. “Noli me tangere,” manuscript sheet (first draft) from Yakov Druskin’s diaries: Pered prinadlezhnostiami chego-libo. Dnevniki 1963–1979 (St. Petersburg, 2001), 190f. [entries from May 8 and 11, 1966]. Illustration from Iakov Druskin, Vblizi vestnikov, ed. G. Orlov (Washington, 1988), 86.

254 255 274

Index

Academy of Art Sceinces (GAKhN), xv, 246 Academy for Communist Education, 108, 110 Adamovich, Georgy, 7 Impossibility of poetry (Nevozmozhnostʹ poezii), 7-8 Adorno, Theodor W., 57 Aero, 212 Agamben, Giorgio, xvi, 12, 121 Agienko, see Sviatogor, Alexander Akhmatova, Anna, 3, 9-10, 12-13 “Song of the Final Meeting,” 9-10 Alexei I (Tsar), 178 Annenkov, Yury, 267 Anzieu, Didier, 276-77 Apollon, 5 Aristotle, 153, 186, 248 Arvatov, Boris, 11-12, 166n35 Aseev, Nikolai, 162n20, 212 Augustine, 273 Austin, J. L., 155, 177 Avanessian, Armen, 218, Bakhtin, Mikhail, 183-84 “Art and Responsibility,” 183 “On the Philosophy of the Deed,” 183 Baratynsky, Evgeny, 228-29 “My Gift is Scant,” 228 Barnet, Boris, 112 Moscow in October (Moskva v oktiabre), 112 Bateson, Gregory, 78 Baudelaire, Charles, 49 Baudrillard, Jean, 36 Belentseva, N. A., 137 Bely, Andrei, 5, 30, 37-49, 51-52, 55, 234, 281 “The Armless Dancer” (Bezrukaia tantsovshchitsa), 48

Glossolalia, 42, 49 “The Magic of Words,” 234 Masterstvo Gogolia, 39-40 “On the Rhythmic Gesture” (O ritmicheskom zheste), 38 “On the Sound of Words” (K zvuku slov), 42 “Rhythm and Sense” (Ritm i smysl), 39 The Scythians, 42 Benjamin, Walter, 23, 56-60, 65, 70, 119, 165, 182-83, 199-200, 246, 251-52, 275, 281 Moscow Diary, 199-200 “New Literature in Russia,” 182 The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, 252, 281 Benn, Gottfried, 181-82 Benveniste, Émile, 225, 239 Berlin, 42, 95, 182 Berlina, Alexandra, iii, xxii, 56n139, 65n3, 70n18, 239n54 Berliner Ensemble, 190 Bernstein, Sergei, 233 Bezymensky, Aleksandr, 166 “Word Factory” (Zavod slova), 166 Binet, Alfred, 135-36 Blue Blouses, 108-109 Blumenberg, Hans, xii, 217n98, 282n5 Bode, Rudolf, 131-32 Ausdrucksgymnastik (Expressive Gymnastics), 131 Bonaventure, 273 Brecht, Bertold, 8, 121-23, 188n32 Brik, Osip, 205, 212n84, 219n105 Bruni, Lev, 88 Bryusov, Valery, 235 “In the Crypt” (V sklepe), 235

320

Index

Bühler, Karl, xix, 28-29, 115, 155 Theory of Language (Sprachtheorie), 28-29 Bulwer, John, 2-4, 134 Burenina, Olga, 260 Burliuk, David, 69 Burroughs, Edgar, 108 Bushkin, Alexander, 112 Butler, Judith, 204 Caillois, Roger, 79n32, 103 Canetti, Elias, 266 Cassiday, Julie, 199 The Enemy on Trial, 199 Cassirer, Ernst, xiv, xviii, 26n63, 175-76, 214 Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, 175-76 Catherine II, 58, 178 Celan, Paul, 230, 245 “The Meridian,” 230, 245 Threadsuns, 245 Central Institute of Labor (Tsentralʹnyi Institut Truda,TsIT), 146, 157, 168 Chamber Theater, 136, 138 Chekhov, Mikhail, 136-137 Chuzhak, Nikolai, 98-99, 169, 214n91, 218 Cicero, 2 Coquelin, Benoît-Constant, 144n91 Cozanet, Albert, see d’Udine, Jean Crommelynck, Fernand, 144-45, 187 Le cocu magnfique, 144-45, 187 Culler, Jonathan, 230 Dal, Vladimir, 55 Darwin, Charles, xv, 130-131 The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animal, 130-131 Das neue Frankfurt, 195 Delsarte, François, 133-34 Derrida, Jacques, 116n7, 203, 224-26, 229, 241-43 Given Time, 224-226 Diderot, Henri, 130 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 183 Crime and Punishment, 183 Doubting Thomas, 243, 267-69, 272-73, 275, 277, 279 Druskin, Yakov, 266-279 Eikhenbaum, Boris, xv, 12-13, 50-55, 59, 232-33, 256

“The Illusion of Skaz” (Illiuziia skaza), 51-54 “On the Artistic Word” (O khudozhestvennom slove), 256 Eisenstein, Sergei, xi, xv, 40, 131-33, 151, 187, 281-82 “Expressive Motion,” 131 Engels, Friedrich, 26, 164 Ermolova, Maria, 136-37 Evreinov, Nikolai, 139, 185-87 Theater for Its Own Sake, 186 Fabrikant, Mikhail, xv Fedorov, Nikolai, 169, 237-38 Philosophy of Joint Action, 169, 237n49 Fehrmann, Gisela, 115 Fet, Afanasii, 240 First Epistle to the Corinthians, 49 First Proletkult Workers’ Theater, 131, 187 Flaker, Aleksandar, 84 Florensky, Pavel, 13, 155n5, 273 Flusser, Vilem, xvi, 31, 61-62, 66-67, 176 Foregger, Nikolai, 127, 147-148, 282 Foreman, A. Z., 285n7 Freud, Sigmund, 1-2, 188, 276, 284 Bruchstuck einer Hysterie-Analyse, 2 Fuller, Loïe, 49 Gabo, Naum, 94, 103 The Realistic Manifesto, 103 Gan, Alexei, 147 Gastev, Alexei, xi, 146, 157-60, 162-176 A Batch of Decrees (Pachka orderov), 157, 166-67 The Machine, 162 “The Hammer,” 162 “Our Celebration,” 164 “Tendencies of Proletarian Culture,” 168 “To the Orator,” 164 Work Positions / Attitudes (Trudovye ustanovki), 158 Ginzburg, Lidia, 10-12 Glanc, Tomáš, 117n12, 259n29 Gnedov, Vasilisk, 3, 5-9, 255 Death to Art! (Smert´ iskusstvu!), 6, 9, 255 Gogol, Nikolai, 39-41, 54-55, 270 The Overcoat, 54, 270

Index

Goodman, Nelson, 18-19 Gorky, Maxim, 66, 75, 215 Gospel of John, 267, 271, 273 Grübel, Rainer, 228 Gumilev, Nikolai, 9, 235-36, 238 “The Life of the Verse” (Zhizn´ stikha), 9, 235 “The Word” (Slovo), 238 Günther, Hans, 183 Gurevich, Liubov, 135, 137-38 The Actor’s Creativity (Tvorchestvo aktera), 137-38 Hamacher, Werner, 60 Hansen-Löve, Aage A., 243, 261n36 Heidegger, Martin, xii-xiii, 25, 64-65, 115, 116n7, 117, 226 Hennig, Anke, 218 Herder, Johann Gottfried, xx, 124, 249 The History of Factories and Enterprises, 75 Holland, Jocelyn, 154n3 Huizinga, Johan, 78 Husserl, Edmund, 139, 142 Logical Investigations, 139 Ignatiev, Ivan, 5 Institute for Artistic Culture (InChuk), 105 Institute for the Living Word, 233 Ivanov, A. 112 Izvestiia, 185 Jäger, Ludwig, 115 Jakobson, Roman, 247 “On a Generation that Has Squandered Its Poets,” 247 Jaques-Dalcroze, Emil, 19-20, 146-47 Johansson, Karl, 88 Kafka, Franz, 58-60 Kiaer, Christina, 191 Kamensky, Vasily, 211 Kandinsky, Vasily, 86-87, 151 “On the Question of Form,” 86 Kant, Emmanuel, 249-50, 267 Kapp, Ernst, xvii, 154, 155n5, 171 Katz, David, 250-52, 264 Structure of the Tactile World, 250 Kharkov, 212 Kharms, Daniil, 260-70, 277 “The Old Woman” (Starukha), 260-61

“On objects and figures,” 262 “The Sabre,” 261 The Story [of] Sdygr Appr, 260 Khlebnikov, Velimir, xiii, 5, 8, 68, 86-93, 162, 228 “The Crane” (Zhuravlʹ),162 Ka, xiii “On ‘modern poetry,’” 162 “Razin,” 88-91, 93 “Turnabout” (Pereverten´), 91 Klages, Ludwig, xv, 116-17, 128, 131, 152 Expressive Movement and Creative Power (Ausdrucksbewegung und Gestaltungskraft), 131 Kleist, Heinrich von, 131 Köhler, Wolfgang, 25 Kolesch, Doris, 266-67 Komarov, Sergei, 112 The Doll with Millions (Kukla s millionami), 112 Koonen, Alisa, 136 Krämer, Sybille, 82, 214, 283n6 Kracauer, Siegfried, 182 Krasnaya gazeta, 34 Kruchenykh, Alexei, 4, 68-69, 84-86, 257, 287 Little Duck Nest (Utinoe gnezdyshko), 84 Piglets (Porosiata), 84 Kuleshov, Lev, 112, 165 Your Acquaintance (Vasha znakomaya), 112 Kuzmin, Mikhail, 12 Laboratory of Expressionist Theater, 146 Lakhinov, Vladimir, 119-121, 282 The Art of Facial Expressions, 119 Gesticulation, 120 Lapshin, Nikolai, 93 Leach, Robert, 190 Lejeune, Philippe, 181 Lenin, Vladimir, 34, 199 “On the Purification of the Russian Language,”34 Leningrad Institute of Artistic Culture (INChUK), xi Leningrad Writers’ Publishing House, 75 Lermontov, Mikhail, 211 Leroi-Gourhan, Andre, 155-56 Leskov, Nikolai, 50, 53, 55-57 Levinas, Emmanuel, 211 Lévy-Bruhl, Lucien, 23 La mentalité primitive, 23

321

322

Index

Linzbach, Jacob, 13-22 Principles of Philosophical Language (Printsipy filosofskogo iazyka. Opyt tochnogo iazykoznaniia), 13-22 Lipavsky, Leonid, 277-78, 284 Lipps, Theodor, 128, 138 Lissitzky, El, x, 88, 93, 95-97, 103, 171n47, 174-75, 190-91, 193, 195-98 The Constructor, x, 103 “Our Book,” 196 Suprematist Tale of 2 Squares in Constructions, 95 “Topography of Typography,” 175 “Typographic Facts,” 95 Victory over the Sun (Pobeda nad solntsem), 196 Literary Learning, 75 Literature of Fact (Literatura fakta), 218 Living Newspaper (Zhivaia gazeta), 118 Ludwig, Otto, 55 Luria, Aleksandr, 156 Lvov, Nikolai, 148 Maeterlinck, Maurice, 240 Makarenko, Anton, 98 Malevich, Kazimir, 84, 285 Mallarme, Stéphane, 49, 94, 228 Ballets, 49 “The Gift of the Poem” (“Don du poeme”), 228 Un coup de des, 94 Mandelstam, Osip, 228-30, 235-245, 247, 267, 283-84 “On the Interlocutor,” 228 “On the Nature of the Word,” 236, 238 “Take from my palms some honey,” 238-39 “Word and Culture,” 267 Marcuse, Herbert, 182 Marienhof, Anatoly, xiii, 232, 234 Marinetti, Filippo, 212, 252-55 Il Tattilismo, 252-53 Marion, Jean-Luc, 272 Marr, Nicholas, 22-31, 37, 156, 281 On the Origin of Language, 23-26 Marx, Gerda, 254 Marx, Karl, 22, 26, 28 Mass, Vladimir, 231 Matyushin, Mikhail, xi Mauss, Marcel, 223-24

Essai sur le don, 223-24 Mayakovsky, Vladimir, 4, 163, 165-66, 247 “Cloud in Trousers” (Oblako v shtanakh), 163 “Order to the Army of the Arts,” 166 “The Poet Worker” (Poet rabochii), 165 Mead, George H., xxi, 250 “The Nature of Aesthetic Experience,” xxi, 250 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 249, 264-65, 280 Phenomenology of Perception, 280 Meyerhold, Vsevolod, 5, 132, 142-45, 187, 188n34, 190-93, 195-96, 198, 200-201, 282 “On the History and Techniques of Theater,” 201 Miturich, Petr, 87-94, 107 Alphabet Cubes (Azbuka-kubiki), 92-94 Moholy-Nagy, László, 253-54 Moscow Theater of the Reader, 109 Morgenstern, Christian, 49 Mukařovsky, Jan, xv Nabokov, Vladinir, xiv, 153 Transparent Things, 153 Nancy, Jean-Luc, 272 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 43-44, 56 Human, All Too Human (Menschliches und Allzumenschliches), 43 Nikitin, Nikolai, 66 Nikonova, Ry, 6 Noiré, Ludwig, 26-27 Origin of Language, 26 Tool and its Significance for the History of Human Development, 26 Novombergsky, Nikolai, 34-35, 178 Word and Deed (Slovo i delo), 34-35 Novyyi LEF, 99, 104, 106, 109, 112, 213 Novyi Zritel´, 185 OBERIU, xiii, 258-61, 266, 279 Paget, Richard, 28-29 Panova, Lada, 9-10, 12, 237n48 Parnakh, V., 148 Peasants Club, 199

Index

People’s Commissariat of Education (Narkompros), 98, 185 Pertsov, Viktor, 246-47 Literature of Tomorrow (Literatura zavtrashnego dnia), 246-47 Peter I, 30, 34-36, 178 Petrograd Institute of Art History, 233 Kabinet izucheniia khudozhestvennoi rechi (KIKhR), 233 Piast, Vladimir, 8 Pilnyak, Boris, xii, 180-181 Pioner, 99, 102, 104 Plato, xx, 33, 129, 154-55, 240 Kratylos, 154 Platonov, Andrei, 166 “Literature factory” (Fabrika literatury), 166 Poetry of the Worker’s Blow, 157, 170 Pokrovsky, Boris, 99, 106-107 Polivanov, Yevgeny, 41-42, 281 “On ‘Vocal Gestures’ in Japanese” (Po povodu ‘zvukovykh zhestov’ v iaponskom iazyke), 41 Popova, Ljubov’, 150, 316 Potebnja, Alexander, 256 Potemkin, Grigory, 58-59 Pozdnev, Arkadii, 143n90, 151-52 Pravda, 34, 195 Proletkult Theater, 131 Punin, Nikolai, 93 Pushkin, Alexandr, 55, 162, 211, 229, 231, 285 “Dar naprasnyi,” 231 “I’ve reared a monument not made by human hands,” 285 Raphael, Max, 248, 250 Reed, John, 108, 110 Remizov, Alexei, 55 Révész, Géza, 26n62, 29 Revolution and Culture, 97 Rheinberger, Hans-Jorg, 79 Rilke, Rainer Maria, xiii, 49, 227 Rodchenko, Alexander, 88, 94, 99, 104113, 150, 204, 206 “On Composition” (O kompozitsii), 104 Room, Abram, 192n40 Rotman, Brian, xvi Rozanov, Vasily, 65-66, 232, 238 The Fallen Leaves, 66, 232, 238 Rozanova, Olga, 85

Quintilian, Marcus Fabius, 2, 4 Sasse, Sylvia, xxii, 200 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 21 Cours de linguistique générale, 21 Schiller, Friedrich, 103 Scientific-Artistic Laboratory, 147-148 Semevsky, Mikhail, 36-37, 178, 186n24 Slovo i delo. 1700–1725, 36, 186n24 Sennett, Richard, 173 Serezhnikov, Vasily, 109 Shershenevich, Vadim, 118 Shklovsky, Viktor, vii, x, xii, 8, 50-51, 54, 70, 86, 211, 215, 232-34, 246-47, 256, 259 “Art as Device” (Iskusstvo kak priem), 256 On Poetry and Zaum´ Language (O poezii i zaumnom iazyke), 86 “Resurrection of the Word” (Voskreshenie slova), 232, 234 Shpet, Gustav, 135, 138-142 “Theater as Art” (Teatr kak iskusstvo), 138 Problems of Modern Aesthetics, 141 Sidorov, Alexei, 72 The Art of the Book (Iskusstvo knigi), 72 Sievers, Eduard, 45-46, 51, 286 Rhythmic-Melodic Studies, 51, 52n121 Simmel, Georg, 249-50 Sinclair, Upton, 108, 110 Sittl, Carl, xv Sixteenth Party Congress, 219n106 Smena, 35 Smirnova, N. A., 137 Sobornoe Ulozhenie, 178 Sokolov, Ippolit, 118-119, 127, 142-152, 282 “Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic Style” (Stil´ R.S.F.S.R.), 148-150 “Skrizhal’ veka,” 150n108 Soloviev, Vladimir, 228 Soviet Cinema, 111 Soviet Writers’ Union, 32, 180 Stage (Die Schaubuhne), 129 Stalin, Iosif, 22, 202, 228 “Marxism and Questions of Linguistics” (Marksizm i voprosy iazykoznaniia), 22

323

324

Index

Stanislavsky, Konstantin, 123-128, 141, 150, 282 Starevich, Vladislav, 112 State Institute for Rhythm, 146 State Institute for Rhythmic Education, 146 State Theater Institute (GITIS), 147 Stiegler, Bernd, xiv, 259, 286n9 Stepanov, V., 148 Stepanova, Varvara, 99, 104-109, 111, 113, 160 Through Red and White Glasses (Cherez krasnye i belye ochki), 108 Stoliarov, Mikhail, 246, 264-65, 269, 270-71 “The Problem of the Poetic Image,” 246 Straus, Erwin, xviii, 264, 269 Vom Sinn der Sinne, 271 Sukhovo-Kobylin, Alexander, Tarelkin’s Death (Smert´ Tarelkina), 108 Supreme Repertoire Commission (Glavrepertkom), 190 Sviatogor, Alexander, 233-34

“The Aesthetic Decay of the Club,” 97-98 “Biography of my Verse,” 97-98 The Challenge (Vyzov), 201 “Expressive Motion,” 131, 133 I Want a Baby (Khochu rebenka), 188-97, 201 “The Kolkhoznik Speaking,” 219 A Month in the Country (Mesiats v derevne), 207-208 “Obrazoborchestvo” (Iconoclasm), 213 The Pocket, 220 “The Purge” (Chistka), 201, 205-6 “Report of a Kolkhoz Member and Writer,” 202 Samozveri (Self-made animals), 99, 102-109, 111-113 “The Theater of Attractions,” 188 “Through Uncleaned Spectacles,” 212 Tschichold, Ivan, 174-75 Tsivian, Yuri, xiv, 20, 149n107 Tsvetaeva, Marina, 227 Tynyanov, Yuri, 51, 53-55, 86, 271

Tairov, Alexander, 127-28, 138-39, 141-43 Director’s Notes, 143 Tatlin, Vladimir, x, 88, 94, 211 Taylor, Frederic W., Taylorism, 142-44, 146, 148-49, 151 Terentiev, Igor, 196, 198, 200 Theater of the Book, 118 Theater of the Reader, 118, see also Moscow Theater of the Reader Thomas, see Doubting Thomas Tihanov, Galin, 138-139 Toller, Ernst, 148 Tolstoy, Alexei, 30-37, 66-67, 71, 119, 179, 187, 284 “Delusion” (Navazhdenie), 34 “On Dramaturgy” (O dramaturgii), 30-32 On the Torture Rack (Na dybe), 35 Peter I, 35 “Peter’s Day” (Den´ Petra), 34 “Purity of Russian Language,” 34 Tolstoy, Lev, 183, 211 Resurrection, 183 Toporov, Viktor, 236 Tretyakov, Sergei, 5, 94, 97, 179-106, 113, 131-33, 144, 151, 165, 179-182, 185, 187-193, 196-198, 200-222, 281

D’Udine, Jean, 128 L’art et le geste, 128 Ukraine, 219n106 Vaginov, Konstantin, xiv Goat Song (Kozlinaia pesn´), xiv Valéry, Paul, 49, 56-7 L’Âme et la Danse, 49 Vertov, Dziga, xi, 112 Soviet Toys (Sovetskie igrushki), 112 Vinogradov, Viktor, 51, 53-4 Virgil, 240 Vitebsk, 95 Volkonsky, Sergei, 127-133, 282 “The Expressive Man,” 133 “The Main Thing, ”129 The Person Onstage (Chelovek na stsene), 128-29, 133 Voloshin, Mikhail, 255 Vsevolodsky-Gerngross, Vsevolod, 233 Vvedensky, Aleksandr, 277 Vygotsky, Lev, 25, 29, 82-3, 130-31, 135, 138, 156 “On the question of the psychology of acting,” 135 Psychology of Art, 130-31 “Tools and Signs in the Development of the Child,” 156

Index

Waldenfels, Bernhard, xii, 167-68 Warburg, Aby M., xv Waters, William, 230 The Way We Write (Kak my pishem), 66, 75, 179 Witte, Georg, xxii, 150n110, 244n66, 68 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 80-82, 115, 155 The Brown Book, 80 Philosophical Investigations, 80-81, 155 Tractatus, 115 Wood, Elizabeth, 199 Work Organization (Organizatsia truda), 146 World war I, 56, 252 Worringer, Wilhelm, 150 Wundt, Wilhelm, 19, 22, 29, 37, 40, 116-17 Völkerpsychologie, 116 Yakovlev, Yakov, 219 The Kolkhoz Movement and the Upturn of the Kolkhoz Economy, 219n106

Yampolsky, Mikhail, 121 Yavorsky, Stefan, 2-3 The Rhetorical Hand (Ritoricheskaia ruka), 2 Yerkes, Robert, 25 Zabolotsky, Nikolay, 259 Zakhava, Boris, 133n62 Zamyatin, Yevgeny, 55, 65, 71, 267-68 Zelinsky, F.F., 281 Zenkevich, Mikhail, 5, 9 Belletristic Memoirs, 5 Zhemchuzhny, Vitaly, 108 Zhirmunsky, V., 26n63 Zholkovsky, Alexandr, 9-10, 12 Zhurnalist, 204, 207 Zieliński, Tadeusz, 22, 40 From the Life of Ideas (Iz zhizni idei), 40-41 Zielinski, Siegfried, 166, 173n50 Zierath, Walter, 255 Zoshchenko, Mikhail, 55, 228 Zrelishcha (Spectacles), 148

325