DOCSLIB.ORG

Foundations for a Mass Media Avant-Garde

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
Foundations for a Mass Media Avant-Garde A sense of the future Foundations For a Mass Media Avant-Garde Omer Krieger MA Fine art Report Slade School of Fine art 7 September 2005 Contents 1. Introduction 2. The Historical Avant-garde a. Concepts, characteristics and problems b. Avant-garde and politics 3. Russian avant-garde a. Constructivism b. Agit-prop c. The case of Gustav Klucis and the Propaganda Kiosk ‘Down with art, Long live agitational propaganda’ 4. Contemporary avant-garde: is there such a thing? a. Deferred action b. The new media avant-garde c. TV CHANNEL (2004-) 5. Appendix: Tomorrow’s Television 6. Bibliography 2 1. Introduction This composition stems from a simple question: what does an avant-garde art practice mean today, and is it possible? In this essay I will explore the concept of avant-garde art, specifically its relation to politics and political change, in an attempt to provide foundations for a contemporary mass media avant-garde. First, I will present concepts and characteristics of the avant-garde, along the positions and insights of Renato Poggioli, Peter Bürger and Andreas Huyssen. This will be followed by a discussion of Poggioli’s pessimist views on the relations between avant-garde and politics. Then I will approach the question of a mass media avant-garde, through the discussion of Russian avant-garde, which will include Constructivism and agit-prop, and the case of Gustav Klucis’ Propaganda kiosk (1922). I will proceed, evaluating possibilities of a contemporary avant-garde: First, Hal Foster’s optimistic writing on neo-avant-garde as creative critique and the model of deferred action. I will then argue with Lev Manovich and his notion of ‘avant- garde as software’, which suggests new digital media as the avant-garde of the 21st century, and conclude in a brief overview of my project ‘TV CHANNEL’ (2004-), as a sounding board for these issues and concerns. 3 2. The Historical Avant-garde a. Concepts, characteristics and problems In the beginning of ‘The Theory of The Avant-Garde’, Renato Poggioli states a main characteristic feature of the phenomenon of modern culture called ‘avant-garde’. This feature regards the relationship of art and politics in the concept of avant-garde. According to Poggioli, the historical phenomena of the avant-garde contained the subordination of ‘the avant-garde image…to the ideals of a radicalism which was not cultural but political’.1 Quoting a 19 th century French scholar, Poggioli stresses and anchors historically the connection that is constituted in this term between art and politics: ‘Art, the expression of society, manifests, in its highest soaring, the most advanced social tendencies: it is the forerunner and the revealer. Therefore, to know whether art worthily fulfills its proper mission as initiator, whether the artist is truly of the avant-garde, one must know where Humanity is going, know what the destiny of the human race is’.2 Poggioli marks four general aspects, or moments of avant-garde movements. The first is activism. It implies an existence towards a positive result, a concrete end. ‘The ultimate hope is…the affirmation of the avant-garde spirit in all cultural fields’.3 Nevertheless, claims Poggioli, this activistic moment can be manifest in an existence ‘for no other end but its own self, out of the sheer joy of dynamism, a taste for action, 1 Renato Poggioli, The Theory of The Avant-Garde, Trans. Gerald Fitzgerald, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusettes and London, England, 1968. p. 9. 2 Gabriel-Désiré Laverdant, “De la Mission de l’art et du rôle de artistes’, 1845, in Poggioli, ibid. 3 Poggioli, p. 25. 4 a sportive enthusiasm, and the emotional fascination of adventure’.4 The antagonistic moment is a second aspect: A spirit of hostility and opposition, which is revealed when we see avant gardists agitating people or institutions of cultural power and tradition. Activism and antagonism can be transcended, says Poggioli, by two extreme attitudes that derive from them: nihilism and agonism. The activistic dynamism inherent in every movement can become nihilism when social controls and moral conventions are abandoned. The urge to destroy the status quo and ‘the febrile anxiety to go always further’ can lead to a self-destructive attitude, defined by Poggioli as the agonistic moment. 5 These two sets of attitudes enable us to start looking at the phenomenon of the avant- garde as a site of tension, rather than a coherent movement or a consistent political idea. Much of the theoretical writing that tries to understand and explain 20th century avant-garde art includes pairs of clashing concepts or seemingly contradictory tendencies that characterize this phenomenon. Poggioli, as we’ve seen, argued that while avant-garde art has been articulating itself as an agent of progress and positivity, it also contains seeds of destruction and negation. Andreas Huyssen focuses in the link between culture and anarchy, from which derive a number of contradictions inherent in the phenomenon of avant-garde. 1. the eminently aristocratic nature of avant-gardism and its displays of the plebian spirit 4 Ibid. 5 Poggioli, p.26. 5 2. Alienation as the situation of the artist in modern society and the particular fascination with the Communist experiment, even though it is totalitarian and antilibertarian, hostile to any individual exception or idiosyncracy. 3. The desire to see realized a destructive impulse and the opposite desire for the latter to serve future construction. The extension of antagonistic and nihilistic tendencies into the political field, to be turned against the whole of bourgeois society rather than against culture alone. 4. The activist impulse leads to militate in a party of action and agitation, while the agonistic and Futurist impulses induce to sacrificing one’s own person, movement and mission to the social palingenesis of the future. Avant-garde Communism is the fruit of a simultaneously messianic and apocalyptic state of mind. 5. As a result – a morbid condition of mystical ecstasy, which contradicts self- criticism and self-knowledge, prevents from realizing that the artist would have neither the reason nor the chance to exist in a Communistic society. 6. (Avant-garde) art can only live in pluralism, which only bourgeois democracies provide, but chooses to promote communism, which is inevitably totalitarian. Communist sympathies can favor the avant-garde spirit only within a bourgeois and capitalist society.6 6 Andreas Huyssen, ‘The Hidden Dialectic: The Avant-garde-Technology-Mass Culture’, in The Myths of Information: Technology and Postindustrial Culture, Kathleen Woodward, Ed., Routledge & Kegan Paul, London and Henley. 6 Peter Bürger deduced from the historical avant-garde a logic, according to which we can formulate a problem that is at the core of this essay.7 On the one hand, the ambitions of avant-garde art were intrinsically placed in and targeted towards the public sphere, informed, encouraged and enthralled by new technologies, in the attempt to reach a high level of popularity, and thus become a new mass culture. On the other hand, it is often too new to be understood by its public. If indeed the new cannot be recognized as such (categorically, like Boris Groys argues, following Kierkegaard)8, then maybe innovation is an intrinsic quality of the avant-garde, which explains the failure of the avant-garde’s ambition to be popular. The plot thickens, or the problem develops when we add to this equation [new = - (popular)] another factor – the state. The power of the Bolshevik revolution was exercised in order to enforce (or at least massively propagate) innovation on the population. What happens when avant-garde’s ethos of negation meets the power of the state? In the case of revolutionary Russia, is it transformed by the appropriation of the state to a position of an affirmative agent in culture, and thus dies? Or does it maintain its soul of resistance even as official art of the state?9 There are several possible histories of the rise and dominance of Russian avant-garde after 1917, and of its decline. 7 This is a good point to join Hal Foster’s doubts about the attempt to theorize avant-garde while using so few concrete practices. One cannot go on writing too many general statements about this phenomenon without asking oneself what practices are included under this title, and is such a unified discussion helpful at all, given the differences between the different avant-garde parctices. It seems a new category, or new sub-categoies would be helpful. 8 Boris Groys, ‘On the New’, http://www.uoc.edu/artnodes/eng/art/groys1002/groys1002.html 9 The latter dynamic can be elicited from TJ Clark‘s ‘Farewell to an Idea’. Maybe it is the case that traces of doubt and difference from Futurism, and especially Suprematism have found their way to agitprop practices. Nevertheless, this kind of reading would be influenced by what we believe agitprop’s value as art is. 7 The question of innovation is indeed central to the notion and artistic legacy of the historical avant-garde. ‘The New’ is a recurring concept in its artworks and art writing. Kazimir Malevich wrote in 1915, in Moscow: ‘to create means to live, forever creating newer and newer things’.10 The relation of the idea of artistic innovation and radical politics in the Russian avant-garde is evident in the term ‘Futurism’ which was attributed to and adopted by artists creating new forms and wishing to abandon ‘old’ forms of expression, as part of the creation of a new culture, for a new society. Gradually, with the growing support and participation of avant- garde artists in the Bolshevik party and Revolution, the term ‘Futurist’ became a signifier of a leftist artist, committed to a political and artistic Revolution and to Bolshevism as a progressive political power in Russia and the whole world.
Load more

Recommended publications
  • The University of Chicago Old Elites Under Communism: Soviet Rule in Leninobod a Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the Di
    THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO OLD ELITES UNDER COMMUNISM: SOVIET RULE IN LENINOBOD A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE DIVISION OF THE SOCIAL SCIENCES IN CANDIDACY FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY BY FLORA J. ROBERTS CHICAGO, ILLINOIS JUNE 2016 TABLE OF CONTENTS List of Figures .................................................................................................................... iii List of Tables ...................................................................................................................... v Acknowledgements ............................................................................................................ vi A Note on Transliteration .................................................................................................. ix Introduction ......................................................................................................................... 1 Chapter One. Noble Allies of the Revolution: Classroom to Battleground (1916-1922) . 43 Chapter Two. Class Warfare: the Old Boi Network Challenged (1925-1930) ............... 105 Chapter Three. The Culture of Cotton Farms (1930s-1960s) ......................................... 170 Chapter Four. Purging the Elite: Politics and Lineage (1933-38) .................................. 224 Chapter Five. City on Paper: Writing Tajik in Stalinobod (1930-38) ............................ 282 Chapter Six. Islam and the Asilzodagon: Wartime and Postwar Leninobod .................. 352 Chapter Seven. The
    [Show full text]
  • The Bolshevil{S and the Chinese Revolution 1919-1927 Chinese Worlds
    The Bolshevil{s and the Chinese Revolution 1919-1927 Chinese Worlds Chinese Worlds publishes high-quality scholarship, research monographs, and source collections on Chinese history and society from 1900 into the next century. "Worlds" signals the ethnic, cultural, and political multiformity and regional diversity of China, the cycles of unity and division through which China's modern history has passed, and recent research trends toward regional studies and local issues. It also signals that Chineseness is not contained within territorial borders ­ overseas Chinese communities in all countries and regions are also "Chinese worlds". The editors see them as part of a political, economic, social, and cultural continuum that spans the Chinese mainland, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau, South­ East Asia, and the world. The focus of Chinese Worlds is on modern politics and society and history. It includes both history in its broader sweep and specialist monographs on Chinese politics, anthropology, political economy, sociology, education, and the social­ science aspects of culture and religions. The Literary Field of New Fourth Artny Twentieth-Century China Communist Resistance along the Edited by Michel Hockx Yangtze and the Huai, 1938-1941 Gregor Benton Chinese Business in Malaysia Accumulation, Ascendance, A Road is Made Accommodation Communism in Shanghai 1920-1927 Edmund Terence Gomez Steve Smith Internal and International Migration The Bolsheviks and the Chinese Chinese Perspectives Revolution 1919-1927 Edited by Frank N Pieke and Hein Mallee
    [Show full text]
  • UNIVERSITY of CALIFORNIA SAN DIEGO Cognitive
    UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA SAN DIEGO Cognitive Counterparts: The Literature of Eastern Europe’s Volatile Political Times, 1917-2017 A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy in Literature by Teresa Constance Kuruc Committee in charge: Professor Amelia Glaser, Chair Professor Steven Cassedy Professor Sal Nicolazzo Professor Wm. Arctander O’Brien Professor Patrick Patterson 2018 Copyright Teresa Constance Kuruc All rights reserved The Dissertation of Teresa Constance Kuruc is approved, and it is acceptable in quality and form for publication on microfilm and electronically: _____________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________ Chair University of California San Diego 2018 iii DEDICATION This dissertation is dedicated to my parents, my sister and brothers, and Scott for providing for me in every way during this process. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Signature Page ...........................................................................................................................iii Dedication ................................................................................................................................. iv Table of Contents .......................................................................................................................
    [Show full text]
  • Resilient Russian Women in the 1920S & 1930S
    University of Nebraska - Lincoln DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln Zea E-Books Zea E-Books 8-19-2015 Resilient Russian Women in the 1920s & 1930s Marcelline Hutton [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/zeabook Part of the European Languages and Societies Commons, Modern Art and Architecture Commons, Modern Literature Commons, Russian Literature Commons, Theatre and Performance Studies Commons, and the Women's Studies Commons Recommended Citation Hutton, Marcelline, "Resilient Russian Women in the 1920s & 1930s" (2015). Zea E-Books. Book 31. http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/zeabook/31 This Book is brought to you for free and open access by the Zea E-Books at DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln. It has been accepted for inclusion in Zea E-Books by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln. Marcelline Hutton Resilient Russian Women in the 1920s & 1930s The stories of Russian educated women, peasants, prisoners, workers, wives, and mothers of the 1920s and 1930s show how work, marriage, family, religion, and even patriotism helped sustain them during harsh times. The Russian Revolution launched an economic and social upheaval that released peasant women from the control of traditional extended fam- ilies. It promised urban women equality and created opportunities for employment and higher education. Yet, the revolution did little to elim- inate Russian patriarchal culture, which continued to undermine wom- en’s social, sexual, economic, and political conditions. Divorce and abor- tion became more widespread, but birth control remained limited, and sexual liberation meant greater freedom for men than for women. The transformations that women needed to gain true equality were post- poned by the pov erty of the new state and the political agendas of lead- ers like Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin.
    [Show full text]
  • Extending Russia Competing from Advantageous Ground
    Extending Russia Competing from Advantageous Ground James Dobbins, Raphael S. Cohen, Nathan Chandler, Bryan Frederick, Edward Geist, Paul DeLuca, Forrest E. Morgan, Howard J. Shatz, Brent Williams C O R P O R A T I O N For more information on this publication, visit www.rand.org/t/RR3063 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available for this publication. ISBN: 978-1-9774-0021-5 Published by the RAND Corporation, Santa Monica, Calif. © Copyright 2019 RAND Corporation R® is a registered trademark. Cover: Pete Soriano/Adobe Stock Limited Print and Electronic Distribution Rights This document and trademark(s) contained herein are protected by law. This representation of RAND intellectual property is provided for noncommercial use only. Unauthorized posting of this publication online is prohibited. Permission is given to duplicate this document for personal use only, as long as it is unaltered and complete. Permission is required from RAND to reproduce, or reuse in another form, any of its research documents for commercial use. For information on reprint and linking permissions, please visit www.rand.org/pubs/permissions. The RAND Corporation is a research organization that develops solutions to public policy challenges to help make communities throughout the world safer and more secure, healthier and more prosperous. RAND is nonprofit, nonpartisan, and committed to the public interest. RAND’s publications do not necessarily reflect the opinions of its research clients and sponsors. Support RAND Make a tax-deductible charitable contribution at www.rand.org/giving/contribute www.rand.org Preface This report documents research and analysis conducted as part of the RAND Corporation research project Extending Russia: Competing from Advantageous Ground, sponsored by the Army Quadrennial Defense Review Office, Office of the Deputy Chief of Staff G-8, Headquarters, Department of the Army.
    [Show full text]
  • Ideology and Atheism in the Soviet Union Religion and Society 28
    Ideology and Atheism in the Soviet Union Religion and Society 28 GENERAL EDITORS Leo Laeyendecker, University of Leiden Jacques Waardenburg, University of Lausanne MOUTON DE GRUYTER • BERLIN • NEW YORK 1989 Ideology and Atheism in the Soviet Union by William van den Bercken MOUTON DE GRUYTER • BERLIN • NEW YORK 1989 Mouton de Gruyter (formerly Mouton, The Hague) in a Division of Walter de Gruyter & Co., Berlin. The vignet on the cover this book represents the symbol of the Agathos Daimon, the snake of the Good Spirit, known from Greek astrological and magical texts. As its Town God, the Agathos Daimon was believed to protect Alexandria, which was famous world-wide for its library with precious manuscripts and books. Translated from the Dutch by H.Th.Wake Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Bercken, William Peter van den, 1946- Ideology and atheism in the Soviet Union. (Religion and society ; 28) Bibliography: p. Includes index. 1. Atheism- Soviet Union. 2. Ideology. I. Title. II. Series: Religion and society (Hague, Netherlands); 28. BL2747.3.B47 1988 211'.8'0947 88-28526 ISBN 0-89925-384-9 (alk. paper) Deutsche Bibliothek Cataloging in Publication Data Bercken, William van den: Ideology and atheism in the Soviet Union / William van den Bercken. [Transi, by H.Th.Wake]. - Berlin ; New York : Amsterdam : Mouton de Gruyter, 1988 (Religion and society ; 28) ISBN 3-11-011406-2 NE: GT © Printed on acid free paper. © Copyright 1988 by Walter de Gruyter, Berlin. All rights reserved, including those of translation into foreign languages.No part of this book maybe reproduced in any form - by photoprint, microfilm or any other means - nor transmitted nor translated into a machine language without written permission from the publisher.
    [Show full text]
  • I from KAMCHATKA to GEORGIA the BLUE BLOUSE MOVEMENT
    FROM KAMCHATKA TO GEORGIA THE BLUE BLOUSE MOVEMENT AND EARLY SOVIET SPATIAL PRACTICE by Robert F. Crane B.A., Georgia State University, 2001 M.A., University of Pittsburgh, 2005 Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of The Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy University of Pittsburgh 2013 i UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH DEITRICH SCHOOL OF ARTS AND SCIENCES This dissertation was presented by Robert F. Crane It was defended on March 27, 2013 and approved by Atillio Favorini, PhD, Professor, Theatre Arts Kathleen George, PhD, Professor, Theatre Arts Vladimir Padunov, PhD, Professor, Slavic Languages and Literature Dissertation Advisor: Bruce McConachie, PhD, Professor, Theatre Arts ii Copyright © by Robert Crane 2013 iii FROM KAMCHATKA TO GEORGIA THE BLUE BLOUSE MOVEMENT AND EARLY SOVIET SPATIAL PRACTICE Robert Crane, PhD University of Pittsburgh, 2013 The Blue Blouse movement (1923-1933) organized thousands of workers into do-it-yourself variety theatre troupes performing “living newspapers” that consisted of topical sketches, songs, and dances at workers’ clubs across the Soviet Union. At its peak the group claimed more than 7,000 troupes and 100,000 members. At the same time that the movement was active, the Soviet state and its citizens were engaged in the massive project of building a new society reflecting the aims of the Revolution. As Vladimir Paperny has argued, part of this new society was a new spatial organization, one that stressed the horizontal over the
    [Show full text]
  • Forging the Enemy in Soviet Fiction and Press
    Forging the Enemy in Soviet Fiction and Press 1945-1982 Raphaelle Auclert Supervisors: Prof. Evgeny Dobrenko and Prof. Craig Brandist University of Sheffield 1 Table of Contents Introduction 4 First Part: The Stalin Era. The Enemy with a Cloak and a Dagger Chapter 1. The Cold War Begins: Historical and Cultural Background 27 1.1. A Fragile Grand Alliance 28 1.2. The Bipolar Brinkmanship: First Round 29 1.3. The Soviet ‘Peace Offensive’ 37 1.4. Postwar ‘Politerature’ and the ‘Manufacture of the Enemy’ 42 Chapter 2. Case Studies: The Enemy Outside: I. Ehrenburg and N. Shpanov 51 Chapter 3. Case Studies: The Enemy Inside the Communist Movement: 89 D. Eriomin and O. Maltsev Second Part: Khrushchev Era. The Ideological Enemy Chapter 4. The Making of the Thaw Enemy on the Cold War Stage 119 4.1. “Peaceful Coexistence” or the Vanishing of the Outside Enemy 119 4.2. Case Study: The Enemy Within: V. Kochetov 126 Chapter 5. Khrushchev’s Apocrypha 130 Chapter 6. The literary ‘Morality Police’ 148 Third Part: Brezhnev Era: Confronting an Invisible Enemy Chapter 7. The Brezhnev Doctrine 157 Chapter 8. Case Study: Enemy at Heart. Y. Bondarev’s The Shore 169 Chapter 9. Case Study: Becoming Your Enemy: Y. Bondarev’s The Choice 181 Conclusion 193 Bibliography 199 2 Forging the Enemy in Soviet Fiction and Press, 1945-1982 Abstract My dissertation offers a new approach to the study of Soviet official prose in the context of Soviet politics and of the Cold War. The Cold War was an ideological contest between two blocs: capitalist and communist.
    [Show full text]
  • Number 142 Films Without Film
    DRAFT: NOT FOR CITATION WITHOUT PERMISSION OF THE AUTHOR NUMBER 142 FILMS WITHOUT FILM: THE BIRTH PA.t>..JGS OF TilE SOVIET CINEMA Richard Taylor :onference on THE ORIGINS OF SOVIET CULTURE Sponsored by Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies The Wilson Center May 18-19, 1981 FILMS WITHOUT FILM: THE BIRTH PANGS OF THE SOVIET CINEMA Richard Taylor (University College of Swansea, U.K.) Most Soviet histories of the Soviet c1nema begin with a quotation attributed to Lenin, 'Of all the arts, for us the c1nema 1s the most important'. Like that other famous statement on the arts that is attributed to Lenin, 'Art belongs to the 1 people', this remark comes down to us through hearsay, through an attribution recollected in the relative tranquillity of later years, at a time when the remark .itself had some political Ut1'1' 1ty. 2 We should therefore treat it with some caution, at least as an expression of significance of such statements lies in the very political utility that they later acquired, when the longer term political function of the arts on Soviet society was being classined as a prelude to the 'cultural revolution' that was to accompany the first Five Year Plan, and when, following the path indicated 3 by Stalin, political arguments were to be conducted by reference to citation from Lenin, rather as earlier generations, in western Europe at least, had resorted to arguments that revolved around differing interpretations of the Bible. I have dealt at greater length elsewhere with the general problems that faced the Soviet cinema in the early post- Revolutionary years and, especially, in the Civil War period, 1917-21, and I shall therefore only summarise the position in .
    [Show full text]
  • The Poetry of Pavlo Tychyna Reconsidered George G. Grabowicz
    Harvard UkrainianCreating Studies and36, no. Con 3–4Ce (2019):aling 447–93.ModernisM 447 Creating and Concealing Modernism: The Poetry of Pavlo Tychyna Reconsidered George G. GrabowiCz Ty Chyna as ProbleM and ParadigM he TyChyna probleM can be stated succinctly. There is a gen- eral consensus that Pavlo Tychyna (1891–1967) is the outstanding TUkrainian poet of the twentieth century. This opinion emerged in the early 1920s and has solidified and remained in place despite all the changes and perturbations that followed; it is shared even by those who condemn Tychyna for his “betrayal of his Muse,” his “vacillations,” “errors,” patriotic or moral “bankruptcy,” and so on. Accompanying this is a widespread perception that emerged already in Tychyna’s lifetime, but became particularly marked in the half century since his death, that his poetry is radically discontinuous, that it divides clearly and neatly into the “early” and the “late”—suggesting thereby not just phases or periods, but essential hypostases, indeed artistic and existential antip- odes. The “early” poetry (the parameters here are vague, but it entails either his first three collections, Soniachni klarnety [Clarinets of the Sun, 1918], Pluh [The Plow, 1920], and Zamist´ sonetiv i oktav [Instead of Sonnets and Octaves, also 1920], or all of his poetry up to the end of the 1920s) is inspired and orphic and expresses with unprecedented power the national rebirth and tragedy of the revolution and civil war (more correctly, the Russian-Ukrainian war of 1917–1921), whereas the later poetry (the liminal moment here is often taken to be 1933–1934, and his poem and collection by the same name “Partiia vede” [The Party Leads], but earlier dates have also been proposed) is one of ever-greater conformism, support for the party linked to ever-greater timidity if not cravenness, and fundamentally nothing short of a lingering death of the poet.
    [Show full text]
  • Stalinism Revisited Stalinism Revisited
    CYAN MAGENTA YELLOW BLACK Stalinism Revisited Stalinism Revisited Stalinism Revisited brings together representatives of multiple generations to create a rich examination The Establishment of Communist Regimes in East-Central Europe of the study and practice of Stalinism. While the articles are uniformly excellent, the book’s signal contribution is to bring recent research from Eastern European scholars to an English-speaking audience. Thus the volume is not just a “state of the discipline” collection, in which articles are collected to reflect that current situation of scholarship in a given field; instead, this one includes cutting edge scholarship that will prompt more of the same from other scholars in other fields/subfields. I would recommend this book highly to anyone interested in understanding the technology of Stalinism in both StalinismStalinism thought and practice. Nick Miller Boise State University The Sovietization of post-1945 East-Central Europe—marked by the forceful imposition of the Soviet- type society in the region—was a process of massive socio-political and cultural transformation. Despite its paramount importance for understanding the nature of the communist regime and its RevisitedRevisited legacy, the communist take-over in East Central European countries has remained largely under- researched. Two decades after the collapse of the communist system,Stalinism Revisited brings together a remarkable international team of established and younger scholars, engaging them in a critical re-evaluation of the institutionalization of communist regimes in East-Central Europe and of the period of “high Stalinism.” Sovietization is approached not as a fully pre-determined, homogeneous, and monolithic transformation, but as a set of trans-national, multifaceted, and inter-related processes of large-scale institutional and ideological transfers, made up of multiple “takeovers” in various fields.
    [Show full text]
  • Soviet Montage Cinema As Propaganda and Political Rhetoric
    Soviet Montage Cinema as Propaganda and Political Rhetoric Michael Russell Doctor of Philosophy The University of Edinburgh 2009 This thesis is dedicated to the memory of Professor Dietrich Scheunemann. ii Propaganda that stimulates thinking, in no matter what field, is useful to the cause of the oppressed. Bertolt Brecht, 1935. iii Abstract Most previous studies of Soviet montage cinema have concentrated on its aesthetic and technical aspects; however, montage cinema was essentially a rhetoric rather than an aesthetic of cinema. This thesis presents a com- parative study of the leading montage film-makers – Kuleshov, Pudovkin, Eisenstein and Vertov – comparing and contrasting the differing methods by which they used cinema to exert a rhetorical effect on the spectator for the purposes of political propaganda. The definitions of propaganda in general use in the study of Soviet montage cinema are too narrowly restrictive and a more nuanced definition is clearly needed. Furthermore, the role of the spectator in constituting the rhetorical effectivity of a montage film has been neglected; a psychoanalytic model of the way in which the filmic text can trigger a change in the spectator’s psyche is required. Moreover, the ideology of the Soviet montage films is generally assumed to exist only in their content, whereas in classical cinema ideology also operates at the level of the enunciation of the filmic text itself. The extent to which this is also true for Soviet montage cinema should be investigated. I have analysed the interaction between montage films and their specta- tors from multiple perspectives, using several distinct but complementary theoretical approaches, including recent theories of propaganda, a psycho- analytic model of rhetoric, Lacanian psychoanalysis and the theory of the system of the suture, and Peircean semiotics.
    [Show full text]