Soviet Epistemologies and the Materialist Ontology of Poor Life: Andrei Platonov, Alexander Bogdanov and Lev Vygotsky Maria CHEHONADSKIH This thesis is being submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements of The Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy, Kingston University, for the award of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. March 2017 Abstract This thesis provides new perspectives on the epistemic conditions of pre- and post-revolutionary Soviet thought (1910s–early 1930s) and constructs a transdisciplinary entry point into a materialist ontology of ‘poor life’. The concept of poor life engages contemporary debates on class composition and individuation from the materialist viewpoint of self-organising labour causality and social mediation. The thesis opens with a critical examination of the ‘Western’ and ‘Eastern’ divide in Marxist philosophy and shifts discussion from the official doctrine of Bolshevism to the under-represented epistemologies of Empirio-Marxism and Spinozist- Hegelianism in the philosophy and political theory of Alexander Bogdanov, the writings and art criticism of Andrei Platonov and the experimental philosophy and psychology of Lev Vygotsky. A transdisciplinary, post-revolutionary logic assumes that theory should start where Marx ended and that it should act in a Marxist fashion across all conceptual and practical realms. The reconstruction of these epistemological conditions leads to an alternative philosophical genealogy of Soviet avant-garde art and the writings of Andrei Platonov. The thesis explores the connections between the Empirio-Marxism of Bogdanov and the problematic of construction, ‘life-building’ and production in the theories of the Soviet avant-garde. Bogdanov proposes an organisational ontology of the active and productive capacity of labour to compose and construct historically determined ‘life-complexes’ and orders of material relations. In turn, the organisation of sensibility, things and relations, or communist ‘life-building’, becomes the primary theoretical and practical agenda of Proletkult, Constructivism, Productivism and the Literature of Fact. The thesis demonstrates the unique place of Andrei Platonov within these conceptual settings. The core of the thesis is a reconstruction of Platonov’s method and form of writing, the aim of which is to demonstrate the conceptual reciprocity of the problems of ‘life- building’ and ‘poor life’. Platonov stresses the negativity of partition and compartmentalisation within the compositional logic of ‘life-building’. In the experience of social poverty, the self- organising force of labour produces a disjunctive unity of thinking and speech, reaction and act, time and space. Vygotsky’s Spinozist-Hegelianism exposes the structural logic of this negativity. The reconstruction of his system shows how mediation produces a dialectical dramaturgy of individuation out of the compositional materiality of poverty and the given ensemble of social relations. The thesis concludes by outlining a differential unity between the three authors. The Soviet problematisation of poor life links social and ontological degrees of organisation, offering epistemological models of compositional productivity and of the individuating negativity of ‘life-building’. The epistemic conditions that we reconstruct in the thesis may have vanished along with their revolutionary context, but they are likely to resurface in the course of any new experiment in radical social transformation. Acknowledgements This research project would not have been possible without the generous intellectual and emotional support of many colleagues and friends. I am very grateful to Peter Osborne for encouraging the experimental and rebellious path of this project. His delicate yet decisive strategy of supervision, and his dialectics of rigour and tentativeness with respect to the research process, has led this project to its appropriate shape. I thank my second supervisor Peter Hallward for his reliability and his very productive criticism. I have been delighted to have Boris Groys as my external supervisor and I thank him for commenting on and discussing Platonov and Bogdanov with me. It was also a great honour to work alongside, and to collaborate and discuss my thesis with, the CRMEP staff and research students. Their impact on the progress of this project is enormous and immeasurable. I wish to thank Teresa Mavica, Katerina Chuchalina and all the V-A-C Foundation members of staff for supporting the project. My sincere gratitude to Viktor Misiano, who has taught me to cross disciplines and think from the standpoint of today. I am deeply grateful to Robert Chandler for providing his translation drafts of Chevengur and to Alexander Suvorov for sharing his thoughts about Vygotsky and Ilyenkov. Great thanks to Danny Hayward, who compassionately worked on the style and improved the language of this thesis. I also thank Emanuel Almborg, Andrés Sáenz de Sicilia, Lucie Mercier, Marina Vishmidt and Liza Bobriashova for editorial support, and for discussing and consulting with me on a number of issues throughout the process. Many thanks to Will Potter, Stefano Pippa, Josefine Wikstöm, Alex Fletcher, John Douglas Millar, Rebecca Carson, Simon Pirani, Ilya Budraitskis, Arseny Zhilyaev, Igor Chubarov, Alexandra Serbina, Benedict Seymour, Luisa Lorenza Corna, Clarrie Pope, Eric-John Russell, Nikhil Vettukattil and Marie Louise Krogh for their care, friendship and challenging discussions. I am infinitely thankful to Alexei Penzin for his invaluable advice, insights and deep engagement with my work, for reading and commenting on the drafts of this thesis and for supporting me in all possible ways throughout. Finally, I wish to thank the longstanding supporters of all my undertakings – my mother Natalia Maksimova and my sister Natasha Maksimova. We share, among many other things, an experience of struggle with the post-1991 ‘poor life’ and a little Soviet library with a first edition of Andrei Platonov. This work is dedicated to them. The research was generously funded by a three-year fellowship from V-A-C Foundation and by a partial studentship from Kingston University. Contents INTRODUCTION .......................................................................................................... 1 CHAPTER I. Mediations Instead of Dichotomies: Reopening Discussion About the Epistemologies of Soviet Marxism Introduction: Geopolitics and Soviet Marxism After 1991 ............................................. 12 A) A Counter-Narrative for Soviet and Western Marxism .............................................. 15 B) A Counter-Narrative for the Soviet Avant-Garde and Art Theory ............................ 29 C) A Counter-Narrative for Andrei Platonov ................................................................ 40 CHAPTER II. The Project of a Proletarian Encyclopaedia in Empirio-Marxism and the Soviet Avant-garde Introduction: A Constellation of Bogdanov and Platonov .............................................. 62 A) Strategic Unity of Marxism and Empiricism in Bogdanov ......................................... 65 B) Bogdanov’s Proletarian Encyclopaedia: Proletkult and the Soviet Avant-garde ..... 77 C) Platonov’s Encyclopaedia for the Proletariat: The Philosophical Functioning of Constancy, Narrative and Perception ............................................................................. 96 CHAPTER III. The Materialist Ontology of Poor Life and The Conceptual Core of the Platonov’s Encyclopaedia Introduction: From Method to Concept in Platonov’s work ........................................ 131 A) Class: Others, Mistakable, Half-Kulaks, Doubject and Other Class Creatures ...... 133 B) Dual Being and Two Organs of Thought ................................................................. 145 C) Nature and Labouring Being, Poor Life and Veshchestvo of Existence .................. 155 D) Struggle With the Void: Toská and Communism ..................................................... 171 CHAPTER IV. Mediating Poor Life: Vygotsky’s Homo Duplex Versus Platonov’s Doubject Introduction: A Constellation of Platonov and Vygotsky ............................................. 184 A) Vygotsky’s Encyclopaedia: The Unwritten Das Kapital and The Status of Philosophy ....................................................................................................................................... 186 B) Poor Life: Poverty, Disability and Diversification of the Modes of Cultural Behaviour ..................................................................................................................... 197 C) The Social Ontology of Mediation .......................................................................... 207 D) Vygotsky’s Theory of Individuation as Disjunctive Unity of Internal Functions ..... 220 CONCLUSION ............................................................................................................ 237 BIBLIOGRAPHY ....................................................................................................... 243 Introduction This thesis focuses on the early Soviet epistemologies developed by the writers and thinkers of the pre- and post-revolutionary decades. It constructs a concept of poor life that is, I argue, a crux of the interconnected systems of thought established by these key thinkers who remain hardly recognised by Anglophone philosophy. The concept of poor life unfolds through the exposition of the logically and historically determined forms