Poetics of the Tool: Word-Work in the Language Laboratories of the Russian Avant-Garde (Aleksei Gastev)

The past decades have led to a growing interest in the impact of writing implements on creative processes. However, due to an overwhelming influence of media theoretical approaches, the notion of the tool has been mostly limited to various kinds of apparatuses and machines, thus reducing the history of the tool to its technical aspects and excluding the crucial role of the word as tool itself. The essay retraces the story of the word as organon from ancient philosophy to contemporary thinking and places the work of the Russian poet and ergonomist Aleksei Gastev within this context. Gastev's work not only offers an insight into the frequently hidden fact that symbolic action is far from being a mere act of abstraction, but always remains rooted in the material shaping of things. His concept of the word as an instrument allows for an understanding of aesthetic objects as active entities. Even though deeply rooted within the ideology of productionism, this activity sharpens our awareness of how tools, just as words do, tend to subvert their subordination to a purposive rational power of control and expand the options of mere technical ideas of shaping and forming.