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224 Conclusion Poetics of the Unconscriptable FROM THE AGE OF the Industrial Revolution, technology was tethered to instrumentality, that is, viewed solely as an instrument in the acquisition of power, control, and mastery over the environment. Concomitantly , any technological undertaking was inevitably theorized as possessing a centripetal force that subjected the surrounding world to the exigencies of power. Nowhere is this idea of instrumentality more pronounced than in the recent reception of the Russian avant-garde. By reconstructing an alternative aesthetic path stemming from the Greek techne, this book has attempted to unbind the ties that bound technology with control, demonstrating them not to be conterminous after all. Technologies linked to the classical aesthetic notion of techne by more than mere etymology sprouted in Soviet Russia in the 1920s and defined some of the more exciting and idiosyncratic projects of the country’s avant-garde artists. This book argues therefore for the presence of an opposite force, the force of techne’s exploratory impulses that pushed out of the overdetermined political imaginary of Soviet culture, allowing for certain depoliticized, de-ideologized spaces and phenomena even among those who wished to take part in the ongoing sociopolitical transformation. It was a centrifugal force that brought into being the wonderlands of the Russian avant-garde. The chapters you have encountered in this book were structured to mimic this center-fleeing trajectory of techne. Starting at the self and its transformation into a machine, we move outward, eventually engaging not only with Soviet Russia’s ultimate other, industrialized America, but also opening a window for intercommunicative possibilities with the universe at large. In the process, the book moves from the articulation and exposition of less consciously dissenting technological practices to those that are more consciously subversive. The starting point was the seemingly incongruous example of Alexei Gastev whose poetry celebrated technical rationality, efficiency, and will to effect control over the self, and then via the transformed self over its environment . Gastev’s work came closest to the principles of technical ratio- Poetics of the Unconscriptable 225 nality that were both practiced and advanced by the state ideological apparatus . Yet, attempting to negotiate its attachment to competing sources of influence, from Soviet reflexology and Taylor’s scientific management of labor to the Western avant-garde and Nikolai Fedorov’s cosmism, Gastev’s poetic work veers off its predetermined path and comes dangerously close to unabashed avant-garde experimentation. Vsevolod Meyerhold aspired to exercise a comparable control over the self and its environment, within the circumscribed realm of the theater. Despite the declarative instrumentality of these aspirations, Meyerhold ended up creating a biomechanical experiment that not only failed to support the authoritarian position of the artist as an engineer and director of life, but in fact questioned the very viability of such control. As analyzed here, Meyerhold’s position is located in the gaps of signification between the stated directorial intentions, the biomechanical form of the play, and the play’s content that resists what its form attempts to confirm. Meyerhold’s archly avant-gardist The Magnanimous Cuckold uncovered and examined more or less everything that can go wrong in the process of searching for and acquiring absolute power, staging both a statement and its disavowal. The subject of the third chapter is the antiutopian novel We, whose author Yevgeny Zamyatin never declared his attachment to any avant-garde movement. Unaffiliated though he might have been, Zamyatin nevertheless created a portrait of the perfect avant-garde artist in the character of D-503. In my reading, D-503’s internal conflict, stemming out of his questioning of certain dogmatic truths that he wishes to uphold, does not reveal him as a parody of avant-garde artists (although he may have been conceived as such), but on the contrary ensures that he fits quite well into their revolutionary milieu. The manifest gap between the intent behind D-503’s techno-poetic undertakings, whether his writing or his rocket Integral, and their execution echoes, then, the ambivalence to be found in Meyerhold’s staging of The Magnanimous Cuckold. The simultaneous pull in opposite directions in both Meyerhold’s theater and D-503’s constructions constitutes, in fact, the fundamental principle of the aesthetic avant-gardism for both artists, where radical unsettlement and a perpetual search override any desire either for order or authorial control. Like The Magnanimous Cuckold, D-503’s diary ends up underscoring the unsustainability of hopes either for harmony in life or for an...

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