CONFLICT, CONTACT, INTUITION
Remember Hamlet, trying to expose his father’s killer? The play’s the thing wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the king. For Hamlet, it was the theatrical frame itself that would serve as technology for intuition: he would watch how his suspect watched, to divine hidden guilt. Play within play, film within play, play within film, films about directors struggling with actors, plays about failed actresses: these genres depict embedded frames as if their layers lure out hidden thoughts and motives, illuminating the shadows of hidden social ties. The generic meta-form itself, the play within a play, lends itself to serving as a technology for intuition for the prince because of the ways it organizes attention to attention. Consider also all the plays and films about making plays or films, which center dramatic conflict around production communications and conflicts, characters searching for authors.
Gordon Craig (1908) dreamed of the uber marionnette, the actor-robot who would not rebel. GITIS teachers, however, good Aristotelians, honored the principle of dramatic conflict—and dramatic conflict within the script did not suffice in itself to make good theater, so they constantly repeated the creative need for conflicts between actors and directors. Actors are supposed to push back and directors to complain about actors’ stubbornness, vanity, and lack of agility; such conflicts were to be expected, not stifled (even if the director should win). To represent the actor-director relationship as rife with conflict is standard; books and films that do so are popular in Russia, appearing early in the twentieth century with the rise of the auteur director across Europe. With an eye to Socrates, Stanislavksy famously reproduced arguments between his own avatar, a director and his young acolytes. Nikolaj Gorchakov (1954) similarly recollected his own debates with director Evgenij Vakhtangov in dialogue format. Tairov represented his own rehearsals through dialogues and conflicts with actors. Rehearsal accounts multiplied in late Soviet and post-Soviet times, weaving into autobiographies by director-heroes like Yuri Liubimov, Oleg Efremov, Piotr Fomenko, Mark Zakharov, and Leonid Kheifetz. Of all these texts, only a few have made their way into English translation; within Russia they sell well. Nearly all of them involve conflicts that yield creative epiphanies and shifts in perspective.
When actors challenge directorial work, their rebellion itself is supposed to stir the creative process. It is as if the Aristotelian idea of dramatic conflict were transposed into the theatrical divisions of labor, a play nested inside that division such that conflicts between directors and actors generate energy to animate the story. In the curriculum, in key texts, and in sessions of critical advice, konflikt figures as a force for creativity. Behind the scenes, in rehearsal and during the process of learning to stage drama, konflikt opens perspectives, and demands improvisation. In a pamphlet marking the 120th year since the founding of GITIS in 1878, one rector asserted:
GITIS should never be regarded as single-minded, single-voiced…. [W]e can easily discern different voices, dissenting, doubtful, mutually contradicting…. If your aim is to teach someone to be creative, you cannot achieve that without first providing a creative, totally new medium … while being in constant dialog with past authority, your own past or someone else’s. We might call this a formula of creativity: the more tightly wound the inner spring of creative energy inside the pupil, the more dissatisfied he becomes with his master…. GITIS represents this long-standing, venerable theatre tradition of inner discontent and constant lack of stability. (GITIS 1998, 1)1
Theater and film projects, as collective endeavors, make struggle tangible in ways that, for example, painting does not (or not often these days; consider the teams who worked under the old masters). Directors cannot pretend to be solitary authors (when they try, actors and technical crews, like any workers, find ways to drag their feet—but less than one might think, for they rarely stop caring about the public outcome, in which their faces are the ones visible).
Forcing actors would be pointless except in the most rigidly choreographed productions: directors must learn to negotiate, convince, cajole, or manipulate, and yes, to argue with, actors. In an informal speech in the fall semester, master instructor and director Heifetz apprised the directing students: “You show up with a play, and you say, ‘here is the main event,’ and an actor will challenge you: ‘But why?’ ” (Fieldnotes November 9, 2002). He recounted the first play that he had ever directed, at the Soviet Army Theater. The actors had all been given small roles, and several were dissatisfied. They contested his staging of provincial country life, even though they rarely left Moscow, “until I fought back with them.”
To spare student directors too much conflict right at the beginning, their very first assignments at GITIS utilized no actors at all, allowing practice with syntheses of media and forms (music plus lighting, lighting plus scenery) before wrangling live people. For example, our cohort’s directors for this assignment chose among five watercolors by proto-Cubo-futurist painter Petrov Vodkin: the students were to intuit a story behind the picture and create a corresponding atmosphere using only music and props. Later exercises gradually added actors, as the students developed means to give the actors convincing and compelling directives.
KONFLIKT AESTHETIC
The aesthetics of konflikt at GITIS also suffuse work to build theatrical collectives, as responsive assemblages of people and things focusing on sensations and contacts. Think back to the drill with the thread in chapter 2: as the students attend to the thread, they also learn that maintaining perfect contact, just right, between tautness and laxness, is impossible (and would be dull). It is better to manage inevitable oscillations, even to roughen their textures; as we ought to know from King Lear or Stanley Kowalski, failures to communicate sharpen dramatic conflict.2 Conflicts and obstacles: that such sources for artistic enchantment exceed virtuosity alone is among the primary wisdoms imparted at GITIS. Drills focusing on contact and communication also taught about breaks and interruptions, juxtapositions and kontrapunkt (counterpoint). For example, a student strikes a pose such that the next can join with a connecting position; after managing this a few times, they were encouraged not simply to continue a theme or story, but to strike a contradiction to the last pose, to react agonistically with kontrapunkt.3
Konflikt has long held a central position in European theatrical production and dramaturgy; by Aristotle’s definition, conflict is the pivot that makes drama dramatic. Russian literary scholar Propp elaborated on the obstacle, even in pure material forms, as a specific species of fictional conflict. Soviet considerations of what counted as worthy of thematic conflict shifted over time.4 The “old” battled the “new” in Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin; by 1960, during Nikita Khrushchev’s “Thaw,” successful plays featured a post–World War II generation struggling not with their elders, not against pressures of conformity, but to be understood (Houghton 1962).
Thematic konflikt—diegetic struggles among characters or worldviews—also informs acting and training techniques that juxtapose materials, rhythms, and perspectives. In the early 1960s director and master instructor Maria Knebel’ wrote about such techniques in a set of Stanislavsky’s drills known as “Memory of Physical Action,” intended to sharpen attention even to the most subtle of material obstacles as sources for creative konflikt.5 A student might mime peeling a potato and then peel an actual potato—not in order to perfect the motions, but to hone awareness of those glitches that real potatoes pose, to wean the student of the generalizing forces lurking in the urge to perfection. Confronting any specific material object shows the student instead: “[A]ll the little obstacles unavoidably encountered in life when one makes even the smallest action. One object is too small, difficult to grasp, another slips out of your hands, one does not fit another, and so on. Objects stop being obedient: the thread won’t slide into the needle, the soap slips, and so on … [such]conflict always sharpens perception, organizes and directs attention, mobilizes the will, and makes for emotionally saturated, internally dynamic action” (1967, 161). Conflicts constitute dramatic events, they “make for … dynamic action.” In November 2002 I watched a young woman cut and butter a slice of imaginary bread as the instructor called out missed chances to play conflict: What about butter patties that slip to the floor, or a hard crust that deflects the knife? She was missing the little dramas that engage an audience and thus opportunities to make contact: “You do these pantomimes too schematically! Like an order given by the Party! Without the nuances and details that grab an audience with illusion!” Such events made drama even on the smallest scale: the more obstacles, the more interesting.
The aim of “Memory of Physical Action” is not to fix a standard for mimesis, for perfect representational accuracy. Instead, it is to alert actors to attend to the unpredictable posed by any specific material object or body in any specific space and time. Such awareness need not await the failure of tools or things (pace Heidegger, actually existing matter can resist at any time without detectable malfunction at all); practice in embodied attention to the singularities of materials is key. Conversely, even a reluctant prop or a clumsy acting partner might not restart the habitual inattention of an actor who, limited by stage fright, has not learned to run multiple tracks of attention and becomes too distracted in front of audiences to react to a partner’s new gesture. To this end, students were frequently reminded, in every place they inhabited, to always seek something that they had never noticed before: a smudge, a wire, anything. And failing that, to change their own angle of vantage.
ESTRANGEMENT
The agile actor, as Diderot first wrote and as the director Meyerhold articulated often, runs more than one track of awareness at the same time; one of them observes the self. A good actor cannot operate with a one-track mind—even Stanislavsky wrote against full submersion (which some viewed as a draining sort of self-hypnotism) as being sublime to experience but dull to the audience. Actors and psychics practice similar drills to perfect juggling multiple rays of attention (although it is usually the psychics who stage demonstrations, reciting one hundred phone numbers from memory, blindfolded, while shooting an arrow at a target and playing piano with their feet). It takes not only practice, but also a willingness to hold disjunctures among perspectives within consciousness. Some genres run on such disjuncture: for the Vakhtangov Theater, the actor might play Turandot as if Turandot were played by yet another character, a “critical actor” who is nested inside (or worn over) the actor. Enacting such a-realist conflicts between actor and character has long been a favorite device on Moscow stages—even in Stalin’s time, especially in fantastical and children’s genres.
In Russian twenty-first-century theatrical practice, the term konflikt covers similar territory as has the term ostranenie (“defamiliarization,” “estrangement,” “alienation”). In a 1917 essay titled Technique in Art, Russian formalist critic Viktor Shklovsky elaborated on this coinage, arguing that artists deploy ostranenie when their work impedes habitual perception, makes usual modes of perception difficult. An artful poem slows the reader down; she does not simply recognize printed words, she re-cognizes their forms, their represented sounds (perhaps even questioning why they sound as if intrinsically belonging to high-class or lowbrow registers).
In the decades before the formalists published, Meyerhold had been drawing from grotesque master of fantastic literature E.T.A. Hoffman to develop a theory of estrangement (Jestrovic 2006; Possner 2016). Hoffman had identified a quality that he called “familiar-alien” (Meyerhold translates the German into Russian as znakoma-chudo) in seventeenth-century paintings in which musician-birds perch in tree branches while peasants dance below, as well as in drawings of saints’ temptations in which little devils blow anus-flutes or fire from gun-barrel noses. Voicing ideas later amplified by Shklovsky (and also by Meyerhold’s student Eisenstein, who modified stage juxtaposition into film montage, and by Brecht, who wrote about alienation devices after conversations in Moscow), Meyerhold wrote about the power of grotesque contrasts to provoke mental effort, to animate sentience: “The grotesque, in seeking the supernatural, binds opposites into a synthesis, crafting a picture that leads the observer to attempt to solve an unfathomable riddle…. Is this not the task of the stage grotesque, to constantly hold the observers in a condition of double relation to scenic action, which changes it movements through contrasting strokes?” (Meyerhold, Balagan 1912; see translation in Meyerhold 1969).
As a defamiliarizing impulse, an estranging prod, and a little shock of alienation to generate fresh thinking, ostranenie is often figured in terms of animation and sudden motility. At the turn of the twentieth century, like Stanislavsky and others, Shklovsky was concerned with refreshing the senses, counteracting the automatic responses and dulled instincts of industrial life.
For ways to refresh human energy, Stanislavsky turned to French psychology and Indic yoga; Shklovsky found a means to reanimate perception close at hand, in Russian literature—and not only in the avant-garde. In Shklovsky’s view, Aleksandr Pushkin prodded at poetic expectations a century before the Russian futurist poets would take up grammatical deconstruction as political mission. And unlike other structural thinkers (Marx, Saussure, Freud), who aligned formal systems with the habitual and the unconscious, Shklovsky saw that even familiar forms and systems can be handled in ways to de-automatize thought and sensation, “to make the stone stony” ([1917] 1965, 2). Ostranenie need not destroy in order to work—play with perspective can activate the mind: if you can’t move the mountain, look at it from a different window. As his very first example, Shklovsky offered a passage from Lev Tolstoy that deconstructs property relations by depicting the thoughts of a horse, who ponders the ways humans use possessive pronouns.
The concept that Shklovsky defined for literary criticism had already been theorized in theatrical circles: at the end of the nineteenth century Meyerhold was experimenting with ways to defamiliarize, and in 1907 he wrote that the realist theater had forgotten how much it relied on conventions, pretending to be raw representation. Mainstream theater, instead of battling with materials, with physical words, props, and bodies, had come to rely on them; orchestra pit and lights already separated stage dialogue from audience murmurs, dampening the possibility of the latter interrupting. Meyerhold dreamed of a theater capable of more surprises, with protruding prosceniums and revealed carpentry, movable platforms and pulleys. Treating language as matter, too, Meyerhold spoke of theatrical work through metaphors of industrial craft, much as his friends among the futurist poets did, treating language as matter, as Mayakovsky did in his 1926 essay “How to Make Verse,” published in several Soviet papers that year, such as Leningrad Pravda (see also Lemon 1991). But his actors were not to become mindless cogs or robots; they were to analyze gestures, to break them down in uncomfortable ways, to hone the capacity to attend to ways the body engages with spaces, objects, and other bodies. The actor was to sharpen awareness (here Meyerhold owes Diderot) of simultaneously being both artist-subject and subject-object-character, to develop the ability to zerkalit’ (reflect a mirror upon) the self.
Meyerhold’s biomechanical exercises (e.g., in which students practiced patterns of stylized, acrobatic moves linked to a goal, like “shooting a bow”) were practiced as forms of ostranenie. Their odd movements and artificial sequences disrupt, complicate, and slow down habitual embodiments, replacing them with other conventions to contrast with the usual. His actors learned in this way to re-cognize not only the stoniness of a stone, but also the relations among hands that feel stone and to other actors and the audience. In biomechanical exercises, strange movements aid the study of rakursy (from the French raccourci for shortcut or foreshortening), searching for angles that change perception, perhaps by shifting relative positions onstage. Their repetition is not to automatize, but to increase reflexive sensitivity. Meyerhold’s biomechanics, far from instilling simple units of motion, empty, robotic repetitions, aimed for something like what Jakobson would later call the poetic function, only with the body, the ability to comment with the body about the body.
Many artists hoped during the first years after the Revolution that shaking aesthetic conventions might change minds, change the world, but not all of them were socialists or revolutionaries. And ostranenie, as Shklovsky defined it, did not remain the sole property of the avant-garde. Its principles continued to run through Soviet theatrical education (at times by changing vocabulary, avoiding the formalist brand), just as Meyerhold’s sense of the animating potential of montage continued to influence even after his execution in 1940, through his student Eisenstein (and through the latter’s students in turn). Within places like GITIS, people never stopped playing with shifting proscenia and angles, and after Meyerhold’s rehabilitation in the mid-1950s, such play became increasingly commonplace, even on Moscow main stages.
TECHNOLOGIES AGAINST INTUITION
I am enchanted by the ways theatrical artists talk about konflikt. Their words recall the hopes for estrangement as a means to generate contingencies and juxtapositions, thereby animating new thoughts, even debates, at the very least renewing or engaging creative energies. They devote lifetimes to techniques that will capture the forces of counterpoint, whether to generate epiphany or simply to stage events that feel “interesting!” or even “Chudo!” (“miraculous, enchanting”). There is a problem, however, in ascribing too much to estrangement itself: there are degrees and directions of estrangement, to different effects. Clams about the efficacy of estrangement were developed at particular historical intersections of sociopolitical conditions and sociotechnical networks, where people pushed and pulled “[t]he historical metamorphosis of estrangement from a technique of art to an existential art of survival and a practice of freedom and dissent” (Boym 2005, 1).6
Attempts to estrange conventional barriers separating audience from actor can look similar while invoking different goals or playing out different results. Russian proscenium breakers Meyerhold and Evreinov, for example, both confronted dominant realisms by bringing spectators into the play, but not to the same ends (see also Boym 2005; Clark 1995): one aimed to reach social equality, while the other sought to reach higher metaphysical awareness. Debates about what art might change or ought to change shift ground from, say, 1930s Berlin to 1970s New York City.
Not all instances of ostranenie rock the world. We might hope that baring the device through fresh juxtaposition or montage or by breaking the frame or revealing conditions of production7 will motivate new perceptions of the taken for granted, the conventional, or the habitual. When they have, it remains difficult to say which alienation device concretely nudged which social transformations. An estrangement can focus audience awareness on the aesthetic conventions at hand or draw attention to some habitual perception, and yet not draw attention to all the material channels and social structures that funnel relations suffusing each encounter with art. An estrangement technique can refresh perception along one channel, even while it floods or jams others. A case in point is Nikolai Evreinov’s staging of the storming of the Winter Palace, for which he deployed masses of actor-spectators to disrupt conventions of scale, perspective, frame, and angle. While the 1920 event thereby made a statement about mass political agency to some audiences, many participants later recounted the performance as if it had been the Revolution itself (Clark 1995).
The shock of estrangement can even block, rather than spur, reflexive awareness. Stage magicians know this, but so do many agents of government, those who work out how to estrange one set of perceptions in order to install another.8 In the interrogation room or on the stage, the spotlight is differently disorienting, differently displacing the same cup of tea. Cristina Vatulescu, writing on “police aesthetics,” describes estrangement during Romanian interrogations of the socialist period. To make her point, she quotes from the 1963 CIA manual Kubark Counterintelligence Interrogation, assuming not so much direct and recent transnational influence on interrogation technologies as a logic shared from longer ago, whereby the interrogator works to undermine the interrogatee’s sense of knowing anything: “The aim of the Alice in Wonderland, or confusion technique, is to confound the expectations and conditioned reactions of the interrogatee … not only to obliterate the familiar but to replace it with the weird … pitch, tone, and volume of the interrogators’ voices are unrelated to the import of the questions” (2010, 178) The goal in interrogation estrangement is not to refresh sensations or spark creative response, but to shock and traumatize by manipulating sign forms, setting pitch, volume, and tone against reference. The point is not to draw attention to conventions that scaffold perspectives—and thereby social hierarchies. Alice in Wonderland technologies may detach the subject from his or her usual intuitions, but in order to animate the interrogator’s logic, as in false confession.
Interrogators break out details from past narratives in ways not so unlike the way Meyerhold broke up classic dramatic scripts, staging them in a new order. Even before such an encounter, state agents need not organize “personal files” according to any particular allegation. The files fill up, as Vatulescu also notes, “without order”: the name of a first dog, favorite ice cream, a hair ribbon, a theater ticket. Such a collection, before it is mobilized, can seem hapless or harmless: in 1997, one friend recounted to me how in 1983, in her early teens, after a small demonstration in Moscow against American nuclear weapon systems, she had been taken for a beseda (a “chat,” euphemism for “interrogation”). She and her fellow arrestees, smoking in the holding area, had been handed a “lame questionnaire”: “What soccer team do you like?” “What is your favorite subject?” She remarked that this experience had taught her “how badly the KGB was organized—it was a cardboard tiger.”
All the same, montages of such detail can later arm the interrogator to bewilder the person interrogated, to simulate the state’s omniscience, and to cast doubt on relationships that seem to have supplied the hair ribbon or pet names. Much as in cold reading, in which the client fills in details and comes to imagine that it is the psychic one who sees the connections among them, the interrogatee, faced by the interrogator even with unordered sets of detail, can imagine she knows their connections, asking, “How do they know this?” when in fact they do not, not yet. A key difference—primed by structures for policing rather than those for staging of telepathy—is also the enticements prodding the interrogatee to ask herself: “Who gave them this detail?” Here estrangement methods are tactical, neither mystical nor pedagogical, intended to plant paranoia, even to stimulate future counterbetrayals.
FRAGMENT AND WHOLE, BREAK TO CONTACT
Across Russia, historical narratives of rupture have torqued the ways people have taken up or rejected breaks in frame, montage, and other estrangement devices. Consider a few contrasts in ways that “fragments” have been made and been put to use. As scholars of colonialism have perceived elsewhere, there are fragments that challenge not only the idea of wholeness but the very idea of the “fragment” itself (for if there were no identified wholes, what would “fragments” be pieces of)? (see also Pandey 1992).
Much juxtaposition requires a recognizable break, pieces cut to be reassembled. Of all possible means of estrangement, juxtaposition was theater director Meyerhold’s preferred; to achieve it, he split up existing texts into new units that he could rearrange. For example, he broke up Ostrovsky’s classic The Forest from five acts into a montage of thirty-three “attractions” that no longer told a story, but instead resonated with each other as with conditions offstage (something like ringing intertextual chords, only with a technical focus on breaking out notes, rather than seeking them, and resonating with newspapers and events on the street, with less poetry). He did the same later with Gogol’s Inspector General. Decades before thinkers such as Mikhail Bakhtin and then Erving Goffman would break down the ideal of the individual speaker to distribute utterances (or depictions of utterances) across texts and situations, Meyerhold scattered script and gesture across human actors and materials—as commedia dell’arte actors had done—repeating the words of visible prompters or using a puppet to depict the author peeking out from behind a curtain.
Techniques of disjuncture—like other methods for estrangement—are not alone sufficient to reanimate perception, to catalyze social awareness, or to animate agency;9 they can renew perception on one level while dulling on another. Moreover, making breaks at quick tempo can create the illusion of animation, seem to motorize or energize, like stop-motion in cartooning. There is a fountain in the middle of Detroit Metro Airport whose jets converge at the center in smooth unity, giving the impression of solid and still tubes of translucent matter. Then, at computer-controlled intervals, the jets are interrupted to produce Morse code dashes of water and dots of air—now the water appears finally to move, even though it has been moving all along.10 Here disjuncture reveals movement, even while producing the illusion that it is movement that is new, not the breaks.
Conversely, the sense that a whole is broken is not always produced by fracture from natural continua. “Brokenness” is like dirt in Mary Douglas’s (1978) sense; to break is to chisel or to startle “matter out of place,” acts that require not only ideological maintenance and naturalizing repetition (habitus), but also the occasional recognitions of estrangement. Those same institutions that regulate entry at points for auditions or for showing bureaucratic papers both connect social assemblages and fracture pieces for estrangement, pieces that can be deployed in technologies both for and against intuition.
By extension, the conditions that set up judgments of the “broken” versus “whole”—that set them up as if they are natural, as if apprehended by intuition rather than by aesthetic means or through practical material habits—differ historically. We need not cross ostensibly hermetic cultural circles or national boundaries to encounter alternate motivations or working practices for claiming either condition. In my adopted home state of Nebraska, my mother’s husband works constantly on a hay thrasher—one that she terms “broken.” For him, since he first made its acquaintance in 1942, that thrasher has never quite constituted a single, individuated object to be broken; it is a technical node that has always demanded his bricolage, work that has evolved from asking around town to scanning Craigslist for similar thrashers made with similar enough parts. Whether thrashers are “broken” or should be replaced by new, “whole” ones is a point of gentle conflict. My mother sees strewn pieces and parts as signaling class: “We look like the Clampetts.”11 However, for him the world of objects is always already overlapping across materials that are more or less compatible to adaptation; to oppose broken to whole is, to him, a silly, useless binary. He describes an encounter with neighbor boys, laughing while quoting their description of a turbine roof ventilator: “ ’It’s broken!’ Broken? No, pay attention, look here, you can notice: ‘This here piece is warped.’ You look there, and then you can think, ‘What can I use to shape another flange to fit it?’ Then you go in the garage and get a Folger’s can and ….”
My relatives draw on different expectations for durability and different allegiances to the ideal of wholeness. They also draw from differing experiences of material infrastructures and different ideological and moralizing ways to link materials and aspirations: Are the fragments signs of low class or of ingeniousness? To this farmer and former factory worker, material scenes that whisper “breakdown” to us city folk (for my mother returned to the country after being raised in a city, the first generation, her father and mother the only ones to leave the Appalachians, where all the aunts and uncles and cousins remained) speak of possibilities in a world always ready for thinking with and making with, in permanent flux for bricolage. Pace Martin Heidegger, people must pattern relationships to tools in certain ways before their “breakdown” makes sense as breakdown. How those relations come about and what they enable next are the more pressing questions. As anthropologists have learned, taking notes from thinkers from Franz Boas to Michel Foucault, people constantly break down and separate phenomena that could otherwise also be apprehended as continuous—to name colors, to segment sounds—and to claim separate “races,” “languages,” “selves,” or even “events.” Conditions must converge in still more ways for a perception of a break to bind to expectations such as purity, durability—or wholeness. In social worlds where durability of matter is not an expectation, broken tools do not force estrangement, and its inspirations follow other contingencies.
Efforts to maintain wholeness against brokenness—to bridge broken intertexts or to heal gaps between generations—thrive not because textual canons really make wholes or because generations naturally adhere, but because specific, historically motivated ideologies, such as capitalism versus socialism, charge wholes and fractures with moral power. Worlds that must never touch govern peoples who must not make contact. Like most ideologies when aligned with political goals to separate and rule, these become circular: contra the lessons of logicians, circular logic is all too often found beautiful in its repetitions, homologies across material structures standing as natural truths that mask the histories of built conditions (Bourdieu 1977): Why do water lines not reach this village or that town? The answer shoots back from people who have never lived in such places, be they in the United States or in Russia: “What for? Just look at how dirty they are; they would just steal the pipes!” The circles of such logics eat their own tails.
GEOPOLITICS IN BREAKDOWN
The stakes for defining what counts as whole and what as broken are high. The last century can be narrated through points of breakdown and ruin: real sufferings and material destructions have been told both from ideological perspectives that minimize them as well as from those that mythologize them. At the same time, the globe’s civil wars, world wars, and proxy wars have left bullet holes, graves, and empty seats tangible to some populations and not to others. In just one set of contrasts, World War II took 400,000 American military lives; in school in the 1970s we were also told that this war lifted the United States out of the Great Depression, and that military manufacturing had triggered a burst of production and prosperity that lasted through the 1960s. Some kids were skeptical, but the losses were small enough, the destruction was far enough away. It was only by walking in Soviet cities in the 1980s that I saw traces of the war that had burned swaths of stunning devastation through Soviet territories, buildings still to be reconstructed, millions of civilians killed in the sieges and air raids, millions dead at the front still mourned. Americans suffered much less infrastructural damage and immensely fewer war casualties—at least twenty times fewer than those in the USSR. Even during the war the United States learned of sieges and genocide secondhand, if at all, and later through the words of camp survivors.12 Twenty-five years after the end of the war, USSR firsthand, visceral knowledge of the war receded as the veterans and partisans passed away, although those born during the evacuations and bombings remain, as do those who were raised in the rubble. In Western Europe the U.S.-funded Marshall Plan built the West German autobahn, among other things, but no such deus ex machina from without came to heal the Soviet infrastructure. Repairs took decades.
Narratives of travelers to the USSR and Russia all too often stress material lacks (usually by unstated comparison to life in a green American suburb or quaint urban street). Worse, they portray these lacks as evidence that all promises of Soviet modernism were inherently bankrupt. These stories omit consideration of, among other thing, the long-term effects of war.
Soviet people related to luxury goods in ways much more complicated than Cold War American accounts depicted. (see Dunham 1976; Fehérváry 2002; Crowley and Reid 2010)—similarly careful work is still needed to understand material culture in response to the destruction of WWII. After the war, devastated infrastructure and diversion of resources to rebuild the military contributed to the famous snarls in Soviet distribution. By the 1970s it had become easy for socialism’s detractors to criticize the state for easily broken consumer goods, the latter serving as material proof of the system’s failure (Fehérváry 2013). But certain conditions remain overlooked: those European countries treated as a baseline for material normalcy either suffered much less war damage or received rebuilding funds and labor from the United States.
By the early twenty-first century the ideologies of ruin were shifting yet again. Two decades of marketization since 1991 had not spread glossy capitalist ease evenly across Russia; material objects and infrastructures broke down as much as ever. Hospital fires, plane crashes, and submarine disasters continued. Some blamed the ruins on the Soviet infrastructure, which was built quickly, not planned to sustain twenty-first-century population growth or energy demands. Others blamed a supposedly passive Russian populace, inured to tragedies. A small minority protested that special interests had been diverting resources that the socialist state had once expended (e.g., to mitigate yearly freezing and thawing of pipes) and argued that it was during the 1990s—not only during socialism—that the government stopped investing such funds and labor, and commercially minded former bureaucrats took over maintenance. In this space, violent film and stage genres, from the chernukha (dark naturalism) in the 1980s and 1990s to the New Drama of the 2000s, proved both resonant and controversial.
Material breakdowns can never be fully understood as local; too many of the structures of feeling and the ideological valences that embed them for experience rely on comparison. By the time the twenty-first century was under way, it had become clear to some that America had not won the Cold War in 1991; rather, it had managed to evade exposure of modernist technical failures a bit longer. It was later that images of American collapse traveled to the former socialist world; like other tourists, Americans included, Russians saw the “ruin porn” depicting American cities from Detroit to New Orleans. Socialist matter, it turned out, was not the only sort to degrade. Material distinctions of quality, once imagined to distinguish socialist from capitalist worlds, had lost their sharpness. The tendency of all matter to shift state, to change under temperature changes or through contact with biomaterial, transcends any particular political or economic system, even one that understands “breaks” as unexpected or contingent “events.”
Philosophers, sociologists, and avant-garde artists, from Mikhail Bakunin to the Sex Pistols, have hailed “creative destruction” (Ackerman and Puchner 2006) as both a clearing of the ground for building anew and a source for insights born of estrangement.13 But again, the idea that to sunder parts is a technique to rouse consciousness (to awaken a drive for freedom, to unmask the patriarchy) gained followers in a world of competing territorial powers. To those looking from an imperial vantage, breakdown signals a return to raw chaos. But their ruptures are already cooked; to experience a tool or structure as broken requires commitment to seeing the world as separate sets of already claimed and bounded wholes (a culture, the nation, the highway system).
DEANIMATED ANIMATION
For a break to estrange or to (re)animate, still other conditions must be met.In a world of wholes, breaking can both animate and deanimate. Russians have been typecast both as revolutionary avatars of destructive creativity (see Clark 1995) and as robotic, totalitarian automaton soldiers. Roma have also been doubly typecast through similar tropes depicting them both as avatars of freedom and as bodies empty of will, programmed by nature to dance or to wander. Black people in the United States face a similar wall of tropes that align freedom and slavery with animation and deanimation (see Ngai 2005).
To follow a few strands of ideologies that invest material breaks with meaning or agency, I turn to representations made in the United Kingdom and in the United States, both of which deanimate people by reanimating objects isolated as broken. Not incidentally, they do so as they impute belief in occult, monstrous, or ideologically lurid forces to others. One is a documentary filmed in Russia, and the other is a fiction film made and set in the United States. Both arrange and animate the broken to automatize people and can only do so by presupposing that humans move or think only by individual, internally generated energies—anything else leads to depictions of people drained of energy, existing without aim, puppetlike.14 The British project purports to objectively document and even honor Soviet research on bodily reanimation, rocketry, space flight, and intergalactic communication.15 All the same, the documentary manages to denigrate, framing subjects against a montage of broken objects and layering them under ironic voice-over. The American horror film sets its violence within squalor and decay, implying a materialist critique of capitalist, industrial labor relations before swerving instead to hint of immaterial but murderous forces, machine habits left behind after factories have closed, possessing the bodies of unemployed workers once animated by assembly lines.
In 2011 the BBC produced a documentary on the influence of Russian cosmism on Soviet rocket design and space travel, titled Knocking on Heaven’s Door. The film sustains a mood of gently astonished condescension, alternating with wonder that fantastical dreams actually thrived in Soviet times, yielding productive advances in rocket science and communications research. The narrator claims to take us behind “the razzmatazz” of stage celebrations of Yuri Gagarin (the first human in space) and on a “strange journey into a Russian world where mysticism and science merge, and nothing is certain, not even death.” These words appear over scenes of young women lighting candles before icons, then we cut to a lid being lifted from a cryogenic container in which, we are to know, deceased clients have paid to store their heads. The narration and camera work betray snobbery towards people who ostensibly lived in a vacuum, without knowledge, behind the Iron Curtain, yet bravely managed under repression to mystically reanimate the universe with brainwaves and UFOs. The film works to localize Russia to the extreme, as if the rest of the industrialized world had not dreamed similar dreams, sometimes in competition with the USSR. The documentary host interviews Daniel Medvedev, representative for a small “transhumanist” company that preserves brains and bodies for future reanimation. While the camera pans the location, just outside Moscow on country roads, the host quips upon approach, “Not exactly a gateway to paradise.” Editors layer a seemingly real-time whisper (in fact dubbed) over a shot inside the lab, panning across piles of metal, bits of wood, and plastic containers: “Funny guy, refers to them as ‘patients’.” Adds the host: “Outside, it was like the set of some dystopic movie.”
The objects on the screen distract from Medvedev’s words about uploading souls in the future (motifs that would not long afterward structure U.S. productions such as Battlestar Galactica and Avatar). Montage points instead to materials in disarray, as if to claim these images as the real technologies for intuiting what is really going on here, thus animating materials to speak, elevating their agency to do so over Medvedev’s. This move is ironic from the perspective of cosmism, the philosophy that inspires the transhumanists, which posits that the whole universe, all matter, is always alive: conditions such as life and death, broken and whole, are all temporary. In case we miss the BBC’s point, the voice-over continues to undermine Medvedev’s words expressing the dream of a future classless world, in which all will thrive: “It would be a world of rich, healthy people, not for rich, healthy people.” Purrs the narrator, “That’s revisionism for you,” over an outdoor shot of empty blue water jugs, an old radiator leaning on a refrigerator, pots and lids around a metal table, sponges and a bottle of dish soap, a rooster visible behind bent chicken wire. A mess? Or tools caught mid-motion?
Russian-made news and documentaries cover similar topics and even film similar material arrays of objects. Some also use montage to frame and define people through relations to broken objects—fiction classics (e.g., Tarkovsky’s Stalker, 1979) did this, as did much of the 1990s chernukha. Unlike the BBC filmmakers discussed above, however, Russophone makers of recent documentaries of the mystical, occult, and paranormal do not. For example, in one episode of Battle of the Psychics, contestants were interviewed in the vestibule of an apartment building in front of broken, graffiti-marked mailboxes. Such mailboxes certainly contrast, as Muscovites often themselves remark, to the genteel, clean decor inside the apartments—but nothing in the camera work used the mailboxes to reframe the story in terms of systemic ideological failures, nor was the camera work used to undermine the speakers.
Compare the BBC deanimation of people by association with broken things to that which unfolds in the 1974 horror classic The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Both films say more about dominant ideologies linking materials, morality, class, and capitalism than they do about their respective subjects—in Texas Chainsaw, about the American working classes especially. This horror film lives on, by the way, as a familiar figure pointing to transgressions of right living in American pathologization of poverty as “squalor,” as if broken things signal frightening personality disorders rather than broader relations.16 Citations to this film pop up throughout popular culture, in reality shows such as Hoarders, in which participants liken their grandmother’s rooms piled high with Tupperware to “old horror films like Texas Chainsaw Massacre.”17
Most broken of all in Texas Chainsaw Massacre is the murderous, mute character called Leatherface, who animates his chosen instrument of death, the chainsaw, another thrumming monster. Or is Leatherface its puppet? His depraved “white trash” kin, we learn, are workers left idle when the old slaughterhouse turned off its lights. The slaughterhouse machines went still years ago, but their energy perversely continues to automatize and reanimate the old workers. While they have broken the factory down for parts, appropriating freezers and meat hooks the better to butcher unsuspecting teenagers, they are not agents; they merely carry on the labor the factory trained them to perform, its pieces (once means of production) still infusing them with a kind of instinctual second nature, mere living puppets (on why even stage puppets are, in fact, never merely passive, see Barker 2017).
The film compels disgust for the material experiences of labor in the United States, projecting fears of class warfare, of the working poor rising in murderous revenge. In both Texas Chainsaw and the BBC documentary, images of broken machinery or material disarray animate occult figures, evoking class warfare and the war against communism, neither of which, it seems, is over.
Within Russia, material disorder and poverty do not connect to decades of slasher film imagery (this is one genre that Soviet censorship definitively opposed). In cities that face the challenges of the permafrost line, where rust and weather beat hard on metal parts, more common than reactions of horror are expressions of pride in resourcefulness: a little duct tape, and we are on the road, like magic! There is a scene in the Russian blockbuster vampire film Night Watch (2004) in which the leader of the good guys (scruffy shape-shifters who run the energy utilities on old equipment) grabs a roll of duct tape and straps his head to the head of his scout, eye to eye, to create and hold a telepathic channel, to see what trouble is coming (from the sleek, shiny-new-car-driving bad guys).
In Russia (as in the United States), rejecting or avoiding objects deemed insufficiently new can be read as immature, as being too squeamish. And yet those who take such a stance may be increasing: celebrity psychic M., one of the youngest contestants on the first season of Battle, was often an outlier for the ways she spoke about objects put to use in the trials. In one episode, contestants were asked to distinguish which of two apartments in the same building had been the scene of a brutal murder. One was layered with decades’ worth of Soviet-style furniture, wallpaper, rugs, and light fixtures. The other was newly tiled, painted white, with chrome fixtures, appliances, and an Ikea sofa—Spartan, monochrome “Euro-decor.” The older contestants found the first apartment “cozy,” “holding good memories.” Only called it creepy. As it turned out, the murder had occurred in the new and glossy apartment; the blood had been cleaned up and the damage erased in the remodeling.
ENCHANTED WHOLES
In some cases, to disaggregate, to break and reconnect—as in film montage—serves less to animate particular beings than to rouse those abstract spirits imagined to drive nations or masses. German filmmaker Werner Herzog does such work in Bells from the Deep: Faith and Superstition in Russia (1993). A section in the middle of the film combines thespian with occult glamour: the camera sweeps along a narrow red carpet, cutting along the edges of polished stage boards. People filing past have lined up dozens of bottles, plastic and glass, large and small, labeled Klinskoe beer and Pepsi soda, all holding tap water for Alan Chumak to charge with cosmic energy. The camera cuts to pan a multitude of faces, people with arms raised up, palms facing forward. Chumak begins to speak, telling the crowd to imagine, “as if you are straining to hear over a bad telephone connection.” Then the camera rests behind his silhouette. Chumak raises his arms wide and begins a gestural conductor’s dance over the bottles while the people watch silently.18 Herzog has superimposed over the crowd, with mouths still, a Russian church choir, with the sound of the song “Pomiluj Gospodi, pomiluj Gospodi” [Lord, have mercy], a montage that recasts audience as congregation, transforming Chumak into choirmaster and priest, making holy water. Bells from the Deep was marketed and reviewed as a documentary, but Herzog calls it his most effective visual poem. Like a poem, it juxtaposes pieces that echo—bits of scenery with props, sounds with signs, faces with objects—in ways that he feels authentically convey the deep mystery of Russia.
Herzog readily allows that some of the pieces were his own inventions. In the section that gives the film its name, his voice narrates figures crawling across the frozen Lake Svetlojar, telling us that they want to peer below, to catch sight of broken church spires of the lost town of Kitezh, said to have been submerged in the thirteenth century, like Atlantis or Avalon. It turns out that when Herzog arrived in the winter to begin filming on location: “I wanted to get shots of pilgrims crawling around on the ice trying to catch a glimpse of the lost city, but as there were no pilgrims around, I hired two drunks from the next town and put them on the ice. One of them has his face right on the ice and looks like he is in very deep meditation. The accountant’s truth: he was completely drunk and fell asleep, and we had to wake him at the end of the take” (Cronin and Herzog 2003, 252).
Here, too, the director lays a track of choral music over outstretched arms and hands, animating a sleeping body as if reaching for communion through the ice. We can acknowledge the poetic virtuosity, the appeal to “deep mystery,” as an appeal that some Russians gravitate to, even as a moral lodestar (see Pesmen 2000). Unfortunately, appeals to beautiful or mysterious national essences have fortified refusals—in many states—to extend basic infrastructure and security to, for example, people like the Roma. However, to turn a critical eye on uses of juxtaposition is complicated, as Boym (2005) has noted, by the ways techniques for ostranenie have become associated with enlightenment, liberty, and creativity. Herzog animates a landscape to depict opacity by manufacturing bits of footage before the montage has even begun; his pieces are cut not from a whole, but to comprise an imagined unity.
These tendencies are not immanent in estrangement itself; there is more evidence to demonstrate that they have been baked in, have come to seem natural semiotic affordances through historical encounters that enveloped artists’ projects.
PERSPECTIVES
Avant-garde techniques—like any others—can serve repressive as well as liberatory ends. The original surrealist movement, among others, wed aesthetic commitment to anticolonial political conviction, arguing that Europe’s forms of rule and conquest, like its art forms, were constituted by linear realism. To overturn them, the surrealists championed art from the colonies, believing that the native peoples had retained open channels to “wild thought,” their art embedded in ritual and community, maintaining mystical roots that the West had poisoned. Surrealists, like many in the avant-garde, thus laid claim to modernism and primitivism at the same time in an aesthetic of associative symbolism, like dreams, they claimed, which might bring us into contact with the recently discovered subconscious.
FIGURE 7.1. Salvador Dali, Slave Market with Disappearing Bust of Voltaire, 1940.
Surrealism aims to juxtapose “two more or less [distant] realities” (Reverdy [1918] 1975). Many sorts of modernist montage and collage play with incongruities in scale or perspective; surrealism in particular challenges viewers to see such incongruities simultaneously as figure and as ground in a symmetry that mirrors the political claim, demanding attention to perspectives. There is no negative space beyond perspectives in the plural, so perception must keep shuttling—it is as if the viewer holds open more than one channel for information at once, and as if the painted beings or faces in both figure and ground are capable of taking perspectives themselves.
In 1925 the French surrealists declared furious opposition to empires, claiming alliance with anticolonial political movements, endorsing negritude in the 1930s and Algeria in the 1950s. Surrealists exhorted like-minded artists and poets to channel the voices of imperial subjects into a politics that would undermine the supposedly clear vistas of panoptic imperial vision. Surrealists hoped to catalyze alternatives to imperial display, to undermine both old realism and skeptical, rationalizing modernism.
FIGURE 7.2. London World’s Fair, Canada Exhibit, 1851. This drawing depicts viewers walking among exhibitions, suggesting possibilities for them to notice the perspectives of other walking viewers.
And yet in championing and claiming unconscious energies among colonized peoples, even in spurning the panoptic fantasy of transparent rule, the surrealists continued other imperial ways of looking: orientalizing juxtapositions of seemingly incongruous objects or ontological realms already ran through imperial dreams of extension.19 Imperial aesthetics never did, in fact, keep purely to linear logics or sweeping objective perspectives, and also juxtaposed realities, oscillating between figure and ground. To be sure, World’s Fairs’ competitive displays of political and economic hegemony favored ethnographic naturalism, and the realism of material detail certainly dominated within single dioramas that re-created households or rituals.20 To attend a World’s Fair, however, was never a matter of gazing just at one diorama, but of moving about among many of them. The fairs were spaces to watch other visitors who were also moving among the frames that marked individual exhibits.
Postcards of single exhibits depicted viewers not only taking in a model of another world (a future world) from some panoptic position, but seeing how others see.
FIGURE 7.3. Peer at those peering into the future among other lookers. New York World’s Fair, 1939.
The viewers at the dioramas’ edges suggest multiple angles; even more, who is viewer of whom is vulnerable to shifting and oscillation. This oscillation, in this case a quick switching across angles afforded by juxtaposition, is not, after all, what makes radical art radical. An effort of perception must be sustained, —and by more social forces than aesthetic forms or individual will. To see and to unsee may require effort, a learned oscillation of sensation (arguably more effort than to smell and to unsmell), but it can foster the opposite of revolutions, habituating persons to unsee sustaining labors, to identify a space as, for instance, all male or purely white.21 As we have seen, work to create or claim communicative contact deploys similar sensory oscillations (the heard and the unheard, the taut and the loose, the clear and the jammed)—but so too does work to create gaps. Moreover, many of the most misleadingly Russophobic accounts of events in Russia depend on a trope of large-scale oscillations in historical forms; this enables many to convince themselves that they understand Putin and thus all of Russia’s policy interests because, they are told, the current head of state reverbs from Stalin’s time.
Journalist Peter Pomerantsev, in Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible (2014), confesses to being enchanted by such readings while also insisting that Russian communications and media are best described as perversions, a kind of surreal approach to facts. By the book’s end, however, he admits that the very media techniques under fire in Russia were developed in the United Kingdom, not in Moscow. Now you see it; now you don’t. Indeed, some of the press tactics that Americans objected to during the 2016 presidential campaigns were blamed on Russian influence, but few are aware of specific tactics for undermining local news developed decades earlier by the U.S. State Department and the Radios. The ways the U.K., U.S., Russian, and other powers have divided communicative labors that block, open, and disorder news channels remain unseen.
BAD BREAKS
In autumn 2002 at GITIS, our first-year cohort devised a frame-breaking finale for the kapustnik: the boys unrolled a long red cloth across the front of the stage, scattering it with amber splinters of glass from beer bottles. The girls lined up behind in shimmery evening dress. Everyone sang in Latin: “Gaudeamus igitur iuvenes dum sumus”; on the last note, the girls slipped off their heels and stepped, in unison, onto the shards. The metaphor seems obvious: bare feet on broken glass; we suffer for art. During rehearsals, the teachers had denounced this ending—not because it broke the proscenium, broken glass against flesh at the edge of the stage, but as a “naturalist trick” that was “too sad and catastrophic” for a light gala genre. The students persisted, however, refining the finale for tragicomic effect.
They staged their finale not in some generalized space-time (such as “Russian culture”) but in counterpoint to recent memory of violence in the city, launched from behind a theatrical proscenium. In Moscow on the evening of October 23, 2002, armed Chechen rebels took the stage of the Dubrovka Theater, disrupting the second act of the hit musical Nord-Ost, based on a much-adapted Soviet novel, The Two Captains, by Venjamin Kaverin. The musical, an ode to Russian and Soviet polar and military aviation, boasted a real World War II bomber plane in the finale. On October 23 this finale was never played, because soon after the first intermission men dressed in contemporary military camouflage emerged from backstage and declared: “You are all hostages!,” clearing the boards of actors and blocking all exits. Confused audience members thought at first that the shots fired into the air were part of the show; as one survivor remarked later, “Everybody in the audience liked it, they shouted ‘Bravo’!” The siege lasted three days. The 763 hostages were tossed candy bars and nuts from the theater café, and the orchestra pit served as a toilet. Until cell phone batteries ran down, hostages were encouraged to call relatives and reporters, stating one key condition for their release: an end to the war in Chechnja. After the third night, before dawn, government troops gassed the building and raided it. All 50 rebels died, along with 139 hostages.
Teachers at GITIS all lost former students, actors, in the siege. During class time they spoke of it only once, and they did not encourage more talk about it. The rest of theatrical Moscow, however, drama critics and others, described the event as a new and catastrophic convergence of spectacle with terror. In the 1990s, bombings in the city had occurred mainly on public transit and in pedestrian spaces: on buses, in the metro, and in metro underpasses (see Lemon 2000a). The selection of a theater as the space for violent protest was new, and it intensified worry about incursions of violence and of spectacle into everyday life. Barely a week after the Nord-Ost incident, the play Terrorizm, by the brothers Vladimir and Oleg Presnjakov, opened at the Moscow Art Theater (MKhAT). Reviewers vaunted its treatment of the “small, cruel ways we all terrorize each other” while also reengaging long-running debates about how the “real” and the “theatrical” ought to relate, lamenting both that representations accrued too much energy, beginning to catalyze social reality, and, conversely, that media had begun to dilute real catastrophes into virtual spectacles.
Staging a jagged, broken proscenium frame, the students worked in ways that paralleled those debates, without direct words. Their teachers did not identify the problem with the finale in terms of the unspeakability of violence (pace Scarry 1987): pain is no more or less incommunicable than pleasure; the problem in speaking of pain or torture is to find willing listeners. To speak of pain as inflicted is to attribute responsibility. Yet the channels for such attribution weave through familial and state institutions and structures (Hill and Irvine 1993), and thus there are nearly always stakes in speaking of pain in ways that identify agents.
The commentary about the Dubrovka events, like the students’ broken bottles, gestured beyond pain, to concern that perhaps all those same technologies that make art artful and life livable—including frames for play and ways of playing with frames—are what kill us. But we are willing to keep trying, even when it means stepping on broken glass, making the audience wonder whether this is play or real. Like Chumak charging the water bottles lined up along the edge of the stage, in this way the students reached across the frame, if not quite breaking it. Of course, pressing their feet into shards, they knew that the right beer bottles break along curves, defanging the sharp edges. A bit of collective stage magic, this “naturalist trick” to break the frame.
