Modernism and the making of the Soviet New Man

Vujošević, Tijana

doi:10.7765/9781526114877

Cited by 19 publications

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“…Bogdanov, Lunacharsky, and Tatlin all played into the sense of spectacle, from popular theatre and street crowd to the architecture of the future sublime. And then there were the names less well known to us, such as Meyerhold, and the subsequent streams of designers and engineers who were ready do work on or for the human soul (Vujošević, 2017).…”

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David Roberts meets the switchman: A footnote to the total work of art in European modernism

Beilharz

2019

Thesis Eleven

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The scope of David Roberts’ book on the Total Work of Art is daunting. It stretches from the French Revolution through to the modernist avant-garde and its dissolution in totalitarianism. If Wagner is its chief leader and artistic animator, it also echoes back to Robespierre, Napoleon and Saint-Simon, and through at least to Bolshevism and Futurism, Stalinism and Italian Fascism. The total work of art totalizes the world of the artwork, but it also adds in the politics of the sublime, turns politics into art and negates both as independent spheres of existence at the same time. In this piece I offer some observations on the thinking of a key switchman in this story: Leon Trotsky.

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confidence: 99%

David Roberts meets the switchman: A footnote to the total work of art in European modernism

Beilharz

2019

Thesis Eleven

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Blagoustroistvo: Infrastructure, Determinism, (Re-)coloniality, and Social Engineering in Moscow, 1917–2022

Lähteenmäki

Murawski

2023

Comp Stud Soc Hist

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Blagoustroistvo is an archaic Russian word used today primarily to refer to urban public works. This article, a collaboration between an anthropologist and a historian, focuses on aesthetics, rhetorics, and concrete practices of blagoustroistvo in Moscow during two temporal junctures: the first decade following the October Revolution (ca. 1917–1930), and the decade of Sergey Sobyanin’s Moscow Mayoralty (2010–). Our juxtaposition reveals striking continuities and contrasts. Both in the 1920s and 2010s, we show, blagoustroistvo was characterized by a semiotically-intense presence in the city; associated with an emphasis on deterministic socio-psychological “engineering”; ideologically framed by a “vernacularized” form of Marxism-Leninism; and invested with a powerful role in reconfiguring society’s spatial hierarchies, political geometry, and class consciousness. In the former period, social transformation referred to the inversion of class hierarchies and a partly illusory reconfiguration of power between center and periphery. In the 2010s, however, blagoustroistvo became a project that sought a reversion to class categories and the re-colonial reconstitution of the center’s coercive domination of the fringes. Our analysis proffers blagoustroistvo—a high-modernist, deterministic “infrastructural ideology” that has endured into and flourished in the twenty-first century—as a uniquely illustrative concept for understanding the shifting ideologies of Soviet and post-Soviet infrastructural modernity and its winding but stubborn colonial logics. Moreover, our explication of blagoustroistvo’s trans-epochal meanderings brings comparative nuance to current global debates around the alleged “return” of “social engineering” to urban governance and design in the guise of artificial intelligence, big data, smart cities, and “surveillance capitalism.”

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Architecture between empire and revolution: housing and the shaping of Soviet Leningrad

Lähteenmäki

2024

Planning Perspectives

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Modernism and the making of the Soviet New Man

Cited by 19 publications

References 0 publications

David Roberts meets the switchman: A footnote to the total work of art in European modernism

David Roberts meets the switchman: A footnote to the total work of art in European modernism

Blagoustroistvo: Infrastructure, Determinism, (Re-)coloniality, and Social Engineering in Moscow, 1917–2022

Architecture between empire and revolution: housing and the shaping of Soviet Leningrad

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