K-punk said:
Communism, after all, is associated with a constructivist aesthetic: as inhumanly glamorous as anything Kapital has come up with.
To which we might punktifilously add: "
The Lyotard of Libidinal Economy and Duchamp's Trans/Formers provocatively combines modernist aesthetics with Marxism to propose that the inorganic body of the proletariat - an artificialized body, utterly cut off from the supposed organicism of the peasantry, bred as a machine part in the labs of capital to withstand the inhuman conditions of the factory and therefore capable of a whole new affective range - is the greatest modernist product ever. Lyotard scandalised the bleating socialists of his day by writing of a proletarian jouissance: ' the English unemployed did not become workers to survive, they - hang on tight and spit on me - enjoyed the hysterical, masochistic, whatever exhaustion it was of hanging on in the mines, in the factories, in hell, they enjoyed it, enjoyed the mad destruction of their organic body which was indeed imposed upon them, they enjoyed the decomposition of their personal identity, the identity that the peasant tradition had constructed for them, enjoyed the dissolution of their families and villages, and enjoyed the monstrous anonymity of the suburbs and the pubs in the morning and the evening.' Programme for a post-Soviet constructivism: to extract this masochistic jouissance of artificiality, the inorganic and the anonymous from capitalism and put it to work for communism. "
And to which we might also add another word on overidentification. Russian avant-garde art of the early twenties (futurism, constructivism) not only zealously endorsed industrialization, it even endeavored to reinvent a new industrial man, one who was no longer the old man of sentimental passions and traditions but the new man who gladly accepts his role as a bolt or screw in the gigantic coordinated industrial machine. As such, it was subversive in its very ultraorthodoxy, that is, in its overidentification with the core of the official ideology: the human image that we get in Eisenstein, Meyerhold, constructivist paintings, and so on emphasizes the beauty of his or her mechanical movements, his or her thorough depsychologization. What was perceived in the West as the ultimate nightmare of liberal individualism, as the ideological counterpoint to Taylorization, to Fordist ribbonwork, was in Russia hailed as the utopian prospect of liberation. Recall how Meyerhold violently asserted the "behaviorist" approach to acting: no longer advocating emphatic familiarization with the person the actor is playing but instead ruthless bodily training aimed at cold physical discipline, at the ability of the actor to perform the series of mechanized movements. This is what was unbearable to, and in, the official Stalinist ideology, so that Stalinist socialist realism effectively was an attempt to reassert a "socialism with a human face," that is, to reinscribe the process of industrialization into the constraints of the traditional psychological individual. In socialist realist texts, paintings, and films, individuals are no longer rendered as parts of the global machine, but as warm, passionate persons.
K-punk said:
the Chinese pro-market anti-capitalist communism
Someone mistook markets for capitalism up-thread. Markets have existed for thousands of years (and money almost as long, money [mere payment capital] being
profoundly different from abstract capital), and so would conceivably outlive capitalism, being essential to any mode of trade. Modern capitalism merely appropriated markets and money, as it always does most other things, to its foundational moments in the Cartesian, rational-empirical 18th century). I'm assuming K-punk is using "anti-capitalist" here in relation to its humanist supports - anti-parliamentarianism, anti-rural, anti-village ("Oh look! Twenty more destroyed this week to make way for gleamprog coal-fired power plants!"), anti-religion (delirial suppression of the Falun Gong, which, despite being founded as recently as 1992, when Chinese capital went manic, boasts 100m members - ie capitalism at its purest as anti-capitalist (real nice of the US to give it's currency a fixed exchange rate too). [Gek, the Chinese, notoriously, LOVE gambling (not sure whether this is due to present circumstances or a hauntological displacement from British-colonial opium trading times!), so there should be no shortage of them willing to take up strategic positions as hysterical rogue traders with the West's leading financial institurions. Can you organise the visas
?]
