Life-building and Perspectival Vision, an interview with Maria Chehonadskih

The programme of life-building and perspectival vision is what proletarian culture begins to mean when it encounters the experience and events of revolution as they unfold.

Maria Chehonadskih, p.232.

 

Matthew Fuller: In this issue of Computational Culture we are looking at potential overlaps between different approaches to epistemology, specifically, political understandings of it arising from feminist and decolonial movements, and a possible set of confluences or complementarities these might have with Bayesian mathematics, and, in particular, the way these have significance for many aspects of computational culture, such as certain forms of AI or data science in the present.  I’m not going to ask you questions specifically about this, but we are extremely interested in the way your book addresses related questions of epistemology, subjecthood, subjectivity, politics, technology and scientific practices.  There seem to be some very interesting resonances with the theme of this special issue.

Though your book does not set up the same question, it is very illuminating for this special issue in that it engages with histories of knowledge formation in relation to wider kinds of materiality, the notions of sensing understood to be present in the world – the co-creation of the world by all beings, for instance, and the relation of science to politics, amongst other questions.   It offers a genealogy of a potential political metaphysics and epistemology that seems pertinent.

The book covers a time of great intellectual and practical ferment, of multiple attempts to find a mode of knowledge, politics and aesthetics adequate to bringing to fruition the revolution of October 1917, following also that of 1905, and in the midst of the upheavals that follow the first world war.  You do an immense amount of archival work, reactivating the early Soviet archive as these ideas came to life in direct organisational terms, and place them within their own historic formation.  It’s a remarkable experience to read, that unsettles the present, and also compelling a recognition of the contingencies and limits of what we are working with today.  Could you—as earthquakelike as it is—map the terrain of the book a little?

Maria Chehonadskih: You are absolutely right, the central problem of this book is the question of epistemology and revolution. In this book I was asking whether there is a junction between the action of the revolution and the formation of knowledge? Simply put, what happens when a radical break with the past is proclaimed? Does this very act of revolutionary transformation produce a new mode of relating to truth, history and modernity? In other words, does the revolution produce the same type of knowledge formation as it is the case in non-revolutionary times? During the Russo-Ukrainian War and within the post-socialist conjuncture, the question about epistemology and revolution has become more specific: we also have to problematise the imperialist core of knowledge within the epistemologies of socialism. We have to deconstruct this core more decisively in order to be able to go beyond it. In this book I questioned the dominant historical narratives centered around Leninism, dialectical materialism and the transition to Stalinism. I am obviously not the first one to attack this narrative. There have been many attempts to bring to the attention movements and traditions that were overshadowed by Leninism and Stalinism. However, dialectical materialism as a core philosophical and ideological foundation of the October Revolution has always been placed on the pedestal of much of the research so conducted. Anything that would conflict with this monumental ideology was measured against it. In the book, I struggle to name works within the field of philosophical and theoretical investigation which inquire into the epistemic reconstruction of the peripheral theories as fully autonomous formations with a strong voice and real life beside the crystallisation of an official socialism. I must note that epistemic reconstruction of this kind should be distinguished from empirically informed studies and case studies dedicated to the marginalised traditions, peoples, languages, biographies and movements. I am talking about an attempt to decentre the discourse of Leninism, an effort to deconstruct other theoretical developments in relation to the revolution.  My work builds on these empirically informed studies and case studies, but I have been trying to make sense of the entire constitutive rationality and the theoretical architectonics of revolutionary theories.

You may object to it and argue that there is nothing to deconstruct there. The most important theoretical formations outside dialectical materialism have already been discovered. For example, there are numerous comparative studies of the so-called ‘Russian Formalism’ with Structuralism. Yet this adjective ‘Russian’, invented in the West for the ease of identitarian and nationalist cataloguing against the transnationalism and federalism of the Soviet project, does something interesting to the formalist project. The so-called Russian Formalism, locally understood as a multitude of research programmes, including the Moscow Linguistic Circle and Saint Petersburg’s OPOYAZ (the Society for the Study of Poetic Language), have always been presented as a dissident movement, which had nothing to do with the revolutionary project. It has been rather seen as a national school maintaining pre-revolutionary scientific values. It is for this reason that it was possible to compare Formalism with Structuralism: ‘Russian Formalism’ is a non-Soviet formation that continues research programmes similar to the Western academic communities. The same could be said about Constructivism in art and architecture, Vygotsky’s school of psychology and anything else that destabilises the dialectical materialist core of the Soviet project. Thus, this particular narrativisation of post-revolutionary theory creates a parallel imperialist core to dialectical materialism. One ‘discovers’ a Western remainder of freedom and academic rigour within ‘socialist barbarity’. One makes it domestic for western conceptual terrains. I was trying to both confront both Cold War narratives of dialectical materialism as the only formation representing the October Revolution, on the one hand, and the recuperation of ‘everything else’ as dissidents, on the other.

Posing the question of epistemology in light of the conjuncture of knowledge and power, geopolitics and geography, as well as decentering and displacing dominant narratives, characterises many feminist and decolonial strategies. Saying that, I think we have to be careful with how much proximity we can establish between Soviet, socialist and decolonial historical moments. I think there is a huge difference and undeniably different axes of relations within the polar world of the Cold War. What I mean is rather a possibility to fruitfully engage with the important conceptual work that has been done in these fields. In this regard, Dipesh Chakrabarty’s Provincializing Europe and the recognition of how inadequate the application of European concepts to materials and realities that are very different to the domestic terrains of these concepts may be, are very important to this book. It was a very helpful conceptual orientation in relation to both the socialist project and its capitalist outside. The claim of this book was to say that we cannot domesticate Western theories and apply them to the study of socialist revolution. We should not Westernise this material. I was trying to observe discourses themselves and give them a voice. Such position can be idealist too, because we should not forget that our education and historical distance to this material affect how we analyse it. Yet, strategically, I was trying to look at the revolutionary discourses themselves and that is why some of the archival research was also quite important for my work.

The idea was to write a socialist counterpart to Foucault’s ‘The Order of Things’. I realise that it sounds overambitious, and I doubt that I managed to make this work. Writing with this ambition, however, led me to a close encounter with the French understanding of epistemologies, which also underpins postcolonial and, by extension, decolonial critique. Through Canguilhem, Simondon and the broad scope of Althusserianism, I also worked through the questions of epistemology and science. As my book simmered in this complex broth, I approached the old dilemma of how theoretical and scientific knowledge relates to life. Does the relation always assume a conflict?  The encounter with everyday life, history and experience was also very important for my protagonists, to the extent that most of them saw in it the essence of the revolution.  The understanding of knowledge has been important in relation to how knowledge is situated, and how we use knowledge. I think in my conclusions I formulated this quite nicely ,saying that ‘It is not enough to analyse the model of the panopticon. It is how the prisoners experience this “punitive rationality” in their daily interaction with it that constitutes the essence of what it does. The embodiment of the model transforms what has been modelled’ (pp. 233-234). This does not escape late Foucault who works through this question in relation to the transformation of the self, but I was also thinking about social use as a form of transformative action within a given structure. For example, about how a peasant woman could wear a constructivist unisex dress in the 1920s. I did not trust what was written in the official text or what was proposed as a model dress or a model building for the proletariat. My strategy was to read journals and unpublished debates where all these polemical questions could be found. They aren’t proclaimed in manifestos, but appear on the margins of discourse.

MF: There is an extraordinary proliferation of terminology, words to try to exemplify and almost to summon into being new modes of thought that were adequate to the kinds of equality being envisaged and in some cases being put into place at that time.  Words, such as empiriomonism, comrade things, proletarian perspective, and so on.  Could you identify some of these, and how they embody a political epistemology?

MC: Let me begin with empiriomonism, which functions as a political and theoretical opposition to dialectical materialism and informs the artistic and literary practices of the avant-garde and Proletkult (Proletarian Cultural Enlightenment Organisations). The term was invented by Alexander Bogdanov, who synthesised empiricism and Marxism and, as part of a wider circle of activists and thinkers, proclaimed that the German philosophy of science, the works of Ernst Mach, for example, should ground the scientific understanding of Marxism, as opposed to the idealist theories of materialism found in the works of the Plekhanov’s school. Bogdanov published a three-volume treatise, Empiriomonism, in which he postulated that matter should not be understood as a passive substance and solid entity, but as a concatenation of forces and resistances through which the systems of subjects and objects, otherwise known as environments, societies and material culture emerge. Bogdanov’s empiriomonism became a revolutionary movement dedicated to a Marxist analysis of the systems of people, things and ideas. The question was how people, things and ideas compose into a structure, and how they become part of a more complex composite structure. Empiriomonism rejects subject-object dualism. There is no cognising subject who perceives the passive world outside itself. There is only one plane of forces, resistances and structures that form objects and subjects. For this reason, it is a monist philosophy, as opposed to the dualist philosophies of old materialism. Empiriomonism is a philosophy of the revolution, according to Bogdanov and his followers, because it delegates agency to a new kind of subject who is not a classical cognising individual, but an entity formed accidentally in a process of merging into a structure. This accidental arrival into the world as a product of all kinds of environments, nonetheless, empowers this subject, because it discovers the power in the collective co-evolution and cooperation.

The development of these concepts relate this standpoint to systems theory and the philosophy of environment. For instance, the concept of proletarian perspective, and overall, a very strong emphasis on perspectivism and relativity, reflects the position of an observer within the complex composite structure. Ernst Mach gives a very helpful illustration, when he says that an object, such as a pencil, is a straight object only under certain conditions, but if you put it in water, the pencil will appear as crooked. Mach says, that it would be too simple to say, that what we see as a crooked object is just a false vision. The optical illusion is neither true nor false. It would rather be right to say that under certain conditions, the object becomes crooked. In other words, we should understand the conditions under which things appear as what they are. Bogdanovites understand the proletarian and class perspective in similar terms. Bogdanov gives a notorious example of a peasant who believes in wood goblins. For this example, he was instantly attacked for holding a position of heretical non-Marxist relativism: he says that even if these goblins do not exist, they may determine religious, culinary and other everyday practices of peasants. Thus, wood goblins exist for them and in their historical experience. The wood goblins are not real in an absolute objective sense, but in a relative historical sense.

The notion of perspectivism becomes important for the understanding of social totality and the artistic focus on proletarian and people’s experience. For example, in Andrei Platonov’s novels, animals act as revolutionaries and workers. It is not an element of absurdism, but the proletarianised peasants’ perception of horses and bears as co-workers and comrades. From this grounding, objects or things in daily life can also become comrades, if they are decommodified, made by people and for the use of the people.  The relation between people and objects then constitutes a system of things. This also relates to the production of ideas. The question becomes of how to construct the dis-alienated relationships between the members of what Bogdanov termed a system of people, things and ideas. Artists create communist pots and dresses, the comrade things for the proletariat. They are based on free liberated labour and are functional rather than decorative. So, comrade things exist outside of the circulation of commodities and the capitalist way of producing them. Other artists discuss the system of all socialist objects and new post-revolutionary infrastructures, such as public transport, central heating and free housing.

MF: Tektology in particular seems to have strong resonances with ideas of distributed and situated cognition, of systems theory and ecological thought.  Organisational interaction in a given system, or multiple interweaving systems, as a means of structuring experience, becomes a way of understanding all kinds of processing of matter and of thought, with built in and multi-layered notions of perspectivism that seem highly relevant today.

MC: I think that both Tektology and Empiriomonism resonate with some elements of these ideas. Tektology continues empiriomonism, but also breaks with it. If empiriomonism is a philosophical doctrine expressed in the language of a philosophical treatise, which sets itself the task of resolving mind-body dualism, Tektology rejects old philosophical questions. In Tektology, Bogdanov moves to the objective description of system formation. Tektology largely abandons the problem of subject and object. It concerns with a formal description of how a system comes into being. Indeed, it is essentially a proto-systems theory and a proto-cybernetic theory with elements of environmental philosophy. Bogdanov introduces something that is very close to contemporary cybernetic understandings of information. He doesn’t use the word information, but his theory of metabolism between matter and energy, as well as his reflection theory, anticipate what will later be conceptualised as the transmission of information. The proximity to Mach’s scientific epistemology makes it also very close to the theories of situated knowledge. The concept of proletarian perspective demonstrates how it works conceptually.

MF: On page 19, there is a very interesting quote from Bogdanov on the equality of thinkers and of epistemologies that comes from his book Empiriomonism.¹ He argues that, “If for the empiriomonist the experience of all fellow human beings is of equal value—something I have previously designated as a certain cognitive ‘democracy’—then for the empiriomonist this experience is moreover the result of the collectively organised work of all people, of a kind of cognitive ‘socialism’.”  This seems to have echoes of Jacques Rancière’s arguments for the equality of intelligence (in, say, The Ignorant Schoolmaster) or more general anarchist imperatives to equality in liberty, but it also seems to establish a way of thinking about social structures as forms of cognition that elaborate, entrain or repress capacities in different ways.  Could you elaborate a bit on what is meant here?

MC: Here Bogdanov emphasises the difference between the theory of knowledge in the empiriocriticism of Ernst Mach and Richard Avenarius and his own empiriomonism. The democracy of the former has to do with the discovery of the socio-economic roots of cognition and scientific development. For example, according to Mach’s theory, rational and abstract knowledge evolves from intuitive labour technics and the formal documentation of these technics in instructions and manuals to scientific methodologies. The appropriate example of this theory would be a historical illustration of how the manual technics of counting first developed into mathematical knowledge and then into computational algorithms. Bogdanov gives a more speculative example of the labour technics of splitting and crushing, which may have led to the discovery of the concept of particle and atom. Taking this theory of knowledge a step further, he argues that labour should be understood as a force that organises social experience in its entirety as an economic, technical and cultural form. It is from this assertion that the formula of the unity of people, things and ideas emerges. In this sense we can also say that Bogdanov’s theory of knowledge is close to the debates about the status of schooling as intuiting and learning through encounter and practice. The Bogdanov of the post-revolutionary period comes closer to Rancière’s arguments with regards to pedagogy and power dynamics in political organisations. Proletkult is a new form of political organising against the party form. It is based on a horizontal unity between comrades rather than top-down leadership and dictatorship. In his experiments with proletarian schools and universities, Bogdanov was openly against the master-pupil model of education. He envisioned laboratory forms of knowledge production as the basis of his short-lived Karl Liebknecht University.

MF: There is a wealth of material in the book which relates to the formation of groupings such as Proletkult, LEF, and the articulation of arguments and practices around Constructivism and Productivism as well as wider debates around art including notions of “Factography”.  As you say, “It is hardly art as we know it, but it is definitely a new biopolitical technics for the organisation of proletarian life.”² Equally, there are new figures of knowledge in action, such as zhiznestroenie, ‘life-building’ which involve a substantial transformation of existing social roles, into a communist use of the body, indeed a communist form of the body and its techne, with consequences for their epistemic and technical aspect.  Could you elaborate a little on this?

MC: My intervention into the artistic debates was to show the influence of empiriomonism and tektology on art and literature. I wanted to see how this epistemic proposition has been disseminated outside of Bogdanov’s own work. I wanted to stress the importance of the previously ignored influence of Proletkult, which was established by Bogdanov and Lunacharsky on the eve of the February Revolution in 1917.  What I was able to discover is that the ideas about the concatenation of people and things, radical equality, workers merging with infrastructures, comradeship and collectivism, construction and life-building proliferate through the new Proletkult pamphlets and debates about proletarian culture. This displaces the standard art history narrative about the epistemic foundations of the avant-garde and constructivism, which is too often has been seen as an expanded modernist programme in the post-revolutionary context.

Factography is a movement that only has recently received attention it deserves.³ It emerges much later, in the late 1920s out of discussions about the crisis of the novel and the new forms of post-revolutionary writing based on fact, journalism and the non-fiction forms of autobiographies. I was interested in their theory of fact, which has an empiricist foundation. The question of what is considered to be factual in creative writing and how it depends on perception, interpretation and political standpoint emerges, because the convulsive events of revolution demand registration and documentation, which traditional literary genres cannot do due to the very hectic temporality of the post-revolutionary life. Novels package the facts of revolution into the formulaic and fictional narratives, which represents the old regime and its dramas irrelevant for socialist society. How can we represent the revolutionary facts of life, which emerge every day? Should we record the direct speech of workers and peasants – but is it not mediated and distorted by our experience and subjectivity? Tretiakov proposes to write biographies of things, for example, about the production of bread, instead of placing the torments of a bourgeois individual at the centre of our writing.  This would demand a close cooperation with workers who produce bread, as well as the knowledge of the entire production process and how it is arranged in the post-revolutionary factory spaces.

I linked these debates about fact to the Bogdanovian question of knowledge production, life-building and perspectivism. The fact is not an immediate experience or a perceived empirical reality, it is a co-production based on practical action and observation in the spirit of Bogdanov’s theory of labour technics. The mining of the fact out of the sea of the post-revolutionary empirical is the process of collective shaping of the new post-revolutionary structures of production and consumption, which includes the creation of the comrade things and socialist infrastructures. In this sense it is the practice of organising post-revolutionary experience or what they termed as life-building and construction.

MF: Later in the book you discuss the work of the novelist Platonov, particularly drawing on his book Chevengur, recently translated into English by Robert Chandler and Elizabeth Chandler.⁴ Platonov is writing during a period of the retreat of the hopes of the revolution, the sclerotisation of the party, and eventually Stalinism, moving from the later 1920s to the 1930s.  One of the many things that Platonov is doing is trying to think about the way, in which images of thought or of hopes of thought and theories of experience enter into experience.  You call his work “the proletarian encyclopaedia of a really existing multitude of the poor”⁵ who are also “comrades of the animals and plants”, people often travelling across the landscape of the provinces of the Soviet Union of that time.  As a novelist, as well as an engineer, Platonov is less programmatic than some of the other writers discussed and arranges many voices, doubts and tensions in his work, whilst also siting his writing firmly in the possibility of the building of communism.  How does Platonov, in this polyperspectival work, address knowledge, experience and power?

MC: According to my reading, which I acknowledge might be highly speculative, I link what Platonov is trying to do in the field of literature to the idea of a proletarian encyclopaedia. Platonov does not directly use the notion of an encyclopaedia, but many scholars in literature have discussed the repetitive structures, characters and notions in his fiction and non-fiction texts. The same short story could have up to five different versions, partly because Platonov was often unable to evade editorial censorship and tried to make his text publishable, but also because he had a clear strategy of repeating and articulating the same idea in various forms. The same characters move from one text to the next. They are a kind of missionaries who disseminate Platonov’s concepts. I was trying to map these concepts and reconstruct his encyclopaedia. It is also a proletarian encyclopaedia, because following the debates on perspectivism, Platonov constructed different points of view in his novels. These are the points of view of people who encounter the event of revolution. The totality of visions constituted through the multiplicity of voices and experiences displace the voice of the narrator, who becomes only a modest listener to this cacophony arranged in a collage-like structure. We enter the space of proletarian experience, which exceeds the territory of the industrial working class. In his novels, not only human characters reason about the revolution, but also do the animals, grains and soil, exhausted by capitalism. I mentioned his working class bear and horse, but there are also cows and burdocks, who are anguished in their anticipation of socialism, because it will bring to the end the suffering and exploitation of nature. His human characters often participate in Socratic dialogues, utter philosophical propositions and invent strange proletarian concepts. Platonov distributes his authorial power to the anonymous voices of his people. The question of power is otherwise articulated as the problem of proletarian power, its use and abuse in the concrete historical context of the revolution.

MF: You include a quote from a text by Platonov called “Proletarian Poetry” which seems interesting for the topic of this issue.  He writes:

“Is the truth an abstract category?  No.  Huge masses of people want the truth now. And that which a body wants cannot be immaterial, spiritual, abstract.  Truth is a real thing.  It is a perfect organisation of matter in relation to human being”⁶.

You could read that quote and think, OK, that’s very positivist in a certain way, but Platonov develops the form of his writing by layering and interweaving many such perspectives, often inhabiting them in an affirmative way to seeing where they lead.  How does this kind of statement, which might read as a kind of positivism, but is an aspect of toská, or anguish, work in relation to ideas of desire, “poor life” and labour in Platonov, or of a relation between desire and truth?

MC: We haven’t yet touched on the question of positivism, which is an elephant in the room, when it comes to Bogdanov’s utilitarian theory of knowledge. The appreciation of the new types of scientificity, as opposed to fiction or speculation, has a positivist flavour. Lukacs, for example, attacked Tretiakov and Factography for what he saw as its descriptive journalism and  formulaic characterisation of the protagonist. Instead of seeing a living being with complex psychology, the factographer discovers the category of the conscious proletariat in every working class person they encounter. With Platonov, it gets more complicated. Indeed, what is seen as truth is the bodily need, but what the body truly wants is communism, because only communism can feed and nourish this body properly. Communism then should become a concrete thing, materialised in matter and body. The hungry body cannot be fed by speculative ideas about the arrival of communism after the end of yet another war, or yet another economic experiment. However, this kind of positivist ethos is overturned as an ontological claim in his later writings, because the physiological need for communism also characterises animals, plants and soil, or in general, what Platonov calls a poor life, a planetary state of poverty. If we continue to exploit the soil in the same way as capitalist agricultural production does, there will be no material realisation of communism, only a beautiful abstraction. The emotional spectrum of anguish, toská, that we encounter in Platonov, is to do with this basic bodily need of communism, which torments humans and nature. As one of his protagonists says ‘the world should be changed as soon as possible. Otherwise even the animals will be going insane’.⁷

MF: The reality that Platonov is trying to capture and understand is also produced through language, of variously mixed kinds.  Can you say a little about Platonov’s approach to language, and the way in which it involves different notions of perspective, knowledge, subjectivation and so on?

MC: That is a notoriously difficult question.  In my view – and here I am following a huge body of philological studies and careful reconstructions of what is going on in terms of linguistic transformations in Platonov’s work – he created a language within the Russian language.
Nobody spoke this language. What he does with it is often achieved by twisting grammatical rules, transforming concrete nouns into abstract concepts. Sometimes he also plays with dialects and pronunciation and invents parascientific words. In short, he creates a physiognomy of a proletarian take on an abstract idea.

MF: The ‘doubject’ seems to be a key notion here, or an example of such an approach. How does this formulation come about?

MC: The ‘doubject’ is a concept that one of the characters, Kopionkin, invents. This character is a communist who travels across central Russia and helps establish Soviet power. He was a peasant before the civil war, and travels with a working-class communist horse. Kopionkin tries to make sense of Marxist theory, Bolshevism and revolution. He invents the word doubject (dub’ekt), perhaps, by fusing the word subject, object and oak (dub in Russian), when a party member, a proper subject from Moscow with a communist party membership card, attempts to enter his communist commune. Kopionkin cannot remember the word subject, but he remembers that it is somehow similar to the word object, while the oak is the symbol of stupidity and strength. Another character takes this up and calls his fellow peasant the subject-human. This is because communist propaganda taught that the peasants and workers were now the subjects of history, no longer the mere objects of their bosses. Then you have a comrade woman, because it is the woman with communist views. There are also people termed half-intellectuals, because they don’t have noble origins, or half-peasants, because they are neither rich nor poor, and nobody knows to which Marxist class category they belong.

MF: Platonov has a particular feel for technology as a site of dreams.  For instance, in Chevengur, there is a figure early on – Zakhar Pavlovich – a peasant who, when introduced, makes use-free wooden replicas of tools and devices. He then encounters the railway, “a new world of appealing ingenuity,” to which he is happy to dedicate his life, starting at the lowest level – cleaning out the firebox.  In The Extinguished Lamp of Ilyich, there is the story of the introduction of electricity to a village, as Platonov himself did, which portrays the thoughtfulness of the engineer who attempts this task and the wider experiences of the villagers.  What kinds of processes of subjectivation in and through, and against, technology attract Platonov? Platonov also invented a number of technical devices, including a system for irrigation – could you say a little about these and how they embodied his thinking?  For instance, the ecological dimension of his writing?

MC: The above examples seem to represent a self-critique and mocking of his earlier political ideas, which vulgarised Bogdanovite understandings of technology as the junction of labour, matter and energy. Labour-energy shapes materials as products of technological infrastructures. In this schema labour is not a subject, but a dynamic element within the broader infrastructure. The young Platonov, like many Proletkult artists, dreams of becoming a machine and losing himself in the collective body of industrial infrastructure. This industrial optimism and technological utopianism about the new age of machines who can deliver communism and transform life becomes hushed with the political and artistic maturation of Platonov. He later tends to appreciate the artistry and creativity of workers who twist the efficiency of machines and introduce artisanal element into industrial world of precision and coldness. It seems that Platonov got troubled because he saw how such techno-utopianism mutated into the Stalinist industrialisation plan and violence towards nature that was not dissimilar to that of capitalist economic strategies. However, even in his earlier science fiction writings, which unfortunately have not been translated, a protagonist usually experiments with sophisticated technology that invokes an ecological catastrophe, because the experimenter becomes obsessive and somewhat Nietzschean in his use of this technology. The human use of technology and craft by workers and peasants is contrasted with the obsessive irrational rationalisation of a scientist, which can also be treated as a critique of positivism. In the article ‘On the First Socialist Tragedy’ written in the early 1930s, Platonov openly critiques the Stalinist obsession with technology and warns that nature is not a passive matter that can be shaped in any way society wants. Nature has its own ‘dialectical’ mechanisms to respond to harmful human actions and restore its magnitude.⁸

This doesn’t mean that Platonov embraces some kind of Rousseauism. In fact, he has a very particular view of how communist technology should function and operate. This technology should “repair the earth”, restore it from the centuries of capitalist exploitation. Platonov invented quite a few technologies himself. One was a “photo-electric resonator-transformer,” something that resembles a contemporary solar panel, another one was an electric moisturiser for roots systems of plants, an automated electric device for soil watering invented to fight drought in Voronezh region. In his numerous journalistic articles and essays, he discusses the path to a socialist economy based on renewable energy.  Overall, he seeks to rethink what Marxists understand by nature and technology, integrating Bogdanovian insights with the discussions of agrarian socialists and his own experiences of engineering and land reclamation.

Notes