A brief partial-summary of last wednesdays seminar:

we opened with a short, non-committal discussion around Hatherley’s article, which I thought I’d summarize and intersperse with points from our discussion:

– the essay introduces Taylor as an American Cybernetician , whose meathod of regulating and rationalizing  labour was pivotal in what Lenin saw as a means of “preparing the grounds for a system that will supersede capitalism” – as Hatherly puts it: “we could read Lenin’s Taylorism as a liberating theoretical leap. A harnessing of mechanisation and efficency, of mathematical infallibility, to a radically democratic Communist society”

He frames Zamyatin’s novel in this context, departing from the idea of We as simply a cautionary tale, a critical attack on the ideologies it appears to satirize. Instead Hatherly looks at the book as more oblique, ambiguous and complex.

– within the satirical exaltations of Taylorism is “a sincere wonder at the possibilities of the machine” manifest within Zamyatin’s aesthetic: we noted that, barring the Integral and the executional “Machine”, there is an apparent lack of technology within the book. Instead, the form imposed on the narrative (discussed previously) functions as a kind of embodiment of the technology that in part inspires its fascination  – affording a perspectival shift in the blurred, fragmentary relaying of thought and imagery; the increased velocity of a “technological” epoch – the book reads like a landscape as seen from an automobile, an airplane. 

(on the tangent of aesthetics, El Lissitzky and his (children’s?) book About Two Squares was mentioned briefly, as employing form in its minimal, elemental construction, as a means of communication and propaganda – how does the form of Lissitzky’s art – and of constructivist art in general – relate to that of Zamyatin’s writing?)

– Hatherly answers this question directly: “We is on one level an extrapolation and expansion of Constructivism, the utopian art movement of the period, which aimed at a transformation of everyday life at its smallest levels, harnessing art to production.”  

– at the time in which We was written, it is noted that – ravaged by civil war and dissolved through mass migration – both economically and technologically the Soviet Union was crippled: “At this point in the Soviet Union there were barely factories at all, let alone the Taylorised glass constructions dreamt of by Lenin, Rodchenko or Zamyatin. Taylorism had the power of the purest of fantasies.”

Hatherly concludes by distilling a broken optimism from the book, acknowledging the kinds of potentials within the rationalist construction that is both denounced and ratified through Zamyatin’s book:

” Contained within the novel and in the Constructivism it satirises is a promise of a transformation of everyday life via technology that is in part based on the possibilities of fantasy…there is something bracing about these austere, rationalist constructions in their collectivity and idealism, a broken promise still riven with poignancy.”

– moving away from the essay, the topic of propaganda came up in relation to the function of the Integral. The ship, while destined for other, off-planet civilizations, is more a propagandistic tool for OneState itself – providing a public work that encapsulates a collective voice of self-aggrandizement repeated through its continued construction.

Lifting suburbia from its terrestrial confines, these 70’s space-colony renderings express a desire to preserve normality in an era of upheaval. Above the clouds of atomic test explosions and the turbulence of social liberalism, these colonies of four-bedroom houses and freshly-mowed lawns drift in orbits of guileless innocence – endlessly spinning into their own domestic oblivions. 

The title is only loosely related today’s conversations, but I like it.  in Ana’s copy (the 1924 translation) it reads “Hey Mathematician! Dreaming?” which doesn’t sound quite as good.

We opened with an overview of Hutchings’ “Structure and Design in a Soviet Dystopia”, which approaches We as an illustration of Zamyatin’s critical principles – an embodiment (in its design, structure) of the author’s effort “to forge a new aesthetic appropriate to an epoch of technology and speed” – in other words, “the modern imagination, obsessed with physics” – this, notably, in spite of the critical/satirical position he allegedly takes on Futurism (Italian and Russian) and Constructivism.  

– – – Taylorism 

– Zamyatin’s text is unarguably sparse and condensed – streamlined into a rapid and efficient journalistic format replete with headline bullets synopsizing each compact “record”. This captures the immediacy and suspense of events unfolding in real time, contributing a velocity to the text that makes it into a sort of material projectile or vehicle of its own. views from an airplane, a car window. 

– the brevity and speed, coupled with typographic associations of blurred imagery and fragmentation: the repeated use of dashes and dotted lines: “today’s viewer and reader will know how to complete the picture, fill in the words…” – Zamyatin.

revolutionary properties of art, the literal connotations of “revolution” within the structures Zamyatin imagines: specifically glass spaceship INTEGRAL:

a graceful, elongated ellipsoid made of our glass-as eternal as gold, as flexible as steel. I saw the transverse ribs and the longitudinal stringers being attached to the body from within; in the stern they were installing the base for the giant rocket motor . . . . 

With fire they sliced and welded the glass walls, angles, ribs, brackets. I saw tranparent glass monster cranes rolling slowly along glass rails. . . . (We, 82)

  – with comparisons made to the greatest Constructivist monument never built  – Tatlin’s tower (Monument to the Third International)

– both function as propaganda machines; the notions of interplanetary vs. terrestrial space called forward here might be useful to further explore – how does the former abstract into the latter? – I don’t know if this makes any sense.  

– on the obsession with form / structure with a certain disregard for the element of human inhabitance – a kind of environmental determinism, whereby the parameters of a construction, (of a city, of OneState) dictate the actions of its denizens.

juxtapositions of the rational/irrational made through geometrical associations: the euclidian angularity of OneState and the matter it contains vs. curvilinearity of the abstract: “I didn’t hear that laugh, only saw it with my eyes. I saw the curve of that laugh, ringing, steep, resilient and lively as a whip” (30). 

the “fluid” that runs through the novel’s dream-irrational moments . . . !?

employment of mathematical symbols to do semantic work: 

(- -) the idea of synthesis, vs. (+) affirmation and (-) negation

√-1 (literally, an imaginary unit, or as D-503 puts it, an “invisible solid”) as a site of existential angst, a rupture in the protagonist’s maintenance of logic and reality. protracting this into the significance of textuality:

“On the surface of the paper, in the two-dimensional world, these lines are right next to each other. But in another world. . . I’m starting to lose my feel for figures.” (60)

– another thought about contemporary glass architecture, related to wednesdays seminar: the ways in which we navigate and socially inhabit digital space seem to, in some ways, be replicated in our physical environment – a nytimes article from last year draws parallels between online voyeurism / exhibitionism and the increased transparency of new condominiums.

“To literature today, the plane surface of daily life is what the earth is to an airplane – a mere runway from which to take off, in order to rise aloft, from daily life to the realities of being, to philosophy, to the fantastic”                                                                                                              
           
– Yevgeny Zamyatin: “On Literature, Revolution, Entropy and Other Matters” Soviet Heretic, p111.

an excellent essay by Owen Hatherley

This is the first of what will become a series of seminar recaps – a fragment-archive of the conversations we have in class. On Wednesday we started to think – on a very general, meta scale – about Zamyatin’s We :

– a brief political/historical context; Zamyatin was writing in light of the Russian Revolutions, WWI. Its critical position on Communism caused the book to banned from publication in Russia, and eventually Zamyatin was himself forced to emigrate (1931), settles in Paris.

– questions of translation, re-translation: while the novel was completed c. 1921, it was was initially published in english, (new york, 1924), and made a circuitous trajectory through a range of translations before finally attaining Russian publication in the late 80’s. The penguin intro chronicles failed attempts made at posing the novel as originally a Czech work, in order that (an erroneous) Russian translation of this copy be published in Zamyatin’s homeland.

– there were several English translations in class, we noticed initial differences in chapter headings; will be interesting to further explore the ways in which these versions differ

– the employment and characterization of numbers and letters – textual and numeric symbols become associated with facets such as gender and personality, in a way a grafting of these symbols onto the human body; questions of physicality and textuality.

– Zamyatin the engineer, the naval architect; beginning to think about the novel as a kind of construction

– an intertwining of affect and rationality, the corruption or subversion of rationality by way of poetic distillations (ie: the list form of the chapter headings, the poetics of lists; an affront on the utilitarian)

– the city of glass; panopticonal associations; metaphorical values of transparency, reflection, distortion. Interesting here to explore political metaphors and implications of glass architecture; Foster’s re-modeling of the Reichstag, for example.
-and in a more regional context, glass architecture is one of Vancouver’s hallmarks; a city of reflections and refractions inclined to resemble any place but itself (the generic, cinematic city).

– glass walls, borders, boundaries: the position of Zamyatin as writer in exhile; his own reflections in a kind of abjection of his homeland (OneState as an OtherState, geopolitical orientalism)…something mentioned about the “geographic imaginary”

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