The conference The Political Economy and Cultural Forms is organized by NYU Professors Ilya Kliger and Rossen Djagalov. RSVP to attend in person.
This workshop is dedicated to the methodological problems that arise when cultural forms are analyzed in conjunction with their political-economic context. The introduction of such approaches as social reproduction theory, world systems analysis, uneven and combined development, and historical poetics in the field of Slavic cultural studies have intensified its engagements with political economy. These newer approaches have entered into a productive dialogue with a longer tradition of Marxist cultural analysis (Fredric Jameson, Raymond Williams, the Frankfurt School, existentialist Marxism).
PROGRAM
April 25
9-9:30 Breakfast
9:30-10:50 SECTION I
Jennifer Flaherty, “Bervi-Flerovsky’s Poetics of Praxis”
This paper analyzes the literary devices of populist writing, focusing on the combination of statistical analysis, travel writing, and description in Bervi-Flerovsky’s Conditions of the Working Class in Russia (Polozhenie rabochego klassa v Rossii). I argue that Bervi-Flerovsky’s style derives from his effort to provoke in readers an action-oriented sympathy which I call a poetics of praxis. This is revealed to be synonymous with comprehension in the Enlightenment rationalist sense of the word, best expressed by the metaphor of “seeing” that places Bervi-Flerovsky within a literary history that builds on Radishchev’s Journey from Petersburg to Moscow (Puteshestvie iz Peterburga v Moskvu), in which ethical sight is a leitmotif. My reading shows Bervi-Flerovsky’s populist writing to be more indebted to specifically literary—yet simultaneously political-theoretical—processes than is typically assumed. Looking backward to Radishchev, the paper also looks forward to Tolstoy, who, in his appropriation of populist methods and concerns, puts similar devices to work in his own amalgam of travel writing, statistics, and description: What Then Should We Do (Tak chto zhe nam delat’). In this diachronic view, I consider the radical-Enlightenment roots of the device we typically know from Shklovsky’s theory of estrangement. In this paper, populist writing emerges as an important part of literary history.
Anastasiya Osipova, “Relics of Survival, Instruments of Mobilization: Documents and Artifacts of Political Confinement as Tools of the Pedagogy of the Repressed”
The paper that I will share with the participants of the workshop will be the methodological section of the introduction to my monograph, entitled Survival and Mobilization: Genre Memory and Soviet Prison Writing.
In this book I argue that prison––first in the Russian Empire and then in the Soviet Union––became a laboratory of cultural forms which developed under conditions of extreme material privation and became invested with heightened significance for the psychological and political survival of their authors and audience. The experience of internment and forced relocation put into contact diverse ethnic, class, and political groups that otherwise may not have interacted. In this traumatic setting, cultural production and transmission often assumed a surprising, hybrid form. Over time, writing by political prisoners accrued its own genres, economy of means, and artistic history, which continue to exert their influence on the forms of cultural and political imagination in the present.
20-minute break
11:10-12:30 SECTION II
Esa Purschke, “How to Do Things With Things”
Marx’s famous introduction to the Grundrisse contains two suggestions regarding the relationship between political economy and social forms: Its methodological remarks on “real abstraction” have influenced a great deal of inquiry into how the value-form is further structurally replicated in the “ideal abstraction of cognition” (Sohn-Rethel), in the structural fetishism of bourgeois legal form (Pashukanis), or in aesthetic semblance (e.g., Althusser). But towards the (unfinished) end of the section, Marx less emphasizes the fact of this equivalence than that he aggregates a stunning number of notes towards the contingent, uneven, and often non-synchronic character of translations between “productive and social relations”, including law, family, philosophy, and art.
At the conference, I seek to take up and develop this latter question: how to account for the circuitous, nonlinear paths through which political economy—and not just value-form, but the complex, evolving antagonism between capital and labor—concretely develops downward towards the social context of living. I will take as my point of departure a peculiar set of cultural experiments emerging from the midst of the Proletarian Culture Movement, a mass cultural organization active in the first decade after the October Revolution: so-called thing-narratives and thing-scripts, devised for popular literary and dramatic activity. These scripts, I show, are less concerned with transmitting political lessons about the real abstractions of production than with exploring the concrete yet uneven experiences of labor accumulating along a production chain spanning town and country. Or, rather than overriding experience with historical or analytical constructs to induce class consciousness, they seek to develop cultural forms that attend to, mediate, and thus reaggregate the various phenomenal contexts constituting the ‘collective worker’ (Gesamtarbeiter).
Dominick Lawton, “Literature and the Commodity Form in Early Soviet Culture”
This paper is drawn from the introduction to my current book project, which reinterprets major literary texts from various aesthetic currents surrounding the Russian revolution as formal meditations upon, and reactions to, the volatile status and availability of mass-produced objects. In discussions of this period, the connections most often drawn between literary form and material things are basically phenomenological, as with the ubiquitous references to Viktor Shklovsky's famous definition of art as reviving perception and "making the stone stony." But scholars of modernism in the capitalist world, especially those working within a Marxist tradition, have long traced how commodity fetishism shaped early 20th century literary aesthetics--that is, not hard, tangible materiality, but what Marx called the "phantom objectivity" of the commodity form. How can we think about literature through the prism of the commodity form, and the intangibility of economic value, in the Soviet 1920s or 1930s? To what extent do the mixed economy of NEP, or the persistence of (in Stalin's words) "commodity production of a special kind, commodity production without capitalists" as a feature of Soviet political economy after 1929, invite us to perceive reification, or the abstract logic of exchange-value, as formal elements of early Soviet texts? My paper reflects upon these questions with reference to examples that may include Shaginian's Mess-Mend, Gladov's Cement, and Olesha's Envy.
Lunch
2:00-3:20 SECTION III
Julia Alekseyeva, “Antifascist Aesthetics Beyond Content: Reflections on the Politics of Form”
This paper stems from the arguments made in my book Antifascism and the Avant-Garde: Radical Documentary in the 1960s (forthcoming Feb 2025, University of California Press). It lays bare the stakes for the project, specifically concerning the connection between leftist ideology and aesthetic form. This paper theorizes the politics of form in documentary practices, beyond what philosopher Jacques Rancière termed the “distribution of the sensible.” It uses the work of Soviet avant-garde documentarist avant la lettre Dziga Vertov as a lodestar in my conceptualization of antifascist form. I argue that Vertov’s mobilization of what Annette Michelson, after Karl Marx, described as the epistemological break creates a radical media literacy that inculcates a pedagogy of doubt as antifascist praxis. The paper then reflects on methodological issues surrounding the term “media literacy” and its relevance to the contemporary world, especially given the advent of AI.
Siarhei Biareishyk, Eisenstein's Capital Film: How to Update Marx for the Twentieth Century
Famously, Sergei Eisenstein undertook an ambitious process of making a film based on Marx’s Capital as its script—a project that remained unrealized. I follow Eisenstein’s notebooks and collages for the film to show that his point of departure was to be focused on the present political and economic moment, some half a century after Capital’s initial publication. In fact, taking up the present cultural forms as the means of representation of the conceptual movement of Marx’s work was the only proper methodological approach for this task, according to Eisenstein. What is at play in Eisenstein’s anachronic approach, I argue, is the tension between the “invariants” of capitalist mode of production—those essential aspects without which capital can neither be nor be conceived—and its capacity for “variation,” as it manifests itself in new cultural forms and political conjunctures. Focusing on Eisenstein’s notebooks and collages, this paper will unfold the underlying assumptions of his approach—capital’s nexus rerum, primitive accumulation in the twentieth century, imperialism as a stage of capitalism, money in Soviet economy—and reflect on the methodological and theoretical upshots of his investigations as well as on its limitation from the standpoint of Marx’s Capital itself.
20-minute break
3:40-5:00 SECTION IV
Olena Lyubchenko, “Social Reproduction Theory and Capitalist Multilinearity: The Soviet Case”
Three years into Russia’s invasion of Ukraine (February 2022), critical political economy analyses have emphasized the hybridity of the Putin regime. Terms like "authoritarian neoliberalism" or "military Keynesianism" describe Russia’s divergence within global capitalism but often fail to transcend dualism and mystification, rooted in the narrative of failure of its post-Soviet transition to liberal democracy. The state’s ideological and political features are frequently framed as extra-economic—driven by patriarchy or nationalism—or as interfering with capitalism’s "normal" function. To demystify how capitalism operates in post-Soviet Russia, with its dependence on relations of class, gender, sexuality, and race, this paper examines the historical conditions shaping its present form. I posit that the lifemaking crisis of the early 1990s in post-Soviet countries demands a re-evaluation of what was qualitatively distinct in the Soviet relationship between production and social reproduction. To this end, I integrate a theory of capitalist multilinearity as a skipped step within a dialectically revitalized Social Reproduction Theory (SRT), using its concept of embodied and differentiated labour as an ontological foundation. I begin with SRT preoccupation with reproduction of the total process of life by embodied human labour in concrete social-spatial relations of domination and power - a unitary understanding of social relations of exploitation and oppression. But while SRT assumes capitalist multilinearity – as the extent and form of life’s subsumption to capital or how and to what degree capital relinquishes control over reproduction time are historically concrete and multilinear phenomena, it is left undertheorized. I propose a social reproduction theory of uneven, combined, and dependent development of global capitalism—a unitary theoretical approach capable of addressing capitalist multilinearity within the broader task of theorizing totality as 'the concentration of many determinations.' This unitary approach transcends “state capitalism” debates, offering a coherent understanding of Soviet distinctiveness within global capitalism. It illuminates how the Soviet project’s distinct form of social reproduction—with its contradictions and promises—shaped its evolution into what appears as present-day hybrid statist neoliberalism in Russia.
Renny Hahamovitch, “The Rise and Fall of the Space Age: The Value of Technological Development and the Shape of the Future in American Capitalism and Soviet Communism”
My paper looks at the relationship between technological development, state planning, and the social perception of the future in the United States and Soviet Union. I discuss the particular logic in each country of how scientific knowledge, technological change, and social progress were understood to be linked within the futuristic framework of the “Space Age.” I argue that while both space programs were conceived of within explicitly capitalist or communist versions of this future, space leaders in both countries often felt that their own ideological system was inferior because they felt it ill-fitted the pursuit of such long-term technological futures, and so deliberately pointed to competition as the key justification for space. The coming of détente then undermined that value, deteriorated the Space Age as a coherent social framework for the future, and led to the rapid decline and reformation of both space programs.
20-minute break
5:20-6:40 SECTION V
Zachary Hicks, “Life Goes On: Gleb Panfilov’s Прошу слова (I Wish to Speak) as Political Allegory”
This paper is an excerpt from a dissertation chapter on Soviet cinema of the “long 1970s,” a period defined by the petering out of the Stalinist developmental model and framed by the beginnings of global economic downturn. Drawing on Moishe Postone’s analysis of the experience of historical time as well as a theory of allegory drawn from Fredric Jameson and Roberto Schwarz, in the larger chapter I read cinematic manifestations of historical torpor from the late-Soviet “era of stagnation” as symptomatic of a crisis of value production, which elicited contradictory responses from filmmakers. Directors working in state-run film studios produced films within an industry seeking explicitly to aid in revamping the socialist economy. Films like Larisa Shepitko’s Ты и я (You and I (1971)), Sergei Mikaelyan’s Премия (The Bonus (1973)), and Gleb Panfilov’s Прошу слова (I Wish to Speak (1976)) present us with an anti-historical temporality within which individual attempts to selflessly revamp the productivity of the Soviet system encounter resistance from the system itself, generating a kind of animated suspension. I locate the basis for this particularly socialist crisis of value in the contested reproduction between two competing political economic logics at work in Soviet society: one exponential growth and one of social reproduction. Films of the period intermingle the mundane and the sublime through moments of ethical dilemma in which an individual’s conflicted relationship to the socialist commons allegorizes the situation of late-Soviet cultural production more generally and its place within a flagging world system. I draw out a specific temporality—manifest as an aesthetic of timelessness—which cuts the cinema of the period and makes sensible the more abstract problem of economic stagnation. The chapter excerpt for this workshop will focus primarily on Gleb Panfilov’s I Wish to Speak.
Djordje Popović, “The Ministry of Pain and the Theology of Hell”
The Ministry of Pain, Dubravka Ugrešić’s celebrated 2005 novel, ends with the narrator-protagonist standing at the edge of an abyss, reciting her famous “Balkan litany.” Having already lost in the Wars of Yugoslav Dispossession all that was once held in common—land, resources, memories, language, hope—the narrator now appears also to be losing those properties that seem inalienable by definition: what she identifies as her voice and her trace. It is at this exact moment, when the narrative, historical, and philosophical subject undergoes near-complete annihilation, that Ugrešić offers a rare glimpse of hope, a redemptive element that has received little critical attention.
Papers will be available upon request a week ahead of the event from rossen.djagalov@nyu.edu.
