This essay is a part of Negation's Organizational Culture Dossier. The rest of the collection can be found here.
A revolutionary culture somehow both precedes and follows the revolution. In the wake of the Bolshevik and the Maoist revolutions, the problem of culture was as much the task of producing a revolutionary subjectivity, as it was critiquing feudal vestiges and bourgeois reactions. To study this shift from ideology critique to techniques of revolutionary ideologization—especially in the antipodes of the capitalist stronghold—inspires a feeling of transcendence. With sentimentality one encounters the specter of communism outside of communist society today, as ruins and memories. Indeed, the fall of the USSR and the opening up of PRC to western value chains pushes world-communism back into a mythic time. We live alongside not a bloc but rather an archipelago of actually existing socialisms—from Kerala to Rojava to Cuba to Chiapas. As Deleuze puts it with regard to the machinic assemblage of Man with a Movie Camera: “the question of the corresponding assemblage of enunciation remains open, since Vertov's answer (Communist society) has lost its meaning.”[1]
At precisely these points, though, where we encounter the communist document in capitalist social relations, an immanent pole arises. In Vertov’s hint at the utopian synthesis of human and machine, city and citizen, the car and camera through montage, contemporary viewers have recognized a speed, ecstasy, and relational databases of new media—the montage of experience through hyperlinks and surfing cyberspaces, the homology between the brain and the neural net.[2] Such comparisons evoke Paulo Virno’s characterization of post-Fordist society as a “communism of capital.”[3] In the following, such comparisons between communism and late capitalism abound—as the master builders of global capitalism look to Soviet architects, and as networks of new media seem homologous to the projectionists of Maoist cinema. Looking from capitalist culture to a communist one, we encounter thus a tarnished looking glass. Inheriting a revolutionary subjectivity from the antipode for a metropolitan organizational culture is then an exercise in identifying with the patina and antagonizing our own image.
Base and Superstructure in Soviet Architecture

Ivan Illych Leonidov was an avant garde architect, urban planner, and painter active after the Bolshevik revolution. He was a professor at the VkhUTEMAS arts and design school, which was a sort of Moscow version of the fabled Bauhaus in Dessau, Germany—a hotbed for manifestos and contentions amongst the constructivists, rationalists, and supremacists. VkhUTEMAS differed fundamentally from Bauhaus, however, insofar as it became a pedagogical lab for scaling design education to the masses, but also because its revolutionary Soviet context raised the stakes of their experiments.[4] They had a world to remake, and so they did. Less so for Leonidov, who was an exemplary “paper architect.” Save for a staircase, he built only representations—bold designs of white lines on a black plane, resembling astrophotography or electrical circuit schematics.[5] These truly novel forms will go on to make Leonidov posthumously into a darling of the late capitalist west.[6] In 1990, the architecture and design department at MoMA put up an exhibition of drawings of the Soviet avant-garde in which Leonidov got some spotlight and was treated at length; one of his competition drawings for a Palace of Culture of the Proletarsky District of Moscow adorned the cover of the exhibition catalog.[7] It is symptomatic that the show’s curator, Catherine Cooke, somewhat patronizingly interprets Leonidov’s far out idiosyncrasies as vestiges of the formalist Suprematism.[8] This kind of attention to his work, however, would have only inspired Leonidov’s chagrin; he was keen to disavow such an interpretation.

Leonidov belonged to the constructivist camp, which took the architectural vocation as the “task of life construction,” and “organization of new forms of life.”[9] That is to say, for a constructivist, “architecture was a social and cultural endeavor before it is a formal and material one.”[10] To the perennial question of the relation between form and function, and their relative independence—whether the same form could be deployed for different functions—Leonidov defers to a notion of Kultorganizatsia.[11] The perennial question only arises if and when we are concerned with external form; however, for the constructivist, “form is a result of organization and functional relations of working and constructive moments.”[12] In being dazzled by the external forms, what we fail to see in Leonidov’s plans is praxis—the cultural organization within which the users of the building fall, which determines its “inner” form. The architectural historian Anna Bokov writes that instead of making form follow function (as the modernist dictum goes), soviet constructivists put architecture as a whole toward a larger social purpose—namely, to turn the working masses into revolutionary subjects.[13]

Leonidov’s drawing for a workers’ club came with a programmatic list and experimental collages, which makes the plan read, in the architectural historian Anna Bokov’s inter-medial estimation, like a graphic novel.[14] From chemistry labs to botanical gardens, continuous information dissemination (amounting to a “living newspaper”) to sports grounds, Leonidov insisted on a cultural organization that integrated scientific and artistic activity.[15]


Such insistence on integrated functions was tied intimately not only with the constructivism as an architectural approach, but also the architectural typology of the workers’ club as the site of producing a new type of human. A club proper would be a space of recreation, assembly, performance, and education, in the wider revolutionary program, for the constructivists, these clubs were primarily social condensers, and they “included communal housing, clubs, palaces of labour, administrative buildings and factories, and were supposed to become provodniki i kondensatory sotsialisticheskoy kul’tury (conductors and condensers of socialist culture).”[16] Even at the eve of the Bolshevik revolution, left newspapers had called for such clubs, “More clubs! As fast as possible!.”[17] Bokov writes that “There are currently over a hundred workers’ clubs and palaces of culture, built between the late 1920s and mid-1930s in Moscow and the surrounding region. Today these buildings range from total decrepitude to active use.” But in their heyday, the workers’ club was a key instrument of the aspiration and practice of proletarian culture, for the evidence and facilitation of a new form of life.
Leonidov is one example of a large movement of imagining and building workers’ clubs as social condensers—as socialist spaces that would produce the new, post-revolutionary species being. They were by no means hegemonic or homogenous—Leonidov faced great skepticism even from the constructivists, and the constructivists polemicized rationalists who believed in the independence of form, but form itself as determined and perceived by the body and physical science.[18] Nevertheless, their tasks remained the same—to produce a space that cultivated the revolutionary form of life—and so did their contradictions. To both camps architecture was somehow both organic and mechanistic, a living form and a machine, insofar as they aimed at the utopian synthesis where the alienation between the human body and its prostheses is abolished—a desire most eloquently expressed, in my opinion, through montage in Vertov’s Man With a Movie Camera.[19] Moreover, the social condenser as a factory for revolutionary subjectivity was initially articulated by the Prolekult project (short for “proletarian culture”), led by the marxist persona non-grata Alexander Bogdanov, who himself, and by extension the project, fell out of favor with Bolshevik leadership by 1920—but the social condenser, as club, palace, kitchen, or house, lived on.
The philologist Ludovico Silva took great pains to establish base and superstructure as Marx’s architectural metaphors, and not concepts for limitless iteration.[20] Eschewing the sense of detachability of a scaffolding—as an ideologue would ascribe an independence to ideas—the French edition of Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy opted for edifice in lieu of “superstructure,”[21] driving home an image of an inseparable alienation between the lifeprocess and its symbolic form. While the scaffolding can come off, the visible facade of the building is tectonically grounded in the invisible fondation. In a way, it is precisely this spurious jump between the metaphor of scaffolding and facade—ideology in its determining and determined phases with respect to social forces—that might complete a theory of culture. Turning to the social condensers and the cultivation of proletarian culture of the soviets, we not only have a reconfigured—if not eradicated—social alienation, but also a literalization of the metaphor. The superstructure of the building corresponds to its external form—both its foundation and its edifice. The base of the building was not the foundation, or the materials it was assembled out of—as that came second in the constructivist method—but rather the function, the cultural organization, the program.[22] What did people do inside, outside, and how. Instead of “form follows function,” in the social condenser we have that (internal) form is function.
At the same time, there is a rather vulgar economic determinism at play in the fate of the social condenser. Between 1926 and 1932—between the New Economic Policy and the first Five Year Plan — the trade union movement soared, with upwards of 700,000 members in the textile workers’ union and 400,000 in the metal workers’ union.[23] As a result, workers’ clubs proliferated, with the unions as the main clients. It was exactly in this context that Leonidov’s proposals were dubbed “economically unfeasible” even by sympathetic voices.[24] Was the integration of scientific production with aesthetic perception untenable to trade union clientele? The charge of idealism upon Leonidov’s ultra-left materialism of architecture—praxis in the final instance—is curious, and worth investigating in its own right. Moreover, the housing crisis that lasted throughout the Soviet period, driven by the proletarianization of rural populations, drove the notion of the worker’s club as a second home—not only as a social condenser that is as much, if not more, active in shaping subjectivity than the domestic enclosure, but also a solution (or dissolution) of economic scarcity.[25] Alongside palaces of culture or club houses, the communal living houses as social condensers became a perennial ad hoc fix to the Soviet housing crises. Families shared one room as the living and dormitory space, and shared kitchens and toilets with other families. Living through this reconfigured privacy—if not a dearth of privacy—served as an education in socialist culture under the social condenser analytic. The planning of cities and public housing as social condensers led to “a kind of a closed daily circuit for the worker, but this housing-factory-club loop also functioned as an autonomous settlement unit, similar to a Russian obshchina,” a traditionally close-knit community familiar to the newly proletarianized peasant.[26]

With the housing question, as with Leodinov’s abstract geometries, there seems to have loomed a real anxiety about the iterability of forms—especially their traffic between the postrevolutionary and prerevolutionary contexts. Not only were many designs for social condensers termed by their architects as temples, for the communication or acculturation of the people, some social condensers were even built in place of demolished monasteries—that older social architecture put to a higher purpose (but a transcendent one, instead of social). The Putilovets church is a key example, which became an avant-gardist workers’ club, and then a palace of culture with a Palladian facade—columns with doric capitals, a frieze, and pediment. The supplantation of the radical experiment in the social condenser to what was in the 20th century a rather toothless—if not racist—western civilizationist aesthetic ought to frustrate the revolutionary desire. Bokov finds this progression to be generalizable. She writes:
Already during the early 1930s, the utopian ideas of communal [life] had been replaced by more traditional views on lifestyle, family values and individual interests, which characterised the official cultural and artistic creed of the Stalin era, Socialist Realism. It was not an accident that workers’ clubs transformed into palaces, and later, houses of culture, refocussing on education and entertainment, instead of the ideological condensing of the masses….The history of [the social condenser] was initially a search among existing types, such as the church or the theatre, followed by a commitment to creating a new architectural form for this new social type.
As older forms and types had trickled, wittingly or unwittingly, into the search for the social condenser, so did the condenser come up in the post-fordist end of history. Starchitects, from Zaha Hadid to Norman Foster to Rem Koolhaas, whose erudition makes monuments to global capitalism—airports, stadiums, corporate offices—have all looked to the social condensers for inspiration.[28] They were drawn to the unification of life and art, the final insistence on the program, and the promise of making a new form of life—in a word, the organizational emphasis of the soviet avant-garde became a precursor to the cybernetic and systems theoretic practice of architecture (in correspondence to the cybernetic capitalist funding and clientele it found).
Hadid has received flak for making buildings with slave-like labor[29]; Foster’s firm has an anti-degrowth line and are vying to become the guild masters of space colonization (based on their architectural interventions in third world humanitarian logistics solutions)[30], and Koolhaas was famously implicated by David Harvey for erasing the democratic New York in his ode to a delirious New York.[31] At the end of her discussion on the many lives of workers’ clubs, Bokov asks what might there be left to learn from the condensers without the society they produced. It seems that spectacular architects have taken their lesson—and our lesson might lie in the meaning of this appropriation. The reworking of form and function in the social condenser—the program as form—had a utopian ring to it, but it also became the cultural precedent for a reification of praxis, an architecture of the program as purposive, informatic activity.
Although every point made in the foregoing discussion is more or less indebted to the sprawling work of Anna Bokov, I have managed to understate the importance of mass assembly, action, and spectacle for the social condenser. Almost all buildings in the social condenser type included a space of performance; if not directly adopting staging mechanisms in their formal composition—such as processional motifs—they were in conversation with avant garde theater of the time. Social condensers were spaces that appeared, but also spaces of appearance—where the revolutionary subject supposedly represented itself to itself. This too is a sine qua non of the social condenser—and especially one that illuminates the meaning of the capitalist appropriation of this type. Namely, the abstraction of action qua action.
Koolhaas famously divided the program and distributed it into space[32]—in that moment even the concreteness of praxis had melted into air. Virno defines praxis as a virtuosic activity in which we put to work what is in common—an end in itself, and that exhausts in its finishing—not leaving behind a product, beautifully so. Affective labor is precisely this virtuosic activity that has been turned into one of the lifebloods of contemporary capitalism, not in spite of but in parallel to abstract labor embroiled in the extraction of surplus value. The meaning of the wormhole between capitalist starchitects and the soviet constructivists is then precisely the revolutionary investment in mass action on the one hand, and integration of that virtuosic action—where art and life collapse into each other—into the valorization process of capital.
Reticulation and Projection in Maoist Cinema
The media scholar Jie Li has argued, rather compellingly, that the socialist revolution in China was a media revolution. From the 1950s to the 1970s, mobile projectionists grew from fewer than 2,000 to an “army” of some 200,000.[33] Even when film production went down during the Cultural Revolution[34], film screening was increasing. The “film-exhibition network” expanded from fewer than 600 movie theaters nationwide to more than 12,500 projection units by 1958 and to some 162,000 by 1983.[35] Supplementing these numbers with the content, reception, and practice of film going/projecting, Li argues that the socialist revolution was not only represented and amplified by media, but also made by it. One of the most curious notions that follows from this suggestion is that the masses were not only represented and connected by media, but also acted as media—consisting of the projectionists bringing cinema to remote villages, but also participatory audiences emulating revolutionary models. Li finds a poignant allegory to this double sense of “mass media” in a scene from Heroic Little Guerrillas (1961) on the 1958 war of the People’s Army against the nationalist party in Taiwan. Inspired by films about the guerrillas in the Sino-Japanese war, a group of kids faced with a broken military communication line join hands to conduct electricity with their bodies, to ultimately bring a climactic victory.

In the communist media revolution, the masses were thus transmuted from receivers of the revolutionary spirit into its transmitters, emulating models after witnessing models.[36] A number of subversions of the received wisdom of western media and cultural theories follow. The message of the revolutionary mass media was to become media. The spectator—instead of being trained into a docile subjectivity, receiving psychoanalytic sutures of social contradictions by the cinematic apparatus—was the constitutive infrastructure of mass media, a fleshly apparatus. This participatory factor, Li points out, instead of leading to a brainwash (literally a calque of the chinese term xǐnǎo) afforded a greater agency to the audience; the laughs and scoffs in a screening were rehearsed in the cultural revolution per the party line, but also the content was misread, misinterpreted or even forgotten. In more than 160 interviews conducted with viewers and projectionists Li found that some had forgotten the content of the films, but gladly recalled the “hot noise” (Li’s calque for the Chinese term renao) of cinema—a hubbub, excitement, festivity. On the other hand, projectionists, and the vast archive of film and trade journals, on the other hand, noted how some audiences (indicatively) misread the medium of film—locals, in one account, confused the shaman depicted in an anti-superstition film with the projectionist.[37]
In light of such moments of conjuration and (mis)recognition, Li reads the task of making the peasant masses into revolutionary subjects as an exercise in spirit mediumship—a seance not for the dead (what Marx described as “table-shaking” in his section on commodity fetishism) but for those not yet born.[38] It is in this light that Maoist cinema overturns Walter Benjamin’s thesis on art in late capitalism. The latter famously argued that the mechanical reproduction of art destroyed its aura, its singularity in spacetime, coincident with eroding the ritual basis of art. Bourgeois society, as a last-ditch effort, may try to make a cult of beauty—a theology of art, as Benjamin calls it—as in the dictum of l’art pour l’art. But eventually, it is bound to give way to a political basis of art. Cult value gives way to exhibition value, or so the story goes. In contrast, in the cinema of the Chinese revolution, a rural socialism unlike the metropolitan capitalism addressed by Benjamin, Li argues that exhibition value and cult value reinforced each other:
The sacred aura of communism thrived rather than withered through the technological reproduction of the cinematic altar that illuminated Mao and models, martyrs and miracles, and utopian futures and demonic pasts during village nights without electric light. Indeed, outside of major metropolises, the earliest and most frequent screenings in many rural counties took place inside or on the grounds of temples, shrines, or churches. As cinema replaced ritual opera, ancestral worship, and church services, it coalesced with Maoist mass rallies, parades, and struggle sessions. As much as the mass reproduction of indexical images, cinema electrified the revolutionary masses: attracting a scattered audience with both new technological magic and more familiar “hot noise” associated with temple festivals, inducting them into the Mao cult, converting them into a pious congregation, and exposing class enemies as demons to be purged.
Indeed, the trade journals from the 1950s to 1970s attest that any screening of Mao’s image was the prime cinematic attraction.[40] We might explain the cult value of Mao’s cinematic image also by emphasizing the cult as a community in Benjamin’s schema—art, as autonomous or as fetish or as political, is but an engine of reticulation—a parasocial relationship with Mao is a truly social relation with the community of observers. Not unlike Bokov’s analysis of the social condensers, older forms of religiosity were literally the spaces in which the revolutionary culture took place in the case of Maoist cinema.
Moreover, this communizing function of art is theorized precisely in Kant’s third critique as a moment of subject constitution.[41] Aesthetic judgment—whether of beauty or of the sublime, pleasure or displeasure—both expresses and constitutes a community which cannot but assent to such a judgment (in Kant’s case, it is a community of rational beings).[42] Li hints at the status of Mao’s cinematic image as a social sublime: “While staging a vicarious encounter with the great leader, cinema was also the culmination of technological wonders that inspired sublime feelings of awe for the Party.”[43] In Kant, the sublime is the frustration that arises when the limited imagination attempts, and fails, to apprehend nature as a whole per the expectation of reason’s idea of totality.[44] This disjunction between reason and natural intuition reminds the subject of her difference from nature.[45] The intricacies of the cinematic apparatus, the vastness of the Party, and the guerrilla network is a socio-technical totality that cannot be imagined except in the sublimated form of cinematic ritual, especially in Mao’s image—as both an icon (Mao’s likeness) and index (insofar as cinema arrives to the viewer function of Party’s projection network) of the revolutionary party form. The sublime, per Kant, also seduced the beholder to a self-consciousness as a rational subject—thus it might follow that the social sublime of Mao’s image might seduce the masses into a revolutionary subjectivity.
Not in spite of but precisely because of this cult of Mao, Li homes in on “grassroots religiosities” as an intimate other of Maoist cinema. On the one hand, the urban film discourse found the tribal or Tibetan construals of film as Real to be provincial simplemindedness—in the same stroke, on the other hand, they evoked the spiritual function of cinema, its capacity for exorcism of reactionary tendencies and conjuration of revolutionary ones. Although she seeks to jettison the burdens of western cultural and media theory, Li shows that the message of the Maoist cinematic medium was in part an older medium of ritual practice. In this manner, the much decried rupture in Chinese revolutionary histories between the anti-feudal Maoism and the Dengist socialism with Chinese characteristics are rendered as two sides of the same coin. Li even stretches the media revolution to the present day—not unlike the weird line drawn between starchitecture and the social condensers, and between new media and Vertov. The mass reception and response to COVID appears to Li as an ongoing media revolution—laden with guerrilla tactics of adaptation and navigation of uncertainties.[46] The guerrilla audienceship of cinema-goers, in the city and the countryside, then anticipates the linguistic gymnastics with which contemporary Chinese internet users dodge censorship.[47]

The stretching of the guerrilla concept into cultural activity might seem rather extravagant, but as Li shows, such capaciousness of this term is endemic to Maoism. Indeed, militancy and war are not only pushed to multiple frontiers in the Maoist revolution, but as mechanical warfare had pushed the boundaries of warfare in the so-called Great War of Europe—diffusing the boundaries between combatants and the hors-du-combat, the battlefield and land, introducing new asymmetries—guerrilla warfare too shifts the rules of war. Li partially reconstructs a Maoist media theory revolving around the figure of the guerrilla. The following passage from On Guerrilla Warfare is indicative:
The leader must be like a fisherman, who, with his nets, is able both to cast them and to pull them out in awareness of the depth of the water, the strength of the current, or the presence of any obstructions that may foul them. As the fisherman controls his nets through the lead ropes, so the guerrilla leader maintains contact with and control over his units. As the fisherman must change his position, so must the guerrilla commander. Dispersion, concentration, constant change of position—it is in these ways that guerrillas employ their strength.
This metaphor/concept is wide ranging, not least because of its anticipation of networks and the web. Guerrilla warfare is a matter of communications infrastructure, a logistics of perception first and foremost. The deployment of their strength—the guerrilla capacity—is a network effect as opposed to a capacity that could be located within a single individual, or machine. Li notes that:
Closely related to the term for CCP organization, zuzhi (组织), which literally means to “group and weave,” the concept of network (wang 网, literally “web” or “net”)—suggesting elastic and enmeshed guerrilla tactics aimed at capturing the enemy and the masses—became shorthand for the party’s growing and sprawling bureaucracy.
The network was thus both a metaphor and metonym of the Party and its militants. “Guerrilla” in this manner, not as an aberration but in the very text of Maoism as Li shows us, becomes a term that necessarily slips between the literal and the figurative. This is not unlike Andrew Culp’s Guerrilla Guide to Refusal, in which the author deftly shows the ways in which insurgent life forms in late capitalism might approach a singular point of opacity and undecidability. Culp’s decidedly post-Marxist, and urban approach to the guerrilla finds resonance in Li’s appraisal of the Chinese media revolution of a mostly rural society (where the guerrilla act was more a matter of participation than refusal). There would have to be one important discord in this resonance, however: on the matter of propaganda. Culp draws on the anarchist tradition’s tactic of propaganda by the deed—the revolutionary act serving as a demonstration and incitement and inspiration to the possibility of revolution. Unlike Maoist cinema, however, where propaganda was itself the chief deed:
Projectionists used xuanchuan, the Chinese term for propaganda, as a verb rather than as a noun, thus reorienting our understanding of propaganda from a collection of texts to a constellation of acts. Moreover, xuanchuan in Maoist projectionist lingo refers to all activities beyond film projection to communicate government directives, mobilize for local priorities, and enhance the attraction and comprehensibility of film for the local population.
Propaganda as a verb can be read as coeval with mediation as mediumship. The text, message, or film drops out of the equation, as cinematic practice comes to stand neither for the party’s intended messaging nor for revolutionary modernity, but rather for a we-feeling of the Maoist party-state. It was the very act of becoming a mediated polity, of becoming a node in a network, that constituted—in Li’s reading—cinematic experience of the Chinese revolution.
It should nevertheless give us pause how this notion of Chinese revolution as a media revolution—with an emphasis on its cultic aspects—dovetails with the civilizationist paradigm of contemporary conservatism. The Singaporean diplomat Kishore Mahbubani has remarked that—contrary to what Li calls it—the PRC is not a party-state as much as a civilization-state.[51] Its key objective is to restore and continue Chinese civilization. The right wing of India and Russia are spinning similar civilizationist political claims.[52] In a similar vein, Li’s media analysis might conjure a continuity between the ritual processes of feudalism and socialism—all the way to the so-called state capitalism today.
Epilogue: The MaoHaus as an Actually Existing Social Condenser
The British architectural and cultural critic Owen Hatherley had made a name for himself writing about Soviet buildings, as former utopia and current ruins.[53] But then he visited his subject, in flesh and concrete. In a 2017 article called “Actually existing social condensers,” Hatherley confessed “how much you can get wrong if you write about architecture as media rather than buildings. Almost all of the buildings I wrote about as crumbling and depopulated ruins are used and inhabited.”[54] Variously preserved and used, the social condensers inherited by the Russian Federation have an almost perverse class character. The users of the buildings that have been restored, renovated and protected as heritage “turn out not to be the proletariat, who are much more often to be found in the more chaotically, cheaply renovated examples of the genre,” with nightclubs, gyms, and McDonald’s as in the Vasilevsky Island Factory Kitchen in St Petersburg.[55] On the other hand, for the better preserved ones, Hatherley goes on:
The functions that are ’condensed’ today in a building like the ZIL Palace of Culture are not for the education and leisure of a working-class community working in an vehicle factory, but the workers of a service sector in a capitalist metropolis; the display of architectural fidelity in one (faithfully renovated) part of the building can conflict sharply with the blaring, aggressive kitsch in another part.
In 2017, the parametricist[56] design firm AntiStatics installed a facade in the vicinity of The People’s Art House Print Shop in central Beijing—the latter being “once one of the primary producers of the Chairman’s now iconic image.”[57]


The conceit of this perforated and undulating surface, that might strike a passerby in the day as a modern structure by virtue of being so clearly a digital fabrication—almost asynchronous with its old and residential surroundings—is that at night the facade emits images of Chairman Mao’s face, much like the Print Shop. Whereas social condensers as buildings differ from social condensers as media, here the building in its edifice projects both media of yore, but also its own mediagenic character as a structure conceived via computer simulation. The MaoHaus structure adorns the entrance of a contemporary arts and cultural space.[58]
Appendix: Leonidov’s programming
From Anatole Kopp’s translation of Leonidov’s 1929 plan for a Club of a New Social Type—in Town and Revolution.
Elements of the Project, Organization, Functional Relations
1. Scientific winter garden (botanical garden), area 2,500 square meters. Including space for:
a. Experimental botany.
b. Zoology.
c. Exhibitions.
d. Playgrounds, sports, tennis, basketball, croquet, chess, etc., corners for social and political work, etc.
2. Hall, area 700 square meters, for lectures, films, demonstrations, planetarium, meetings, etc.
3. Library.
4. Eight laboratories for specialized scientific research.
5. Spacious grounds for gliding and flying, car racing, civil-defense exercises, military games, walking, etc.
6. Gymnasium and related facilities.
7. Sports ground.
8. Children’s pavilion with play areas and pool.
9. Park.
Outside the club ... all the political and economic news of the day and the activities of the club and its scientific institutes are flashed on screens or reported over loudspeakers, a sort of animated newspaper that no workers’ or peasants’ collective should be without.
Notes
- Quoted in Seth Feldman, “Vertov after Manovich,” Revue Canadienne d'Études cinématographiques / Canadian Journal of Film Studies, vol. 16, no. 1, 2007, 39.
- Manovich, “Vertov’s Dataset,” in The Language of New Media, (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2002), xiv-xxxii.
- Paulo Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude (Cambridge: Semiotext(e), 2004). Some commentators write: “Virno lists three communist demands and their abhorrent capitalist interpretations [in the communism of capital]. The demand for the abolition of wage labour turned into precarity and a stark division between those having to work extremely long hours and those without any work at all. The demand for the dissolution of the state morphed into neoliberal governance of the markets and the power of the multinational enterprise over national governments. The critique of alienation and demands for the valuing of singularity converted into a celebration of the diversity of consumer identities, into ‘a fetishistic cult of differences’.”
- Anna Bokov, “Vkhutemas and the Bauhaus: On Common Origins and 'Creation with Fire,'” in Dust & Data: Traces of the Bauhaus Across 100 Years (Spector Books, 2019), 246-55.
- Leonidov himself placed astrophotography of the moon next to his architectural drawings in Contemporary Architecture 1929 (3). See Akiko Honda, “A New Vision in Architecture: Ivan Leonidov’s Architectural Projects between 1927 and 1930” (Semantic Scholar, 2016) on aerial perspective and the astrophotographical theme in Leonidov.
- But his own milieu treated him with more ambivalence. Moisei Ginzburg, a fellow constructivist, is quoted in Architectural Drawings of the Russian Avant-Garde (35), praising Leonidov’s design but also dubbing his works economically unrealizable, diagnosing in his constructivist practice a utopianism, where Leonidov’s solutions are somewhat arbitrary and divorced from reality. It was mostly the historian Anatole Kopp, writing in English, who took Leonidov as a point of breakage and paradigm shift in the architecture of the time.
- Note that the museological objects here are drawings, not buildings.
- Ibid, 35. The politics of the Architecture and Design Department of the MoMA at the time is also significant. The exhibition that followed this one, was Information Art: Diagramming Microchips, where the viewer was encouraged to find beauty in machines, specifically, in the schematics of integrated circuits—the new, sexy forces of production. This show was sponsored by Intel, and of course the question of who and where these schematics turned into real machines was foreclosed. On the raciality, labor and spectacle of microchips, see Lisa Nakamura, “Indigenous Circuits: Navajo Women and the Racialization of Early Electronic Manufacture” American Quarterly, vol. 66, no. 4, 2014.
- The constructivist architect Moisei Ginzburg quoted in Anna Bokov’s “The Social Organism,” in Contemporary Perspectives on Architectural Organism (Routledge, 2023), 59.
- Bokov’s summary in “Social Organism,” 59.
- An interviewer first poses this question to Leonidov in Sovremennaya Arkhitektura, 1929 (3), 110 in terms of the material conditions of possibility of building the kind of architecture he envisions. Leonidov responds (111) that only those who wish to make kult’urnuyu revolyutsiyu in the old way would think that the “means of cultural organization” proposed by Leonidov are fantastic, or unfeasible.
- Bokov’s translation of Leonidov’s Sovremennaya Arkhitectura interview in “Soviet workers’ clubs: lessons from the social condensers,”The Journal of Architecture, vol 22, no. 3, 2017, 429-30.
- Bokov, “Social Organism,” 68.
- Bokov, “Soviet workers’ clubs,” 430.
- Living newspaper was a form of political theater, whose architectural-ization in Leonidov’s plan anticipates new media. Leonidov also stipulates that news “flash on screens” embedded in the building. A section of his list of programming is appended at the end of this essay.
- Bokov is translating and quoting from a program of the OSA, a constructivist group, in 1928. “Soviet workers’ clubs,” 407.
- Quoted in ibid., 203, originally from 1917.
- Bokov, “Social Organism.”
- Funnily, Leonidov is dismissive of Vertov for the latter eschewed narrative, and indeed social content in the form of characters and their actions. The functionalism of Leonidov seems to have required the human actor as the center of functions.
- Ludovico Silva, Marx’s Literary Style (Verso, 2023).
- Uberbau, in the German, is closer to scaffolding.
- Bokov, “Social Organism.” It seems that for the more mainstream constructivists like Ginzburg, the Bauhaus example of functionalism was more or less acceptable, but Leonidov pushed it to the level of equating function to form—which anticipates the spatialization of the program in capitalist architecture.
- Bokov, “Soviet workers’ clubs,” 422.
- See note 15.
- Bokov, “Soviet workers’ clubs,” 417-18.
- Ibid.
- Ibid., 431.
- Anna Bokov, Lessons from the Social Condensers (Gta Verlag, 2023), 10-11. Koolhaas, as the architectural critic Kenneth Frampton notes, cites Leonidov as a favorite. For Koolhaas’ appropriation of the social condenser, see Elena Martinez-Millana and Andrés Cánovas Alcaraz’s 2022 essay “The panopticon prison as a “social condenser”: The study of the project for De Koepel prison by Rem Koolhaas/OMA (1979–1988)” in Frontiers of Architectural Research. Another “oligarchitect” mentioned by Bokov is Steven Holl. For the Soviet avant-garde’s influence on Norman Foster, the mind behind London’s Gherkin, see https://normanfosterfoundation.org/archive/shukhov-the-formula-of-architecture/.
- Paul Goldberger, "Zaha Hadid is Still Wrong About Construction Worker Conditions," Vanity Fair, August 27, 2014, https://www.vanityfair.com/culture/architecture/2014/08/zaha-hadid-worker-conditions-lawsuit.
- Evident in Foster’s retrospective at the Centre Pompidou last year. The show ended with two adjacent rooms. In one, a video of Foster being interviewed by the curator Frédéric Migayrou was screening. In the other, project videos and models of Foster + Partners abounded. The latter exhibit boasted Foster’s ability and proposals for building in uninhabitable zones—the global south and the moon alike. In the former, Foster urged for more nuclear energy and a circular economy model. See Philip Jodidio et al. Norman Foster. Edited by Frédéric Migayrou, (ACC Art Books, 2023).
- “Artistic freedom and artistic license, promoted by the city’s powerful cultural institutions, led, in effect, to the neoliberalization of culture.” David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford University Press, 2005), 47. In Cartographies of the Absolute (Zero Boos, 2015), Alberto Toscano and Jeff Kinkle connect this erasure to a “corporate headquarter complex”—indeed, an architectural behemoth—which thrived as social democratic institutions like CUNY eroded in the neoliberal turn. In his essay on “Public Funding and Alternative Spaces,” the critic Brian Wallis adds another spatial aspect to this “neoliberalization of culture,” as he details how NEA funding is a form of governmentality that turned alternative art spaces—often of radical inspiration—into docile administrative institutions.
- For an example of Koolhaas’ liquefaction of the program, see "Reading the Program, Koolhaas vs Kahn," Pick Up Sticks, 2014, https://cargocollective.com/pickupsticks/filter/Program/Reading-the-Program.
- From Jie Li’s talk “Socialist Hot Noise: Loudspeakers and Open-Air Cinema in Maoist China” at SOAS. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q9d25ALiiCQ.
- Ibid.
- Jie Li, Cinematic Guerrillas: Propaganda, Projectionists, and Audiences in Socialist China (Columbia University Press, 2023), 46.
- Ibid. 94.
- Ibid, 22. Li writes also elsewhere in the text: “Every village welcomed the movie team with a procession ordinarily used to honor local cult deities at temple festivals, and the village chief personally carried the film print with red ribbons and a Mao portrait from its last projection site.”
- Li writes: “Whereas film theorist André Bazin traced the ontology of the photographic image to the mummy complex to embalm the dead, Chinese socialist cinema was to serve as a clairvoyant crystal ball that helped audiences “look afar” into a utopian future and to connect their individual interests with the collective good.”
- Li, Cinematic Guerrillas, 22.
- Ibid, 50.
- The discussion referenced here takes place under the theme of the “deduction of pure aesthetic judgment,” §§30-39 in Kant's Critique of the Power of Judgement, ed. Paul Guyer (Cambridge University Press, 2001).
- Guyer summarizes what I call the “communizing function” in anthropological terms thus: “because of the shared nature of human cognitive capacities, [pure aesthetic experience] can be expected to occur in the same way in everyone, and so the judgment of taste’s claim to speak with a universal voice can be sustained” (xxix).
- Li, Cinematic Guerrillas, 52.
- Kant, Critique, §27. “The quality of the feeling of the sublime is that it is a feeling of displeasure concerning the aesthetic faculty of judging an object that is yet at the same time represented as purposive, which is possible because the subject’s own incapacity reveals the consciousness of an unlimited capacity of the very same subject, and the mind can aesthetically judge the latter only through the former.”
- Kant, Critique, §28. “Sublimity is not contained in anything in nature, but only in our mind, insofar as we can become conscious of being superior to nature within us and thus also to nature outside us (insofar as it influences us).” I am glossing over the difference between mathematical and dynamical sublime in Kant, where the former is—roughly speaking—concerned with representing the infinite, and the latter is with overcoming forces of nature. One could develop a two pronged Party sublime analogously, the mathematical and dynamical corresponding to iconicity and indexicality in the cinematic network.
- Ibid., 250.
- This YouTube short gives a quick summary of how dodging internet censors is a Chinese “national sport,” and a fool’s errand on the state’s part: https://youtu.be/sznoikfRA24?si=7PfDnZbPZMA8-nG5.
- Li, Cinematic Guerrillas, 5-6.
- Ibid., 45.
- Ibid., 29. Li also emphasizes that this sense of propaganda is similar to the term in medieval Europe—as propagating what is true—which many of the revolutionaries might have inherited in mission schools (19).
- “The primary goal of the Chinese government is to rejuvenate Chinese civilisation and ensure that there is no repetition of the century of humiliation it suffered from 1842 to 1949. In the eyes of many objective Asian observers, the CCP actually functions as the “Chinese Civilization Party”. Its soul is not rooted in the foreign ideology of Marxism-Leninism but in the rich cultural reservoirs of Chinese civilisation. In this regard there is no fundamental contradiction between America and China.” From Kishore Mahbubani, "Has China Won? The Chinese Challenge to American Primacy, March 31, 2020, https://mahbubani.net/has-china-won-the-chinese-challenge-to-american-primacy/.
- Gregorio Bettiza et al., "Civilization and the Ideological Contestation of the Liberal International Order," International Studies Review, vol. 25, no. 2, 2023. Multipolarity is short-hand for civilizationist conservatism.
- Owen Hatherley, Militant Modernism, (Zer0 Books, 2009).
- Owen Hatherley, “Actually existing social condensers: On the mundanity of Soviet Modernism,” The Journal of Architecture, vol. 22, no. 3, 2017, 512. That architecture finds its essence in media—especially the photograph, if not the drawing—is a point belabored by many critics: Beatriz Colomina, Paul Preciado, Fredric Jameson, among others.
- Hatherley, “Actually existing social condensers,” 520-521.
- An architectural approach closely associated with Zaha Hadid.
- "'THE MAOHAUS' 16 BanQiao Hutong Facade," AntiStatics Architecture Design, https://www.antistatics.net/maohaus.
- "Banqiao No. 16 Cultural Space Reconstruction," Tanzo Space Design, https://www.tanzospace.com/list/post/449155/.