This paper presents three distinct readings of Russian avant-gardist art. While Jonathan Beller argues (in the wake of Walter Benjamin’s ground-breaking essay on the status of the artwork under the conditions of technological reproducibility) that Russian avant-gardist art - and particularly film with its technique of montage - has to be interpreted in terms of an ideology critique of Taylorism, Jacques Rancière rejects any metapolitical account of Russian avant-gardist art and film as critical representations of capitalist mass production characteristic of Taylorism. According to him, Russian avant-gardist art and film exhibit an “aesthetic logic” constitutive of an “aesthetic communism” or “communism of the senses” weaving together multiple equivalent and simultaneous activities. However, both interpretative frameworks fail to grasp the significance of biopolitical theories and practices crucial to the projects of the Russian avant-garde. For this reason, this paper turns to Boris Groys’ contention that Russian constructivism in particular accomplishes the merging of aesthetics and biopolitics into a kind of bio-aesthetics that exceeds both Beller’s Marxist framework of ideology critique and Rancière’s aesthetic regime.
Gwendolyn Miles Smith Professor of Philosophy at Trinity College (CT, USA) and Privat-Dozent of Philosophy at the University of Vienna. Author/editor of 26 books; author of 80+ articles and book chapters; translator of 11 books and of 90+ articles; he works primarily in the area sof aesthetics and political theory. Most recently, he published a book about the Austrian writer Peter Handke (2025). He is completing a volume examining the question of the arts (literature and theater, music, painting) in Alain Badiou's seminal work. This volume succeeds recent volumes on "Slavoj Zizek und die Künste" and on "Jacques Rancière und die Literatur". Furthermore, he is completing a volume that examines the contemporary constellation of biopolitics, aesthetics, and art by gathering theoretical and artistic perspectives from and/or on China, Japan, Turkey, Australia, Brazil, Russia, Italy, France, Austria, and Germany. Publication date for both volumes will be end of 2025. Finally, he has begun working on a book addressing the disarticulation of "great literature" in the work of Elfriede Jelinek.
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