Cosmic Shift by Zaytseva Elena Anikina Alex

Author:Zaytseva, Elena,Anikina, Alex
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: National Book Network International
Published: 2017-04-11T04:00:00+00:00

Part Three

From the archive

Archives, as lost and recovered collections of humble objects, are the material evidence of the weight and flow of history. They reveal ruptures between different types of time – historical, psychological and collective.

Can archives then be the site of social change, as arguably was the case with the archive of Moscow conceptualism?

13

Vadim Zakharov

AUTHOR, COSMOS, ARCHIVE

The subject of this book could have been formulated in various ways: “The Author in the Cosmos of Ideology” or “The Cosmos as a Symptom of the Neurotic Condition of Totalitarian Society” or simply “The Author as Archive.” But anyway, in this case the three elements – Author, Cosmos and Archive – are crucial to an understanding of social utopias and philosophical, aesthetic and psychoanalytical theories.

The artists, poets and philosophers of the early twentieth century vaguely envisioned the cosmos as a vector of escape into the bright future. As a general rule, however, the fuel used for takeoff was an ideology of one kind or another, together with all its nuances. The Cosmos as an obsessional idea for society as a whole, and in particular for the Author. Malevich, Kandinsky, Filonov, Labas, Williams, and many others are the cosmonauts of their own utopias and concomitant ideologies. The theories of Fedorov, for instance. All these utopias ceased to exist in the 1930s, when the flames of personal utopias gave way to the infernal communist conflagration. Authors who launched themselves into a cosmos turned out to be ideologists of individualism, and therefore enemies of the socialist society that was being built. A society that aspired in its totality towards the ‘heavens’ of a collective world order that had tossed the individual into the combustion chamber of the booster rocket.

Every author actively structures the utopia of his own individual personality and realizes himself in this utopia, expanding its boundaries in all manner of diverse spaces, including the cosmos which, in the final analysis, is the goal towards which his primary ambitions are directed. Of course, the very concept ‘cosmos’ often changes. When the cosmos becomes the real objective of a collective author, ideologies become actively engaged – socialism, communism, Maoism. In contrast with the individual methods and practices for mastering a different space, or religious and psychological methods, the collective methods and practices resemble posters or slogans. Everything about them is sham. From the very beginning real flights into cosmic space were accompanied by a battle of ideologies with banners displayed on both sides. But when the cosmos becomes exclusively an object of scientific research, most people forget about it.

Today there is a notable upsurge of interest in the cosmos both in the West and in modern Russia, which is once again dashing into the abyss of totalitarianism. How many official declarations there have been recently in Russia about flights to Mars and the construction of stations on the moon. The cosmos is again being transformed into an ideological vector, an arena for confrontations between Western and post-Soviet ideologies and the battle between new technologies, a field of military domination.

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