Translation by Ainsly Morse was first published at Translit almanach #6-7

«Today's Russia is at the bottom of the world list for quality of the most important state institutions. Our country is ranked 158-159 out of 187 countries for political freedom – between Pakistan, Swaziland and Togo. For freedom of the press we are 147 out of 179, at the level of Iraq, Venezuela and Chad. Russia ranks 123 out of 158 for corruption, next to Gambia, Afghanistan and Rwanda. For property rights it is 89th out of 110 countries, next to Mozambique, Nigeria and Guatemala. For quality of the judicial system – 170th out of 199, side by side with Burundi, Ethiopia, Swaziland and Pakistan. For efficiency of bureaucracy – 155 out of 203, neighbouring Niger, Saudi Arabia, Cameroon and Pakistan. An authoritarian state model legalises violence in society. Russia occupies seventh place among 112 countries for the number of murders per 1000 residents –– between Ecuador and Guatemala, a little lower than South Africa and slightly higher than Mexico. In terms of physical safety overall, our country ranks 175th out of 183 countries, along with Zimbabwe, Sudan, Haiti and Nepal.»

From a report by A. Illarionov on Russia's place in foreign ratings.

When they tell you in plain Russian, in the dry language of numbers

that in terms of

political freedoms and civil rights

Russia occupies 158–159th place –– somewhere between

Pakistan and Togo, ––

what do you feel, a person

of the era of centralised Moscow conceptualism,

of the futures and marketing of sovereign democracy?

Insulted for your nation?

.  

Alexander Skidan (AS): In Russia today, poetry, on the one hand, is very marginalized; it’s off the scene, so to say. At the same time, in the context of new authoritarian steps toward the shrinking of the public sphere, poetry somehow has won back some part of the attention and power that it lost during perestroika when, as you know, what was forbidden before became open and free, and all the hot topics migrated from literature and poetry to the public sphere or into the newspapers. There was a huge gap in the Nineties, when poetry was an absolutely marginal, individual enterprise. Now it’s different. Our group sees poetry as one very specific, very strange field where something very important is happening or could happen. That’s why we want to ask you how you could define the singularity of poetic expression, poetic language, and poetic subjectivity. So the latter would be the topic of my first question. In contemporary poetry, and by that I mean poetry after Celan, Mandelshtam, Brodsky, we can’t grasp a strict, homogeneous subjectivity anymore. It’s so elusive: self-effaced subjectivity that demands new clarification and new definitions. If I can dare to ask you to comment on this displacement of subjectivity from Mallarme and Rimbaud’s age to the post-modern sense of Lyotard’s displaced subject…

Giorgio Agamben (GA): More generally, I would say that the problem of poetic subjectivity is not only a modern problem. It’s always the most complicated and difficult thing to grasp. Even if you go back to the poetic tradition of the Romantics, each poet tried to grasp poetical experience and poetical subjectivity. It always implies a kind of desubjectivation. It’s like in the negativity of the famous letter by John Keats: the poet is the one who has no ego. The poetical subject is not a subject. This is the gesture “J’ai un autre.” Each time a poet has tried to grasp the problem of poetical subjectivity, it has always led to negative subjectivity, non-subjectivity, desubjectivation. The Portuguese poet Pessoa is another incredible example. There is a famous letter I quote in the book where he defines how he writes. When he writes, suddenly another ego materializes and speaks through him. He gives this the name of the heteronym. Even in classical poetry, the problem of the muse is precisely that: it is not the poet who speaks, but the muse. This simply means that poetical subjectivity is a very complicated thing. In the Sixties in San Francisco there was this interesting school called “Dictated Poetry” and they went back to this idea of the muse and the idea that the one who speaks is not the poet. Then, it can take the Hegelian form that it is the language that speaks. This is just to say how big the problem of poetical subjectivity really is. Even Dante says in a very famous description of his poetics that “I is one (third person) that speaks when love inspires him.” So this is the banalitй du base, as the Situationists used to say. Then, one should begin from this and try to think through the problem. I wouldn’t say that it’s a modern problem. Suddenly, it has become more intense, but I would say it’s a constituent element of poetry.

First published at Translit almanach on poetry "Who is speaking?"

Recently I understood clearly that art couldn’t help but be communist. This is not at all a manifestation of ideology, as it would seem to some. Nor is it dogma. It is just that suddenly it became obvious that all art – from Ancient Greece to the present day; that art which has overcome the egoism and conceit in itself – contained the potential to be communist. Regardless of its pessimism or optimism, such art is dedicated not to some social group but to one and all. This is not some kind of propaganda trick. That’s what happens with an artist whose art is not afraid of people. Often art is either afraid of losing itself in the crowd or, the other extreme, it attempts to be artificially populist so it isn’t suspected of being refined or subtle, or is addressed to an in-crowd of discerning connoisseurs and experts.

Nikolay Оleynikov: When I think about the art worker’s place in contemporary reality, unexpected pictures flash before my eyes: a poet torching an ugly office building in the city center or an artist, his face covered by a bandana, being arrested by seven cops at a demo. I like these pictures. Boring is the artist who has convinced himself that his place is in the studio from eleven in the morning to seven in the evening. And fine is the poet who doesn’t merely rock the Internet or club slam with his words, but devotes himself to activism.

There are many artists who come to mind here – impressive artists who saw that full creative realization was possible only within a political or workers movement. This includes not only the entire spectrum of pre-Revolutionary Russian and early Soviet art, but also, of course, Gustave Courbet and Honorй Daumier (among the revolutionary artists of France), the politicized Berlin Dadaists, Diego Rivera and the Mexican muralists, and Emory Douglas, the Black Panther Party’s minister of culture and a brilliant graphic artist. These artists were not afraid of forfeiting their artistic identity by fusing with a political movement, of losing themselves in activist work, of being stripped of the supreme, righteous lack of bias that, allegedly, alone makes the artist’s gaze infallible in the court of art history. Is that the case? For, if you recall, all these artists shouldered the burden of administrative work and distinguished themselves as organizers, recognizing the importance of their mission and mercilessly expending their talents in the daily struggle.

01. Our Principles: Self-Organization, Collectivism, Solidarity

The Chto Delat? platform unites artists, philosophers, social researchers, activists, and all those whose aim is the collaborative realization of critical and independent research, publication, artistic, educational and activist projects. All of the platform’s initiatives are based on the principles of self-organization and collectivism. These principles are realized through the political coordination of working groups—the contemporary analogue of soviets. The projects undertaken by any of these groups represent the entire platform and are closely coordinated with one another. At the same time, the existence of the platform creates a common context for interpreting the projects of its individual participants.

We are likewise guided by the principle of solidarity. We organize and support mutual assistance networks with all grassroots groups who share the principles of internationalism, feminism, and equality.

DV: Everyone has long ago given up wracking their brains over the question of whether it is possible to elaborate precise rules for organizing the work of a collective. It is now quite rare to come across a new manifesto or declaration. The cult of spontaneity, reactivity, and tactics—the rejection of readymade rules—is the order of the day. Tactics, however, is something less than method. Only by uniting tactics and strategy can we arrive at method. Hence it is a good thing to try one’s hand at writing declarations from time to time.

DR: But why now this declaration? I think it marks an important point in Chto Delat’s evolution from collective to counter-institution. We are trying to translate things we learned to (dis)agree upon over the last years into a broadened context with new constituents; to outline the principles of counter-institutional behavior very different from the extremely hierarchical and exploitative institutions that produce the social relations of the art world today. The main use of such an admittedly utopian endeavor is arguably that it shows us how far we have to go to realize our dreams of solidarity. That, and not the outlining of “rules,” is the whole point of writing declarations in the first place.

DV: These are the basic principles of the structure of the platform - I would also call them as ideal structure of work that unfortunately in reality function differently. The main problem is the lack of collective initiative, the growing passivity of the most of the participants. So at the moment the platform functions more as the space of identification, as a kind of identity that marks all people who are openly involved with it with a certain basic position. Also I hope that during the possible change of general political situation from repressive-reactionary towards progressive the platform could play a role of a trigger of different process and facilitate the growing number of its members with the tool for collective work.

This transcript is a excerpt of a workshop during which the reconstituted Karl Marx School of the English Language read the second to last chapter on primitive accumulation in Capital Vol. 1. An audio installation with paintings by Dmitry Gutov was shown in the framework of the exhibition "Principio Potosi" at the Reina Sofia Museum for Contemporary Art.