This article is based on a lecture given by the author at the forum held by the China Academy of Art "Century: A Proposal," Strasbourg, France, 2017.12.02

Roughly and very briefly, I shall cover the years between 1966 and 1969.

My basic thesis is simple and hopefully thought-provoking. In a deep time perspective, Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution can be interpreted as a generator for producing and distributing a new kind of subjectivity. This new subjectivity should prepare the singularities in post-revolutionary China for a kind of sociality which would not be essentially based on the human relation to nature, but would be basically constituted by and through advanced technologies. Mao's Cultural Revolution thus was functioning as a hinge (Scharnier in German): between the subjectivities of the traditional agrarian Culture in China and the new modes of existence based on advanced technologies, their agencies, their artifacts, and networks. With the instrument of the Cultural Revolution it should become possible for the singular to skip the petite bourgeoise and proletarian mode of production in a new quality of communitas (Gemeinschaft): an unconditioned we.

I want to unfold my thesis roughly and quickly in four steps.

-       First by explaining what I mean with the idea of a new subjectivity.

-       Second by using the example of our recent rehearsal of Russian avant-garde composer Arseny Avraamov's legendary Symphony of Sirens to point out empirically the question of the generator in the process of the production of new subjectivities. (I will skip this in my speech, because I fear this signs “you have just one minute left.” But I will include it in the written form of my speech.)

-       Third by interpreting the Little Red Book of the Cultural Revolution as a manual in the direct sense—a handbook for subject generators.

-       Fourth by quickly referring to some artistic and political positions developed in the West parallel to the period of the Cultural Revolution and relating them to each other very provisionally.

 

First—The Idea of a New Subjectivity

Starting at the end of the 19th / beginning of the 20th century humans and machines became more and more different parts of a mutually constituted social reality. The machinic became an essential part of us and the other way round, we became part of the machinic. In 1948 German philosopher and writer Max Bense could start an influential text with the sentence: Our existence has become basically technical. A few decades later North American scholar Katherine Hayles commented on the early so-called cybernetic period (Anselm Franke was just referring to it) with the statement that humans primarily had become “information-processing entities, who are essentially similar to intelligent machines.” (Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, Chicago, 1999)

What we can call the spirit of technology was breathing through the whole 20th century. But later in its second half the biological and the technological has become an integrated ensemble, inside of which both are more or less alien to each other. To avoid a kind of alienation which might become painful and unproductive for the future, huge efforts have been made to create new subjectivities, which should be able to bridge the differences and to harmonize the tensions. Complex technology does not need primarily the individual, as a system it needs the processing multitude of innumerable singularities.

 

Second—Symphony of Sirens/City as a Music Box

On November 7, 1923, at noon at the center of Moscow, and exactly one year earlier in Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, the most powerful city symphony ever staged had been performed. Its composer was the Russian avant-garde composer Arseny Avraamov. The performance was called “Symphony of Sirens.”

In the Soviet capital, the performance began at 12:30 p.m. with an artillery volley that signaled the start to all the city's inhabitants, followed by resounding fanfares whose piercing sound resembled the signals of minesweepers. Accompanied by gun and artillery volleys, the Internationale rang out, sung by a huge amateur choir of “Young Guards” with more than 1,000 people. Seasoned machine gunners not only imitated drum rolls but also wove intricate rhythmic figures. At the same time twenty airplanes, used at various parts of the symphony, roared above the Red Square.

The energetic stimulus for the “Symphony of Sirens” was the poetry of Aleksei Gastev (1882–1939) from Suzdal. Gastev spent large parts of the 20th century's second decade in prisons, penal camps and on the run or in exile. He belonged to the radical futurist scene of St. Petersburg. Between 1913 and 1920 he developed alongside his political activities an extreme economy of language thoroughly imbued with the spirit of the “machinic.” In 1921 he published his final collection of poetry in Riga. It consisted of ten poems entitled Pack of Orders. The formal-aesthetic apex of these ten poetic commandments of proletarian culture are verses composed of single-word lines containing machinic orders. The poems functioned as manual instructions. Crossing the boundary that separates art from daily life, Gastev proceeded to build up institutes for the systematic analysis of work management, first in Moscow and then in other cities across the young Soviet Union. Gastev sought to develop on the basis of a binary code of the machine (lift and thrust) an economy of work that fundamentally differed from the sluggish agrarian modes of production and was instead fully attuned to, and able to merge with, the rhythm of the machine. In line with the ideal of a proletarian human machine, the goal was to create a homogeneous assembly of living expert systems.

 

Third—The Red Manual

I interpret Mao's Cultural Revolution, alongside Alberto Moravia's legendary report from 1967, as a strong synthesis of Marxism and Confucianism. The kind of subjectivity, which was at stake to be generated anew, was not the proletarian human machine. Instead, in opposition to Stalin and his Soviet Union, the Cultural Revolution celebrated the concept of a techno-sociality based on equality. Possibilities of social ascent (sozialer Aufstieg) was given neither through consumption as the primary source for capitalist profit (like in the USA) nor through prosperity as gratification for power, but through the quality, variety and distribution of talent and capabilities, especially technical capabilities.

The main method to reach this goal was not constituted primarily by dialectics and class struggle, but by the Confucian ideals of education, instruction (Belehrung), the idea of becoming better, and the setting of an adequate scale—einsetzen von Maßstäblichkeit in der Hamonie—a setting of a kind of mediocracy in harmony. These are all principles and paradigms, which are difficult to be understood in Western Europe. Mao's Cultural Revolution dared to start the unbelievable adventure to combine the most naked and most brave poverty of the past with a maximum of technological process as a potential space. Thus the unscathed (unversehrt/unhurt) subject of the agrarian world embedded in nature should be transformed into a techno-based freedom—without paying the price for the petite-bourgeois identity through which the people of the Soviet Republics had to go before the collapse of the communist system (and in a different—the petit bourgeoise—way the Hippy Movement of the Californian West went through before the establishment of Silicon Valley).

The Little Red Book with important phrases formulated by Mao Zedong did not have the status of a pure object of learning and knowledge that one stored on their shelf at home and occasionally took out to read. Much more, it functioned as a Handbuch in the true sense of the term—it was a manual that you always have available in your pocket, to observe how the machine is running, how you can synchronize with it, how to correct or how to repair it—or to repair yourself. This very special handbook for the correct behavior and acting is highly comparable with the instructions of the Confucian rites which easily can be read as a program. In fact, Mao's Red Book and the instructions for practicing and celebrating the Confucian rites are working supplementary as advanced subject generators.

 

Fourth—Technetronic Era

The notion that human existence oscillates between being at least co-conditioned by technology and a manufactured appearance that is completely artificial has been a prominent feature of artistic production with and through media since the second half of the 1960s. Jean-Luc Godard made his filmic criticism of the ubiquitous mega-machine computer, in his film Alphaville already in 1965. With Alphaville, Godard reacted to the private and public installation of mainframe computers from IBM, whose involvement in the murderous machinery of the Nazis was only known at the time to a handful of alert historians. He also reacted to urban developments in Paris, parts of which appeared like an architectonic enforcement of the circular consistency concept implicit in cybernetics. Jacques Tati needed three years, from 1964 to 1967, to realize this ingeniously in his film Playtime as a scenario set in the present. Stanley Kubrick's Space Odyssey was released in 1968. The West German companion piece to Alphaville, was released in 1973. Rainer Werner Fassbinder's two-part TV film Welt am Draht (World on a Wire) was based on a science fiction novel by Daniel Francis Galouye, titled Simulacron-3.[1]  In this matrix everyone is entrapped, and all view each other as capable of anything, there is no mutual trust. In the end, the chief computer engineer also turns out to be a machine whose intelligence is so highly developed that he is even capable of feeling pity.

In the second half of the 1960s, the post-war German capitalism, which had prospered almost entirely without restraints for fifteen years, went into deep recession. The West German Republic was severely shaken by both economic and political events. In the steel sector alone 10% of the workforce was made redundant. It was evident that mining and heavy industry, up to then stable pillars of prosperity, would not be economically valuable forever. The sacred cow of “growth” showed itself to be highly vulnerable and unreliable in its dynamics. Thus, in the early 1970s, there was an immense political drive to change the structure and foci of industry and to put it on a new, or at least expanded base. Electronic technologies were entering the international markets with artifacts and systems of information technology, data processing, and communications. Their development promised a new, post-industrial economy and a revolution that would be awesome, in which no blood would be spilled and nobody would get their hands dirty. Technology-based services were synonymous with speed, cleanliness, efficiency, predictable reliability, and more intensive social interaction.

Zbigniew Brzeziński, head of the Institute on Communist Affairs of New York's Columbia University coined a strategic neologism in 1969: the Technetronic Era. Zbigniew Brzeziński wrote, “The post-industrial society is becoming a ‘technetronic’ society: a society that is shaped culturally, psychologically, socially and economically by the impact of technology and electronics—particularly in the area of computers and communications.” By conflating technology and electronics, Brzeziński identified not only the massive shifts within the USA, but also a paradigm shift within the geopolitics of the planet. On the way from the age of industrial production to the age of electronic communication technologies, a “global” and even “planetary” community is emerging. On the basis of telematic information that is all linked, the course of history is no longer determined by ideologies that aggressively try to beat the daylights out of each other; rather, it is determined by the communitas of advanced countries in agreement with each other. (I'm still inside Zbigniew Brzeziński's text) The new community of the technetronic era would be ruled by a knowledge elite, who would also shape future universities. This elite would guarantee perfect communicative structures as well as the optimal governance of what had previously not been adequately under control.

Brzeziński meant first and foremost the USA, Western Europe, and in a third place, Japan. With the Cultural Revolution, Mao brought China onto this map for a technetronic era too with the exclusive advantage of a concept of sociality which should flourish half a century later, not as an unconditioned we, but as a conditioned temporal we. Let us go ahead with this.


Notes

[1] The original title was Counterfeit World (1964); the corruption/distortion of the lovely term “simulacrum” from the poetic and philosophical arsenal of the Ancient Greek Atomists is clearly not only the prerogative of Jean Baudrillard.

This article is based on a lecture given by the author at the forum held by the China Academy of Art "Century: A Proposal," Strasbourg, France, 2017.12.02

Roughly and very briefly, I shall cover the years between 1966 and 1969.

My basic thesis is simple and hopefully thought-provoking. In a deep time perspective, Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution can be interpreted as a generator for producing and distributing a new kind of subjectivity. This new subjectivity should prepare the singularities in post-revolutionary China for a kind of sociality which would not be essentially based on the human relation to nature, but would be basically constituted by and through advanced technologies. Mao's Cultural Revolution thus was functioning as a hinge (Scharnier in German): between the subjectivities of the traditional agrarian Culture in China and the new modes of existence based on advanced technologies, their agencies, their artifacts, and networks. With the instrument of the Cultural Revolution it should become possible for the singular to skip the petite bourgeoise and proletarian mode of production in a new quality of communitas (Gemeinschaft): an unconditioned we.

I want to unfold my thesis roughly and quickly in four steps.

-       First by explaining what I mean with the idea of a new subjectivity.

-       Second by using the example of our recent rehearsal of Russian avant-garde composer Arseny Avraamov's legendary Symphony of Sirens to point out empirically the question of the generator in the process of the production of new subjectivities. (I will skip this in my speech, because I fear this signs “you have just one minute left.” But I will include it in the written form of my speech.)

-       Third by interpreting the Little Red Book of the Cultural Revolution as a manual in the direct sense—a handbook for subject generators.

-       Fourth by quickly referring to some artistic and political positions developed in the West parallel to the period of the Cultural Revolution and relating them to each other very provisionally.

 

First—The Idea of a New Subjectivity

Starting at the end of the 19th / beginning of the 20th century humans and machines became more and more different parts of a mutually constituted social reality. The machinic became an essential part of us and the other way round, we became part of the machinic. In 1948 German philosopher and writer Max Bense could start an influential text with the sentence: Our existence has become basically technical. A few decades later North American scholar Katherine Hayles commented on the early so-called cybernetic period (Anselm Franke was just referring to it) with the statement that humans primarily had become “information-processing entities, who are essentially similar to intelligent machines.” (Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, Chicago, 1999)

What we can call the spirit of technology was breathing through the whole 20th century. But later in its second half the biological and the technological has become an integrated ensemble, inside of which both are more or less alien to each other. To avoid a kind of alienation which might become painful and unproductive for the future, huge efforts have been made to create new subjectivities, which should be able to bridge the differences and to harmonize the tensions. Complex technology does not need primarily the individual, as a system it needs the processing multitude of innumerable singularities.

 

Second—Symphony of Sirens/City as a Music Box

On November 7, 1923, at noon at the center of Moscow, and exactly one year earlier in Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, the most powerful city symphony ever staged had been performed. Its composer was the Russian avant-garde composer Arseny Avraamov. The performance was called “Symphony of Sirens.”

In the Soviet capital, the performance began at 12:30 p.m. with an artillery volley that signaled the start to all the city's inhabitants, followed by resounding fanfares whose piercing sound resembled the signals of minesweepers. Accompanied by gun and artillery volleys, the Internationale rang out, sung by a huge amateur choir of “Young Guards” with more than 1,000 people. Seasoned machine gunners not only imitated drum rolls but also wove intricate rhythmic figures. At the same time twenty airplanes, used at various parts of the symphony, roared above the Red Square.

The energetic stimulus for the “Symphony of Sirens” was the poetry of Aleksei Gastev (1882–1939) from Suzdal. Gastev spent large parts of the 20th century's second decade in prisons, penal camps and on the run or in exile. He belonged to the radical futurist scene of St. Petersburg. Between 1913 and 1920 he developed alongside his political activities an extreme economy of language thoroughly imbued with the spirit of the “machinic.” In 1921 he published his final collection of poetry in Riga. It consisted of ten poems entitled Pack of Orders. The formal-aesthetic apex of these ten poetic commandments of proletarian culture are verses composed of single-word lines containing machinic orders. The poems functioned as manual instructions. Crossing the boundary that separates art from daily life, Gastev proceeded to build up institutes for the systematic analysis of work management, first in Moscow and then in other cities across the young Soviet Union. Gastev sought to develop on the basis of a binary code of the machine (lift and thrust) an economy of work that fundamentally differed from the sluggish agrarian modes of production and was instead fully attuned to, and able to merge with, the rhythm of the machine. In line with the ideal of a proletarian human machine, the goal was to create a homogeneous assembly of living expert systems.

 

Third—The Red Manual

I interpret Mao's Cultural Revolution, alongside Alberto Moravia's legendary report from 1967, as a strong synthesis of Marxism and Confucianism. The kind of subjectivity, which was at stake to be generated anew, was not the proletarian human machine. Instead, in opposition to Stalin and his Soviet Union, the Cultural Revolution celebrated the concept of a techno-sociality based on equality. Possibilities of social ascent (sozialer Aufstieg) was given neither through consumption as the primary source for capitalist profit (like in the USA) nor through prosperity as gratification for power, but through the quality, variety and distribution of talent and capabilities, especially technical capabilities.

The main method to reach this goal was not constituted primarily by dialectics and class struggle, but by the Confucian ideals of education, instruction (Belehrung), the idea of becoming better, and the setting of an adequate scale—einsetzen von Maßstäblichkeit in der Hamonie—a setting of a kind of mediocracy in harmony. These are all principles and paradigms, which are difficult to be understood in Western Europe. Mao's Cultural Revolution dared to start the unbelievable adventure to combine the most naked and most brave poverty of the past with a maximum of technological process as a potential space. Thus the unscathed (unversehrt/unhurt) subject of the agrarian world embedded in nature should be transformed into a techno-based freedom—without paying the price for the petite-bourgeois identity through which the people of the Soviet Republics had to go before the collapse of the communist system (and in a different—the petit bourgeoise—way the Hippy Movement of the Californian West went through before the establishment of Silicon Valley).

The Little Red Book with important phrases formulated by Mao Zedong did not have the status of a pure object of learning and knowledge that one stored on their shelf at home and occasionally took out to read. Much more, it functioned as a Handbuch in the true sense of the term—it was a manual that you always have available in your pocket, to observe how the machine is running, how you can synchronize with it, how to correct or how to repair it—or to repair yourself. This very special handbook for the correct behavior and acting is highly comparable with the instructions of the Confucian rites which easily can be read as a program. In fact, Mao's Red Book and the instructions for practicing and celebrating the Confucian rites are working supplementary as advanced subject generators.

 

Fourth—Technetronic Era

The notion that human existence oscillates between being at least co-conditioned by technology and a manufactured appearance that is completely artificial has been a prominent feature of artistic production with and through media since the second half of the 1960s. Jean-Luc Godard made his filmic criticism of the ubiquitous mega-machine computer, in his film Alphaville already in 1965. With Alphaville, Godard reacted to the private and public installation of mainframe computers from IBM, whose involvement in the murderous machinery of the Nazis was only known at the time to a handful of alert historians. He also reacted to urban developments in Paris, parts of which appeared like an architectonic enforcement of the circular consistency concept implicit in cybernetics. Jacques Tati needed three years, from 1964 to 1967, to realize this ingeniously in his film Playtime as a scenario set in the present. Stanley Kubrick's Space Odyssey was released in 1968. The West German companion piece to Alphaville, was released in 1973. Rainer Werner Fassbinder's two-part TV film Welt am Draht (World on a Wire) was based on a science fiction novel by Daniel Francis Galouye, titled Simulacron-3.[1]  In this matrix everyone is entrapped, and all view each other as capable of anything, there is no mutual trust. In the end, the chief computer engineer also turns out to be a machine whose intelligence is so highly developed that he is even capable of feeling pity.

In the second half of the 1960s, the post-war German capitalism, which had prospered almost entirely without restraints for fifteen years, went into deep recession. The West German Republic was severely shaken by both economic and political events. In the steel sector alone 10% of the workforce was made redundant. It was evident that mining and heavy industry, up to then stable pillars of prosperity, would not be economically valuable forever. The sacred cow of “growth” showed itself to be highly vulnerable and unreliable in its dynamics. Thus, in the early 1970s, there was an immense political drive to change the structure and foci of industry and to put it on a new, or at least expanded base. Electronic technologies were entering the international markets with artifacts and systems of information technology, data processing, and communications. Their development promised a new, post-industrial economy and a revolution that would be awesome, in which no blood would be spilled and nobody would get their hands dirty. Technology-based services were synonymous with speed, cleanliness, efficiency, predictable reliability, and more intensive social interaction.

Zbigniew Brzeziński, head of the Institute on Communist Affairs of New York's Columbia University coined a strategic neologism in 1969: the Technetronic Era. Zbigniew Brzeziński wrote, “The post-industrial society is becoming a ‘technetronic’ society: a society that is shaped culturally, psychologically, socially and economically by the impact of technology and electronics—particularly in the area of computers and communications.” By conflating technology and electronics, Brzeziński identified not only the massive shifts within the USA, but also a paradigm shift within the geopolitics of the planet. On the way from the age of industrial production to the age of electronic communication technologies, a “global” and even “planetary” community is emerging. On the basis of telematic information that is all linked, the course of history is no longer determined by ideologies that aggressively try to beat the daylights out of each other; rather, it is determined by the communitas of advanced countries in agreement with each other. (I'm still inside Zbigniew Brzeziński's text) The new community of the technetronic era would be ruled by a knowledge elite, who would also shape future universities. This elite would guarantee perfect communicative structures as well as the optimal governance of what had previously not been adequately under control.

Brzeziński meant first and foremost the USA, Western Europe, and in a third place, Japan. With the Cultural Revolution, Mao brought China onto this map for a technetronic era too with the exclusive advantage of a concept of sociality which should flourish half a century later, not as an unconditioned we, but as a conditioned temporal we. Let us go ahead with this.


Notes

[1] The original title was Counterfeit World (1964); the corruption/distortion of the lovely term “simulacrum” from the poetic and philosophical arsenal of the Ancient Greek Atomists is clearly not only the prerogative of Jean Baudrillard.