Irina Sandomirskaya’s lunch lecture, allusively entitled “The Story of O.,” was the first event of the magazines week on “The Position of the Speaker.”

Irina, whom I have never heard before, is a cultural studies professor in Sweden. She gave a virtuosic, perfectly tailored account of the famous deaf-blind educator Olga Skorokhodova (1914?-1982), the Soviet Helen Keller.

To recall a bit of the narrative itself: Skorokhodova, or O., as Sandomirskaya called her, lost her sight and hearing in her early childhood. She was taught how to read, write, and emulate speech by Ivan Sokolyansky, a special education expert and language philosopher of the Soviet 1920s. At a special school in Kharkov, he developed a set of pegagogical techniques based on Pavlov and, supposedly, Marx, these techniques were very much in the spirit of the time, utilizing a combination of communicative-corporeal methods (lip reading by touch, hand signing etc.) and machine prosthethics to communicate with the children.

In her talk, Sandomirskaya presented the story of O. as an allegory of modernity’s subjectivity, which requires a zero position of deaf-blindness, a “blosses Leben” or “bare life,” from which to arise in the sphere of what is, essentially, a pioneering experiment in biopower. O.’s own accounts sound like they are coming close to a complete “emancipation of the human senses,” as Marx famously predicts in his Paris Manuscripts, but at the same time, they are under continual suspicion, for being an experimental Pygmalion side-effect, overdetermined, it would seem, by the viciditudes of the time. That sounds very complicated, but it actually isn’t. Sandomirskaya’s intriguing narrative was extremely accessible. You can listen to it at ....

Sandomirskaya’s talk fit ideally into the three leitmotifs of documenta 12, and was really geared to a random cultural public with little to no knowledge of the complexities of Soviet history. In some ways, it presented a brilliant introduction to the problematic of the epoch on the whole. The public was very eager to hear more, though some of the questions were a little difficult to follow; my notes have terrible ommissions here, simply because I couldn’t linguistically catch what people were saying.

One question, however, was very symptomatic, so I think I should mention it: one gentleman said that he really liked the talk, that it expressed the strangeness and retroactive value of the Soviet experiment, and its ambivalence, but wasn’t O really a product of the Stakhanovism of the time of the first five year plan? Sandomirskaya made the illuminating differentiation that O.’s teacher, like his more famous and theoretically important colleague Lev Vygotsky, really belonged more to the 1920s, representing a constructivist idea of horizontal Gramscian hegemony, with all its contradictions, later repressed and eliminated altogether, though its product (O) survived, her sense suspiciously emancipated from the deafness of an asocial void, socialized, and made objective. Sandomirskaya was careful not to conflate its educational-communicative-technological pathos with some unified Soviet ontology. This is quite important pedagogically, because it tells a cultural public interested in the problematic of the Soviet avant-garde not to jump to conclusions in discussing what is all too often framed as a narrative of defeat. One could actually say that narratives like Sandomirskaya’s, which I really enjoyed, show just how much there is to be reassessed in this time, whose archeology really has only to begin.

Interestingly, there were many points of connection of Sandomirskaya’s lunch lecture to Chto delat’s new issue, “Debates on the Avant-garde.” This issue, which I will write about in my next post, contains a skype dialogue that I did with my colleague the philosopher Alexei Penzin (link). In it, Penzin broaches the intriguing subject of the avant-garde experiment’s relation to the emergence of biopower, as something that prefigures and indeed produces the conditions we are working in today.

Penzin makes an Adornian argument and says that biopower is a positive reduction of this experiment, which was actually based in negativity. Sandomirskaya’s talk illustrates this quite well, and presents an almost classical account of negativity as the deafness-blindness-incapacity for signification that overcomes the subject, enveloping it in perfectly opaque night and uncertainty, only to be led out of this zero-state of mobile things come undone into a brave new world of prosthetic-communicative devices. This narrative comes strangely close to that of Hegel’s Phenomenology. Biopower, as Penzin put it, emerges when these devices are reproduced without this negativity, as positive, soft techniques for a neo-Taylorist rationalization of reification that now reallocate their zero-positions into new enclosures. This, perhaps, is a good point to break off, and to leave that whole subject for my next post, which will be on Chto delat’s workshop “Debates on the Avant-garde.” It will only come tomorrow, since I have yet to see the actual documenta...