ORTA as Constructors of Hope

 

​Text by Dmitriy Mazorenko for the catalogue for the Kazakhstan's pavilion at the 59th Venice Biennale—The first New Genius Book "Sacred expositions of the Great and Immortal Lai-Pi-Chu-Plee-Lapa", 2022

 

 

​​​It seems foolhardy to speak of utopia in Kazakhstan. There are sound reasons for this. Modernizing projects of "actually existing socialism", utopian in spirit, each time brought about social catastrophes: a deadly famine, an acute shortage of goods, an ecological crisis, an atomization of society. In modern Kazakhstan civilizing leaps "from above" turned out to be nothing but a simulation and led to the social unrest of January 2022 and the resulting hundreds of casualties.

Local disappointment is compounded by the global situation. The limited results of the 1968 revolution dealt the first blow to the agents of a different future. The communist utopias of the USSR, China and Europe, under construction at that time, did not become a compelling antonym to capitalism, which had laid the foundation for all the cataclysms of the 20th century. On the contrary, during the Cold War period utopia became equated with Stalinism, which had violently stifled the very idea of human emancipation. Following the fall of the Soviet Union utopia became wholly eliminated from social life.

Everywhere utopia was replaced by anti-utopia, and its cultural representations convinced us of the wretched condition of any project for progressive organization of society. A spirit of despair enveloped the postmodernism which, among other "ends", celebrated "the end of history". The loss of an active perception of history locked us into a perpetual presence—thus philosopher Fredrick Jameson characterized the condition of current society. Dreams of large-scale social changes have been pushed back into the past and replaced by nostalgia for unrealized fantasies of modernity.

Following the disappearance of the socialist bloc the micropolitics of antiauthoritarian leftists have been substituting for projects for a better world. Grand narratives, first and foremost that of communism, have been stigmatized as examples of naïve, hopeless idealism. The ideas of a new society were accused of depriving the masses of even minimal agency. From this rebuke it also followed that utopia appears at a point when political activity has ceased, which structurally makes it an enemy of the political as such.

To date, despite the rejection of grand narratives, a viable alternative to late capitalism has not been developed. This is not solely because it is necessary to create a mechanism to equitably distribute resources and to convince the ruling class and society that it is indispensable. What is needed is to allow for the appearance of a qualitatively different socio-economic system in our historical situation. In view of that, utopia is still capable of giving us hope for the possibility of a different kind of order. But in what form can one work with it?

There are many alternative answers to this question. If we base ourselves on the theories of the philosophers Ernst Bloch and the previously cited Fredrick Jameson, then utopia cannot be presented as a planned, potentially completable project. It genuinely presupposes a break with the established order of things and an attempt to uncover within the present a new grammar of society. But the social world does not attempt to use utopia to discover some predetermined idea: after all, individuals acting within it still do not know just what they are supposed to achieve. It is the non-teleologicality of utopia that was missing from modernizing projects of the past. Here also lies the difference between utopian (Utopische) from utopistic (Utopistische)—an abstract idea that imposes on the future certain typical features.

The foundation of utopia is what Bloch termed the "elemental energy of hope". Here is the origin of every movement—not negative, but constructive at its core. For this energy it is not so much implementation in space that is primary, as is the very possibility of becoming. This is why utopia is a process—a process of formation of something long-awaited and new, even something fantastic, but without any structural logic. Bloch calls it "Not-Yet-Being".

It is, in turn, accompanied by the "Not-Yet-Conscious" domain of as yet unachieved daydreams and reveries of the future, which resisted Freudianism, entrenched in the realm of a repressed or forgotten past. However, this new thing is by no means an accident—fragmentary elements of it are manifested in current culture, economy and politics. They are not found on the surface, but are hidden under layers of already existing signifiers and therefore require painstaking searches and distinctions. 

Because Bloch's utopia lacks no center from which it could develop and towards which it could appear to strive, it is a totally unstable construction. When acting in the world, people can only hope for a favorable outcome, but they lack any assurance that such is possible. Indeterminacy and the accompanying intrinsic dynamism allow utopia to avoid the congealing produced by an obsessive desire to reach a final goal. It also corresponds to the very nature of our life: full of blind spots, gaps and contradictions.

The only goal of an utopian movement is likely reaching its maximal intensity. The endpoint of utopia is inaccessible to us—it constantly evades being recorded. As a result, a utopian movement becomes an attempt to capture what is hidden at the limits of a constantly changing rational world. This continuous dynamics is not a bad infinity, but a productive indeterminacy that presupposes the presence of a large number of alternatives for social development.

Turning to the question of politics, the utopian imagination always originates in some kind of ideological perspective. As a result, no attempt to think up another world can be apolitical. Furthermore, the political aspect of utopia is strengthened by several other problems.

One of the typical features of a postmodern subject is an incapacity to hope for a better world. This deep feeling has been replaced by affects—moments of attraction towards images in the style of a high technology future. Here the political challenge involves gaining back the right to desire, since it is a necessary condition for utopian thinking.

However paradoxical it may sound, liberation of desire is also necessary to once again begin experiencing the impossibility in principle of attaining utopia. Utopian thinking involves a process of imagining a radical distinction which does not seek to achieve any kind of result. It offers us the hope for the possibility of other social and cultural forms, which we, in any event, will never be able to uncover prior to their manifestation in human culture.

According to Jameson, one can overcome these two problems through analysis of what is blocking utopian thinking. For Bloch, art is the best space for both analysis and searching for utopian forms, since it is always a step ahead of the epoch in which it finds itself. Art also allows one to avoid banalization of concepts of an alternative system, thanks to the perceptual and semantic complexity of its creations. 

Such a utopian focus is found in all the practices of the Kazakhstani artist Sergei Kalmykov. It is not just that he creates images from fantasies: Kalmykov's intent in creating works of art, both textual and visual, is conditioned by his desire to plan new true-life worlds.

To a large extent, artistic acts were Kalmykov's response to the crushing atmosphere of political fear and material deprivations which was the inescapable reality of Soviet Kazakhstan. He hoped to rise to eminence in figurative painting; however, faced with the reality of mass repressions, world war and a deficit economy, he fairly quickly realized that this plan was meaningless.

Kalmykov's postwar period, with the surrealist and fantastic works so typical of his art, became a time of utopian experiments. In his works he did not put forward an integral schematic for another world, and likely did not even intend to develop it. Rather, he was developing the art of creating other worlds, quickly sketching them out so that other artists could deduce from them the underlying principles of utopian production.

As an example, we may cite his idea of an egalitarian and emancipated collectivity of people as artists—an idea that echoes Friedrich Schelling's conception of the aesthetic state. While rejecting communism as ideological window dressing, he nonetheless adhered to a fully socialist position and insisted that the state of an undefined future "provide everyone with material-technical conditions". This bounty would secure the possibility of a truly collective artistic process, the main purpose of which would be to give each human being the possibility of creative self-definition. Kalmykov believed that fine golden threads are hidden in the body of every person. They connect human societies not only with each other, but also with the entire "depth of space and time": as a result, all existing and new true-life worlds become possible. According to Kalmykov, these links and their utopian force may be brought to light through the use of special machines that can only be created in artistic practices.

The ORTA collective follows Kalmykov in his endeavor to search for the means of creating new worlds. At the same time, they also deploy some other principles of Kalmykov's strategy. The first of these is collectivity. It is expressed by the fact that the artists created their transdisciplinary installations and performances jointly and on equal terms with the people who carry out technical tasks and who are usually overshadowed by or even outside the industry of contemporary art. The artists also attach significance to non-human objects which are endowed with fully-functioning agency. In addition, collectivity also is expressed in regular co-action with the viewers in various artistic contexts, be it playing on invented musical instruments or cooperating in the study of spaces constructed by the artists.

The second principle is freedom of creative self-definition. In attempting to become free of existing forms of human activity, ORTA strives to develop a new language situated outside the boundaries of art, engineering, science and philosophy. The collective's transdisciplinary practices are a point of synthesis of this language. More than that: each new project of the artists becomes a reaction to a previously achieved synthesis. The artists' practices replace each other following experimental verification in action or co-action with the viewers. Thus, the free play of syntheses is the defining element of all activities of the collective. 

The third principle is the production of hope for an egalitarian and emancipated future the coming of which, nonetheless, is not guaranteed. In this sense the significance of ORTA practices lies precisely in generating the "elementary energy of hope". This allows us to identify them with what Jameson termed a utopian machine. Paradoxically, any attempt to give utopia explicit features in the form of an artistic or political project leads to its disappearance. On the other hand, its dynamism is assured by uninterrupted artistic production, which offers hope and leaves unobtrusive traces of a new world. This is what the metaphor of a utopian machine seeks to express.

Within the discourse of the ORTA collective the utopian machine is termed the Theory of the New Genius, which sums up all the principles inherited from Kalmykov. The essence of its ontological attitude is to strive towards the domain of freedom and to abandon the domain of necessity. This may be easily comprehended from the example of the language being synthesized by the collective. Because current iterations of this synthesis are occurring within the infrastructure of contemporary art, the artists are compelled to correlate their language with the language of contemporary art. But at each successive stage the collective raises the stakes and ever more persistently seeks to go beyond the strict limits of art.

A legitimate question arises: is a system of language that goes beyond the boundaries of the already existing system even possible? This is the political aspect of ORTA's work—planning a radical differentiation. A new language always grows from an existing symbolic system—in other words, that of social relations. But these always contain relations between power and domination, which make difficult all utopian impulses. The only possible language free from these relations is a language which no one uses. But Kalmykov's Theory of New Genius offers the ORTA collective hope for another kind of language system, one whose boundaries may keep hidden the outlines of future forms of social life.

 

Sources:

1. Anderson, P. The Origins of Postmodernity. London; New York: Verso, 1998.

2. Bloch, E. The Principle of Hope. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1986.

3. Bloch, E. Tübingen Introduction to Philosophy. Yekaterinburg: Publishing House of the Ural University, 1997. (Bloch E. Tübinger Einleitung in die Philosophie, Russian translation).

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12. Pavlov, A. Utopia in the Recent Western Marxism: Anomaly, Hope, Science. Voprosy filosofii. 2021. No. 9. 25-36. 

13. Sorokina, Y. Gravitational Singularity of the "Eurasian Utopia". Central Asian Journal of Art Studies. 2018. Vol. 3(4). 132-148.

14. Srnicek, N., Williams, A. Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work. London; New York: Verso, 2016.

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Translated by Henryk Baran