Disrupted Rhythms: The Dance of the Rhythmanalysts. #1 Preliminary Demarcations

Disrupted Rhythms: The Dance of the Rhythmanalysts is an ongoing creative investigation suited to an era of disrupted rhythms. It is a rhythm-laboratory comprised of dancers, performers, cinematographers, photographers, composers, musicians, poets, intellectuals and anyone we can seduce into participation. Our enquiry into the nature of rhythm takes us from the heartbeat to modes of production, from customs and conventions to revolutions and crises. Yet despite the grand scope of our investigations, our method starts with movement―impromptu dance―the joy of moving in space.

To live today is to live with a sense of disruption. Global events such as the 2007/8 financial crises and recession, the ensuing crises of ‘representational’ democracy, the COVID-19 pandemic and impending economic fall-out, and escalating threats of ecological catastrophe bring down a hammers blow against the end of history, which provided, for some at least, a sense of disruption discontinued. Disrupted Rhythms is a poetic phenomenological investigation into this sense of disruption. It deploys devices and techniques from dance, music, painting, poetry, photography, costume, film, performance, philosophy, phenomenology, economy, history, sociology, dialectics, music theory, biology, physiology, politics, and a plethora of other approaches and disciplines useful to our cause. Its starting point, however, is rhythm.

1.

The Universe according to Rhythm

“Rhythm expresses itself as an ordering force not only in the Dance, in music and poetry, but in all art. It appears in the distribution of colour and space in painting, plays an important part as form organization in sculpture and architecture. There we have linear and spatial rhythm. It is an ordering, regulating quality in the distribution of sounds, lines, colour, forms, words, and movements. Rhythm expresses the relationship,―in terms of time, space, or intensity,―of two or more concrete values which recur more than once. It is a feeling for, a measure of intervals. To feel rhythm is to have a sense of intervals.”

Elizabeth Selden, Elements of Free Dance¹

Rhythms are everywhere: the rhythm of my daily routine, the rhythm of the city scape, the rhythm of nature, the rhythm of social customs, the rhythm of the body, the rhythms of its organs, the rhythm of the microscopic, the rhythm of the planets, the solar system, the galaxy, the rhythm of the economy, the rhythm of production, the rhythm of political systems, the rhythm of history. Rhythms are everywhere, they are so apparent we often miss them. We are often so wrapped up in them that they almost disappear. It is often only in dance, in music, and in poetry that we become alert to the rhythms around us. It is not that rhythms only exist in the sphere of the arts, but rather the arts heighten our awareness of them.

A “feeling for the measure of intervals” could be applied to anything. Everything has a rhythm, and every science, and every intellectual discipline, contains an element of rhythmanalysis. Rhythmanalysis is simply the disclosure of the universe, in all its elements, according to rhythm.

2.

Rhythmanalysis and the Dancer

“We do not wait until we have read the latest books on biology before running, leaping, walking, or raising our arms, and even if we devote our time to reading about such subjects, nothing would change with regard to our primitive powers.”

Michel Henry, Philosophy and Phenomenology of the Body²

The dancer has a unique insight upon the world. The dancer’s measure does not come from the clock or the strict mathematics of grams, meters, etc. Even when such devices are deployed they can only make sense to the dancer by a particular incorporation into the dancer’s embodied awareness of the measure of intervals. The dancer’s comprehension of the rhythmic emerges from their own carnal primitive powers. Dance cannot be reduced to the intellect, the dancer learns through action.

The rhythmanalyst, as imagined by Henri Lefebvre, occupies a role somewhere between the scientist and the poet. Much like the dancer, “He listens to his body; he learns rhythm from it, in order consequently to learn external rhythms from it. His body serves him as a metronome.”³ The rhythmanalyst’s own body sets the pace and provides the measure. The rhythmanalyst deploys techniques not unfamiliar to the dancer: “the control of breathing and the heart, the control of muscles and limbs.”⁴ For Lefebvre, the rhythmanalyst must be like both a poet and a physician, and capable of discerning rhythm in both its mathematical and carnal dimension.

Our dance of the rhythmanalysts seeks to draw the rhythmanalyst into dance and the dancer into rhythmanalysis. Through the rhythmic joys of dancing in space we deploy our bodies in the service of an investigation that seeks to comprehend the primitive sense of the organisation of time and space.

 

3.

A Topology of Rhythm

We attempt to map the interplay between different rhythms, or polyrhythms. I arrive on the Beach. It is Friday 23^rd October 2020, just after 3pm. The date is not insignificant. The demarcation of days, weeks, months and hours contribute to and structure our rhythms. The cyclical rhythms of the seasons situate us within a particular environment. October brings with it a drop in temperature, an increased likelihood of overcast sky and rain. Our actions take place against a backdrop of the rhythm of temperature and weather. Clouds seem pregnant with the possibility of rain, but the forecast says something different (at least for the time being). Our anticipations based upon the forecast, and our anticipations based upon looking at the skies, structure our rhythms on the day.

The date is also important because it situates our activities in relation to the COVID-19 outbreak. The UK has not yet entered a second lockdown, but restrictions are rising. Such restrictions, for example, the space allowed between us, where and when we can travel, impart rhythmic demands. The shoot goes ahead, but always with a sense of potential impending disruption.

The beach is quiet, but not deserted. Many are out for what appears to be an afternoon stroll. Their individual rhythms form a kind of symmetry; each person, around the same time undertaking a similar task. Whilst there is no intentional choreography, conventional daily routines and the general structure of the day dictates a kind of spatial and temporal simultaneity. Our task and its rhythm clashes with theirs. Its pace and its objective is different, even, in a way, disruptive.

The location is also important. The distance from Brighton to Saltdean is 4.7 miles, and far enough for walking to feel a little “too much” for many of us. Thus different transports are required. This, for some, is the first time on public transport since the pandemic. I arrive with Lucy, the photographer, in her car. I have taken a lot of stuff (food, water, cups, costumes, computer to play music, small speakers, etc) all contained in a suitcase. We arrive slightly late and the rest of the team are already there. This disrupts my flow. I feel a sense of haste, but also a sense of disorientation that would seem inappropriate for being the person organising the project. (A certain sense of ‘having a role’ bestows particular expected rhythms.)

Kai, the cinematographer, suggests that we shoot on the beach next to the concrete groynes. We walk across the small stones that comprise the beach. Carrying the heavy suitcase across the shifting stones, against the gusting wind provides a sense that the polyrhythms are conspiring against me.

A certain sense of chaos has already engendered my arrival. Jojo (performer) returns to help me with the case. We set it down and I take out my 2p coin dress, which is made from cellotape and £20 worth of 2p coins. It is heavy, uncomfortable, and never easy to get on. I struggle. All items of clothing bring with them their own rhythms. All clothing has a flow, or rigidity, a particular organisation of colour, shade and pattern. The cut of an outfit shapes movement. And each item has a certain historical-cultural association drawn from a broader set of social and regulatory rhythms. Marc and Jojo wear suits suggesting a kind of formality, potentially unsuited to the culturally-expected rhythm of the beach. The cut of the suit allows for movement, but often with limitations. The 2p dress is restrictive, the collar limiting the movement of the neck. The weight and rigidity limits movement generally. The coins, nonetheless, seem to mimic the shape of the stones beneath it. This gives it a sense of being both ‘natural’ and ‘unnatural’, ‘organic’ and ‘weird.’ It at once fits and doesn’t fit.

In my haste, and, in part, due to my restrictive outfit, I forget to set up the music.

During the shoot itself numerous elements come into play. The cyclical rhythms of the sea and the waves confront the linear rhythms of the project. The project is linear in the respect that it drives towards something, albeit drifting off into knots of self-absorbed flow. The rhythms of the sea and the waves, the stones and the wind creates a polyrhythmic multisensory terrain that confronts the dancers and conditions their movements. Afterwards I note that the performers almost forgot to interact, as if the polyrhythmic environment was all consuming and intoxicating.

The performers (myself, Marc and Jojo), cinematographer (Kai) and photographer (Lucy) each provide a different rhythm. Each task brings with it different demands and different technical engagements that require us to get into a different rhythm.

The multisensory dimensions of rhythm should not be overlooked. The sound of the waves and the wind. The visual sense of overcast brightness against which the drama takes place. The smells and tastes of salty water and fresh sea air depending on one’s proximity to the water and the direction of the wind. The physical feeling of the rhythm of temperature, especially the shock when the waves crash over you. The element of balance and proprioception as we navigate the terrain.

We dance, we move, we explore. My body already feels tired as it adjusts to the interplay of temperature and the weird polymorphic environment. I look up to notice that Marta (another performer) has arrived. We stop, take a breather, and move on to shooting a second dance.

4.

Disrupted Rhythms

“Musical Meaning is vague, mutable, and in the end deeply personal. Still, even if history can never tell us exactly what music means, music can tell us something about history.”

Alex Ross, The Rest is Just Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century⁵

It is tempting to hear, in the atonality of 20^th century music, a sense of a discordant century. Not the peaceful harmonious progression of humanity, but a period of ruptures: technological acceleration, war, revolution, turmoil and struggle. Listen to Schoenberg, Webern and Berg, Stravinsky, Russulo etc. and we get the sense and uncertainty of the disrupted rhythms.

This is not to suggest that the disrupted rhythm always carries an element of misery, disruptions can bring both disappointments and opportunity; inspiration and despair. As a music teacher, Arnold Schoenberg knew the power of disruption. “It should be clear, then,” he writes “that the teacher’s first task is to shake up the pupil thoroughly. When the resultant tumult subsides, everything will have presumably found its proper place.”⁶ Disruption brings opportunities. The process of creation has taught us that the accidents are sometimes the most magical part, and bestow upon the artwork something that we couldn’t have imagined or planned for. Disruption brings possibility. Nonetheless, not all disruption produces positive results. We seek to understand the potency of disruption and deploy it to appropriate ends. Yet to do this requires an ability to listen to disruption, to understand its multiple dimensions and complex dynamics. Atonal music may help. We find in atonal music a kind of technology for rhythmanalysis, a way of feeling through an era of disrupted paths and discordant futures.

 

5.

Musical Listening as Social Phenomenology

“Cartoon music for me was a real breakthrough in terms of musical form, how it was structured. It seemed to me that it was completely revolutionary for the time. Maybe it was in my subconscious from watching Road Runner as a kid or what-have-you, maybe it is all the kinds of music that is used, the quotations… I always loved Ives as a young composer, Ives was one of my favourite and cartoon music seemed to relate to Ives in some way in terms of quotation and different genres, everything being treated the same, in the same slapstick kinda way, but, you know, a little bit of jazz would appear, classical would appear, all these different kinds of things would appear and really in a new way, and it was really revelatory in a lot of ways and very inspiring.”

John Zorn in Bookshelf on Top of the Sky: 12 Stories About John Zorn (Dir. Claudia Heuermann, 2002)

 We listen to music, as a technique of learning how to listen to life. The deployment of quotation in music provides a rhythmanalytic exercise that helps us grasp the phenomenology of disrupted rhythms. As Zorn notes in his discussion of cartoon music, “Nothing is really developed in that music. What’s developed is what you see on the screen, so there is a drama going on. A drama is played out, but to the director the sound is secondary, to me the sound was primary. So I try to analyze some kind of new structures, and I think I learned a little bit about putting new sounds together by the analysis of what happens in Carl Stalling specifically, Carl Stalling’s cartoon music.” Removing the image and simply listening to cartoon music enabled Zorn to learn something about rhythm and musical form. We undertake similar exercises, yet our goal is not simply to learn something about musical form, but also social form. We seek to condition the body to understand musical and social disruption. We start, however, with the task of listening, listening to anything. We experiment with listening and what we are listening to. Sometimes, as in the case of Zorn and cartoon music, we remove the visual. Other times we add a visual. Sometimes we listen to music. Sometimes we listen to the street.  We condition our body to think dynamically within these rhythms. Through doing this we seek the carnal capacity to comprehend disrupted rhythms in every quarter of our lives.

6.

Pandemic as Rhythm

“In music, in Poetry too, the silences have a meaning”

Henri Lefebvre, Rhythmanalysis⁷

The rhythm of the pandemic is captured in its silences and its absences. This could be the silence of the once bustling streets, the smaller circles of physical engagement, the distance between us, the simultaneous daily routines performed in isolation. Yet sometimes the absence is harder to place, such as the sense of being haunted by a virus that is both everywhere and nowhere. Sometimes this is our usual routines, yet it feels ‘haunted’: something isn’t right. Something is missing. According to Mark Fisher, the eerie “is constituted by a failure of absence, or by a failure of presence. The sensation of the eerie occurs either when there is something present where there should be nothing, or there is nothing where there should be something.”⁸  The virus is a failure of absence that marks the world with a sense of the eerie. It is ‘here’, but it is not present, it hides among us. For Fisher “The eerie concerns the unknown”⁹. As invisible guest, the virus can remain unknown, even if sometimes it manifests as symptoms.

But its eerieness does not stop there. The altered routines and new rhythms, even when they start to feel ‘natural’, seem ‘poisoned’ as if underscored by a hypnotic drone that never exactly feels right, a routine that seems slightly out of joint, or slightly on the edge.

7.

The Rhythm of Capitalism

“Capital is dead labour, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more labour it sucks. The time during which the labourer works, is the time during which the capitalist consumes the labour power he has purchased of him.”

Karl Marx, Capital¹⁰

“One could, to supplement the concept with images, depict capital: a chain of bacteria that grabs passing matter, that feeds itself by dividing itself, that multiplies by dividing itself. A false image: bacteria produces the living by absorbing the inert. Meanwhile capital grows by making the void: it kills around it on a planetary scale. Both in general and in detail. Capital does not construct. It produces. It does not edify; it reproduces itself. It simulates life. Production and re-production tend to coincide in the uniform! Traditionally, we take it out on the rich, on the bourgeois. Thus the object of action is displaced. We forget that the guilty party is not even money, it is the functioning of capital.”

Henri Lefebvre, Rhythmanalysis¹¹

In the writings of Marx and Lefebvre, capital, as a system, is depicted with the sensibility of horror. Lefebvre’s pandemic-like depiction of capital, no doubt adapting and building upon Marx’s vampire-like depiction. For Marx, the workers, by necessity of their class position as employees, are “robbed” of their labour. The relationship between the employer and the employee is not one of mutual exchange, but a parasitic relationship. These two classes develop two different rhythms, and it is the capitalist’s rhythm that conditions their parasitism. The employee sells their body as a commodity by the hour to the employer so that they can sustain themselves and live to work another day. The employer uses their money to buy the labour of the worker so that they can make not only their money back but more money. These two conflicting roles (or rhythms) inscribe a class struggle into the workplace. The employer attempts to get the most out of their commodity (the worker) by making them work longer hours for shorter pay with shorter lunch breaks (etc.), and the employee seeks to resist this. This reality shapes the rhythm of the working day. As for Lefebvre later, this is not a moralistic critique of the capitalist as employer, Marx notes that they may be “model citizens, perhaps a member of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty for Animals”¹², the problem is what (the rhythm of) the functioning of capital demands: the parasitical extraction of more surplus from their workers to supply the capitalist with profit.

Lefebvre adapts this, but upon a planetary scale. For him capitalism comprises of two rhythms, a rhythm of production, and a rhythm of destruction, but, as the above quote demonstrates, these almost collapse in on each other. Capital parasitically seeks not only the worker as a commodity, but everything that stands in its wake. It colonises space and time with a rhythm where production is destruction and destruction is production. Capital emerges as a global pandemic that comes to haunt our everyday life, as it escalates towards total destruction.

8.

The Rhythm of the Spectacle

“[The Spectacle] is the opposite of dialogue. Wherever representation becomes independent, the spectacle regenerates itself.”

Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle¹³

“[Mediatisation] tends to efface dialogue. It makes the other, the sensible, present, while the subject remains completely passive.”

Henri Lefebvre, Rhythmanalysis¹⁴

Traditional media (newspapers, radio, television) seem designed to efface dialogue. Sometimes literally in the way a panel discussion or breakfast TV interview sets (and limits) its own ideological spectrum, funneling an array of views through it. Yet also in a more general sense, the media landscape, as a whole, creates a world from which no outside force would appear to exist. This does not deny tensions and contradictions, but such tensions only serve to reinforce the general narrative. As Marcuse writes, “The reign of such a one-dimentional reality does not mean that materialism rules, and that the spiritual metaphysical, and bohemian occupations are petering out. On the contrary, there is a great deal of ‘worship together this week’, ‘why not try God’, Zen, existentialism and the beat way of life, etc. But such modes of protest and transcendence are no longer contradictory to the status quo and no longer negative. They are rather the ceremonial part of practical behaviorism, its harmless negation, and are quickly digested by the status quo as part of its healthy diet.”¹⁵

Against this, the internet appeared to many as an alternative. The advent of the internet seemed to herald new possibilities, new forms of dialogue, and new rhythms of social interaction beyond the traditional media strictures. Yet set against the context of different media platforms, the participatory emerges as a spectacle, a kind of repressive participation. We set out to break this by developing an experimental process that seeks to build subverted and rejuvenated models of participatory dialogue.

9.

The Rhythm of Revolution

“Regular rhythmicality seems beautiful to us not at all because of any liking for conventions, but because it is in profound harmony with the rhythmic regularity of our process of life and thought.”

Alexander Bogdanov, Red Star¹⁶

“Iron demon of the age with human soul, nerve like steel, muscles like rail.
Here he is!
He will receive, he will reach, he will attain.”

Alexei Gastev, Poetry of the Worker’s Blow¹⁷

“We must create a population of supermen, ‘not in the sense of Nietzsche’s Blond Beast,’ but in the sense of a future perfect and powerful creature, with cosmic perspective and cosmic powers…. The creation of a human being is a real overcoming of time in the sense of confirming the constancy of individuality against the corrosive force of time.”

Valerian Nicolaevich Muravyov, Control over Time ¹⁸

When Valerian Nicolaevich Muravyov wrote Control over Time in 1928 he was fusing Einstein’s theory of relativity, Nikolai Fedorovich Federov’s ambition to overcome death and raise the dead, and Frederick Winslow Taylor’s approaches to workplace management and the speeding up of production. As George M. Young notes, whilst attempting to use Einstein’s theories to develop a basis for a new sociology, he was nonetheless deploying allusions to the Federovian regulation of nature. “Using Federov’s terminology without mentioning his name, Muravyov writes that the problem of time is the problem of human control over the world’s ‘blind, inert forces’.”¹⁹ He looked forward to a superman capable of withstanding the corrosive force of time. In this respect his writings share affinities with both Alexai Gastev and Alexander Bogdanov.

The search for a new ‘man’, and new rhythm, is embodied in Gastev’s vision of the melding of man with machine, worker and steel. In part, this dream of a new human can be seen as part of the fascination with American Capitalism within the Russian Revolution (and its aftermath). Gastev, Meyerhold, Muravyov and the later Lenin each turned to embrace the ideas of Frederick Winslow Taylor, who sought to speed up production and demonstrate means of getting the most out of the workers, and Henry Ford, whose assembly lines seemed the epitome of ordered and organised production. If such a speeding would seem to conflict with Marx’s critique of capital’s increasing demands upon the working day, the Russian Taylorists saw in Taylorism a means of rising out of peasant feudalism and liberating the worker from necessity.

Whilst Bodganov and the Proletkult movement “vehemently rejected such distortions as equating masses with collectivism or confusing the call to ‘revolutionise the labor and life-style of the working class’ with ‘work faster'”²⁰, Bogdanov was no mere opponent of automation. In his 1907 Science Fiction Novel Red Star, Martians, already transitioned to communism, are far in advance of humans in comradely co-operation. Such comradely co-operation is expressed in rhythms. Not the violent melding of man and machine, but the harmonious regular rhythmicality that structure and order Bogdanov’s collectivism. Bogdanov’s collectivism is not one that emerges as imposed from above, but by the organised interplay between comrades acting in harmony. This collectivism is not only social, but also physiological, enabled through the use of blood transfusion which helps  to prolong life and transform the evolutionary structure of the species. Young notes that “specifically Bogdanov’s experiments in rejuvenation through blood transfusion, suggested to Muravyov that in limited circumstances and within limited boundries, time becomes reversible.”²¹ For Muravyov, Bogdanov is an intervention in the temporal. In Bogdanov, Gastev and Muravyov, the search for a new ‘man’ is linked to the search for a new rhythm for a new age. This search for a new rhythm unites art, science and social organisation in a common task.

We often forget that the Russian Revolution and the surrounding period was not merely a political revolution, but also an industrial revolution and a cultural one too. Just as in the French Revolution a new calendar was created and, with it, an new way of dividing and thinking about time, so too, in the Russian Revolution did a new vanguard of rhythm emerge. In a sense, every revolution emerges, not only from a particular political struggle, but also a struggle for rhythm, and through the constitution of new rhythms.

10.

Participatory Rhythms

If Bogdanov emphasises harmony as the ground for participation, we also embrace disharmony. For us, disharmony is the fertile ground of improvisational collectivism. In its lack of prescription, it enables explorations and collaborations, a subtle interplay of multiple interacting rhythms that open new possibilities. A certain openness of the project brings with it an array of possibilities, but it also enables dynamism: a dynamism suited to an age where planning has become almost impossible, where disruption must be built into the plan.

11.

The Happenings Laboratory

“The situation for a happening should come from the real world, from real places and people rather than from the head”

Allan Kaprow, How to make a Happening²²

We seek to enact a series of happenings in order to produce a kind of laboratory for our rhythmanalytic experiments. These actions take place in the real world, framed, of course, but not scripted. We construct situations for the exploration of improvisational dance in order to gain a greater understanding of rhythm. When our activity is finished we attempt to write up our research. We compile writing, photography, music and film as part of this process of exploration.

12.

Collective Joy

“Moments of joy usually break down the distances between people, bringing us together at least with those able to share the same delight. Such collective sentiment explains joy’s traditional ties with things that are larger, better and more exciting than we are individually. How could there not be a certain delight and freedom in escaping that gloomy tyrant – ourselves – forever brooding over or blocking out our own feelings of failure, shortcomings, neediness, neglect or isolation? Thus, the expression ‘tears of joy’ describes the compelling reality in which our strongest emotions seem to overflow and become quickly contagious when normally stifled feelings are released.”

Lynne Segal, Radical Happiness: Moments of Collective Joy²³

Let us attempt a definition of the erotic. We attempt to capture the phenomenon even whilst admitting that such a definition of the erotic may be neither necessary or sufficient.

Fucking requires rhythm. That rhythm is known as eros.

Yet, not all eroticism is fucking, nor prelude to fucking. The erotic permeates all aspects of life: the delights of the sensual and its anticipation, the increased pace of the heart of the athlete, the tenderness between friends, the collaborative pleasures of raising a child, the collaborations of the research laboratory, the collective joys of revolutionary comrades. Eroticism is the (auto/inter) subjectivity permeated by the rhythms of joy and desire.

Disrupted Rhythms is an eroticism, not as prelude to fucking, but as collective joy emerging in difficult times, and transcending the co-ordinates of an austere solipsism. Disrupted Rhythms is never simply a research project, it is an attempt to explore in and invent fresh co-ordinates of pleasure, solidarity and love.

Photography: Lucy Le Brocq
Words: Bradley Tuck
Performers: Jojo (Jonathan) Denovan
Marc Muir
Bradley Tuck
Cinematographer: Kai Fiáin

Footnotes

¹ Elizabeth Selden, Elements of Free Dance (A.S. Barnes and Company, United States of America, 1930) p.19-20

² Michel Henry, Philosophy and Phenomenology of the Body (Martinus Nijoff, The Hague, 1975) p.5

³ Henri Lefebvre, Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time and Everyday Life, trans. Stuart Elden and Gerald Moore (Continuum, London, 2004) p.19

⁴ Lefebvre, p.20

⁵ Alex Ross, The Rest is Just Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century (Picador, New York, 2007) p.xvii

⁶ Arnold Schoenberg, Theory of Harmony, trans. Roy E. Carter (University of California Press. Berkeley) p.3

⁷ Lefebvre, p.96

⁸ Mark Fisher, The Weird and the Eerie (Repeater Books, London, 2016) p.61

⁹ Fisher, p.62

¹⁰ Karl Marx, Capital: A Critical Analysis of Capitalist Production (Wordsworth, Hertfordshire, 2013) p.162

¹¹ Lefebvre, p.52-3

¹² Marx, p.163

¹³ Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, trans. Ken Knabb (The Bureau of Public Secrets, 2014) p.6

¹⁴ Lefebvre p.48

¹⁵ Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man (Routledge, Oxen, 1964/2002) p.16

¹⁶ Alexander Bogdanov, Red Star: The First Bolshevik Utopia, ed. Loren R. Graham and Richard Stites, trans. Charles Rougle (Indiana University Press, Indiana, 1984) p.78

¹⁷ Quoted in Roy Hellebust, Flesh to Metal: Soviet Literature and the Alchemy of Revolution (Cornell University Press, Ithaca, 2003) p.51

¹⁸ Quoted in George M. Young, The Russian Cosmists: The Esoteric Futurism of Nikolai Federov and his Followers (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2012) p.213

¹⁹ Young, p.209

²⁰ Zenovia A. Sochor, Revolution and Culture: The Bogdanov-Lenin Controversy (Cornell University Press, Ithaca, 1988) p.142

²¹ Young, p.209

²² https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8iCM-YIjyHE&feature=emb_logo

²³ Lynne Segal, Radical Happiness: Moments of Collective Joy (Verso, London, 2017/2018) p.130

–

Click for more articles in this issue: