Sorosian Russian Constructivism

SOROSIAN RUSSIAN CONSTRUCTIVISM

BY

DAVID ARTHUR WALTERS

“However, if I may say so,” Nicholas Petrovich interjected, “you deny everything or, to put it more precisely, you are destroying everything…. But it’s essential to construct as well.” To which Bazarov the Nihilist replied: “That is not our affair…. First, we must make a clean sweep.” Ivan Turgenev, Fathers and Sons (1862)

Back to the Future of Art

Constructive people lead constructive lives. We are tool-making, weapon-wielding, self-conscious beings. If it were not for the manipulative hand, the marvelous mind would be inconceivable. We manipulate matter and alter its forms to put it to good use and to protect ourselves. We fancy that the whole wide world is of our own making. Our cultural constructs and successful cultivation of nature gives us cause to believe that the world was given us to do with as we will, to master and remake to our own liking. When we are in fact destructive, we are creatively destructive: We destroy natural constructs and use the ruins to build our own, and then ruin them in turn to build better ones. If there must be, for example, a regime change to rid the world of a destructive political construction, we must build a better one in its place. A reconstruction in the image of our constructive, northwestern establishment must be founded on the southeastern ruins. In order to make and remake the world, we individuals must begin with the mental constructs or social bridges our elders inculcate in us, and then rehabilitate or renovate those mental buildings. We may even attempt to raze them entirely and totally rebuild our selves from the top down, to verily construct a New Man and New World out of nothing, as absurd as that might seem:

“Ostrezemsya ot Starovo Mira,” “We Renounce the World,” pronounced the Worker’s Marseillaise, adopted by the Provisional Government as the new country’s national anthem after the October Revolution. A whole new meaning of history had to be constructed. “We the people are the children of the Sun, the bright source of life; we are born of the Sun and will vanquish the murky fear of death,” Maxim Gorky’s Children of the Sun had rejoiced in 1905.  In his 1907 story, Confession, Gorky coined the word Godbuilding: the masses or “Man, master of things” becomes immortal God and works miracles. In the 1913 Futurist opera, Victory Over the Sun, an avant-garde collaboration of Russian artists inspired by P.D. Ouspensky’s cosmic consciousness and by an eclipse. The “cheap and pretentious Sun” of Enlightenment’s sacred Reason would be captured and cast into history’s dumpster. Immortal futurist strongmen, namely the ‘Futurelandmen’, would march even beyond rational geometry to the super-rational realm and finally announce, “All’s well that begins well and has no end; the world will perish but there is no end to us!” “The future is our only goal,” effused the Futurists, whose manifesto of destruction espoused originality for its own sake, that new trails might be speedily blazed by artist-gods from the obscure, pregnant O-origin of the instant now. Aleksej Kruchenykh’s libretto included such “alogical”, anti-historical gibberish as “Jeered, scanda luvs!” The subtext was clear: To hell with tradition! Down with language and thinking! Death to pretty, prostituted art!

Kruchenykh, the central Russian Futurist of his day, was the master word-juggler of the trans-mental, proto-Dadaist, tongue-twisting folk language dubbed zaum. The sound poems of the zaumniks were constructed to cheer people up by releasing them from the prison of conventional language, and to inspire them to decipher the riddles of zaum’s coined, borrowed, and barely recognizable words. In a 1917 letter, Kruchenykh wrote of zaum itself as “a riddle…. The reader is curious first of all and convinced that zaum means something, i.e. has some logical meaning.  Hence one can sort of catch the reader by a worm-riddle, by mystery.  Women and art have to have mystery; to say "I love" is to make a very definite commitment, and person never wants to do that.  He is covert he is greedy, he is a mystifier.  And he seeks, instead of I - e [I love], something equal and perhaps special - and this will be: lefanta chiol or raz faz gaz . . . kho - bo - ro mo cho - ro and darkness and zero and new art!  Does an artist intentionally hide in the tree-hole of zaum?” In 1919, a collaboration of zaumniks including Kruchenykh called themselves Company 41° and published within the only issue of their group’s newspaper a manifesto declaring in part:  “Company 41°, unifies left-wing Futurism, and affirms trans-reason as the mandatory form for the embodiment of art. The task of 41° is to make use of all the great discoveries of its collaborators, and to place the world on a new axis.” Another member of the group, one Zdanevich, declared: “Meta-logical Futurism [zaumny futurizm] sets itself the task of realizing in words the facets of experience which could not in any way be realized by our predecessors, so long as poetry was dealing with words that tried to make sense. For this purpose, Futurism creates meta-logical words.” Some of the zaum constructions can be roughly translated, such as this poem from Kruchenykh’s pen:

Iskarioty Vy / nikudy / Ya sam sebya predal / ot bol'shogo smekha / boltayu nogami / puskay iz ukha techot dryan' / sud'i – koryto / noch' i den' / grom i svist / dlya menya - / odno..... / polotentse pokazyvaet kulak (Iscariots you are going /Nowhere / I have betrayed myself / from big laughter / I swing my legs / let junk flow from the ear / judges are a trough / night and day / thunder and whistling /  for me it's -- / all the same / a towel shows a fist.).

Vladimir Lenin let the constructive enthusiasts rave although their metaphysical inclination smacked of subjective idealism hence gave off the pungent odor of stupefying, religious opium – never mind that his narrow-minded, materialistic version of Marxism, his idolization of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, his high-minded moralism stunk to the high heavens of religious bigotry. As far as Lenin was concerned, there were only two philosophical parties, idealism and materialism. As a matter of fact, some mystically inclined artists were intuitively denying the independent reality of the material world altogether, and were calling their idealism constructive realism. They had been deeply influenced by the theosophical notions of the Russian spiritualist, Madame Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, not to mention the speculations on the Fourth Dimension of the Russian mystic and “hyper-space” philosopher, P.D. Ouspensky. P.D.O. gave little truck to the third dimension, which he believed blinds us to the higher dimensions; he praised artists for freeing humankind from the third dimension, saying, in 1911, that “all art is just one entire illogicality.” In the final analysis he would deem them mad, although he himself had managed to square a circle: “The Tao is a great square with no angles,” he claimed.

“Today we have advanced into a new fourth dimension of motion,” announced Kazimer Malevich, idealistic leader of subjective Constructivism and designer of the set and costumes for Victory Over The Sun: “We have pulled up our consciousness by its roots from the earth. It is free now to revolve in the infinity of space. Go forth, art workers; in your movement you will find the new Realism of the world.” Five of Malevich’s paintings exhibited at 0.10 The Last Futurist Painting Exhibition referred to the fourth dimension in their titles; for instance: ‘Movement of the Painterly Masses in the Fourth Dimension.’ The ideological debate amongst constructivist artists was between seemingly opposing factors, mind or subject and matter or object. Should the easel be consigned to the rubbish heap and the artist turned into an engineer, a productive member of communist society? Or was their a compromising, third way, a transcendental, spiritual synthesis of art and technology?

Immanuel Kant had set the stage for the controversy with his Kantian ‘Copernican Revolution’: instead of observed objects affecting the discerning subject, the subject’s constitution affects the way objects are observed; that is, we cannot truly represent or know the object in itself, we can only know what the mind constructs. The possibility of knowledge is therefore in the subject, hence the philosophy of transcendental idealism. On the other hand, there is the natural law of cause and effect; although nature in itself may not be known because of the subject’s constitutional limits, it may be adequately represented. How then, can a human being be a responsible moral agent? That’s easy: Construct two worlds for him, one natural or physical, a world of the senses subject to natural law, the other rational, a world of mental apprehension subject to moral law.  Man, the rational animal, can spontaneously cause his own effects. For a moral law to apply for the benefit of everyone, it must be universal. That is, certain principles are willed as universal laws, to which all should be true for their own good. Wherefore people constitute or construct morality and moral truths. Kant’s constructivism was too liberally construed by the transcendentalists, including the New England Transcendentalists, who got the Kantian gospel secondhand, and then surmised they were in direct touch with God; they did not heed his warnings about the inherent fallacy of the transcendental logic. In fact Kant was ambivalent over the distinction between constructivism and representationalism.  

Malevich distrusted representational art because he doubted the senses; ideals were real for him and others who turned realism downside up: “The forms of Suprematism, the new realism in painting, are already proof of the construction of forms from nothing, discovered by Intuitive Reason,” he rationalized. “I have destroyed the ring of the horizon and escaped from the circle of things,” he announced.

It is difficult to argue with Nothing for Nothing is nondenominational. As the source of all forms, Nothing is perfect. When nothing works, return to Nothing because Nothing really works. Why bother with sordid, limited things themselves when the supreme, archetypical Forms can be constructed from Nothing?

“To reproduce beloved objects and little corners of nature is just like a thief being enraptured by his legs in irons,” Malevich confessed. Still, Malevich would, for good measure, insist all along that his art of nothing in particular, abstracted not from things but from Nothing, was essentially utilitarian or practical, that it could be put to objective, that is to say particular, uses. After all, had he not constructed a cup and teapot for the State Pottery? In any event, who would want to be a village idiot when one could be a prophetic art personality?

The objective or materialistic Constructivist faction differed amongst themselves, at least philosophically if not in deed. For instance, brother sculptors Naum Gabo and Antoine Pevsner found their spiritual reality in natural law. They set realism back on its feet: in their ‘Realistic Manifesto’, invoking Art “erected on the real laws of Life…. We construct our works as the universe constructs its own, as an engineer constructs his bridges, as a mathematician his formula of the orbits.” True, Naum Gabo opposed the conversion of artist into engineer; he believed art should maintain its independence in the new society; yet his art was progressive, alluding to the scientific and technical transformation of mind over matter.

Vladimir Tatlin, Malevich’s longstanding arch-opponent, had all ready raised his ‘Art Into Life’ banner to reject the artistic conventions of useless, decadent society. He did not want his work exhibited at 0.10 The Last Futurist Painting Exhibition with Malevich’s “amateurish” productions, so their works were hung in separate rooms, setting the stage for the constructivist schism. Amongst Vladimir Tatlin’s designs was an efficient stove, an outfit of clothes for workers, a flying machine, and his monumental design for a functional tower to be twice the height of the Empire State Building, Monument to the Third International. Although we may classify him as an objective Constructivist in one sense, he is perhaps best known for his so-called nonobjective or nonrepresentational constructions; such self-presenting objects, called “installations” today, are hopefully unique inasmuch as the constructions do not stand for or represent other objects, least of all the nonexistent ego of the art personality who constructed it. Tatlin had ventured to Paris to beseech Picasso to take him on as an apprentice, and was refused; while at Picasso’s studio he noticed Picasso’s relief constructions, and the collages made from junk; he returned to Moscow and proceeded to construct his own, which he dubbed “constructions” – henceforward the art world had “Constructivism.”

Both Malevich and Tatlin had been Larionov Circle members. In 1911 Mikhail Larionov and Natalya Gontcharova founded a romantic art movement called Rayonnism, inspired by the discoveries of physicists, especially those of Albert Einstein. Their manifesto of 1913 paid tribute to utilitarian art: “We declare the genius of our days to be: trousers, jackets, shoes, tramways, buses, aeoplanes, railways, magnificent ships…. We deny that individuality has any value in a work of art…. Here begins the true feeling of art: a life which proceeds according to the laws of painting as an independent entity.”

For the Russian Love of Germans

It is impossible to draw a line between the subjective and objective factors when viewing works of art, let alone the art of the Constructivists. I believe it was Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling who said that, objectively speaking, it did not matter whether one proceeded from object to subject or from subject to object; the difference is prejudicial; the presumably voluntary subject is usually emphasized over the determined object to dignify Man.

Schelling, who was close to the most remarkable romantic, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, had corrected the great fault of romanticism, its unlimited subjectivity, by restoring objectivity to the scene, where nature would have independent, equal rights. Nature is the name for everything positive or objective, while spirit signifies nature’s negation in self-consciousness. Yet nature as he interpreted it was criticized as being too transcendental, unempirical, and even silly. Both nature and spirit had had an identical substratum in his earlier philosophical compromise, according to his Identitätsphilosophie, which naturally identified his Naturphilosophie and Transcendentalphiloshie as parallel complements to ideal whole. But he later took up the opposition of the subjective or negative and objective or positive philosophies, elevating the negative or intellectual over the positive or physical. The absolute or universal may be realized on Earth in the individual subject through practical activity. Schelling opined that the highest symbolic activity, philosophy, is apparently best documented by art, hence he has been called an aesthetic idealist.

According to some philosophers, philosophy is a sort of poetry. Now authoritative authors may disagree with Schelling’s aesthetic prejudice for figurative art, which implies that Leonardo DaVinci was right in his belief that the eye is nobler than the ear, that visible art is superior to poetry, and insist that thought is freer than sight, for the eye must conform to its object as well as to the will of the perceiving mind. The creative author would probably side with Oscar Wilde’s averment that Literature, whose essence is living criticism, namely the negative, is superior to objective art, mistakenly deemed immortal because it is fixed in deadly reality:

“The statute is concentrated in one moment of perfection,” declared Wilde in The Critic as Artist. “The image stained upon the canvas possesses no spiritual element of growth and change. If they know nothing of death, it is because they know little of life, for the secrets of life and death belong to those, and those only, whom the sequence of time affects, and who possess not merely the present but the future, and can rise from a past of glory or of shame. Movement, that problem of the visible arts, can be truly realized by Literature alone. It is Literature that shows us the body in its swiftness and the soul in its unrest.”

Kazimir Malevich, who artfully criticized art by reducing art to almost nothing, would no doubt understand what Wilde was driving at; but the Russian Constructivists strove to take the individual out of art to realize the socialist ideal, monumentally, while Wilde realized that “there is no fine art without self-consciousness, and self-consciousness and the critical spirit are one; the beauty of art is found in the unity of style, and that beauteous unity “is of the individual.” Furthermore, “Self-denial is simply a method by which man arrests his progress, and self-sacrifice a survival of the mutilation of the savage, part of that old worship of pain which is so terrible a factor in the history of the world.”

The absolutely transcendental idealist and German nationalist Johann Gottlieb Fichte disowned Schelling for polluting metaphysics with physics, insisting that the Not-Self, i.e. the world, was not at all a proper subject for philosophical study. Schelling returned the favor, calling Fichte’s philosophy intellectually abstract and frigid. Fichte’s arid perspective eventually led Fichte to propose an autarkic, totalitarian state, The Closed Commercial State, wherein the wealth and comfort of a few could only be a sign of social disease: “The underlying duty to the state has been overlooked; this is to install each citizen in the possession suitable to him. It is only possible to achieve this last, however, if commercial anarchy is removed, and if the state encloses itself as a commercial state in the same way as it has been enclosed with regard to its legislative and judiciary functions.”

Schelling’s reconciliation of matter and spirit as complements had other great enemies: The intuitive aesthetic and religious aspects of Schelling’s philosophy had alienated the rationalistic and constructivist presumptions of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, his old roommate and good friend. They slung mud at one other until death did them part. Schelling finally elevated revealed religion over art. Hegel believed the Absolute could be discovered by reason, while Schelling intuited that the Creator does not realize the Divine Design all at once because, he reasoned, “God is Life, and not merely Being.” Speaking transcendentally, he noted that the Godhead is not a divine substance but is rather “a ferocious purity only approachable by the pure of heart; the impure, still sullied by being as they are, would be consumed by flames.” His ultimate surrender to irrational divinity offended the materialistic-minded atheists, the Young Hegelians, who were convinced that religion was the foundation of tyranny. They embraced Hegel’s dialectical, historical method but abandoned Hegel’s Absolute, the All or One, whose ultimate goal was Self-consciousness through the gradual liberation of humankind from its material blindness. Hegel eventually viewed the state as the manifestation of the general will, which all free and rational individuals will obey or else; but an earlier tract coauthored with Schelling compared the state to a spiritless machine, “hence the state must perish.” As far as the Young Hegelians were concerned, mankind was its own redeemer, the real Christ, and God to boot. Religion was a self-projection; hence the reverence for God is actually self-reverence. The time for feeling and thinking is over; now is the time to act, to establish heaven on Earth, as it were. Religion, the root of all evil, must be therefore attacked – Marx and Engels would eventually focus on economics instead of religion as the determinant of their constructivist history.

Saving God from Young Hegelians

King Frederick William IV persuaded Schelling to lecture in Berlin in 1841 to defend religion from the onslaught of the atheists. Therefore it behooved him to split the subject-object hair and to raise the ultimate bone of contention, the Absolute, in this case God, as high as he could without repudiating reason. To that end he promised to reveal a new philosophy of revelation, which was never forthcoming while he lived. The lectures were attended by such notable auditors as Mikhael Bakunin, Søren Kierkegaard, and Friedrich Engels.

Engels reported that the leading lights of science occupied the seats closest to the rostrum; behind them were jumbled people from all walks of life including old doctors and ecclesiasts; Judaism and Islam wanted to see what Christian revelation was all about. He proceeded to insult Schelling in the first paragraph of his December 1841, ‘Telegraph No. 207’: “Two old friends of younger days, roommates at the Tilbingen theological seminary, are after forty years meeting each other again face to face as opponents; one of them ten years dead but more alive than ever in his pupils; the other, as the latter say, intellectually dead for three decades, but now suddenly claiming for himself the full power and authority of life.” And later: “Schelling presents the entire development of philosophy…as dependent on himself to begin with, and then not only negates it, but with a flourish…presents it as a luxury in which the spirit indulges with itself, a curio collection of misunderstandings, a gallery of useless aberrations.” As if that were not enough, “he allocates to Hegel a position among the great thinkers precisely by deleting him in reality from their number and by treating him as his creature, his servant.”

Instead of simply spinning Hegel’s philosophy to the right in favor of Christian religion, taking no credit for himself, Schelling reportedly credited Hegel with originally establishing the philosophy of identity as the absolute philosophy, which was negative philosophy, by absorbing the positive aspects of all other philosophies, and then posit itself as positive – we are reminded of how black absorbs all colors, and when heated becomes white hot. Engel’s notes has Schelling repudiating the still repeated claim that Schelling specifically denied that the absolute could be discovered by scientific method, that he instead relied on “intellectual presupposition.” He said the supposition simply was not made, reported Engels. First of all, “the philosophy of identity is not a system of existence, and, as concerns intellectual perception, the term in question does not occur at all in the presentation of the philosophy of identity which is the sole and only one of the earlier period that I recognized as scientific.” Fichte, with whose philosophy Schelling said he did not want to complete break with, arrives at intellectual perception through his immediate consciousness of the ‘I’. But in “intellectual perception” the ‘I’ is no longer regarded as being subjective, it enters the sphere of thought and thus its existence is no longer immediately certain. Accordingly, intellectual perception would not even prove the existence of the ‘I’.” However that might be, if Hegel “demands proof of the being of the infinite power he goes beyond reason; should the infinite power exist, philosophy would not be free of being, and we must ask whether something prior to existence can be thought. Hegel denies it, for he begins his logical with being and proceeds directly to an existential system. But we affirm it, by beginning with the pure power of being as existing only in thinking.” As for the philosophy of revelation, “revelation must include within itself something more than reason – yet something that can be attained only by exercising one’s reason.”

The Constructive Projection

The reconciliation of abstract subject and concrete object is certainly of great import to many of us since the divorce of mind and body and the scientific murder of God, and even the more so to those religious personalists whose symbol is the fish and whose heaven is beyond the lines, colors and forms of earth, where disembodied persons are somehow maintained forever if not resurrected intact, on a perfect plane. We may or may not sympathize with Wassily Kandinsky’s prejudice of 1935: “I see no essential difference between a line one calls “abstract” and a fish…. The capacities of the fish are necessary extras for the fish itself and for the kitchen, but not for painting. And so, not being necessary, they are superfluous. That is why I like the line better than the fish – at least in my painting.” In 1918, The Institute of Artistic Culture had delegated the creation of a teaching program to Kandinsky. That program, published in 1920, was his pet theory based on theosophical assumptions, of a new, profound relation between artists and society. Abstract artists had, in his humble opinion, a loftier vision than others, and the purest means of communicating it, composed in such a way to produce ecstasy in the mass audience. As for non-objective art, he disagreed with Malevich, and said that once the natural bonds are severed, the resulting, so-called art is merely decorative, like a rug or necktie.

The Constructivist realists and idealists alike had an objective: to break with history and create a new world. They repudiated the re-presentation of natural objects and other traditional objects of art, and, although they had abstract objects in mind, they called the presentations of such abstractions “nonobjective” to signify their revolutionary break with current convention.

To the best of my knowledge, neither bodiless minds nor formless intelligences have been actually perceived by themselves nor ably represented; likewise, it seems impossible to behold the ego or ‘I’ as an object per se. We may refer to the existence of independent egos as one of the Universal Ego’s great mysteries. In art we might speak of degrees of abstraction, but abstracted from what? From the basal reality of the pyramid, making our inductions as we ascend the slope from particulars to universals, testing our inductions with deductions along the way? Or shall we deduce conclusions from the transcendental reality beyond its axiomatic apex, the unknown realm where a priori Ignorance is dictator? All Hail to Nothing! Nothing is Perfect!

The budding soviets needed factories to overcome revolutionary chaos and save the world: Scientific Industrial Materialism would naturally win out over Ivory Tower Art. Alexei Gan gave vent to matter in his 1922 manifesto, Constructivism: “Tectonic emerges and forms itself based on the one hand on the characteristics of Communism, and on the other on the expedient use of industrial materials. The word tectonic is taken from geology where it is used to define eruption from the Earth’s center. Tectonic is a synonym for the organic, for the explosion from an inner being. The tectonic as a discipline should lead the Constructivist in practice to a synthesis of the new content and the new form. He must be a Marxist educated man who has once and for all outlived art and really advanced on industrial material. The tectonic is his guiding star, the brain of experimental and practical activity. Faktura is the process of the working of material…. Construction must be understood as the coordinating function of Constructivism…. Construction discovers the actual process of putting together….All hail to the Communist expression of material building!”

The official crackdown on self-destructing Constructivism would come soon enough; the centralized, Socialist Realism of official Proletarian Culture, subject to the so-called Union of Artists, would drive out the passionately debating Constructivists, whether they were painterly purists or utilitarian craftsmen. Many would decamp and flee; some of the most foolhardy of those artists who had been agitated by revolutionary chaos would even face man-made reality and die in Joseph Stalin’s camps. Before then, hearsay has it that Vladimir Lenin had said that a monopoly on art would be harmful and impractical. He was caught up by the science-fiction prospects of a utopian Planet Earth himself: “If we succeed in making contact with the other planets,” he told H.G. Wells in 1920, “all our philosophical, social and moral ideas will have to be revised, and in this event these potentialities will become limitless and will put an end to violence as a necessary means of progress.”

The new flying machines would eventually take man where no man had gone before, to space, the final frontier. The nation was gripped by aviation fever: “Workers, Take to the Air!” was the motto of Aeroflot’s fundraising campaign. In 1915 Kazimir Malevich offered up his ‘Suprematist Painting: Aeroplane Flying.” The Supremacists did not believe that their elemental abstractions, the destructive reduction of fine art to line, color, and geometrical form was useless; rather, the idealizations would somehow serve as models for practical projects. Malevich thought he had transcended space and ventured into eternity through his frame of reference, the square: “Hurry up and shed the hardened skin of centuries,” he urged after painting a square in revolutionary, anarchic black, “so you can catch up with us more easily.”

The Black and White of Atomic Being

Black, Malevich said, swallows up all colors. He replied feelingly to critics who said that his Black Square was a desert and that all they loved had been lost: “The desert is filled with the spirit of non-objective feeling, which penetrates everything.” The usual objects are not required to stimulate feeling; rather, the supreme feeling is in the self-moving, godly act of creation, not in the accidental objectives: “It is difficult for you to get warm in the face of a square,” he responded to Alexander Benois, “accustomed as you are to get your warmth from a sweet little face…. The secret of the incantation is the act of creation itself, and it flies in time, time which is greater and wiser than swine.” And even further, after painting his White Square on White Background of 1918, he effused: “I have torn through the blue lampshade of color limitation and come out into the white. After me comrade-aviators sail into the chasm – I have set up the semaphores of Suprematism – Infinity is before you.”

We may not overemphasize the emotional emphasis Constructivists placed on colors and colorful involvement with black and white. If everything were one color of the same hue, sight would not help us distinguish one thing from another. The power of a primary color in itself, notwithstanding the objects it might be a property of, to evoke emotion is well known to artists and color therapists and gang leaders to mention a few. Malevich’s plain white was not as virginal as his sacrificial bride seemed. White is the combination of all colors in equal proportions; the subtraction of colors results in various colors until black remains. Black is called a color although it has no hue, absorbing all frequencies and reflecting none, and some deem it purest because its stains cannot be seen; but allegedly immaculate white is preferred by most purists, and a black body heated to incandescence sheds the whitest light. In white we are equal in life, and in black we are equal in death. In the infinitude of white space we may be ambivalent, at once glad and terrified. We note well that the Hindu messiah shall appear on a white horse to mark the end of our present dark age and the beginning of yet another golden age. Any Aryan god worth his thunder bolt has a white elephant for his steed, upon which he puts down the darkness; and the white prejudice ran rampant in sheets in the West as the Ku Klux Klan, just as the Royal White Terror, its white being the symbol of capitalism, opposed the French Revolution. The Almighty Terrorist himself appears in the East as a white bull, perhaps as the horned Moon-god, Crescent Sin, whom Moses saw on the Mount as if he were the Moon himself, and the birth of a white buffalo on the Western plain signifies the extinction of the white man that the red man may run free again.

“What the white whale was to Ahab,” said Melville’s Ishmael of Moby Dick, “has been hinted; what at times, he was to me, as yet remains unsaid…. It was the whiteness of the whale that above all things appalled me.” White, he notes, has many favorable associations; “Yet for all these accumulated associations, with whatever is sweet, and honorable, and sublime, there yet lurks an elusive something in the innermost idea of this hue, which strikes more of panic to the soul than that redness which affrights in blood. This elusive quality it is, which causes the thought of whiteness, when divorced from more kindly associations, and coupled with any object terrible in itself, to heighten the terror to the furthest bounds. Witness the white bear of the poles, and the white shark of the tropics; what but their smooth, flaky whiteness makes them the transcendent horrors they are? That ghastly whiteness it is which imparts such an abhorrent mildness, even more loathsome than terrific, to the dumb gloating of their aspect.” He recalls the first albatross he saw: “From my forenoon watch below, I ascended to the overclouded deck, and there, dashed upon the main hatches, I saw a regal, feathery thing of unspotted whiteness, and with a hooked, Roman bill sublime. At intervals, it arched forth its vast archangel wings, as if to embrace some holy ark. Wondrous flutterings and throbbings shook it. Though bodily unharmed, it uttered cries, as some king’s ghost in supernatural distress. Through its inexpressible, strange eyes, methought I peeped to secrets which took hold of God. As Abraham before the angels, I bowed myself….” And he speaks of the White Hoods of Ghent murder, of the Southern Seas dominated by the White Squall, of ghosts rising in a milky white fog, of the White Friar and White Nun, of the Whitsuntide and driven snow, the White Tower of London, the White Mountains of New Hampshire.

Malevich might have paid tribute to Nothing as the source of Everything; however, like the almighty one-god before him, he needed painterly elements such as color and line to construct the new world – the Earth was there at the beginning but was formless and void, darkness covering the surface of the deep waters, before the great division.  The atoms of popular science would do nicely. “Every solid is a unity of absolutely free units,” Malevich explained along monadian lines, as if each unit were an automaton “and what we see in nature is simply the mass integration of free units and the various amalgamations of steel and stone. This apparent amalgamation, in fact, contains units of many kinds, including space. In other words, the fusion is not total, and thus solid matter does not exist in nature. Therefore everything is linked and at the same time separate in its own motion…. This notion was the impetus for breaking up the visual complexity of a solid and dividing its mass into the separate energies of the colors of Suprematism…. What was understood here was the conscious rejection of the material, or the atomization of the picture…. This process of isolation has created the form of the black or colorless square, a form that in its atomization offered all kinds of other forms, and these in turn were painted many different colors…. Such forms, of course, do not express anything related to the objective world, and in the viewer’s mind they are nonobjective. Consciousness now begins to operate with Supremes, with individual units – the signs of dynamic mathematical connections. Expressing this dynamic functioning is the primary purpose of consciousness. The forms are built exclusively on white, which is intended to signify infinite space.” Furthermore,  in an iconoclastic vein: “What Suprematism means to me: the dawn of an era in which the nucleus will move as a single force of atomized energy and will expand with new, orbiting, special systems…. With the atomization of the organism and its liberated units, a violent change is imminent. I think that freedom can be attained only after our ideas about the organization of solids have been completely smashed.” Moreover, “The general philosophical path of these trends leads to the disintegration of things, to the non-objective and to Suprematism, as a new utilitarian body and to the spiritual world of phenomena…. We are going to work on new creative constructions of life….”

Such literary manifestations were required to make the artists’ intentions manifest; otherwise, without a manifesto to explain their seemingly hysterical conduct, they might have been deemed mad. Of course Malevich, with his reductive geometrical analysis, was no madder than Rene Descartes had been with his analytic geometry. Indeed, perhaps Malevich did not go far enough, from natural reality to non-objective “Painterly Realism”, and regress from the white light into the non-dimensional point, the black ace or kali from which creation ensues, to emerge as a truly painterly painter; that is, a painter without a painting, a purely pretentious art personality.

Just what would become of communistic humankind when nothing stood in the way, no-one could say for sure. A librarian by the name of Nikolai Fedorov speculated that an immortal mankind would be recomposed from the molecules of decomposed bodies scattered throughout space; a reconstruction reminiscent of Christianity’s resurrection as well as the Cabalist’s gathering of the glowing shards from the divine crackpot. The crazy Russian Constructivists were, to use a popular phrase from the Sixties, “spaced out.” It is no wonder that they got a glimpse of the future. If only everyone had placed their faith in nondenominational Nothing instead of fighting over history’s rubble, humankind might be really far out today.

Unwelcome Change

Although we have our doubts about the realization of Utopia or Heaven on Earth today, we still imagine that we are self-made men and women; and as such, we are capable of building an ever-better world. Revolution is out of the question, but reforms worked under such progressive mottos as CHANGE are highly recommended from time to time, although such changes only amount to tinkering with the engine that it might careen more speedily down the track to only God knows where; some say to Perdition, where souls are ultimately lost to hellish communism disguised as heavenly democracy. Now each person is a little construction company, as it were. But contractors are responsible not only for their selves but for others like them, and congregate to construct monumental projects. The advance of Western civilization to freedom is inevitable despite Arnold Toynbee’s warnings, therefore the Administration urges us to “welcome change.” A condominium complex is bound to be constructed in one way or another, perhaps along the squared lines of Piet Mondrian’s spiritual communism, to which postmodern towers rebelliously raise classical and baroque objections.

Piet Mondrian, Dutch artist and Theosophist, nearly of the same artistic mind of Malevich in Russia, foresaw the extinction of both private and street life, which would be replaced by what we might today call a cubic commune of the Borg; or perhaps we might compare it to the notorious glass city of Eugene Zamiatin’s dystopian novel, WE, surrounded by banned, primitive nature. Abstract art, said Mondrian, although it is opposed to natural representations of things, is not really opposed to nature: “It is opposed to the raw primitive animal nature of man, but it is one with human nature. First and foremost there is the fundamental law of dynamic equilibrium which is opposed to the static equilibrium necessitated by the particular form. The important task of all art is to destroy the static equilibrium by establishing a dynamic one. Non-figurative art demands an attempt of what is a consequence of this task, the destruction of particular form and the construction of a rhythm of mutual relations, of mutual forms, of free lines…. In order that art should not represent relations with the natural aspect of things, the law of denaturalization of matter is of fundamental importance. In painting, the primary color that is as pure as possible realizes this abstraction of natural color.”

The city Mondrian foresaw was “a unity formed by planes composed in neutralizing opposition that destroys all exclusiveness.” Mind you that “the relationships of lines and colors and forms had been concealed in the old art, but these relationships in the “new art are made clear through the use of neutral or universal forms…. Because these forms become more and more neutral as they approach a state of universality, neoplasticism uses only a single neutral form: then rectangular area in varying dimensions. Since this form, when composed, annihilates itself for lack of contrasting forms, line and color and completely freed.” Lest the reader become un-tethered, s/he must know that non-figurative art, or neoplasticism, demonstrates that so-called art “is not the expression of reality as we see it, nor of the life which we live, but that it is the expression of true reality and true life, indefinable but realizable in plastics. Thus we must carefully distinguish between two kinds of reality, one which has an individual character, and one which has a universal appearance.” Yet the person is bound to disappear in a social communion of sheer abstraction; in effect, the utopia conceived would be totalitarian.

No doubt the individual cannot be human and contrive a cementing identity in the absence of defining relationships. We are self-conscious, self-disciplined creatures who exercise individual freedom in social order. Absolute freedom from resistance, or freedom without order, is chaos, within which nothing certain, including a willing individual, can exist at all. The human order is a moral order, in the old sense of ‘moral’, when moral order meant mental order and denoted an exercise of mind over matter. ‘Man’ or ‘Manu’, “he who measures out thought”, just as ‘Ma’ measured him out, is a rational creature who construes what is at hand, who thinks things out in proportion to his determinations of what is good and evil for him; as far as Man is concerned, the world and everything in it is for him. He cultivates the world accordingly; his ‘culture’ is essentially mental. His constructions may seem to be artificial or unreal but are as natural as he is. Certain Brahmins have opined that the natural world including man and his artifices is unreal, that everything at hand is the work of Maya, the wayward wife who deceives her stormy lord with her illusive charms – in truth he deceives himself, for he is s/he. Triune Maya is the Maker, the Making, and the Made. She might be an illusion but she is a real illusion at that, and she is most real in comparison to the Unknown God or Ineffable Reality, the Absolute Freedom or Nothing we would have but which would destroy us as individuals if we actually had it. Wherefore let us make the most of her even when she is the only one, that non-dimensional Point from which the All proceeds; and then, having given due obeisance to the Ace, poets like gamblers may build their wonderful houses of cards, thinking that ‘poet’ means ‘maker’ of fortune instead of its ‘finder.’  Let constructive philosophers think they have found wisdom when they say I think therefore I am what I think I am.

The yellowed manifestos of Constructivist artists may seem logically absurd, yet they were struggling to reflect the most modern, scientific way of thinking about phenomena. Their testaments certainly make better sense than the terse, nonsensical utterances that abstract painters and installation artists slap onto their brochures nowadays. It might behoove the latter to hire professional philosophers to write their copy; professional philosophers have a knack for making self-contradictory nonsense out of commonsense and keeping laymen from knowing it by putting them to sleep on the first page. The Russian Constructivists were naturally fascinated by the scientific, technological and artistic advances in the West; they wanted a big piece of the action for their new country; they looked to Paris and painted a Russian picture, so to speak, an impression of the “constructive” temperament of their time.

The frustrated idealists of the Russian avant-garde received Social Realism in return: many of them were arrested, imprisoned, executed, defamed, silenced, or exiled. Kazimer Malevich’s works were confiscated and he was prohibited from producing and exhibiting art. He did manage to decorate his coffin with Suprematist motifs before he died of cancer, impoverished, in Leningrad. Alexei Gan died in a labor camp. Vladimir Tatlin, defamed and discredited, returned to figurative painting and worked in theatre design before he died of food poisoning in Moscow. Wassily Kandinsky, now considered to have been one of the world’s greatest modern artists, got out of Russia early and did relatively well as a professor of art at the Bauhaus in Weimar, and as an artist in Berlin and Paris. Since Piet Mondrian was not in Russia, he was not persecuted by the Stalinists – he wound up in New York, where he died shortly after moving into a pleasant artist’s studio on East 59th street.

National Socialist America

Most Americans know very little about the Constructivists, or so they think. Americans certainly have a can-do constructive attitude for the most part. And their popular art, from late modern to postmodern, seems absurd and crass – that is why many liberal-minded people like it. Monumental installations are in vogue – we recall that the Russian Constructivists had charged themselves with the development of a monumental art. National socialism is creeping up on the citizens of the world’s sole superpower, but since the repression of the criminal will to absolute individual freedom or power has been voluntarily internalized, each individual having a certified warden implanted within, instead of being forcefully suppressed from without, a false sense of security prevails, or at least it did until the monumental Twin Towers fell and the authoritarian administration brought the country to the verge of moral and financial ruin.

The American philosopher George Soros, who, as a young Jew disguised as a Christian, survived the battle of Communists and Nazis over Budapest, and who has over the past few years raked in billions of dollars gambling on financial bubbles, believes we are facing the political-economic disaster of our lifetime. He recently forsook the love of money and his distrust in hypocritical philanthropy to rid this great nation of ours of its right-wing administration so that our sins might be openly confessed and a better country constructed accordingly. The Germans and the French, who have a great deal of experience with authoritarian movements, were as alarmed by the pre-emptive, might-is-right approach of the Bush Administration as Mr. Soros, and they were duly ridiculed as well, before they got on board.

Mr. Soros’ worldwide philanthropic activities aim to produce an open society of free thinkers and speakers, to deconstruct totalitarianism wherever it presides and liberally redistribute power to the people so that compensatory social justice might be done. He has funded numerous groups given to vociferously voicing political complaints. But the most of us do not complain much, not any more, at least not publicly, for we have forgotten how far complaints can get us, especially when made in concert. Entrepreneurs of all sorts can make a bundle examining consumer complaints and responding appropriately with new or improved products, or with promises thereof. Opposition to corporate globalization, following in the footsteps of the Reformation, still draws a protesting crowd; and Mr. Soros, who thinks globalization is a good thing, if done rightly, listens carefully and makes a few constructive suggestions. Now he is crying, “Wolf!”

Never mind; many of us are too busy scraping up a living to take to the streets, anyhow. Thank goodness that a living is still available to forestall left-wing revolution and right-wing reaction. At the very least, we are free to make ourselves miserable in the pursuit of happiness, which all too often means the pursuit of material wealth – the U.S. Constitution phrase adopted by the founding fathers, whose main interest was naturally vested in local real estate, initially followed the French construction, “life, liberty, and property,” until “property” was deleted and “the pursuit of happiness” inserted in its stead.

A Pessimistic Vein

We would like to have a constructive attitude and therefore resort to constructive criticism of the status quo; wherefore we would not wind up this monologue in a pessimistic vein. But we are beginning to suspect that our ubiquitous constructivism, which sometimes smacks of destructive nihilism, the clearing of the ground with nothing but a parking lot to take its place, or has an odor of that more constructive constructivism that we one way or another employ for our own good to avoid or restrain the evils usually associated with the opposition to our subjective will, name objective nature, may be one of those evils, perhaps an evil cultivating the others. The warning of Nicolas Berdyaev, the Russian socialist who favored the Revolution but was opposed to the implementation of Marxism, and was then tossed out of Russia and became an anarcho-Christian personalist, comes to mind:

“The idea of the existence of eternal principles of life has a double significance. It has a positive significance when freedom, justice, the brotherhood of men, the supreme value of human personality as that which must not be turned into a means to an end, are acknowledged as eternal principles. And it has negative significance when relative historical, social and political forms are made absolute, when concrete historical institutions, represented as organic, are given the prestige and authority of sacred things…. It can be otherwise expressed in this way, that the eternal principles of social life are values which can be realized in the subjective spirit and not concrete forms which can be realized in the objectification of history.”

Berdyaev’s communism was spiritual. His worldview is often confused with egoistic existentialism; he was actually a personalist, the person of course being the human being who is at-one with the Divine Person. For him there was nothing sacred in this world which can be transferred to eternal life. That is why there “exists a moral obligation that the world should come to an end and be judged by a higher judgment.” Egocentricity, for Berdyaev, was the original sin, an “illusory, distorted universalism, a false perspective…under the power of objectivization, which it seeks to turn into an instrument of self-affirmation…. Man is the slave of the surrounding external world, because he is the slave of himself.” His idolatrous cultural constructions are bound to deteriorate: “Culture always ends in decadence, that is its role. The objectivization of creativeness means that the creative fire is dying down.” Moreover, “Creativeness is a fire, while culture is already the quenching of that fire.” Beware litterateurs, for the cultural elite have substituted literature for life, and live an unreal, visionary existence, slaves of literature and the last word in art. Oscar Wilde would have Berdyaev’s sympathies in respect to culture, for, once the monument is set in concrete by its creators, it becomes a dead thing.

Many years ago I encountered Ernest Becker’s book, Escape From Evil, and I rushed impatiently to the index to look up the definition of evil, which I expected to be referred to there as “Evil, defined, page number….” No such luck. After perusing parts of the interesting book over the years, it dawned on me that the evil alluded to is the escape from evil. Now Ernest Becker’s best-known book is The Denial of Death, wherein we learn that our personalities are defensive constructions, masks, as it were, with which we face or hide the fear of death. The elements of the personal mask, its various lines, colors, and forms or molds, are provided to the individual by the group, and the individuals, in turn, return their own perspectives to the social construction or mask that we might refer to as a group’s “worldview.”

The repressed and therefore subconscious fear of death produces death-denying, fanatic worldviews, such that the ensuing killing sprees and massive destruction gives one cause to believe in the existence of a death instinct or death wish beside the survival instinct or death fear. The externalization and objectification of the unconscious cause of that general anxiety to a particular enemy or scapegoat is on the hate side of hate-others-based group-love. Rational and tolerant worldviews supposedly have the opposite effect; however, rationality is suspect since even the most destructive worldviews can be rationalized, say, as beneficial creative-destruction. And tolerance may compromise the striving for moral integrity - the denial and repression of humankind's native either/or conscience may produce a permissive attitude that leads to the devolution of civilization and demoralization of humankind into anarchy. But anarchy would not last for long, just as random terrorism has never been tolerated for long by any people: when order has deteriorated into disorder, order will take root and organize itself once again. Unconsciously motivated, polarized worldviews are the irrational products of the repression of the fear of death. Tolerant, rational, pluralistic illusions of less conflict and of more opportunities for individual development are needed to counteract them.

So the evil might lie in the escape from evil, as we fight evil with evil and make war for peace. In the seventh chapter of Escape From Evil, entitled “The Basic Dynamic of Human Evil,” Ernest Becker quotes the psychoanalyst Otto Rank: ‘All our human problems, with their intolerable sufferings, arise from man’s ceaseless attempts to make this material world into a man-made reality…aiming to achieve on earth a ‘perfection’ which is only to be found in the beyond…thereby hopelessly confusing the values of both spheres.’

“The whole edifice of Rank’s superb thought,” Becker summarized, “is built on a single foundation stone: man’s fear of life and death…. Men’s fears are buried deeply by repression; only occasionally does the desperation show through…. Men live in a dimension of care-freeness, trust and hope…achieved by the symbolic engineering of culture, which everywhere serves as an antidote to terror by giving them a new and durable life beyond that of the body.”

Becker then acquaints us with Wilhelm Reich’s perspective laid out in The Mass Psychology of Fascism. Reich laid out the guiding principle of ideology, which monotonously harps, “We are not animals….” Plague-mongering politicians promise to engineer the world, to provide people with unlimited rights and prosperity. “They are the ones who lied to people,” Becker recapitulates Reich’s explanation of fascism, “about the real and the possible and launched mankind on impossible dreams which took impossible tolls of real life.” Once you disassociate yourself from animal nature, deeming yourself good and deserving of eternal meaning, then you can launch a political campaign against the animals, whosoever they might be, Jews, Arabs, Gypsies, Rumanians, Poles – no group is exempt but your own, for which you have a hate-others-based love.

We note that tolerance towards Muslims is publicly preached today, but intolerance prevails in certain private circles, where they are often lumped together under the oxymoronic rubric, “Islamo-fascists,” coined by pseudo-conservative neo-barbarians, and thought of as uncivilized terrorists to be eradicated like cockroaches.

Ernest Becker then raises the specter of the Jungian shadow. “To speak of the shadow is another way of referring to the individual’s sense of creature inferiority, the thing he wants most to deny….” He notes that Jung said that the person naturally wants to get away from this inferiority; he wants to “jump over his own shadow” by “looking for everything dark, inferior, and culpable in others.” That is to say, guilt-feelings are projected onto others until the aliens are eliminated.

We turn to Carl Jung’s works and discover that the so-called shadow is imbued with more animality than Jung’s other psychological archetypes, and that man’s animosity is aroused when his animal spirits are repressed for long, inciting the beast within to end its flight when cornered and to strike back in order to survive, which are after all normal responses. No doubt the shadow is a wellspring for realistic insights, and of course a source of inspiration for creative people, who are quite constructive when they have an outlet, without which they might run amok. Of course the human mind has enabled the race to extend its claws and wage war on a vast scale, to literally lay waste to the world that a better one might be constructed. It is said that war is required for the moral improvement of the race, and it is purported the shadow that would burst civilization’s chains and set man loose for awhile, perhaps to build an even better prison house.

In the Shadow of Wotan’s Clutches

Jung effused on the reappearance of Wotan in an essay by that name. Yes, Wotan, the archaic “god of the storm and frenzy, the unleasher of passions and the lust of battle, the superlative magician and artist in illusion who is versed in all secrets of an occult nature” had possessed the German folk, as a small part of the “veritable witch’s Sabbath” following the Great War, when “Everywhere fantastic revolutions, violent alterations of the map, reversions in politics to medieval or even antique prototypes, totalitarian states that engulf their neighbors and outdo all previous theocracies in their absolutist claims, persecutions of Christians and Jews, wholesale political murder,” and so on. “Gods are without doubt personifications of psychic forces (that) have far more to do with the realm of the unconscious” than consciousness. Wotan, “the furor Teutonicus” has seized Germany and inspired Germans to “a state of fury.” Why, “a hurricane has broken loose in Germany while we still believe it is fine weather.” Most impressive is that “one man, who is ‘obviously possessed’, has infected a whole nation to such an extent that everything is set in motion and has started rolling on its course towards perdition…. All human control comes to an end when the individual is caught in a mass movement. Then the archetypes begin to function…. The nationalist God has attacked Christianity on a broad front. In Russia, he is called technology and science…. It is always been terrible to fall into the hands of a living god…. We who stand outside judge the Germans far too much, as if they were responsible agents, but perhaps it would be nearer to truth to regard them, also, as victims.”

Jung’s detractors say that he himself fell into Wotan’s clutches. They cite Jung’s essay, which quoted Nietzsche’s poetic paeans to Zarathustra’s Unknown God, and his affection for blond, blue-eyed youth as part of the evidence. Not all Germans went along with Hitler, and many were those publicly opposed the construction of the Third Reich and perished as a consequence. Quite a few took cover, concealed their identities, laid low.

Still, we can understand the allure of the shadow, and the charming effect of a demagogue who promises to forge unity from chaos, a unity that entails marching off to war, to kill for world peace, to free the world for the global construction of one’s own political order, to build yet another Roman Empire, a Fourth Reich, a Pax Americana. Therefore let us confess, forgive and forgo. Let us let go of our favorite scapegoat, President George Bush, and let us forgive the overwhelming majority who were enchanted by him even though his charisma fell far short of a Hitler or Mussolini, a Lenin or Stalin. Let us build ourselves a better launching pad and space ship, and then go where no man has gone before, to space, the final frontier.

Indeed, while Senator Barrack Obama, a virtual Jungian shadow to the party that freed blacks and then betrayed them during Reconstruction, recommends the radical expansion of social justice and alternate energy programs, Senator John McCain, although he urges handing over vast tracts of protected offshore lands to the oil companies, has distanced himself from the oily administration, recommending the expansion of the space program, with manned flights to Mars and beyond, something that he thinks would inspire all mankind. Such a program might do more for the welfare of humankind, for if man remains where he is, on Earth, he shall certainly perish when the next round of super-volcanoes blow and the planet is struck by comets and cleansed by tsunamies, perhaps due to God’s wrath over gays in the military, so let him take women with him on his space voyages. That an interstellar advance of Western civilization is entirely possible, and that women may not only man but command the most advanced space ships, has been amply demonstrated by Star Trek Voyager programs.

We are of naturally being facetious here, but there is some truth in humor, and we believe the vision will be realized, just as the fantastic science-fiction visions of the Russian Constructivists nearly a century ago have come true in several respects. After all, we moderns have, like the materialistic Russians who followed suit some time ago, idolized technology and science, despite the warnings of Friedrich Schelling and Arnold Toynbee.

Machined Life

Members of the most advanced civilization on Earth, led by the United States of America, upon whom an attack is an attack on civilization per se, are far more communistic or socialistic than they think, and even the more so where they swarm, in urban areas. Of course they do not think of themselves as unconscious zombies, but as self-motivated automatons, each one a god in his or her own right, and therefore free to do as each wills, that each might have his or her own; yet each will is not free, but is resigned, seemingly voluntarily, to circumstances beyond its control, doing its part as planned, depending on the occasion, in the system or machine. And the machined part is not an individuated person, but is in effect the machine, even when opposed to other parts, for in that opposition the machine works. When certain parts squeak loudly and the machine lurches or begins to grind to a halt, the tinkerers do some tweaking here and there, the oil companies squeeze the oil can and grease the wheels, and the mathematically pre-established device progresses harmoniously along the way providentially provided. Of course the ultimate machine has only one moving part, the archetypical wheel itself, and in itself the simple wheel has no parts at all.

Now it would matter not if human beings were machines, as some scientists suppose, as long as they were happy machines. Happiness is, for the constructivist, a subjective consideration, even though he tends like everyone else to blame his concrete circumstances or so-called reality for his bad moods, praising himself when things go well. The objective construct, whether simple or complex, if it exists at all, apparently cannot be known in itself by the constructivist, so it might as well not exist as it is if it really is at all. What does the constructivist care about objective reality, anyway? His reality is after all artificial. He makes the most of nature, whatever that is or is not. But never mind the metaphysical nonsense made out of commonsense. The Gothic spires and skyscrapers piercing the sky are real, and those buildings please him very much because they are his godly doing. The objective reality of the Moon was firmly established when man set foot upon it, and the reality of the holocaust is only denied by fools.

Needless to say, a constructive thinker might not be too disappointed to hear that his insubstantial mental constructs, that his freedom, his self, his god, his state and so on are illusions, for they are, after all, his constructs; besides, he can still lead a constructive life with his illusions, live up to his beliefs as if they were true. But he might not be so happy to hear that he is merely a randomly constructed machine or an organic analogue thereto, that his so-called soul is at the very least nothing and at the most a simple, solipsistic atom, a windowless monad unchanged except by internal perception; and that his social progress from simplicity to complexity has the same destination regardless of the political vehicle taken to the hive. Indeed, he might be convinced that there is something to reality, that he exists and the state has him in chains, and that he must revolt to secure his happiness, which he places in the notion of freedom from such restraints.

Eugene Zamiatin, a naval architect and fiction writer, did not like the way the road to utopia was being paved by the Bolsheviks. He had supported them early on; in fact he had been imprisoned and exiled for doing so; but he questioned the government’s attempts to stifle criticism and clamp down on the arts after the Revolution. “The word is kept alive only by heretics,” he proclaimed to all who would listen. “The only weapon worthy of man is the word; fortunately, all truths are false: the essence of the dialectical process is that today’s truths become errors tomorrow.” Moreover, “Today is doomed to die, because yesterday died and because tomorrow will be born. Such is the wise and cruel law. Cruel because it condemns to eternal dissatisfaction those who already today see the distant peaks of tomorrow; wise because eternal dissatisfaction is the only pledge of eternal movement forward, eternal creation.”  He dared to address the following words to Joseph Stalin, in a letter requesting permission to emigrate: “No creative activity is possible in an atmosphere of systematic persecution that increases in intensity from year to year…. I beg to be permitted to go abroad with my wife with the right to return as soon as it becomes possible in our country to serve great ideas in literature without cringing before little men.” Of course he was imprisoned. Fortunately, Maxim Gorky influenced Stalin to release him for emigration – he died in Paris a few years later.

WE are the World

We know Zamiatin’s dystopian (anti-utopian) novel, WE, best of all. Units of the One State live behind a wall separating the urban nation of glass buildings, organized by primitive mathematics, from primitive nature. They dress in identical uniforms, and have numbers for names. Every aspect of life, except for two hours of Free Time for walking around or writing, is closely regimented by mathematical formulas; the scheduling Tables of Hourly Commandments are posted in each residence. Sexual intercourse is by appointment only, made by couples who fill out pink tickets for the purpose – the glass walls can only be shaded for privacy during those sexual sessions.  The names of the characters are derived from the specifications of Zamiatin’s favorite icebreaker, the St. Alexander Nevsky. The protagonist, D-503, a mathematician, is working on the construction of the Integral, a spaceship designed to "integrate the grandiose cosmic equation" and spread the gospel of the One State throughout the planets. The One State depreciates human imagination, wherefore D-503 is haunted by the counter-thought, the basis for imaginary numbers, the square root of minus-One.  D-503, the Adam of urban Paradise, meets and falls in love with I-330, the Eve of primitive nature - she is a member of a revolutionary group that resides in the jungle. Temptations are rife. People are playing around with higher mathematics, chaos ensues, and we urge the reader to borrow or buy a copy of the book for their edification, and decide whether or not the glass city is heaven or hell or an admixture of both. If it be hell, then let the criticism be constructive, in the form of a heavenly city built beside it.

-WE-