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OBJECTS OF AFFECTION:
TOWARDS A MATERIOLOGY OF EMOTIONS

Princeton Conjunction – 2012. An Annual Interdisciplinary Conference

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY

MAY 4-6, 2O12

219 AARON BURR HALL

In the first issue of the journal Veshch-Objet-Gegenstand, which appeared 90 years ago in Berlin, the avant-gardist El Lissitsky placed the object at the center of the artistic and social concerns of the day: “We have called our review Object because for us art means the creation of new ‘objects.’ … Every organized work—be it a house, a poem or a picture—is an object with a purpose; it is not meant to lead people away from life but to help them to organize it. … Abandon declarations and refutations as soon as possible, make objects!”

Ultimately, only three issues of Veshch-Objet-Gegenstand would be published, but the journal’s project to cultivate object as a primary tool of social organization clearly touched upon broader concerns of its time. At the end of the 1920s, Sergei Tret’iakov, a leading theorist of Russian production art, similarly insisted on abandoning the traditional fascination with individual trials and tribulations and to concentrate instead on the biography of the object that proceeds “through the system of people.” Only such a biography, Tret’iakov maintained, can teach us about “the social significance of an emotion by considering its effect on the object being made.”

Taking the Russian avant-garde’s concern with the material life of emotions as our starting point, the conference brings together an international, interdisciplinary group of scholars working at the intersection between studies of affect and studies of material culture. In the last decade, these two crucial strands of social inquiry have shifted the focus of analytic attention away from the individual or collective subject towards emotional states and material substances. These interests in the affective and the tangible as such have helped to foreground processes, conditions, and phenomena that are relatively autonomous from the individuals or social groups that originally produced them. Thus interrogating traditional notions of subjective agency, various scholars have drawn our attention to “a conative nature” of things (Jane Bennet), to “affective intensities” (Brian Massumi), or to textural perception (Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick) – to name just a few of these interventions – in order to pose questions that fall outside of dominant frameworks for understanding the epistemology of power.

Despite their growing importance, however, these diverse methods and concepts for mapping the emotive biographies of things have not yet been in a direct dialogue with one another. By focusing on the material dimensions of affect and, conversely, the emotional components of object formation, this conference aims to bridge this gap.

Program Committee

Serguei Oushakine (Slavic Languages and Literatures; Anthropology, Princeton U)
Anna Katsnelson (Slavic Languages & Literatures, Princeton U)
David Leheny (East Asian Studies, Princeton U)
Anson Rabinbach (Department of History, Princeton U)
Gayle Salamon (Department of English, Princeton U)

Princeton Conjunction – 2013: An Annual Interdisciplinary Conference

PRINCETON INSTITUTE FOR INTERNATIONAL AND REGIONAL STUDIES
PROGRAM IN RUSSIAN AND EURASIAN STUDIES

“ILLUSIONS KILLED BY LIFE”:
AFTERLIVES OF (SOVIET) CONSTRUCTIVISM
May 10-12, 2013
Princeton

Keynote Address by Richard Pare, the author of Lost Vanguard: Soviet Modernist Architecture, 1922–32.

In 1923, the influential Russian writer Maxim Gorky complained in one of his letters: “In Russia, formalists, futurists, and certain people called constructivists perform all kinds of deformity. It must be stopped.” Stopped it was not. In the early 1920s, Russian Constructivism emerged as a key emblem of Soviet modernity that responded to the call to “materially shape the flux” of social life, as Alexei Gan put it. It did this through a series of crucial theoretical, aesthetic, and technological interventions which broke with the artistic languages of the past and, simultaneously, offered new tools for organizing a new life.  Penetrating all spheres of the everyday – from housing, tableware and clothing to public space, mass performances and journalism – Constructivism fundamentally changed not only the vocabulary of expressive means but also the very understanding of the material environment and its social potentialities.

In the last two decades, this initial and most productive period of Constructivism has captured the interest of scholars again and become a privileged site of analytic and historical investment. The goal of this conference, however, is to shift scholarly attention to a less radical but no less complex stage in this movement’s history: the afterlife of Constructivism. In 1922, Boris Arvatov, a leading art critic of the time, described the Constructivist approach as “illusions killed by life,” seeing in the sober rationality of this movement a viable alternative to the illusionist and mimetic arts of the past.  It is precisely this ability of Constructivism to turn dead illusions into a source of inspiration that this conference plans to investigate.

The conference will explore the remains, revenants and legacies of Soviet Constructivism through the 1940-1970s – both in the USSR and beyond. We are interested in historically grounded and theoretically informed papers that map out the post-utopian and disenchanted period of “the Constructivist method.” No longer “a Communist expression of material constructions” (to use Gan’s formulation), these belated Constructivisms made themselves known mostly indirectly: for example, in the heated debates about the role and importance of aesthetics under socialism, in the functionalist idiom of mass housing, in the visual organization of museum space, or in the reception and development of constructivist concepts in architectural deconstruction.

Program Committee:
Serguei Oushakine (Princeton University), Chair;
Esther da Costa Meyer (Princeton University);
Kevin M.F. Platt (University of Pennsylvania);
Stephen Harris (University of Mary Washington);
Irina Sandomirskaja (Södertörns Högskola).