Keti Chukhrov

8/6/2019 Keti Chukhrov

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Keti Chukhrov

Towards theSpace of the

General: OnLabor beyondMateriality andImmateriality

1. Basic Provisions for the Theory of

Immaterial Labor

In his programmatic work A Grammar of theMultitude, Paolo Virno describes a number ofsigns of post-Fordist capitalism that markradical changes in the First-World productionsystem's relation to labor over the past forty

years. Most importantly, he states that post-Fordism has annulled or complicated thetraditional Marxist correlation between theworker's labor time and the degree of his or herexploitation.1 As labor is dematerialized and thedivision of labor in industrial production erodes,capital not only occupies the working hoursduring which products or goods (and its surplusvalue) are produced; it absorbs all of theworker's time, as well as his or her existence,thoughts, and creative desires. Products orgoods are produced not to be consumed, to be

swallowed directly, but as a set of new modes ofcommunication, knowledge, languages, or evenworlds.ÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊLabor coincides increasingly with thecreative maneuvers of a virtuosic performer, withactive memory and an engagement withknowledge. According to Maurizio Lazzarato, theaim of consumption today is not merely theproduction of goods, but the multiplication ofnew conditions and variations for productionitself.2 The prerogative of immaterial industrybecomes the production of subjectivities andworlds Ð and these are cultural and creativecategories, not economic ones. Consumption inturn gives rise to a consumer who does notmerely devour, but communicates, is "creatively"engaged. In this way, production activates andoccupies life, social and societal space, theintellect, the "soul." Contemporary material laboronly reproduces this scheming of worlds,situations, and events automatically, findingitself on the periphery of strategies of modernproduction.3 Despite all this, Virno believes apositive aspect of post-Fordist capitalism can befound in its having created the conditions for the

emergence of non-private, non-capitalist publicbenefits Ð languages, network-based know-hows, systems for informational and culturaldissemination.4 Virno as well as other theoristsof post-operaism (AndrŽ Gorz, MaurizioLazzarato, Antonio Negri, Enzo Rulani, AntonellaCorsani) refer to what Karl Marx called "generalintellect."5 As Virno puts it,

Marx É claims that É abstract knowledge Ðprimarily yet not only of a scientific natureÐ is É becoming no less than the main force

of production and will soon relegate therepetitious labor of the assembly line to the

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fringes. This is the knowledge objectified infixed capital and embedded in theautomated system of machinery.6

This knowledge is social and general; it is acollective competence that creates a sharedcommon space of production. Although it is truethat post-industrial capitalism has blurred theboundary between consumption, information,

cognition, and communication, this doesn'tmean that post-Fordist capitalism automaticallygenerates a post-capitalist utopia. On thecontrary, when corporations vie for control overthe power of knowledge objectified, the space ofthe commons becomes a real battleground.Slavoj Žižek, in a recent talk at the "Idea ofCommunism" conference in Berlin, made an aptobservation: the wealth of monopolies likeMicrosoft or Nasdaq derive not so much fromtheir sales profits, but mainly from the fact thatthey are acting in the name of a universal, nearly

Enlightenment-style standard of "generalintellect."7

ÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊThe French researcher of immaterial andcreative production AndrŽ Gorz has presented avariety of examples of the new post-industrialeconomy in which cognitive, symbolic, andaesthetic value exceeds both use and exchangevalue.8 Added value and profit depend on animmaterial, imaginary dimension of the goodsinvolved. And it is for this reason that mostindustrial enterprises do not create their ownbrands, but simply provide services to firmswhose products are immaterial. For instance, asGorz points out, Nike doesn't actually own anymachines or equipment at all. The company onlydevelops footwear concepts and designs, and, ina sense, even the "philosophy" of a certainproduct. All other production (including thecreative stage of advertising and marketing) ishandled by partner companies and licenseholders. However, at the same time, the central-office company that produces the productconcept buys up the goods produced in theseindustrial enterprises at very low prices andmakes enormous profits by reselling them as

brand-name products.ÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊSo on the one hand, the field of immaterialproduction allows capital to occupy anincreasingly generalized territory, the space ofthe common good. On the other hand Ð and theambivalence of post-operaist theory is revealedhere Ð all the theoreticians (Virno, Negri,Lazzarato, Gorz) agree that modern post-industrial goods contain such a density ofcreative and communicative effort that even itscommodity form cannot cancel it out completely;the process of creative and intellectual work,

still evident in the commodity, reconnects theresult of immaterial labor back to a commonly

owned general social knowledge.ÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊIt is on this basis that the concept of the"communism of capitalism" emerges in the workof Virno and Lazzarato.9 In other words, the hopeemerges that if capitalism itself so quickly gavebirth to technologies that allow for thesocialization of industry and information, and thetransformation of labor and economy intoknowledge, then the opportunity will arise to

"subtract" this knowledge away from capital. Itbecomes possible to imagine the reappropriationof the commons and their leaving the grasp of acapitalist economy. The political subject or agentfor this withdrawal or "exodus" must be a classof immaterial workers Ð the so-calledcognitariat, or the cognitive multitude.ÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊIn Les RŽvolutions du Capitalisme, MaurizioLazzarato confirms that he considers it possibleto draw up new forms of activity in such a way asto precisely dissociate the creation of commongoods from the accumulation of profit by a

company.10

This should provide access to a non-exploitative type of temporality that "allows forthe creation of subjectivity as well as materialvalues." By subjectivity, Lazzarato means thefactor of creative, intellectual, and politicalindependence from the interests of capitalistproduction. One of the specific tasks in thestruggle against the privatization of public goodsinvolves, on the one hand, distinguishinginvention from occupational, automatic, androutine reproduction, and on the other hand,neutralizing the division between mindlesslyrepetitive routine labor as subjugated activityand creative or intellectual invention. Bearing inmind that industrial production facilities arelocated in Third-World countries while largecompanies' branding and strategy whizzes live inthe First-World, it is striking that today thisdivision takes on not only a social but also ageopolitical character.ÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊAndrŽ Gorz, in turn, sees potential forovercoming capitalism in the overcoming ofproductivism (i.e., in endless production), which,in a sense, counters post-operaist positions.11

Gorz insists that the Marxist position is more

about overcoming post-Fordist economism, inwhich humans are in service to production ratherthan production serving human development, asthe post-operaists would have it. In that sense,Gorz explicitly acknowledges that, just as Fordistcapitalism did, post-Fordism entails a massiveintensification of labor. If the former capturedpeople's bodies, the latter now captures people'ssouls. This totality of immaterial productionleaves no time free of work.ÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊMeanwhile, the common good is obtainednot only through productive labor (material or

immaterial), but via any other free activity, whichis not just optimizing this or that productive

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Kšnig+Neurath standby office.

achievement or goal. Gorz refers here to one ofthe most important components of the commongood in the frame of a socialist and communistproject Ð free time, enabling one to developartistic, or, as Gorz writes, "non-instrumentalized capacities."12

2. A Few Contradictions in the Theory of

Immaterial Labor

Most scholars of cognitive capitalism positionthemselves as Marxists when speaking ofimmaterial ("spiritual" or general) values.However, the post-operaists understand the verycategories of the general (as in "generalintellect"), the "immaterial," and the "common"in a somewhat one-sided manner. Immateriallabor Ð especially for Virno and Lazzarato Ð isoften identified only with intellectual productionor entrepreneurial virtuosity. In Virno's thought,for instance, the concept of virtuosity (which isinterpreted in culture, art, and performance

more as a superficial spectacular stunt foundedon mere mechanical dexterity than as a thought-through apprehension of creative activity)constitutes an essential property of bothpolitical and creative activity.13 In this case Virnoidentifies the category of the general with theintellect and its efficiency factor, which is to say

that immaterial production in any form and thepost-industrial economy overall are synonymouswith the production of the common. But thismeans that only developed cognitive capitalismand technologically advanced forms ofproduction can generate general values.Correspondingly, the new general forms of thecommons can only develop in countries of theFirst or, in extreme cases, the Second world. (By

the way, this is one of the reasons why theindustrial and post-industrial lag of the Sovieteconomy that began in the 1960s is identifiedamong Western leftists with the political,philosophical, cognitive, and creative"immaturity" of Soviet society.) We end up withan idea that it is only possible to imagine moderncreative potentialities and intellectual inventionsproceeding from the technological capabilities ofdeveloped countries. If we were to describe theclassical Marxist notion of surplus value underthe conditions of a late post-Fordist economy, we

would have to acknowledge that immaterial labortoday generates more surplus value thanmaterial labor; which in turn gives us the groundsto consider immaterial or creative workers asbeing the most exploited social layer. It is notsurprising, then, that "revolutionary" vocabularyand "proletarian" poetics are predominantly

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employed in the discourse of contemporarycriticism and the creative industries, and rarelyemerge in the realm of unprestigious materiallabor. ÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊBut this formulation contradicts the genericand humanist horizon of Marx's notion of generalintellect. (The notion of the "generic" stands outas one reminiscent of the post-romantic work ofMarx's youth, when he spoke of the social nature

of all human practice, including language, interms of generic being Ð an anthropologicalcategory gleaned from a dialectical critique ofLudwig Feuerbach's idealist philosophy.) The"general" in "general intellect" assumes not onlyquantity, availability, and technologies for thedissemination of knowledge, nor just theengagement of knowledge and creative abilitiestowards one or another goal (which is essentiallya purely practical task). In fact, it also assumesthe horizon of the "spiritual" that rests upon anexclusionary paradox: no immaterial,

intellectual, or even creative production carriesthe scale and quality of general, non-privateinterests.

Hans Hollein, Mobiles BŸro, 1969.Austrian architect and designerHans Hollein created a mobile office in the form of a plastic bubble.Inside, the individualised, nomadic worker was simultaneouslyshielded from the outside and connected to it by telephone andtelefax.

ÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊThe following argument presents yetanother contradiction preventing theuniversalization of the theory of immaterial labor.The class of immaterial workers often stands outas an avant-garde of political opposition basedon proximity to the most modern post-industrialmeans of production. However, if we turn toLenin's revolutionary motivation for singling outthe proletariat as the class of struggle anduniversalization, here the foundation was notonly the nature of proletariat's tools but also thefact that the proletariat was the most

dehumanized and disadvantaged social group ofits time. Unlike a certain echelon of immaterial

workers (the so-called cognitariat), which is ableto control the means of production to asignificant degree, the proletariat could not.ÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊSlavojŽižek and Alain Badiou believe thatthe motivation for proletarian uprising did notspring from the proletariat's proximity to themeans of production, but, on the contrary, fromtheir detachment to them, from the impossibilityof directing them.14 And so, for example, when

criticizing immaterial workers' (in)capacity forresistance, one can argue that the workeralready controls part of immaterial labor and itsmeans of production, even if he or she does notown them. However, there is no way to explainwhy this does not lead to perceptible changes inthe infrastructure of neoliberal societies. Thereason lies in the fact that the social role oftoday's immaterial workers (in the sense of theconcept of "precarity," the lack of social security)is very elastic. The "cognitariat" does notconstitute a class. It is a social group that can

include top managers of the highest echelon,white-collar workers, and service-industryworkers on short-term contracts. The class gapwithin the "class" of immaterial workers isenormous and often depends on the area orcountry of residence. As AndrŽ Gorz writes, in theUS, for instance, workers in the immaterialsphere make up 20 percent of the workingpopulation, while only 5 percent of this 20comprise the wealthiest part.15 The bulk ofimmaterial labor workers make no usewhatsoever of their higher education and areworking outside their specialization.

3. The Theory of Immaterial Labor and the

Post-Soviet Labor and Production Space

And so, the central contradiction of the theory ofimmaterial labor consists in the fact that thezones of oppression, physical exploitation, andmaterial labor often lie beyond its interpretationof the commons (general intellect, culture,artistic creativity, science, etc.). These zones areautomatically isolated from the spaces of thegeneral, from artistic creativity. It is interestingthat the work of Western artists investigating

routine, industrial, poorly paid labor is alwaysconspicuously marked by the impossibility of ashared cultural space constructed by a pan-European middle class that includes material-labor workers and representatives of non-prestigious professions.16

ÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊIn the social space of developed countries,physical labor is invisible; and if it comes intoview, it is seen as something hovering betweenthe exotic and the obscene. In the works ofartists such as Artur Żmijewski, Michael

Glawogger, or Mika Rottenberg, material labor

testifies to the fatal division between routine,mechanical labor, and the intellectual-creative

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and cultural space of middle-class life andactivity. In Artur Żmijewski's Selected Works, anindustrial worker's 24-hour cycle appears asbare life, akin to that of an animal, split betweenexistential survival and the material-physicallabor necessary for that survival.17 The cultural,creative, or cognitive dimension of the worker'slife is entirely out of the question here. MichaelGlawogger tries to emphasize this same effect of

"bare life" in his labor epic, Workingman's Death,which depicts Nigerian workers at a livestockfactory, a private team of Donetsk miners whohave organized illegal coal mining and sales outof an abandoned mine, Pakistani welders takingapart old ships at a scrap-metal yard, andIndonesian peasants gathering sulfur to sell totourists. Each group is shown as marginal beingstorn away from the life of any rationalcommunity.

Michael Glawogger, filmstill from Workingman's Death, 2005, 122'.

ÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊFor our purposes, it is interesting to seehow the film depicts the history of Sovietindustrialization, the Stakhanovite movement,monuments to the heroic shock workers, and theindustrial heritage of the Donbass asunnecessary remnants of industrial trash. Thedirector does not see them as part of thehistorically emancipated genealogy of labor that,

despite its physical component, was anirremovable part of productive and industrialprocesses in the Soviet Union. The post-industrial remnants of the heroic feats of Sovietlabor and the paid labor of self-organized workteams find themselves on the same side of thescale.ÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊThis is not surprising. Many zones of post-Soviet industrial production were subjected toclosure in the mid- to late 1990s. However, tothis day neither alternative industrial enterprisesnor any post-industrial development have

emerged to take the place of the old productionfacilities. Thus, a great number of former Soviet

industrial regions have become post-industrialnot because they exceeded their industrialcapacities, but rather because they were simplymade inaccessible. While industrial parks in theWest now serve as testaments to the next step inan ongoing urbanization, post-Soviet industrial"trash" presumably reveals the opposite: thedeurbanization and cultural provincialization ofmany post-Soviet cities. The possibilities for so-

called creative industry are concentrated in thefew major cities of an enormous country, while arather significant portion of the population iskeyed into products of the creative industry onlyat the level of passive consumption (throughtelevision, advertising in various media, and soforth). The economic paradox of the post-socialist countries is that in the absence ofdeveloped technological and socialinfrastructures, the expansion of a middle classthere leads to the abuse of underpaid servicelabor by that very middle class. This is the reason

why the rise of the creative industries under theauspices of a resource economy (which is thecase in post-Soviet space as well as in other nonFirst-World countries) may often be combinedwith a return to serf labor provided mainly byillegal migrants. While it is possible in theWestern European context to talk about a certainhomogenous cognitive component of immateriallabor and about its (at least) potential function inthe emancipatory transformation of society, inRussia immaterial labor often appears as a zoneof privileged job placement for prestigiousresidential areas. It is more likely to denotesocial segregation and gentrification zones thansocial development.ÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊIn Glawogger's film, there is an episode onpost-Soviet Ukrainian miners who extract coalfrom a closed mine and subsequently sell thatcoal to illegal clients. These are the exactopposite of the images in Dziga Vertov's DonbassSymphony (1930). Despite the Taylorist elementsin the Soviet project of shock work, in the latterfilm, physical labor does not prevent us fromimagining these workers as producers ofimmaterial, "spiritual" values.

ÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊThe scholar, revolutionary, poet, engineer,and highly qualified metalworker Aleksei GastevÐ who was also the founder and director of theCentral Institute of Labor (1920Ð1938) andauthor of the Labor Configurations (1924) Ð usedto call his directives relating to the organizationof labor "poetological epistles."18 Devoting agreat deal of attention to the Tayloristrationalization of labor, he nevertheless believedthat material labor and its organization do notcancel out poetry, creativity, and invention. Onthe contrary, the becoming of a creative

personality was inseparably tied to the goal-oriented and volitional configurations in the

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organization of labor directed towards socialistconstruction. When not reduced to its Stalinistbackground, shock work is not just extremeoverproduction. The worker's satisfactionderives from a belief in him- or herself as thesubject in the project of building a new society,defining goals and procedures and sharing themeans of production. Contrary to interpretationsof physical overwork and production results as

the only goal of socialist industrialmodernization between the '20s and '60s, itshould be noted that it was not only physicaloverwork that counted as emancipatory, but alsothe opportunity for an industrial worker to layclaim to values beyond factory and overwork Ðthe values that, despite a worker's physicalengagement in production, could exceed his orher particular skills or efficiencies.ÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊIn his article "Dialectic of the Ideal" (1963),the Soviet philosopher Evald Ilyenkov goes farbeyond the concept of "general intellect" by

reintroducing the concept of the "ideal" into thematerialist dialectic. He asserts that it isimpossible to think about material prerequisiteswithout ideal prerequisites. But the ideal in thiscase is not Hegel's idealism. It is "a specificmode of reverberation of the surrounding worldby the human brain," which would never appearwithout material preconditions.19 Thus theMarxist interpretation of the ideal presupposesÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊUnlike post-operaist theoreticians, whostate that general knowledge and common goodsare an external coordination of equipment,knowledge, and societal organs, and that thecategory of the "general" is identical to thesequalities, Ilyenkov emphasizes the ideal as apermanent horizon of human existence.21 Itcannot be reduced to pure brain function, to thephysical-material form of one object or another,nor to some material or immaterial activity. Laboras a social-human activity that separates thingsand life from their natural qualities is alsorelated to the dialectical category of the ideal.22

But labor in its turn Ð be it material or immaterialÐ cannot be reduced to the thing produced or thelabor process. Labor is a form of a person's vital

activity, yet it lies outside the person and isrealized in the form of the "things" he or shecreates. According to Ilyenkov, the possibility forsuch vital activity lies in the very potential of theideal in the context of human existence. If laboris not exploitation of a person's will andconsciousness, then it is a "spiritual" category,the possibility of a dialectical connectionbetween the material and the ideal Ðindependent of its materiality or immateriality.23

ÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊInterestingly, in the most recent films of theso-called post-Soviet new wave (particularly in

Boris Khlebnikov's Free Floating [2006] and Crazy Aid [2009]), physical labor does not separate

people from the areas of cognition, creativity,reflection, and, even less, ethical action Ð unlikein the above-mentioned Western worksaddressing material labor.24 The simplicity of theprovincial worker does not contradict thepotential for a poetic or political relationship toreality. For a person with a Soviet background, itis not difficult to unite the elderly physicist-inventor and the Belorussian guest-worker in

their collective ethical justice project (Crazy Aid),which they bring about by inventing andcreatively implementing absurd situations inurban space, helping their fellow citizens.

Boris Khlebnikov, filmstill from Free Floating, 2005, 101'.

ÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊThe unity of mental activity and physicallabor is the heritage of the socialist project, inwhich general intellect appears not only as adistribution of abilities and knowledge, but alsoas a general, ideal, ethical presumption ofcognition's availability to workers in any area. Onthe other hand, both of Khlebnikov's filmsdemonstrate to what extent the humanisthorizon of the socialist project has fallen out ofthe collective post-Soviet consciousness; it hasonly been preserved in the form of rudimentary,merely personal, and therefore inevitablyeccentric attempts to restore the space of the

"general."ÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊP.S.: Today, with culture having become oneof the most prestigious forms of consumption,many, especially Russian, contemporary artistsare going to extremes. Some see themselves inthe manipulative role of a human office orenterprise for the production of art. Some, on thecontrary, assess their artistic activity in thesystem of contemporary art as "precarious" andexploited immaterial labor. This is unequivocallythe case. The creative industries exploitenthusiasm, desires, ideas, and feelings while

simultaneously teaching that they should beexpediently "packaged" as artistic services.

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These processes must be made self-conscious.However, we should also not forget that theredoes exist an area of the non-exploited and non-commodified. And this is not the field of "non-commercial" or public art (which often fails todistinguish art from social activism), nor that ofthe distribution of knowledge and information insociety. Rather, this area is created from thepresumed potential of the general without a

segregation between material and immateriallabor Ð without an anthropological division ofpeople into two races of producers.ÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊ×

Keti Chukhrov is an art theorist and philosopher. Sheholds a PhD in Comparative Literature and works as aneditor and translator for Logos-Altera Publishers. Shealso writes for Moscow Art Magazine and has authorednumerous publications on art theory, culture, politicsand philosophy in various Russian and foreignmagazines, such as New Literary Review, Logos,Critical Mass, and others. Her monograph Pound &£

(Logos, 1999) was the first in Russian dedicated toEzra PoundÕs works, investigating the interrelationbetween poetics and politics; in 2004 she published

War of Quantities-A Book of DramaticPoems (Borey-art).

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ÊÊÊÊÊÊ1Paolo Virno, A Grammar of theMultitude, trans. IsabellaBertoletti, James Cascaito, andAndrea Casson (New York:Semiotext(e), 2004).

ÊÊÊÊÊÊ2Maurizio Lazzarato, "ImmaterialLabour," trans. Paul Colilli andEd Emery, available athttp://www.generation-online.org/c/fcimmateriallabour3.h tm.

ÊÊÊÊÊÊ3Maurizio Lazzarato, LesRŽvolutions du Capitalisme(Paris: Les Emp•cheurs depenser en rond, 2004), 168Ð198.

ÊÊÊÊÊÊ4Paolo Virno, "The Dismeasure ofArt,", interview by Pascal Gielenand Sonja Lavaert, Open, no. 17,http://www.skor.nl/article-4178-nl.html?lang=en.

ÊÊÊÊÊÊ5See Karl Marx, Grundrisse:Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (Rough Draft),trans. Martin Nicolaus (London:Penguin, 1993), 706. "The

development of fixed capitalindicates to what degree generalsocial knowledge has become adirect force of production, and towhat degree, hence, theconditions of the process ofsocial life itself have come underthe control of the generalintellect and been transformedin accordance with it."

ÊÊÊÊÊÊ6Paolo Virno,Ê"GeneralIntellect,"ÊinÊLessico

postfordista: dizionario di ideedella mutazione, ed. AdelinoZanini and Ubaldo FadiniÊ(Milan:Feltrinelli, 2001), 146Ð151.

ÊÊÊÊÊÊ7"The Idea of Communism:Philosophy and Art" was held inBerlin's VolksbŸhne theater,June 25Ð27, 2010.

ÊÊÊÊÊÊ8AndrŽ Gorz, L'ImmatŽriel:Connaissance, valeur et capital(Paris: GalilŽe 2003), 31.

ÊÊÊÊÊÊ9Virno, "The Dismeasure of Art."

ÊÊÊÊÊÊ10Lazzarato, Les RŽvolutions duCapitalisme, 193.

ÊÊÊÊÊÊ11Gorz, L'ImmatŽriel, 51.

ÊÊÊÊÊÊ12Ibid.

ÊÊÊÊÊÊ13Paolo Virno, "Virtuosity andRevolution," trans. Ed Emory,available athttp://www.makeworlds.org/node/view/34.

ÊÊÊÊÊÊ14This thought was expressed atseveral points during the "Ideaof Communism" conference (seeabove).

ÊÊÊÊÊÊ15Gorz, L'ImmatŽriel, 52.

ÊÊÊÊÊÊ16See the series of films by Polishartist Artur Żmijewski calledSelected Works (2007); MichaelGlawogger's film Workingman'sDeath (2006); and the Americanartist Mika Rottenberg's pieceDough (2006).

ÊÊÊÊÊÊ17For more on the concept of "barelife," see Giorgio Agamben,Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power

and Bare Life, trans. DanielHeller-Roazen (Stanford:Stanford University Press, 1998).

ÊÊÊÊÊÊ18Aleksei Gastev, XXX (LaborConfigurations) (XXX;Мoscow:XXX, 1973). Also see hismanifesto "XXX" (How WeShould Work), XXX (The Poetry ofthe Worker's Blow) (1918;Мoscow: XXX, 1976), 270Ð297.

ÊÊÊÊÊÊ19Evald Ilyenkov, "XXX" (Dialecticof the Ideal), XXX (Philosophyand Culture) (Moscow: PoliticalLiterature Publishers, 1991),240.

ÊÊÊÊÊÊ20Ibid, 238.



ÊÊÊÊÊÊ23Whereas classical Germanidealism considered the worldexisting outside humanconsciousness to be material,and everything conceived by thatconsciousness to be ideal, theMarxist interpretation of theideal used by Ilyenkov allows it

to be seen dialectically: i.e., notopposing the material and ideal,but assuming the ideal to be ahuman potentiality; with the"human" being understoodthrough the potentiality ofliberated labor.

ÊÊÊÊÊÊ24The representatives of the newwave in Russian film today areconsidered to be BorisKhlebnikov, AlekseiPopogrebsky, Vasily Sigarev,Nikolay Khomeriki, BakurBakuradze and Ivan Vyrypaev.

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