Boris Arvatov's Socialist Objects

Abstract

Boris Arvatov is best known as an art historian and critic who championed the utilitarian production art of the Russian Constructivist avant-garde during the 1920s. He was notorious for his single-minded interest in production and technology, but in the essay Everyday Life and the Culture of the Thing (1925), translated for the first time in this issue, he unexpectedly turns his attention to consumption and everyday life.' The essay attempts to imagine how socialism will transform the passive capitalist commodity into an active socialist object. This object, connected like a co-worker with human practice(126), will produce new relations of consumption, new experiences of everyday life, and new human subjects of modernity. Today, as the promise of industrialism recedes into the past and we search out pockets of resistance to global capitalist (post)modernity, the topics of everyday life, consumption, and commodity culture have become familiar in cultural theory. But they are not usually associated with early Soviet Marxism. What makes Arvatov's theory of modernity so unusual for his time, and so strangely familiar today, is his conviction that the subject is formed as much through the process of using objects in everyday life as by making them in the sphere of production. His essay focuses on everyday life in the industrial city of the West-the city that we, to a certain extent, still inhabit, and familiar territory in twentieth-century cultural theory--because Moscow was no modern consumer metropolis in 1925. Russia's already modest industrial base had been catastrophically decimated by seven years of world war, revolution, and civil war, and was only slowly rebuilding in the 1920s. I suppose we have a proletariat in the West and an ideology of proletarian culture in Arvatov once admitted. We have Constructivist ideologists in Russia, and technological industry in the West. This is the real tragedy.2 As we know with historical hindsight, the version of modernity