ARTIFICIAL HELLS

artificial hells
real work, applying our knowledge and skills to real, live and expedient
work . . . Not to reflect, not to represent and not to interpret reality, but
to really build and express the systematic tasks of the new class, the
proletariat. 37
Here, then, we see the beginnings of the idea that art should be useful and
effect concrete changes in society. Against bourgeois individualism, it was
argued, the Proletkult should foster ‘comradely, i.e. consciously collective,
relationships’. 38 Putting aside the overt emphasis on industrialisation, many
of these instrumentalising sentiments chime with today’s discussions
around interventionist, activist and socially engaged art. And these discussions
repeat the same paradoxes that were present in the 1920s: despite
Bogdanov’s enthusiastic belief in the rational organisation of proletarian
culture, there was a clear contradiction between his humanist desire to end
alienation and his intolerance for those who strayed from the recommended
path of collectivism. The proletariat were expected to participate of their
own free will, but only in a manner appropriate to their class position. With
creativity rewritten as a social (rather than individual) enterprise, the status
of interiority and individual emotion became problematic. Art, for
Bogdanov, was a tool to mobilise sentiment, but of a strictly political variety:
‘Art can organise feelings in exactly the same way as ideological
propaganda [organises] thought; feelings determine will with no less force
than ideas.’ 39
This conscription of affect was one of the main objections raised by
Trotsky to the work of the Proletkult. An infinitely more subtle thinker of
culture than Bogdanov, Trotsky found the privileging of collective over
individual psychology to be one of the Proletkult’s central stumbling
blocks:
What does it mean to ‘deny experiences’, that is, deny individual
psychology in literature and on the stage? . . . In what way, on what
grounds, and in the name of what, can art turn its back to the inner life
of present- day man who is building a new external world, and thereby
rebuilding himself? If art will not help this new man to educate himself,
to strengthen and refine himself, then what it is for? And how can it
organise the inner life, if it does not penetrate and reproduce it? 40
Trotsky’s vision of culture advocated creative freedom as self- education,
instead of injunctions to produce ideologically driven art: in his view, there
was no point making demands on what should be the content of art for the
masses, since this had to evolve of its own accord, as a collective psychological
movement. Instead of homogenising the masses to a singular entity,
he pointed out that class speaks through individuals. 41
I dwell on Trotsky here because his position is an important one to
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