Possible impact of the labor theory of Karl B"ucher on Russian formalism

Carl Wilhelm Bucher, German philosopher and sociologist, widely known for his conception of the art development from the rhythm of primitive labour, wasn’t mentioned among the predecessors of the Russian formalism. We hav- en’t just discovered any quotations from Bucher in Russian formalism studies. Maybe the original and first Russian edition of his book was known for Russian intellectuals presumably from unreliable sources, as oral discussions. Andrey Bely, who was interested in German philosophy, knew only the second edition (1923, New Moscow publishers):

“Искусство в первые фазы бытия не было замкнуто в формах: оно было синкретично; оно сопровождало трудовые действия; такова фаза искусства в эпоху тезы (примитивная коммуна); сюда мысли Бюхера “Работа и ритм” (вышла в русском переводе после Октябрьской революции)”1.

[“Art in early phases of being was not limited with forms: it was syncretic; it was accompanied by labor actions; it was the phase of art of the ‘Age of thesis’ (the primitive commune); Bucher’s thoughts in Work and Rhythm (published in Russian translation after the October Revolution)”].

For Andrey Bely, who used Hegelian term thesis (positive or productive postulation) for early development of art, Bucher is involuntary theorist of primitive communism. The aim of the writer to ground his own thought is completely built in the newborn Soviet ideological project, through common for Russian intelligentsia instrumental use of developed scientific concepts.

The direct citation from Bucher we can discover in Shklovsky’s Theory of Prose, where he was portrayed as forgotten theorist of the aesthetic utilitarianism:

“Существуют полагающие, что искусство имеет целью что-нибудь облегчать, или внушать, или обобщать. Полагающим это недостаточно парового копра для вбивания свай, и они привлекают для этой работы ритм (см. главным образом Карл Бюхер). А между тем, как явно для умеющих смотреть, насколько чуждо обобщение, как близко к раздроблению искусство, которое, конечно, не марш под музыку, а танец-ходьба, которая ощущается, точнее - движение, построенное только для того, чтобы оно ощущалось”2.

[“Some people believe that art is intended to facilitate something, or inspire, or generalize. They suppose it’s not enough steam pile driver for driving piles, and they are attracted to the rhythm (see Carl Bucher mostly) as necessary for the job. Meanwhile, as it is clearly able to watch impossibility of any generalization of art, with art’s proclivity to fragmentation, because art, of course, not a march to the music, but dance-walking, which is felt. To be exact it’s a movement built just to be felt”].

At the first, it seems, that Shklovsky denies Bucher’s theory as paramilitary glorification of art as marching. But in fact, he noted that Bucher saw in art not only pragmatics (facilitating labor), but also the cognitive value (generalization), which occurs through suggestion as transition from pragmatic reception to cognitive reception. But Shklovsky rejects cognitive presumptions of art, considering that the direct experience of the aesthetic problems of art is the only figure that explains the art, figure of walking-dancing. Cognitive automatism of perception is denied, but if pragmatic Bucher overcame this automatism of perception, then, as formalists, he thought rhythm as device to introduce figures. In this article we question how the word device appeared in Russian translation of

Новый филологический вестник. 2017. №1(40).

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Bucher, and how it prompted the idea not only about the rhythmic automatism in art, but also about de-automatization of the aesthetic exerience.

The term device, coined by OPOIAZ and Andrey Bely, was often misunderstood in 1920s as deviation from the stable norm of narration or description, as expressivity not in course of aesthetic habits. Mikhail Kuzmin in his address to Andrey Bely said:

Двоеточие с тире -

Это твой прием сумбурный; Твой тотем литературный -Двоеточие с тире.

Двоеточие с тире

Не напрасно ввел ты в моду: Всем ведь нам дала природа Двоеточие с тире.

[Colon with a dash -This is your confused device, Yom literary totem -Colon with a dash.

Colon with a dash

Not in vain brought you into fashion: All because by nature is given to us Colon with a dash].

The device here understood not as invention, but as natural gift, that we need to explicate, and any good explication will do it fashionable. But the word totem, is the point of our research attention.

The Freudian notion of totem wasn’t just common in that time. Herbert Spencer understood totem as sign of poorness of the primitive language. Primitive people, Spencer postulated, have no notions for the social experience, and totems are substitutes of the future notions of social interactions.

Spencer’s approach was widely criticized by Fraser³, Fraser underlined productive function of totem. Totem isn’t instrument to overcome cognitive problems in appropriation of nature, but mean to multiply natural products. Not animist superstitions, but effective instructions. If totem is effective and reproduced formula, it could reproduce in any case consumable production. Fraser’s approach was more legalist than economical, in the distribution of tribal totems he saw beginnings of the international law, where rules of production could prevent the total war (bellum omnium contra omnes). Fraser also could be seen as inventor of potlatch anthropology: if totems could multiply any production, the ordinary syntax, making totems words, would destroy this production.

Colon with a dash, borrowed by Andrey Bely from R. Steiner4, wasn’t for this writer a syntax different, but an intonation figure. These intonations meant to break habitual poetic rhythmus as unproductive, and to open productive pos-

sibilities of rhythm as device.

Andrey Bely explains main functions of the device in his The First Meeting (1922):

Киркою рудокопный гном

Согласных хрусты рушит в томы...

Я - стилистический прием, Языковые идиомы!

Я - хрустом тухнущая пещь, -Пеку прием: стихи - в начинку; Давно поломанная вещь, Давно пора меня в починку.

[A dwarf-miner with his pick

Crunch of the consonants ruins into big volumes, I’m a stylistic device And language idioms.

I’m a crunch-extinguished stove

Cooking this device as filled with poetic verses, But now I’m broken furniture,

I need an instant restoration].

If we will retell this emphatic and elliptic speech, we will have: the labor of versification is expressed with rude crunch of consonants. But to develop good stylistic, not reducible to rude and primitive effects, we need to add to sound combinations semantic combinations (idioms). But this addition is destructive to author’s self-organization. The common notion on poetic activity is that it sublimates and lightens author’s experience (bird-like and air-like poetic inspiration from Plato to today), but Andrey Bely feels the repetition of the same combination as boring. The automatization of device, traced by Russian formalists as moment of literature evolution, here is given in tragic tones: automatization breaks and humiliates poet.

The rude style, based on collision of consonants, is one of the styles of classical rhetoric art, with the predictable practical effect, with influence on real things. This style appeals not to imagination, but to direct feelings, and demands of this style are demands of activism. Andrey Bely declares, that rude style needs additional device to make this labor constructive not destructive. So the device is not only moment of expression, but moment of productive reorganization of the text, opposed to creative entropy. But why the perspective changes radically?

The key is the book by Carl Wilhelm Bucher Arbeit und Rhythmus (Work and Rhythm), translated into Russian immediately after original print in 1899⁵. The original book was published by the Teubner Book Company (Teubner Bu-chgesellschaft), the most prominent European centre for critical editions of ancient writers. The last fact had driven attention of the classical philologist, like famous Russian and Polish propagator of classical humanities Tadeusz (rus: Faddei Franzevich) Zielinski, who reinterpreted Bucher’s research as apolo-

gy of classical art as being close to production rules. So, Zielinski via Bucher glorified ancient art as healthy, optimistic and motivating to progress, as pure form of art different from mixed forms of the latter ages⁶. But this position was completely inadmissible for Marxist teaching on superstructure. Marxist scholar Boris larcho, who systematized precise methods of literary criticism, in the short epigram against Bucher’s theory showed the regressive and profane character of the rhythmic art:

Отец у танца - ритм, а мать его - работа;

Работа, следственно, есть бабушка фокстрота

[The rhythm is father of the dance, and hrs mother is work, Ergo the work is granny of the foxtrot],

Marxist criticist laughs on the cultivation of art to make it main point of social life, this point is completely destroyed with actual mass entertainment. But we see that Bucher’s anti-Marxist theory of rhythm as basic principle of production is closer to Spencer’s and Fraser’s general conclusion on the beginning of production from the lack of language. The primitive language is too weak to arrange instruments of social interactions, and allows only production of some kinds of goods. For Bucher this weakness was the first principle of world economics differentiation.

Bucher opens his book with the critics of the working time as universal notion “обусловленною психически, но неизменною самой по себе телесною функцией”7 [depending psychically from the pure body function]. The work has no time to exist, but has task to restock production: he is closer to Fraser in his glorification of stock-making as root of effective production. But Bucher is less optimistic than Fraser: Fraser declared that totem is enough for primitive effectiveness, Bucher accuses the primitive society for ineffectiveness due to undeveloped body language. If the work depends on feelings and undue conditions, this work is set of devices, but not systematic production. The famine is direct result of taking work without any stable intention: this work is device without constructive work.

Russian word for device, priem, is of the same root that the verb print-mat sya - to start work, to take the task. The semantics of the verb not in initialization, but in belief: if you have started, you must finish and you believe in success. If the work is borrowing and destructive to you, your belief is productive principle. The same root we see in the words predprinimatel’ (reproducing French entrepreneur)

In Russian translation we read:

“Недостаточностью орудий и незнакомством с производительными приемами труда объясняется, почему у отдельных диких народов некоторые технические искусства находят такое широкое распространение, в особенности, искусство плетения, гончарное дело, выделка кож и войлоков и резьба по дереву, тогда как другие промыслы находятся в совершенно зачаточном состоянии”8.

[Not enough tools and unfamiliarity with productive labor devices explains why among certain savage peoples some technical skills are so widespread, especially weaving art, pottery, tanning leather and felt and wood carving, while other technologies [Russian: promysly, kinds of productive works] are quite rudimentary].

We see in the translation the difference of the device from the tool, not relevant for the old-fashioned school poetics and rhetoric. But the conceptual revolution of the Russian formalism couldn’t be understood without invention of this difference. The device is use of tools, allowing to produce complex objects not taking into consideration material predispositions. Clay asks in the hands, as well as wool, while the production of bricks or carts requires industry, far from the taste addiction to the compliant material.

In the original text where Russian translation gives «производительные приёмы труда» (productive labor devices) we see wirksamere Verfahrungs-weise⁹, that could be translated as “moods to realize work” or “experimental approaches to real work”. Bucher spoke on experience, that allows regular production, in contrast to primitive motivations, where lack of language reflects as lack of productive quality. The Russian translation is not about rules of production, but about productive motivation and creative poetic work with material.

Bucher explains that rhythm is regulative, more closer to economic integrity, than to creative inspiration. So he needs to prove, that patience during the work should be not only big, but terrifying:

“Но все-таки труд этот исполняется и притом самыми первобытными орудиями и самыми тяжелыми приемами, требующими необыкновенного терпения. Поэтому должен существовать еще какой-либо момент, уравновешивающий тяжесть работы, помогающий преодолеть неприятность ея”10.

[Still, the work is performed and, moreover, with the most primitive tools and the most severe and hard devices that require extraordinary patience. Therefore, there should be a moment balancing the severity of the work, helping to overcome the current nuisance].

In the original text we read also not about device, but about experience, beschwerliche, Ausdauer fordernde Verfahren¹¹, that we will translate as “hard and exhaustive experience”. But in Russian the experience would mean experience as recollection (French: vecu, Russian: perezhitoe), but Bucher speaks not on memory, but on economics. The word device is hear, in plural, will mean aptitude to take the work, closer to intuition and Russian Formalist radicalism, that prefer intuition to the lessons of the past.

Further we read: “Мы вправе признать, поэтому, что склонность к ритмическим движениям свойственна всяким приемам работы, повторяющимся равномерно”12 [We may admit, however, that the tendency to rhythmic movements is characteristics of every labor devices, recurring evenly], In the original text we see Arbeitsverrichtungen13 that we could translate as labor achievements, regular success. But Russian translator understood any transition of work into resultative practice as device, as enterprise, regular, but intuitive and creative labor.

Bucher intends, that the work as rhythm becomes habit, as part of the body culture. But Russian translator thinks only on the rules how obtain this habit. The device, allowing to start the work, needs to be rethought as device as part of working discipline. The device is mean to overcome cognitive automatism taken as pragmatic automatism, rethinking dancing and other rhythmic practices as regular productive experience. But the best way to criticize this false non-productive pragmatism of device is to declare the art for art.

Translated by the author.

NOTES

• ¹    Белый А. Программа «Вечера Андрея Белого» / публ. и прим. ТВ. Анчуговой// Андрей Белый: проблемы творчества: статьи, воспоминания, публикации / сост. С.С. Лесневский, А.А. Михайлов. М., 1988. С. 684.

• ² Шкловский В. Теория прозы. М., 1982. С. 34.

• ³    Fraser J.G. Totemism. Edinburgh, 1887. Р. 7 sqq.

• ⁴    Парамонов Б., Толстой И. Бедлам как Вифлеем. М., 2017. С. 305.

• ⁵    Марков А. Об одном убийстве философии // Новое литературное обозрение, 2015. №2 (132).

• ⁶    BilcherК. Arbeit und Rhythmus. Leipzig, 1899; Бюхер К. Работа и ритм. СПб., 1899.

• ⁷    Бюхер К. Работа и ритм. СПб., 1899. С. 1.

• ⁸    Бюхер К. Работа и ритм. СПб., 1899. С. 7.

• ⁴    Bucher К. Arbeit und Rhythmus. Leipzig, 1899. S. 12.

• ¹⁰    Бюхер К. Работа и ритм. СПб., 1899. С. 9.

• ¹¹    Bucher К. Arbeit und Rhythmus. Leipzig, 1899. S. 18.

• ¹²    Бюхер К. Работа и ритм. СПб., 1899. С. 17.

• ¹³    Bucher К. Arbeit und Rhythmus. Leipzig, 1899. S. 33.