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De-centering queer theory: Communist sexuality in the flow during and after the Cold War
De-centering queer theory seeks to reorient queer theory to a different conception of bodies and sexuality derived from Eastern European Marxism. The book articulates a contrast between the concept of the productive body, which draws its epistemology from Soviet and avant-garde theorists, and Cold War gender, which is defined as the social construction of the body. The first part of the book concentrates on the theoretical and visual production of Eastern European Marxism, which proposed an alternative version of sexuality to that of western liberalism. In doing so it offers a historical angle to understand the emergence not only of an alternative epistemology, but also of queer theory's vocabulary. The second part of the book provides a Marxist, anti-capitalist archive for queer studies, which often neglects to engage critically with its liberal and Cold War underpinnings.
272 pages, Hardcover
Published October 1, 2021
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April 7, 2025
I am not a queer studies scholar - and I do not pretend to have a grasp of the field's vocabulary or the debates nor the vast bibliography available, but Bogdan Popa's essential book made me aware of the theoretical and ideological impasses that still haunt the categories of gender/sex and by extension transgender studies. This is an essential task today - to try and recognize (and salvage) how the historical and disciplinary decoupling of Marxism from queer studies is part and parcel of today's rise of international ethno-nationalism and right-wing populism.
Neoreaction isn't fringe any longer, nor some 4Chan phenomenon, and racist, anti-immigrant rhetoric follow red scare and lavender scare psi warfare tactics (Stories Are Weapons: Psychological Warfare and the American Mind). A united front is needed more than ever before. It is for me also a way to uncover - a different (and anti-capitalist) dynamic and epistemological contest that the one brilliantly explored by Irresistible Empire: America's Advance through Twentieth-Century Europe dichotomy between old world bourgeois culture and new American mass culture.
A lot of today's moral panics about so-called "cancel culture" appear to be another American import (The Cancel Culture Panic: How an American Obsession Went Global), that nevertheless became the obsessive mediatic preocupation of many other places outside the Anglo-American academia (Russia, Germany, Japan, China, Romania, Serbia, France etc.), so why not be more open to resources gleaned from an unduly neglected east European Marxism tradition and cinematic expression? I for one find salutary this long overdue book on queer communism.
First, I will outline what caught my interest, ending with a few caveats. As an ambitious but eminently readable book, De-centering Queer Theory aims to bring historical materialism back into queer theory and to furnish us a novel materialist conception of queer theory.
1. Overall I appreciate most the 'tone' of this book. It's courage, direction, and revisionist force. It is hard to argue against a well-worked analytical framework and its daring (and successful imho) attempt at uncovering and producing a theoretical alternative to much of mainstream US-based gender theory. So, why the heck do we need an alternative epistemology of gender that has at its core the communist theory of emancipation at a time when we are sliding back into neoreaction further and further?
Simply put, because "anti-communism" has been historically purposely built in during the Cold War, at the very beginning of identity politics, gender studies and queer theory, as part of the whole "arsenal of the Free World", something that has hampered our historical understanding of sexual categories and defanged our wider political engagement.
2. Secondly - the book tests this premise on an entire range of East Bloc movies from the Romanian early Socialist classics The Valley Resounds (Răsună valea 1949) to the extraordinary Soviet movie Alone (1931), movies that do not get much attention nowadays. Such a movie list could well form the basis for a historical materialist research program (again my knowledge here is limited).
I appreciate very much how such 'untimely' cinematic materials, usually ignored (junked?) by the capitalist system become thus what Bogdan Popa calls "socialist objects" or "counterfetishes", like practically everything (including east bloc SF classics or proletkult literature) that fell out of favor and remained outside of the capitalist circulation and valuation - ready for a decontextualized but fruitful (as well as witty) viewing.
3. It is high time to understand how the Cold War shaped and marked the theoretical imagination and epistemology, both the East and the West - particularly the "perception that Marxism and sexuality are antagonistic was consolidated during the Cold War". Bogdan P. combines a Foucauldian frame that traces the contingent nature of social formations - with a strong emphasis on historical materialism and its distinctly progressist (if bombastic) terminology and teleology. Early in the book he characterizes historical materialism as: "a Marxist method that shows that the production of material life shapes our categories of thought".
4. Altough the idea that Soviet sexuality was repressed and puritanical and that the Western sexuality was anti-normative has been challenged in the last years, in everything from media to movies - these Anglo-American assumptions that carry on the rhetoric of the Cold War are still pretty much dominant (outside the academia and a few BreadTube or LeftTube video streams). The aura of James Dean and US countercultural anti-conformism (the figure of the rebel without a cause Rebels: Youth and the Cold War Origins of Identity) should be place it in its proper Cold War context - as a formula to counter both communist revolutionary subjects and reframe anti-colonial and anti-imperialist guerilla fighters for the home audience in anti communist hyper individualist terms.
Even when such a perception is critically challenged, "gender or gay politics, are deeply constituted by Anglo-American anti-communist histories". De-centering queer theory tries not only to challenge this, but to offer an account of why such Soviet epistemologies have been annulled, deleted or otherwise gradually eliminated.
5. In the beginning, I was too quick to call this book revisionist, since it builds a cohesive ideological 'orthodox' Marxist case that does not separate Early Soviet Marxist programs from the later Marxist Stalinism. Many histories try to cleave, keep one and dump the other. Usually liberal or anarcho-communist academia amd art criticism embraces early avant-garde ideals or rejects Leninist vanguardism (separating it from its avant-garde modernist core), while resolutely condemning or refuting later Stalinist and socialist realist periods as authoritarian kitsch (here Clement Greenberg comes to mind).
Refuting or accepting this Stalinist inheritance has haunted the French left intellectuals as well as Marxist theoreticians like Georg Lukacs or Ernst Bloch. In this sense, from what I can gather, the book is strictly Marxist-Leninst (ML) trans- queer- studies book or rather a Marxist-Leninst-Bogdanovist MLB trans- queer (later on I will return to that) version of sexual history (something that comes closer to the "correct outlook on history" of the CCCP and opposed to revisionist histories). It not only takes for granted that "Marxist Stalinism kept at its core an anti-capitalist political economy" but aims to demonstrate this with artistic and theoretical examples.
6. This book could be read as a compendium of ḱnowledge about a 'lost' Soviet world - but importantly without nostalgia, without that bitter-sweet "Ostalgia", brandishing instead a solid theoretical apparatus without the usual red baiting as well as undue idolatrisation of a "superior Anglo-American vocabulary about sexuality". Reading this book I found out about Dan Healey brilliant pioneering study Homosexual Desire in Revolutionary Russia: The Regulation of Sexual and Gender Dissent (Chicago History of American Civilization or about Christina Klein's excellent Cold War Orientalism: Asia in the Middlebrow Imagination, 1945-1961 US soft power midbrow culture politics in Asia. Particularly the mention of Dan Healey study of "male homosexual subculture" during Stalinism - challenges the assumption that the Soviet State was more totalitarian than its western state counterparts. Such was competition in realms of competing emancipatory sexual, political, ideological projects that the triumphalism at the end of the Cold War managed to delete or leave it argely unchallenged. Only the recent For All Mankind series hints to that.
7. The book takes Marxist materiality to its limits - showing how it gradually loses momentum (by focusing on 1980s late Socialist Romanian movies like The Cruise). Another area where I am at a loss is psychoanalytic theory - where Bogdan P. reinfuses with Soviet Marxist theoreticians such as Nikolai Yakovlevich Marr that conceptualized the unconscious as having a class character.
In this sense it can be thought as a good corrective to a scholarly world practically dominated by Western Marxism, again this I think is beyond dispute, altough there has been a revived interest in 'creative Marxism' of Lifshitz, Evald Ilenkov and Bogdanov.
But the official 'diamat' is still off limits. In this sense this book (together with work by Boris Groys, Chukhrov, Boris Buden, Oushakine and others mentioned) is an attempt to refuse the complete junkification of the entire Soviet Marxism (Soviet Marxism), an emancipatory project in its own right - by labeling it as "totalitarian administration" or as content produced by 'tankie' provocateurs online.
Especially considering the Romania case where whatever nuanced leftist position one defends, you get slammed and slandered or branded for life as "sexomarxist", Ceausist, or even neoStalinist apologist.
8. Finally, I think it is important to recognize some measure of originality and success for eastern European Marxism, when considering both rival universalisms (Soviet Marxism and Anglo-American liberal capitalism) and not always capitalize on the winner takes it all. Altough such a promethean and cornucopian future seems a thing of the past, we have to appreciate and learn how such prometheanism cut its teeth, how it was bound with an Ex-Human trajectory (The Ex-Human: Science Fiction and the Fate of Our Species) or joined 'loosership' as a defensive stance, losing most of its internationalist edge. This never-attained communist horizon and its aftermath (The Triumph of Broken Promises: The End of the Cold War and the Rise of Neoliberalism) rhymes with a certain dialectic of defeat and tones down the other and ultimately more academically successfull strain of Western Marxist comrades (Dialectic of Defeat: Contours of Western Marxism) into a Longer March trough the 21st c. wilderness.
9. My only caveat is the entire bloc idea of a "eastern European Marxist" corpus - as a label, "an umbrella term that designates the ideology of State socialism, which has deep roots in Marxism Leninism". I appreciate a collective synthesis that can trigger and deliver such an ideological snowball effect, especially one that rarely sticks together. Western Marxist label, no matter how unitary and good for self-branding also does not hold well on closer inspection.
So I for one have some trouble squaring off different socialist strains of thought. In particular, how can one appreciate such higher synthesis of the rich debates and disputes from the formative period of eastern European Marxism without giving in to a false sense of harmony. Of course they were all finally part of the anti-capitalist productivist project of state Socialism.
But let us appreciate for a second how during the "Golden Ten" of Soviet Philosophy in the 1920s there was such a “hitherto unprecedented pluralism of thought” (Pustarnakov 2003). According to Maya Soboleva and others, there were nearly irreconcilable differences between the various camps expressed through fierce debates that animated the various schools and directions of thought (say btw intellectualism and anti-intellectualism, positivism and idealism, and realism and mysticism, just to give a small range). There existed different versions of pre-revolutionary Russian Marxism and Soviet Marxism, different Hegelianisms, different Spinozisms - just to take the foundational role taken by debates around Spinoza, for example with Plekhanov, or say Bogdanov. Or the 1925-1932 debates between the “mechanists” (Kliment Timiryazev, Liubov Axelrod, Ivan Skvortsov-Stepanov, and others) and a unifying vision of the “dialecticians” (Abram Deborin, Grigory Tymyansky, Yan Sten, and others). I understand that this is beyond the scope of this book, and maybe better this way. Of course, there were known tensions around Bogdanov's "empiriomonism" and Lenin's disparagement of it, even if, to be appreciated, such epistemological and intellectual rivalries never fractured the main trust of their anti-capitalist project. Today if one decides to use Bogdanov's and decontextualize empiriomonism (in its primary Machist form) one risks completely decoupling it from Leninism (based on Lenin's virulent response to it). This path is taken up by theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli in support of his interpretation of quantum theory in Helgoland: Making Sense of the Quantum Revolution.
10. One of the most important concepts of this book is "productivism" and productive bodies, an analytic Bogdan P. derived from both Alexander Bogdanov and Boris Ignatievich Arvatov's 1926 Art and Production (Art and Production). This and its associated chapter were most illuminating in contrasting the capitalist and communist projects - especially how productivism operated and stood in opposition with "constructivism" and in particular with social constructivism that dominated US social sciences. I also wondered about a different split in the realm of artistic theory - that does not get mentioned, mainly the one btw early Soviet constructivists and productivists.
This productivist generative aesthetic was later on abandoned during the long decay of late Socialism and the book strives to encapsulate this backslide trough various artistic examples from the thaw period - when the adoption of conservative norms of sexuality, for example such as abortion prevailed (examples from movies as well as experimental art from the period are being discussed). To illustrate the productive bodies of the eastern European Marxism - the book deploys a "Soviet dialectical conception, men and women were not given as a material embodiment that was fixed and unchanging. According to a Marxist logic, they were elements in a mode of production that had to abolish capitalism continuously." Bogdan Popa quotes Boris Groys in remarking that communism was a world-building project that generated or aimed to generate its independence from the market economy via a new conceptual apparatus.
11. In this constant abolition of capitalism and collectivisation effort, liberal societies were deemed obsolete, and a new vocabulary was deployed together with a specific theory as a step towards the emancipation of humanity.
The boundary btw art and production had to be abolished (according to Arvatov - a key theorist of the Proletkult that expanded on Bogdanov's "proletarian monism"). Arvatov argued - in ARt and PRoduction - that artists had to step inside the production process to transform the production for profit into one for need. Indeed, if one leaves aside these debates - and Lenin's distrust of Proletkult's productivism and its Cultural Revolutionary bottom up aspect, BP argues for the continuity btw the Proletkult movement and the later socialist realist artistic productions. According to this, political bodies in socialism (in contrast to US understanding of "identity") were neither territories of freedom nor anti-conformist subjectivities that fought an established ideology.
Acting in line with the Communist party - they enacted a future communist society and produced it continuously.
12. So "for Marxists, socialism produces human subjectivities for their social value, as opposed to US social science emphasis on the social that constructs a given body and personality". Taking the quote attributed Mayakovski and literalizing it "Art is not a mirror to hold up to the world, but a hammer with which to shape it" - strangely enough one gets closer to a newer, more literalist and realist definition of science fiction (Fluid Futures: Science Fiction and Potentiality) on the edge between things that evade representaiton and realities that are more easily representable. The innovation of socialism here is a decidedely processual one where production is emphasized and not the final product (achieving full communism). Communism was thus a process of production - and this constituted the newness of Soviet socialism.
Such imaginative jumps were always helped by the stronger (sensual?) connection to the material world and productive labor supplied those new structures of feeling. Marxist film characters are thus to be theorized as against individual identity and for an "achievement of collective organizations".
13. A final point that merits more exploration, but lies outside of the corporealist frame of De-centering Queer studies is the dialectic btw the relations of production and the forces of production. According to Stalin, productive forces are “the relations of men to nature” in opposition to the relations of production which he defines as “the relations of men to one another in the process of production”.
These continuously developed productive forces at any given stage were an important part of historical materialism and of Soviet Marxism and they show a certain intellectual common ground with German idealist Schelling-ian power ontology, as I understand it. Marx’s turn to historical materialism seems to be partially indebted to Schelling’s strong critique of Hegel’s deduction of reality from thought (even if Marx never acknowledged this nor is it possible to demonstrate this empirically).
Neoreaction isn't fringe any longer, nor some 4Chan phenomenon, and racist, anti-immigrant rhetoric follow red scare and lavender scare psi warfare tactics (Stories Are Weapons: Psychological Warfare and the American Mind). A united front is needed more than ever before. It is for me also a way to uncover - a different (and anti-capitalist) dynamic and epistemological contest that the one brilliantly explored by Irresistible Empire: America's Advance through Twentieth-Century Europe dichotomy between old world bourgeois culture and new American mass culture.
A lot of today's moral panics about so-called "cancel culture" appear to be another American import (The Cancel Culture Panic: How an American Obsession Went Global), that nevertheless became the obsessive mediatic preocupation of many other places outside the Anglo-American academia (Russia, Germany, Japan, China, Romania, Serbia, France etc.), so why not be more open to resources gleaned from an unduly neglected east European Marxism tradition and cinematic expression? I for one find salutary this long overdue book on queer communism.
First, I will outline what caught my interest, ending with a few caveats. As an ambitious but eminently readable book, De-centering Queer Theory aims to bring historical materialism back into queer theory and to furnish us a novel materialist conception of queer theory.
1. Overall I appreciate most the 'tone' of this book. It's courage, direction, and revisionist force. It is hard to argue against a well-worked analytical framework and its daring (and successful imho) attempt at uncovering and producing a theoretical alternative to much of mainstream US-based gender theory. So, why the heck do we need an alternative epistemology of gender that has at its core the communist theory of emancipation at a time when we are sliding back into neoreaction further and further?
Simply put, because "anti-communism" has been historically purposely built in during the Cold War, at the very beginning of identity politics, gender studies and queer theory, as part of the whole "arsenal of the Free World", something that has hampered our historical understanding of sexual categories and defanged our wider political engagement.
2. Secondly - the book tests this premise on an entire range of East Bloc movies from the Romanian early Socialist classics The Valley Resounds (Răsună valea 1949) to the extraordinary Soviet movie Alone (1931), movies that do not get much attention nowadays. Such a movie list could well form the basis for a historical materialist research program (again my knowledge here is limited).
I appreciate very much how such 'untimely' cinematic materials, usually ignored (junked?) by the capitalist system become thus what Bogdan Popa calls "socialist objects" or "counterfetishes", like practically everything (including east bloc SF classics or proletkult literature) that fell out of favor and remained outside of the capitalist circulation and valuation - ready for a decontextualized but fruitful (as well as witty) viewing.
3. It is high time to understand how the Cold War shaped and marked the theoretical imagination and epistemology, both the East and the West - particularly the "perception that Marxism and sexuality are antagonistic was consolidated during the Cold War". Bogdan P. combines a Foucauldian frame that traces the contingent nature of social formations - with a strong emphasis on historical materialism and its distinctly progressist (if bombastic) terminology and teleology. Early in the book he characterizes historical materialism as: "a Marxist method that shows that the production of material life shapes our categories of thought".
4. Altough the idea that Soviet sexuality was repressed and puritanical and that the Western sexuality was anti-normative has been challenged in the last years, in everything from media to movies - these Anglo-American assumptions that carry on the rhetoric of the Cold War are still pretty much dominant (outside the academia and a few BreadTube or LeftTube video streams). The aura of James Dean and US countercultural anti-conformism (the figure of the rebel without a cause Rebels: Youth and the Cold War Origins of Identity) should be place it in its proper Cold War context - as a formula to counter both communist revolutionary subjects and reframe anti-colonial and anti-imperialist guerilla fighters for the home audience in anti communist hyper individualist terms.
Even when such a perception is critically challenged, "gender or gay politics, are deeply constituted by Anglo-American anti-communist histories". De-centering queer theory tries not only to challenge this, but to offer an account of why such Soviet epistemologies have been annulled, deleted or otherwise gradually eliminated.
5. In the beginning, I was too quick to call this book revisionist, since it builds a cohesive ideological 'orthodox' Marxist case that does not separate Early Soviet Marxist programs from the later Marxist Stalinism. Many histories try to cleave, keep one and dump the other. Usually liberal or anarcho-communist academia amd art criticism embraces early avant-garde ideals or rejects Leninist vanguardism (separating it from its avant-garde modernist core), while resolutely condemning or refuting later Stalinist and socialist realist periods as authoritarian kitsch (here Clement Greenberg comes to mind).
Refuting or accepting this Stalinist inheritance has haunted the French left intellectuals as well as Marxist theoreticians like Georg Lukacs or Ernst Bloch. In this sense, from what I can gather, the book is strictly Marxist-Leninst (ML) trans- queer- studies book or rather a Marxist-Leninst-Bogdanovist MLB trans- queer (later on I will return to that) version of sexual history (something that comes closer to the "correct outlook on history" of the CCCP and opposed to revisionist histories). It not only takes for granted that "Marxist Stalinism kept at its core an anti-capitalist political economy" but aims to demonstrate this with artistic and theoretical examples.
6. This book could be read as a compendium of ḱnowledge about a 'lost' Soviet world - but importantly without nostalgia, without that bitter-sweet "Ostalgia", brandishing instead a solid theoretical apparatus without the usual red baiting as well as undue idolatrisation of a "superior Anglo-American vocabulary about sexuality". Reading this book I found out about Dan Healey brilliant pioneering study Homosexual Desire in Revolutionary Russia: The Regulation of Sexual and Gender Dissent (Chicago History of American Civilization or about Christina Klein's excellent Cold War Orientalism: Asia in the Middlebrow Imagination, 1945-1961 US soft power midbrow culture politics in Asia. Particularly the mention of Dan Healey study of "male homosexual subculture" during Stalinism - challenges the assumption that the Soviet State was more totalitarian than its western state counterparts. Such was competition in realms of competing emancipatory sexual, political, ideological projects that the triumphalism at the end of the Cold War managed to delete or leave it argely unchallenged. Only the recent For All Mankind series hints to that.
7. The book takes Marxist materiality to its limits - showing how it gradually loses momentum (by focusing on 1980s late Socialist Romanian movies like The Cruise). Another area where I am at a loss is psychoanalytic theory - where Bogdan P. reinfuses with Soviet Marxist theoreticians such as Nikolai Yakovlevich Marr that conceptualized the unconscious as having a class character.
In this sense it can be thought as a good corrective to a scholarly world practically dominated by Western Marxism, again this I think is beyond dispute, altough there has been a revived interest in 'creative Marxism' of Lifshitz, Evald Ilenkov and Bogdanov.
But the official 'diamat' is still off limits. In this sense this book (together with work by Boris Groys, Chukhrov, Boris Buden, Oushakine and others mentioned) is an attempt to refuse the complete junkification of the entire Soviet Marxism (Soviet Marxism), an emancipatory project in its own right - by labeling it as "totalitarian administration" or as content produced by 'tankie' provocateurs online.
Especially considering the Romania case where whatever nuanced leftist position one defends, you get slammed and slandered or branded for life as "sexomarxist", Ceausist, or even neoStalinist apologist.
8. Finally, I think it is important to recognize some measure of originality and success for eastern European Marxism, when considering both rival universalisms (Soviet Marxism and Anglo-American liberal capitalism) and not always capitalize on the winner takes it all. Altough such a promethean and cornucopian future seems a thing of the past, we have to appreciate and learn how such prometheanism cut its teeth, how it was bound with an Ex-Human trajectory (The Ex-Human: Science Fiction and the Fate of Our Species) or joined 'loosership' as a defensive stance, losing most of its internationalist edge. This never-attained communist horizon and its aftermath (The Triumph of Broken Promises: The End of the Cold War and the Rise of Neoliberalism) rhymes with a certain dialectic of defeat and tones down the other and ultimately more academically successfull strain of Western Marxist comrades (Dialectic of Defeat: Contours of Western Marxism) into a Longer March trough the 21st c. wilderness.
9. My only caveat is the entire bloc idea of a "eastern European Marxist" corpus - as a label, "an umbrella term that designates the ideology of State socialism, which has deep roots in Marxism Leninism". I appreciate a collective synthesis that can trigger and deliver such an ideological snowball effect, especially one that rarely sticks together. Western Marxist label, no matter how unitary and good for self-branding also does not hold well on closer inspection.
So I for one have some trouble squaring off different socialist strains of thought. In particular, how can one appreciate such higher synthesis of the rich debates and disputes from the formative period of eastern European Marxism without giving in to a false sense of harmony. Of course they were all finally part of the anti-capitalist productivist project of state Socialism.
But let us appreciate for a second how during the "Golden Ten" of Soviet Philosophy in the 1920s there was such a “hitherto unprecedented pluralism of thought” (Pustarnakov 2003). According to Maya Soboleva and others, there were nearly irreconcilable differences between the various camps expressed through fierce debates that animated the various schools and directions of thought (say btw intellectualism and anti-intellectualism, positivism and idealism, and realism and mysticism, just to give a small range). There existed different versions of pre-revolutionary Russian Marxism and Soviet Marxism, different Hegelianisms, different Spinozisms - just to take the foundational role taken by debates around Spinoza, for example with Plekhanov, or say Bogdanov. Or the 1925-1932 debates between the “mechanists” (Kliment Timiryazev, Liubov Axelrod, Ivan Skvortsov-Stepanov, and others) and a unifying vision of the “dialecticians” (Abram Deborin, Grigory Tymyansky, Yan Sten, and others). I understand that this is beyond the scope of this book, and maybe better this way. Of course, there were known tensions around Bogdanov's "empiriomonism" and Lenin's disparagement of it, even if, to be appreciated, such epistemological and intellectual rivalries never fractured the main trust of their anti-capitalist project. Today if one decides to use Bogdanov's and decontextualize empiriomonism (in its primary Machist form) one risks completely decoupling it from Leninism (based on Lenin's virulent response to it). This path is taken up by theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli in support of his interpretation of quantum theory in Helgoland: Making Sense of the Quantum Revolution.
10. One of the most important concepts of this book is "productivism" and productive bodies, an analytic Bogdan P. derived from both Alexander Bogdanov and Boris Ignatievich Arvatov's 1926 Art and Production (Art and Production). This and its associated chapter were most illuminating in contrasting the capitalist and communist projects - especially how productivism operated and stood in opposition with "constructivism" and in particular with social constructivism that dominated US social sciences. I also wondered about a different split in the realm of artistic theory - that does not get mentioned, mainly the one btw early Soviet constructivists and productivists.
This productivist generative aesthetic was later on abandoned during the long decay of late Socialism and the book strives to encapsulate this backslide trough various artistic examples from the thaw period - when the adoption of conservative norms of sexuality, for example such as abortion prevailed (examples from movies as well as experimental art from the period are being discussed). To illustrate the productive bodies of the eastern European Marxism - the book deploys a "Soviet dialectical conception, men and women were not given as a material embodiment that was fixed and unchanging. According to a Marxist logic, they were elements in a mode of production that had to abolish capitalism continuously." Bogdan Popa quotes Boris Groys in remarking that communism was a world-building project that generated or aimed to generate its independence from the market economy via a new conceptual apparatus.
11. In this constant abolition of capitalism and collectivisation effort, liberal societies were deemed obsolete, and a new vocabulary was deployed together with a specific theory as a step towards the emancipation of humanity.
The boundary btw art and production had to be abolished (according to Arvatov - a key theorist of the Proletkult that expanded on Bogdanov's "proletarian monism"). Arvatov argued - in ARt and PRoduction - that artists had to step inside the production process to transform the production for profit into one for need. Indeed, if one leaves aside these debates - and Lenin's distrust of Proletkult's productivism and its Cultural Revolutionary bottom up aspect, BP argues for the continuity btw the Proletkult movement and the later socialist realist artistic productions. According to this, political bodies in socialism (in contrast to US understanding of "identity") were neither territories of freedom nor anti-conformist subjectivities that fought an established ideology.
Acting in line with the Communist party - they enacted a future communist society and produced it continuously.
12. So "for Marxists, socialism produces human subjectivities for their social value, as opposed to US social science emphasis on the social that constructs a given body and personality". Taking the quote attributed Mayakovski and literalizing it "Art is not a mirror to hold up to the world, but a hammer with which to shape it" - strangely enough one gets closer to a newer, more literalist and realist definition of science fiction (Fluid Futures: Science Fiction and Potentiality) on the edge between things that evade representaiton and realities that are more easily representable. The innovation of socialism here is a decidedely processual one where production is emphasized and not the final product (achieving full communism). Communism was thus a process of production - and this constituted the newness of Soviet socialism.
Such imaginative jumps were always helped by the stronger (sensual?) connection to the material world and productive labor supplied those new structures of feeling. Marxist film characters are thus to be theorized as against individual identity and for an "achievement of collective organizations".
13. A final point that merits more exploration, but lies outside of the corporealist frame of De-centering Queer studies is the dialectic btw the relations of production and the forces of production. According to Stalin, productive forces are “the relations of men to nature” in opposition to the relations of production which he defines as “the relations of men to one another in the process of production”.
These continuously developed productive forces at any given stage were an important part of historical materialism and of Soviet Marxism and they show a certain intellectual common ground with German idealist Schelling-ian power ontology, as I understand it. Marx’s turn to historical materialism seems to be partially indebted to Schelling’s strong critique of Hegel’s deduction of reality from thought (even if Marx never acknowledged this nor is it possible to demonstrate this empirically).
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