Stagnation Knowledge Workers Council speech
Leiden Uni/ Jan 25’
Comrades, we will start with what is better called sverka chasov, checking the clocks, when the workers literally look at each other’s watch to sync them. We are all set. I prepared a sticker for each of you; it contains a word and two lines. These words will come as a bonus in the end of the session; they are not random. What time is it now? It is stagnation time. Even if some of you hope that the European GDP will soar again, this type of stagnation we face will not fade away. It doesn’t talk numbers. Instead, it takes time and holds it captive. Current political stagnation reverses Gramshi’s formula of morbid symptoms of interregnum, where old is dying, and new is not yet born. Today, the old is frantically trying to be born again, so where is the new? How soon is it?
Eric Bulatov's Horizon (1971-72) will be our visual interface to this time and space. For the first half-century, the USSR existed in a modern time, where the present was sacrificed for the future, perceived as a proto-future (which was, in particular, the basis for the concept of socialist realism). The subjectivity of Soviet people was shaped by this temporality. They resided in a grand narrative of History with a capital H. They measured their lives by its movement, constantly reflecting on the revolution and gazing into the horizon of communism.
In the era when Soviet society moved into the present, the horizon of the future did not vanish. It transformed into a drawn curtain, a photographic wallpaper on the brutalist concrete boundaries that grew as high as Soviet Sputnik could reach and delved as deep as the oil pipes drilled for an insatiable European industry. The premise of looking at - suggests that our horizon today is also blanketed, maybe in different colours.
For the first half-century, the USSR existed in a modern time, where the present was sacrificed for the future, perceived as a proto-future (which was, in particular, the basis for the concept of socialist realism). The subjectivity of Soviet people was shaped by this temporality. They resided in a grand narrative of History with a capital H. They measured their lives by its movement, constantly reflecting on the revolution and gazing into the horizon of communism.
Soviet time of stagnation has become what Walter Benjamin, in his ‘Theses on the Concept of History’, calls an empty, homogeneous time - of comfortable or hopeless existence. Genre of Production Drama - explores the lack of horizon and the loss of teleological time, the movement towards some future, through the convenient traditional metaphor of Soviet society, construction, as any construction being a synecdoche of the construction of communism. The film performs the imaginary transformation of the empty time of the 70s into a special messianic time. Thus, the doom of stagnation turns into its opposite - a special movememnt towards end with capital E, a time in which the redemptive drama of Soviet society is played out.
There will be six letters, each of which stands for an angle in the kaleidoscopic device, which I offer you to see today. For every angle, I cut the piece from Bulatov’s picture. I am reminded of cutting as violent act precedes every image-making.
A. Ruins of the Future: Impossibility of Messianic Calculation
In Benjamin’s analysis of Trauerspiel, ruins represent historical contradictions—symbols of failed political and social utopias where grandeur meets decay. Similarly, late-Soviet production drama illustrates economic stagnation through depictions of factories and construction sites—once sites of progress that now lie in ruin. Protagonists confront bureaucratic inertia and the remnants of past industrial ambitions. The intended scientific and rational planned economy produces excessive paperwork, misallocated resources, and inefficiency, similar to the Baroque ruler in Trauerspiel, who is trapped in a ceremonial display of power instead of its realization. The films reflect a dialectical tension between idealized technical progress and constraints from an out-of-touch bureaucracy class.
(From now on : stills from the film Bonus 1975 by Sergey Mikaelyan, written by Alexander Gelman.)
The planned economy was a legacy of the revolution (precisely its last stage, industrialisation). Like everything in the revolution, it was born out of the union of Marxist science and revolutionary romanticism. Heroic sublimation was at the heart of the planning economy, a dialectical miracle, where rational planning is sublated by the feat and reasserted over. Economic ideas were at the heart of socialist ideals, so - inverting classical Marxist logic - the Soviet economy was not quite an economy but always a materialisable metaphor with a plan- its embodied symbol and holder of the order.
The planning system in the 1970s once again became the central subject of debate. Poetry was bleached out, and science was reincarnated alongside rationalisation, while the economy underwent changes reminiscent of those described by Alexei Yurchak in “It Was Forever Until It Was Over.” It experienced a kind of ‘performative turn’: the sublime nature of production did not vanish but was reproduced in the form of diluted, hollow rhetoric—one of the elements of Yurchak's ‘authoritative language.’ This ambiguous dynamic can be seen most clearly in the transformation of the central act of Soviet production: the fulfilment and overfulfilment of the plan. The plan was the main trope of the economic poetry of industrialisation. Its fulfilment was an effective act of sacrifice. However, the plan began to dilute its own sovereignty.
B. Political Theology and the Disappearance of the Sovereign
Benjamin’s analysis of Trauerspiel reveals that sovereignty in Baroque drama is indecisive and theatrical. In early socialist cinema, the Party acted as a divine sovereign, ensuring historical progress. By the 1970s and 80s, this sovereign is absent, marking a shift from Leninist-Stalinist political theology to an impersonal bureaucratic machine. The new hero faces an anonymous economic structure where decisions stem from abstract planning quotas instead of revolutionary will. These films illustrate a loss of faith in the certainty of progress, reflecting Benjamin’s sovereignty—powerful in name but hollow in action. Directors, including the cinematic, once visionary creators, become bureaucrats focused on compliance. Benjamin describes Trauerspiel as a theatrical display of sovereignty rather than its exercise. In the 1970s-80s, modernisation often acts as performance rather than genuine transformation. Factories are reported as modernised, while scientific achievements are celebrated in speeches that yield minimal impact on production.
Planning was the guarantee of the very existence of the socialist order, its difference from capitalism. From a method of grandiose acceleration, planning became a means of organising today: building not communism but ‘real socialism’. However, when attempting to rationalise to readjust to everyday needs, planning created confusion and became a cause of retardation. The plan became a political-economic fetish, an idol to be served by Soviet production. This idol required ritual rather than faith. And the system of rituals became increasingly hypocritical. The everyday practice of Soviet production was transformed into a network of tricks and subterfuges aimed at the fulfilment of the plan.
C. Loss of Transcendence and the Triumph of Secular Rationalism
Just as Baroque Trauerspiel replaces divine fate with historical contingency, late Soviet production drama replaces ideological certainty with economic rationalism. The scientificity of cinema production and overall production — with its emphasis on statistics, efficiency reports, and rational planning—substitutes economic discourse for ideological fervour. But this scientific discourse is itself allegorical: instead of revealing the truth, it masks contradictions, producing bureaucratic speech that no longer corresponds to reality. The films frequently expose the gap between economic theory and practice, showing how rational planning devolves into absurd paperwork, failed initiatives, and performative modernity.
Nevertheless, in this system itself - as in all official rhetoric - lived the memory of its meaning and teleological mission. In addition to the stagnation of the economy (which gave the Brezhnev era the name ‘stagnation’), this situation gave rise to a particular ethico-economic anxiety. The question of the fate and meaning of the plan became a question of the very existence of Soviet society. This anxiety is explored by the genre of production drama.
D. Melancholic Anxiety of the New Subject
Benjamin links melancholy in Trauerspiel to a historical awareness of decay, incompleteness, and loss. In the late Soviet production film, the protagonist is often a technocrat-bureaucrat, not an avant-garde builder of communism but an administrator caught between idealism and economic necessity. The films of stagnation-era cinema portray the anxiety of the Soviet planner, who must rationalise irrational structures, defend policies that no longer inspire, and navigate an economy that functions in appearances rather than reality. The hero’s melancholy is not personal but systemic—it is the realisation that scientific planning itself has become a ritual rather than a tool of transformation. Many films were stopped from destruction after being edited, performed a disillusionment and alienation of the stagnation period, mirroring the melancholic heroes of Benjamin’s Trauerspiel.
The plot of ‘The Premium’ is characterised by an almost parable-like schematism: the trust builds a factory, exceeds the quarterly plan, and the workers receive a bonus, a premium. However, the habit was broken. One brigade, under the leadership of Vasily Potapov in full, refuses the bonus. The collective gesture sows alarm throughout the construction site. Potapov declares that he is ready to give explanations only at a meeting of the party committee of the trust. The meeting lasts almost the entire film. Except for a ten-minute prologue and a two-minute finale, the camera does not leave the cabin. When the characters go out for a smoke, we watch them through the window. In this tiny room, fate is decided. Watching this film unfolds as a court.
Potapov, the team foreman, gives explanations: the bonus is ‘fake’, the trust did not deserve it, it was received illegally. At the beginning of the year, there was another heavier plan. The trust failed to cope with it, so the leaders achieved in the Main Department that the plan ‘reduced’ and retroactively issued a simpler one. The trust exceeded. The easy, cushy job of planners. The team of proletarian, down-to-earth workers, never allowed to work with numbers and planning, morphed into a team of knowledge workers: after independently collecting data, their analyses proved that the trust could have coped with the first plan if not for downtime, chaos on the construction site, circular bail and neglect of management. False triumph was more important than real achievements. The foreman makes a proposal: to save the construction site, the whole trust must give up the bonus. It is necessary to return the money to the state, to go through the disgrace - and only in this way, having cleared the conscience, to breathe new life into the construction.
Potapov's proposal revives a dead idea, breathing life and meaning back into the plan. It is scandalous because it breaks the social contract: when implemented, bosses lose their positions, and workers lose the money that ensures their comfortable existence. Under the guise of a series of rationalisation proposals, Potapov initiates a revolution—or rather, a revival of the revolutionary time. Instead of a community built on a compromise of interests, he resurrects another collectivity that rejected private gains for the sake of shared ideals. He seeks to transform the construction of the factory into the construction of communism again. This revolutionary impulse is steeped in despair; it appears ridiculous and, from a rational perspective of bureaocrats, meaningless.
The allegorical nature of the film is made clear by the only non-diegetic shot that opens it - a long panorama of the faces of anonymous proletarians that we saw in the beggining. This image - people lined up in a row in front of the viewer's gaze and returning this gaze back - is one of the most recognisable visual tropes of Soviet art. Transformed into a cliché of the ‘severe style’ of the ‘60s, it represents the people as the collective protagonist of history. Sidney Lumet's 12 Angry Men here becomes 12 work council figures of different genders, representing different levels of production - from a trust manager to a crane operator. They are emotional, not just angry, bewildered, under the influence.
Cinematographer Vladimir Chumak's camera deforms the opening shot conventions for a reason, creating a special place for the viewer. In the gradual progression of the workers' faces, it seems that they stand not in a line but in a circle. The spectator finds themself in the centre - surrounded rather than facing the impending harsh stares of the collective. This position opens a more vulnerable presumption: you, as a spectator, are not a co-conspirator of the community but a figure under suspicion. You await trial.
E. Allegory of Disintegration Symbols
Benjamin contrasts the symbol (which offers unity and totality) with allegory, which reveals fragmentation and historical decay. Early Soviet cinema, especially under Stalin, sought symbolic representation of socialist ideals—characters were heroic engineers, self-sacrificing workers, and enlightened leaders. By the 1970s-80s, however, production dramas could no longer function as pure symbolic affirmations of socialist progress. Instead, they took on an allegorical quality—showing the contradictions between economic idealism and bureaucratic inefficiency. The worker is no longer an embodiment of socialist transformation but an isolated figure struggling against impersonal forces. This shift reflects the melancholic nature of Benjamin's Trauerspiel, where the allegory moves from potential to defeat, from the hero to the collective loss of direction.
The group in the cabin received a call from the accounting department; a few people from the brigade came to collect their bonuses. For Potapov, this is a failure on his part. Without saying goodbye, he leaves the meeting and never returns. And exactly in this moment of failure and loss, the ‘Premia’ opens to a messianic time. The chairman of the Party Committee delivers a lofty monologue. The crux of it includes these words: ‘We all know and love to rise to the podium and speak eloquently about the working class. We have a literate, modern, intelligent, and cultured workforce. They are the true masters of the construction site. And when this master came to us, confiding all his concerns, we did not recognise him. Initially, we thought he was a rascal; then, we considered him a fraud. After that, we said, ‘You're a decent chap, but please take your notebooks and data back; they are ours.’.
Brigadier Potapov for the dead concept of ‘working class’ becomes incarnation, echoing the Christ’ one. He vanishes because of treachery and hypocrisy. But thanks to him, communism can be revived. The chairman takes an apostle role to convert others. Potapov's proposal is accepted, not by full consensus, leaving the dissensus and difference in the room. The last shot in the cabin where the trial happened brings us back to the circular panorama of the opening. The camera repeats the movement from the prologue of the film; it circles along the faces of the characters, and they raise their eyes and look at us point-blank. Provoking this direct gaze, the camera returns their gazes to the gazes of the workers from the prologue. It interpellates the participants in the meeting, turning them from philistines into communists. Again.
F. The Collector in the Archive: Towards Playful Bureaucracy
Benjamin compares the allegorist to the collector, who assembles broken, fragmented objects to construct meaning. In production drama, the equivalent of this montage of ruins is the bureaucratic archive—endless documents, charts, planning quotas, and reports that accumulate meaninglessly. Scientific knowledge is abundant, but decision-making remains opaque and ritualised. The archive of data about the real discrepancies becomes a symbol of the system’s inertia, an allegory of paralysis, alienation by the means as by the end. In this genre, the planner becomes both a melancholic figure and a tragic collector, assembling meaning from disparate and incoherent elements—economic data, ideological rhetoric, and hollowed work. Then the allegorist deals with the uncollected bonuses of unpayable debts and undelivered messages.
Thinking together about the ends, stagnation and my favourite soviet film is already the greatest bonus for me in the production drama of the academic life that always risks turning into another A24 office horror. What time is it now? It is time to practice the allegorist will to collect fragments, but not of the ruins. The film shows us how a new cinematic genre can become a pre-enactment, rather than a re-enactment, representation of certain drama if not a tragedy, if not a farce. The film “Premia” prompted more widespread workers' unionising in the USSR because of its elegant allegoric and interpellatory tightrope walking between a realistic diagnosis of the loss of revolutionary time, which undermined the soviet system’s discourse and still fit into the party’s agenda.
Here and now, after the time-travelling, I want to open the last section of the Knowledge Workers’s council. The question goes: what stagnation bonuses are we ready to refuse?
To answer it allegorically means collecting the unheard-of fragments of pre-enactments: the situations from the horizonless future that artistic researchers are doomed to puzzle with. All of you received the sticker with a rather abstract notion on it. I ask you now to find a partner or unite in a group of three to think of a scene when the artist meets with this abstract notion, embodied in the flesh of a character or an object, be it law, coffee cup, bus driver or a cat. It’s time to be creative. After discussing a scene, please write it down or draw it on the back of your papers so that I can collect them and we can analyse it together in the next assembly. As time is everyone’s master, and we are running out of it, I ask you to spend two minutes writing your own idea and then discussing what could happen with your partner’s.
| Questionaire: |
|---|
| What is the end of history for you? |
| When and how will it end for you? |
| What are you missing the most in this Catastrophe? |
| Where is your political horizon? |
| What change is meaningful for you? |
| Describe one which is most important in feasible, materialist metrics. (Can you submit a chart, some data to help us analyze it?) |
| What is your first priority to be planned in our council? (Propose it in the form of a rule to be collectively discussed.) |
| How many hours per week or per month are you willing to contribute in the knowledge workers' council? |
| How much time do you have to share your attention outside of the classes we have offline? How much attention do you need from others? |