For Marx, the machine enslaved the worker, reducing him to an
extension of its being. The worker was dehumanized; he became a
mere living appendage
of the machine. But by the 1920s
in the Soviet Union, that negative view of the machine and man's
relation to it had undergone a great change. Post-revolutionary Russia
welcomed man's transformation into a machine. Richard Stites has
written about the cult of the machine in the 1920s, as seen in
Fordism, Taylorism, Aleksej Gastev's poetry, and Mejerxol&soft;d's
Biomechanics. I will examine how one Russian Marxist, the literary
critic Vladimir Fri&chachek;e, was able to begin with Marx's attitude
toward the machine and come to celebrate man as machine. Fri&chachek;e
found a model for this transformation in the mechanization of the
theater toward puppet theater and cinematography.
The concept of the ideal actor as a puppet had come into vogue
around the turn of the century among such writers as Maeterlinck and
Edward Gordon Craig. Fri&chachek;e was only one of many who connected
and conflated marionettes, machine mechanisms, and nascent
cinematography in the theater. He disliked the trend because it robbed
people of their vitality: In as much as passive heroes appeared
more often in plays, so too did the actor become more passive. He
turned into a mannequin, a wordless doll. He played the same role as
that of a character on the screen of a mechanical stage. The Moscow
Art Theater with its repertoire of static dramas turned completely
toward cinematography
(
Fri&chachek;e saw the theater of the early 1900s as a capitalist
enterprise in big trouble. He equated it to a factory where the
director/boss exploited the actors/workers. The artist's role in the
factory
does not sound completely negative in
Fri&chachek;e's terminology: wherever he could, he downplayed the
individual's role as a part of a larger system, be it society, class,
or even nation. The problem lies in the fact that the actor is aligned
with the disenfranchised worker who has no say in the operations of
his capitalist, and therefore flawed, factory.
Fri&chachek;e thus had established two metaphors—one that was widely held, the other of his own making—concerning the state of theater and its actors: the actor as marionette, and the theater as a capitalist factory. He fused the two metaphors into a single vision, in which the machine-like workers must wrench the strings from their masters and, like Pinocchio, come to life and gain their independence. But unlike Pinocchio, the proletariat remained more machine than human. Fri&chachek;e wanted man to become a machine, the machine to come to life, and the man/machine to be a cog in the wheel of society at large.
World War I provoked the change in Fri&chachek;e's attitude toward
machines and technology. War helped him separate technology from its
users and appreciate technology's contributions to humanity. War
cleansed humanity of its vices and defects. The transformation was
obviously complete in Fri&chachek;e's mind in his 1927 review of Erwin
Piscator's Berlin production of Ernst Toller's spirit
lived on the screen even after his death. And at the same time as the
mechanized Lenin is enlivened, the live audience is
mechanized—always erupting in applause upon Lenin's
appearance.
Fri&chachek;e's evolving views on the relationship between man and machine help us explain and bridge the gap between Marx's negative views on mechanization and early Soviet Russia's celebration of it.