Vertov: Between the Organism - 麻省理工学院人工智能研究专业

Vertov: Between the Organism
and the Machine

MALCOLM TURVEY

In every living being, we find that those things
which we call parts are inseparable from the Whole
to such an extent, that they can only be conceived in
and with the latter; and the parts can neither be the
measure of the Whole, nor the Whole be the measure
of the parts.

— Goethe

我

The standard reading of the work of Dziga Vertov argues that, due to his
afﬁliation with the Constructivist group of avant-garde artists that emerged in the
Soviet Union after the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, Vertov employed the
machine as the model for both his ﬁlms and the new Soviet society depicted in
他们. In The Material Ghost, Gilberto Perez writes:

[Vertov’s] Man with a Movie Camera [1929] pictures the city as a vast
machine seen by the omnipresent seeing machine that is the camera.
The structure of Vertov’s ﬁlms, their aggregate space pieced together
in the cutting room out of all the manifold things the mechanical eye
can see, suggests the constructions of the engineer so prized in [这]
new Soviet society.1

The centrality of the machine to Constructivist theory and practice, 以及
Vertov’s work, is beyond dispute. 然而, it has obscured the inﬂuence of other
models on Vertov as he came to make Man with a Movie Camera in the late 1920s,
including one that is often thought of as antithetical to the machine, 即, 这
organism.

Most obviously, Man with a Movie Camera is structured according to the daily
cycle of a complex living organism such as an animal or human being—sleep,

Gilberto Perez, The Material Ghost: Films and Their Medium (巴尔的摩, 马里兰州。: Johns Hopkins

1.
大学出版社, 1998), p. 159.

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OCTOBER

waking, 工作, and relaxation—a structure established in earlier city ﬁlms such as
Walter Ruttmann’s Berlin, Symphony of a Great City (1927). More importantly, 作为
Annette Michelson has pointed out, the model for the new Soviet society depicted
in the ﬁlm is an organism, not a machine:

This ﬁlm . . . joins the human life cycle with the cycles of work and
leisure of a city from dawn to dusk within the spectrum of industrial
生产. That production includes ﬁlmmaking . . . 矿业, steel
生产, 通讯, postal service, 建造, hydro-electric
power installation, and the textile industry in a seamless, organic con-
tinuum. . . . The full range of analogical and metaphorical readings
thereby generated signify a general and organic unity.2

Michelson does not explain why she uses the term “organic” as opposed to
“mechanical” here. 什么, precisely, do these concepts mean, and is Michelson
correct to apply one rather than the other to Man with a Movie Camera? 如果是这样, 为什么
would Vertov have employed the organism as a model for the new Soviet society,
and where in Soviet culture and society of the 1920s might it have come from?

二

The terms “organic” and “mechanical” are often applied to art works, 还有
as to many other phenomena, but their meanings are rarely made clear. In order
to clarify these concepts, it is helpful to examine brieﬂy the debate between two
scientiﬁc-philosophical paradigms, which I will label, for the sake of convenience,
machinism or mechanism on the one hand, and organicism on the other. It is in
large part the insistence of the organicist paradigm that there are essential
differences between the organic and the inorganic that has shaped the opposi-
tional meanings of the terms “organic” and “mechanical.” Although the debate
between these two paradigms has taken place since the end of the eighteenth cen-
tury primarily among philosophers and scientists, it is part of the much larger
debate about the political, 社会的, 道德的, and existential ramiﬁcations of modern
science that has been such a fundamental feature of Western culture since the sci-
entiﬁc revolution.

By the end of the eighteenth century, the conception of the natural universe
as a causal mechanism, a “blind watchmaker,” to use Richard Dawkins’s felicitous
analogy,3 was ﬁrmly in place. According to this conception, nature has no teleol-
奥吉, purpose, or meaning, but instead consists of elementary particles of matter

Annette Michelson, introduction to Dziga Vertov, Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov, 编辑.

2.
Annette Michelson, 反式. Kevin O’Brien (伯克利: University of California Press, 1984), p. xli.
3.
Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe without
设计 (1986; 纽约: 诺顿, 1996). Dawkins is, 当然, appropriating and correcting eighteenth-
century theologian William Paley’s “argument from design” that the natural universe is like a watch
made by a (sighted) watchmaker.

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Vertov: Between the Organism and the Machine

meaninglessly and purposelessly interacting in space according to physical laws.
Alfred North Whitehead referred to this conception as “scientiﬁc materialism” in
his classic work Science and the Modern World, and described it as follows:

[Scientiﬁc materialism] presupposes the ultimate fact of an irreducible
brute matter, or material, spread throughout space in a ﬂux of conﬁgu-
rations. In itself such a material is senseless, valueless, purposeless. 它
just does what it does, following a ﬁxed routine imposed by external
relations which do not spring from the nature of its being.4

One of the scientiﬁc-philosophical paradigms that emerged out of this materialist
conception of nature is what philosophers and historians of science commonly
refer to as mechanism. According to mechanism, the chief, and indeed for many
the only, valid method of scientiﬁc explanation is reductive. It consists of explain-
ing the nature and behavior of something in terms of the nature and behavior of
its constituent parts, all the way down, 如果需要的话, to the elementary particles of
matter out of which it is made.5

Needless to say, mechanism has generated a great deal of hostility over the
last two hundred years, in part because it appears to reduce all phenomena,
including human beings and other living organisms, to meaningless, purposeless
interactions between particles of matter. Many have argued that, because of this,
mechanism has been responsible for creating a profound existential and ethical
crisis in modernity. Schiller called the existential emptiness putatively opened up
by materialism and mechanism the “disgodding” of nature, and a century later,
Weber coined the phrase “the disenchantment of the world” to describe it.
According to the historian of science Anne Harrington, Weber’s

assessment of science as a “disenchanting” force in the modern world
would hardly have surprised [his audience]. Since the 1890s, an inten-
sifying stream of German-language articles and monographs had been
identifying the rise of a certain kind of mechanistic thinking in the nat-
ural sciences as a chief culprit in a variety of failed or crisis-ridden cul-
tural and political experiments. Science had declared humanity’s life
and soul a senseless product of mechanism, so people now treated one
another as mere machines.6

The hostile reaction to mechanism has taken many shapes over the last two
hundred years, and is much too vast and complex to describe. What is important
here is that one form it has taken is the antireductionist claim that living, organic

Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (纽约: Free Press, 1967), p. 17.
4.
5.
There is still much debate about reductionism. For a contemporary critique, see John Dupré,
The Disorder of Things: Metaphysical Foundations of the Disunity of Science (剑桥, 大量的。: 哈佛
大学出版社, 1993).
6.
新泽西州: 普林斯顿大学出版社, 1996), p. xv.

Anne Harrington, Reenchanted Science: Holism in German Culture from Wilhelm II to Hitler (普林斯顿大学,

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OCTOBER

phenomena are fundamentally different from dead, inorganic phenomena such
as particles of matter or machines, in that their nature and behavior cannot be
explained by being reduced to the nature and behavior of their parts. 根据
to this argument, mechanist reduction can only explain inorganic phenomena,
which can be reduced to the meaningless, purposeless mechanics of elementary
particles. Organic phenomena cannot be explained in this way because of their
meaningful, purposive design and behavior.

The roots of this claim lie in Kant’s Critique of Judgment. 那里, Kant argues
that the a priori categories, such as causality, that human beings bring to their
cognition of nonliving phenomena are deﬁcient with respect to living phenom-
ena. In cognizing living phenomena, Kant argues, human judgment is forced to
postulate a principle of teleological causality that Kant calls “natural purpose.”
According to this principle, the parts of a living organism have to be explained by
appealing to the teleology or purposive functioning of the organism as a whole.
Whereas the parts of a mechanical model cause their effects independently of
each other and can be explained separately, the parts of a teleological model are
both cause and effect of each other:

The ﬁrst principle required for the notion of an object conceived as a
natural purpose is that the parts, with respect to both form and being,
are only possible through their relationship to the whole. . . . 第二,
it is required that the parts bind themselves mutually into the unity of a
whole in such a way that they are mutually cause and effect of one
another.7

This argument has been very inﬂuential over the last two hundred years, 和
has been taken up by a number of philosophical and scientiﬁc movements. 几乎
immediately, it inspired Goethe to claim that nature’s teleology is revealed in the
small number of basic forms or Gestalten that all natural phenomena are the prod-
uct of, as well as the way these metamorphose into ever more complex forms.
Kant’s argument was also used as one of the foundation stones of nineteenth-
century vitalism in biology. Associated with ﬁgures such as Johann Blumenbach
and Johannes Müller in the early nineteenth century, vitalism argued for the need
to postulate irreducible teleological principles at work in living organisms that
could explain their seemingly purposive design and behavior. 同时, Kant’s
argument about teleological causality was also taken up, in different ways, 由
antimechanistic and antimaterialist, idealist, so-called natural philosophers of the
nineteenth century such as Schlegel, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, and has contin-
ued to exert an inﬂuence into the twentieth century due to philosophers such as
Henri Bergson, as we shall see.

Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, quoted in Timothy Lenoir, The Strategy of Life: Teleology and

7.
Mechanics in Nineteenth-Century German Biology (芝加哥: 芝加哥大学出版社, 1982), p. 25.

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Vertov: Between the Organism and the Machine

The arguments of these various scientiﬁc and philosophical individuals and
movements differ in many important ways. The reason I refer to them collectively
as organicist is that repeated in them again and again are two basic claims about
the difference between living organisms and inorganic phenomena such as
machines, claims that are used to criticize mechanistic reduction with respect to
有机体. 第一的, organicists argue that the parts of an organism cannot be
explained without appealing to the purpose of the organism as a whole. Unlike an
inorganic phenomenon such as a machine, whose parts interact purposelessly and
therefore blindly and can be explained independently of each other, the parts of
an organism work toward the purpose of the organism as a whole, as if intention-
盟友, as if possessed of knowledge about what that purpose is. 第二, organicists
claim that a living organism interacts creatively with its environment, adapting to
it in order to survive, while inorganic phenomena such as machines interact
blindly with their environments. The environment plays an essential role in the
life of an organism, since organic life consists largely of adapting to an environ-
ment in order to survive; but the environment is extraneous to an inorganic
phenomenon such as a machine. If an organism is removed from one environ-
ment and placed in another, it will adapt to it; a machine, 然而, will keep on
functioning the same way regardless of whatever environment it is in.

当然, all of this is open to dispute from a scientiﬁc and philosophical
point of view. What is important here is not whether the arguments of organicists
are true or not, but rather that they have shaped the meanings of the terms
“organic” and “mechanical.”

三、

With this conceptual clariﬁcation in mind, it becomes clear why Michelson is
correct to describe the new Soviet society depicted in Man with a Movie Camera as
an “organic continuum” rather than as a machine. 第一的, and most importantly,
Vertov does not represent the parts of this society as interacting purposelessly and
blindly, independently of each other, in the manner of the parts of a machine.
反而, he constantly shows how each part is working toward the purpose of the
whole, as if intentionally, as if possessed of knowledge about what that purpose is.
Almost every part of this society, to paraphrase Kant, is both cause and effect of
every other part. This Vertov does by depicting Soviet citizens engaged in differ-
ent activities in different places at different times in order to give “everyone
working behind a plow or a machine the opportunity to see his brothers at work
with him simultaneously in different parts of the world,” thereby overcoming the
blindness that artificially separates them.8 He then links them together, 作为
Michelson points out, through “strategies of visual analogy and rhyme, rhythmic

Vertov, “Kino-Eye” (1926), in Kino-Eye, PP. 73–74.

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OCTOBER

patterning, parallel editing, superimposition, accelerated and deaccelerated
motion, camera movement—in short, the use of every optical device and ﬁlming
strategy then available to ﬁlm connection.”9 The most famous and obvious exam-
ple of this is the exhilarat ing sequence in which filmmaking and text ile
production are connected through editing, graphic matches, and then superim-
位置. But the ﬁlm as a whole, as Vlada Petric has shown in his meticulous
分析, is replete with more subtle linking techniques, such as the circular
motion of the cameraman’s hand as he cranks the camera, which is rhymed by var-
ious other activities and objects throughout the ﬁlm, including the concluding
superimposition of circular human eye over circular camera lens.10 As Vertov him-
self puts it in his article on the ﬁlm,

Each item or each factor [in the ﬁlm] is a separate little document.
The documents have been joined with one another so that, on the one
手, the ﬁlm would consist only of those linkages between signifying
pieces that coincide with the visual linkages and so that, 在另一
手, these linkages would not require intertitles; the ﬁnal sum of all
these linkages represents, 所以, an organic whole.11

By way of these visual linkages, Vertov emphasizes the essential oneness of the new
Soviet society, the fact that every human being and human activity, whether it be
矿业, steel production, or ﬁlmmaking, is an indispensable part of a larger whole
in which it participates and to which it makes an essential contribution, 相当
than a separate part that, like the part of a machine, functions independently of
the larger whole. 这样, according to Michelson, his ﬁlms attempt to instill in
his Soviet viewers the belief that they are all interdependent on each other and all
equally owners of the means of production, “the euphoric and intensiﬁed sense of
a shared end: the supercession of private property in the young socialist state
under construction.”12

此外, unlike a machine that will, according to organicists, blindly
keep on functioning regardless of its environment, human beings in this ﬁlm are
shown creatively interacting with the new industrial environment emerging
around them, including machines. In an early manifesto, Vertov declared his
desire to “introduce creative joy into all mechanical labor . . . causing the worker
to love his workbench, the peasant his tractor, the engineer his engine,”13 and
throughout Man with a Movie Camera, workers exhibit this creative joy in their
labor and the technology they use, including the Kinoks themselves, whose cre-
ative use of the machines of cinema is one of the major themes of the ﬁlm. 这

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Michelson, introduction to Kino-Eye, p. xxxvii.
See Vlada Petric, Constructivism in Film: The Man with the Movie Camera, A Cinematic Analysis

9.
10.
(剑桥: 剑桥大学出版社, 1987), 小伙子. 3.
11.
12. Michelson, introduction to Kino-Eye, p. xl.
13.

Vertov, “我们: Variant of a Manifesto” (1922), in Kino-Eye, p. 8.

Vertov, “The Man with a Movie Camera” (1928), in Kino-Eye, p. 84.

Vertov: Between the Organism and the Machine

ﬁlm’s viewers are also implicated in this creative labor. For as Petric has shown,
through the use of “disruptive-associative montage,” which consists of “the apposi-
tion of often unrelated and contradictory themes,” the viewer is required to
creatively infer what the connections between many shots are, connections which
are only revealed by the ﬁlm retroactively.14 For these reasons, Michelson is cor-
rect in describing this society as an organic, rather than a mechanical, 一.

From where might this organic model have suggested itself to Vertov, 和
why might he have used it? As is well known, the standard view of Soviet culture
and society in the 1920s is that it was swept up in a “cult of the machine.”15
然而, scholars have shown that there were other inﬂuential, antimechanistic
paradigms in the ’20s, including an organicist one. Boris Gasparov, 例如,
has claimed that

By the second half of the 1920s . . . [the mechanistic] frame of thought
was challenged by another trend, which could be called “organic, “exis-
tential,” or “neoromantic.” Based on a sharp distinction between what
is and is not “life” . . . it approached phenomena of the former order in
a way radically different from that ﬁt for describing phenomena of the
latter order. The “organic” phenomenon’s wholeness, its dynamic, 曾经-
evolving nature, and its ability to interact “creatively” with the environ-
ment were acknowledged as its most fundamental characteristics.16

Gasparov cites a number of examples of this organicist paradigm in the late 1920s,
including the biologist Troﬁm Lysenko’s theory of biological evolution, which won
favor over so-called mechanistic genetics under Stalin; and the linguistic theories
of Mikhail Bakhtin and his disciples, which treat language as an organism.
同时, Christina Lodder, in her classic work Russian Constructivism, points to
an organicist trend in Constructivism itself, represented most clearly by Tatlin and
Miturich. According to Lodder, these artists self-consciously eschewed the
machine as a model for at least some of their art works, and attempted to ﬁnd ways
to create art works with organic relations to nature and the environment.17

Another possible source of Vertov’s organicism has been pointed to perhaps
unwittingly by Gilles Deleuze, who argues in The Movement Image that Dziga Vertov
“realizes the materialist programme of the ﬁrst chapter of [Henri Bergson’s]

Petric, Constructivism in Film, PP. 95–107.
Richard Stites, Revolutionary Dreams: Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the Russian Revolution

14.
15.
(纽约: 牛津大学出版社, 1989), 小伙子. 7, PP. 145–64.
16.
Boris Gasparov, “Development or Rebuilding: Views of Academician T. D. Lysenko in the Context
of the Late Avant-Garde,” in Laboratory of Dreams: The Russian Avant-Garde and Cultural Experiment, 编辑.
约翰·E. Bowlt and Olga Matich (斯坦福大学, 加利福尼亚州。: 斯坦福大学出版社, 1996), PP. 147–48.
17.

Christina Lodder, Russian Constructivism (新天堂, 康涅狄格州: 耶鲁大学出版社, 1983), 小伙子. 7.

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OCTOBER

Matter and Memory through the cinema.” By this, Deleuze seems to mean that
Vertov’s ﬁlms depict social reality very much like material reality as described by
Bergson’s metaphysics, a ceaselessly changing reality in which everything interacts
with everything else. As Deleuze puts it, “Whether there were machines, 土地-
scapes, buildings or men [being ﬁlmed] was of little consequence: each—even the
most charming peasant woman or the most touching child—was presented as a
material system in perpetual interaction.”18 In Vertov’s cinema, claims Deleuze,
“everything is at the service of variation and interaction.”19

Deleuze’s interpretation of Vertov’s ﬁlms aside, it is not implausible to link
Vertov to Bergson. As Hilary Fink has shown, Bergson’s philosophy exerted a
major inﬂuence on Russian modernists from the 1890s through the 1920s, 和
she argues that “Bergsonian ideas were so much in the air during the second and
third decades of the twentieth century that most Russian intellectuals were likely
to be familiar with the basic themes of Bergson’s Introduction to Metaphysics and
Creative Evolution.”20 While Bergson most likely did not have a direct inﬂuence on
Vertov, echoes of some of his ideas can be heard in Vertov’s work, especially in his
conception of Soviet citizens as being interconnected in a larger organic whole
that must be revealed by art due to the limitations of human perception. Whether
or not this means it is the “materialist program” of Bergson’s philosophy that
Vertov “realizes,” as Deleuze argues, is another question.

Russian modernism from the 1890s until the ascendancy of socialist realism
in the late 1920s consisted of a number of individuals and movements who dis-
agreed with each other, often vehemently, and who pursued different artistic
strategies and objectives. 尽管如此, Fink and others have argued, they were
uniﬁed by “the theurgic impulse to transform reality through art.”21 By “theurgic
impulse” is meant the idea, inherited from Russian orthodox religion, that “one
continually strives to uncover and to build what is already present all around—the
kingdom of God.”22 Russian modernists, 当然, transformed and, in many
案例, secularized this idea, but it survives in their theories and practices. 全部
tended to argue that the true nature of reality was hidden from human beings and
needed to be revealed by the creative act of the artist. By revealing the true nature
of reality through art, the artist would enable human beings to participate in reality.
The division between art and life would therefore be overcome. It is this shared,
theurgic conception of art, Fink claims, that explains the appeal of Bergson’s phi-
losophy to otherwise very different artists and artistic movements within Russian
modernism, for his work gave this conception philosophical legitimacy.

同上。, p. 80.

18. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement Image, 反式. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam
(明尼阿波利斯: 明尼苏达大学出版社, 1986), p. 39.
19.
20. Hilary Fink, Bergson and Russian Modernism, 1900–1930 (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University
按, 1999), p. xiv.
21.
22.

同上。, p. xv. See also Bowlt and Matich, introduction to Laboratory of Dreams, PP. 8–9.
Fink, Bergson and Russian Modernism, p. 27.

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Vertov: Between the Organism and the Machine

As is well known, the point of departure for Bergson’s philosophy is his con-
ception of time and his critique of Western philosophy and science for conceiving
of time spatially. By this, Bergson means that time is reduced by most Western
thinkers to a series of separate, static states much like a series of still photographs.
In reality, he argues that time is duration, “the continuous progress of the past
which gnaws into the future and which swells as it advances.”23 Time does not con-
sist of the replacement of one state by another, but rather one state constantly
changing. The past endures into the present and the future, like a “ﬂux of ﬂeeting
shades [of color] merging into each other,” or the “ﬂow” of a river.24 The reduc-
tion of time to a series of separate, static states is due to the intellect’s practical
need to measure time and predict the future. Geometry exempliﬁes this tendency
of the intellect, and this is why philosophers such as Descartes praise geometry as
the valid method for achieving true knowledge of reality. Bergson does not dis-
miss the intellect because of its important practical function, but he does argue
that the knowledge of reality it produces is relative because it dispenses with time
as duration, which any absolute knowledge of reality must incorporate. In addi-
的, the nature of time as duration entails that reality is fundamentally unpre-
可听写的, for “to foresee consists of projecting into the future what has been per-
ceived in the past.”25 Because time does not consist of a series of separate, 静止的
states but one state changing, there is no such thing as one state repeating
another in the future. 因此, one cannot predict the future precisely from the
过去的, and “duration is irreversible.”26 “Duration means invention, the creation of
形式, the continual elaboration of the absolutely new.”27

On the basis of this conception of time, Bergson makes a number of other
索赔. 第一的, he argues that reality is not composed of separate entities, 例如
particles of matter, interacting in predictable ways, as mechanistic physical theo-
ries argue. 相当, reality is an indivisible, continuous whole that is constantly
changing in unpredictable ways. Everything is connected to everything else
throughout time and space, and reality is mobile. As Bergson puts it in Matter and
记忆, “Matter thus resolves itself into numberless vibrations, all linked together
in uninterrupted continuity, all bound up with each other, and traveling in every
direction like shivers through an immense body.”28

第二, Bergson claims that human beings cannot perceive the mobility
of reality with their sense organs because “to perceive means to immobilize.”29

同上。, PP. 2–3.
同上。, p. 6.
同上.
同上。, p. 11.

23. Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, 反式. Arthur Mitchell (Mineola, 纽约: Dover , 1998), p. 4.
24.
25.
26.
27.
28. Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, 反式. 氮. 中号. Paul and W. S. 帕尔默 (纽约: 区域书籍,
1988), p. 208.
29.

同上.

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OCTOBER

Perception subtracts everything that the thing being perceived is connected to
throughout time and space.30 Hence, Bergson talks about perception as an act of
isolating what is perceived from its surroundings, by which he means the larger
spatial whole and temporal becoming of which it is a part:

I should convert [objective reality] into representation if I could isolate
它, especially if I could isolate its shell. . . . 它 [是] 必要的, not to throw
more light on the object, 但, on the contrary, to obscure some of its
aspects, to diminish it by the greater part of itself, so that the remain-
这, instead of being encased in its surroundings as a thing, 应该
detach itself from them as a picture. . . . [对象] becomes “perceptions”
by their very isolation.31

In Creative Evolution, Bergson describes the objects we perceive as being “cut out
of the stuff of nature by our perception,” as if perception were a pair of scissors.32
It is for this reason that Bergson believes that “to perceive is to immobilize” and
that he uses his famous analogy between perception and photography. 洞察力
cuts out objects from their temporal becoming and the spatial whole of which
they are a part, much like a still camera does.

第三, artists in particular possess a special mental power, which Bergson
calls “intuition,” that enables them to overcome the epistemic limitations of
perception and achieve absolute knowledge of reality. Through “an effort of intu-
行动,” the artist is able to penetrate to the inner becoming of things, restoring the
spatial and temporal connections between things that human perception sub-
tracts and thereby revealing that any one thing is part of a larger whole that is
constantly changing in unpredictable ways.33

最后, by penetrating to the inner becoming of things, the artist reveals to
human beings that they themselves are part of a reality that is constantly changing
in unpredictable ways. 因此, human beings are revealed to be free to participate
in this ever-changing reality, to evolve creatively. “We are creating ourselves con-
tinually,” Bergson claims, and he likens this self- and world-creation to artistic
creation, thereby legitimizing the theurgic conception of art, the idea that,
through artistic creation and revelation, the artist is participating in reality, 哪个
itself is one great work of art in progress.34

These arguments were appropriated and transformed in a variety of ways by
Russian modernists, not least the Futurists, to whom Vertov was exposed as a
young man prior to the revolution. How about Vertov himself ? At ﬁrst sight, 它
might appear that Vertov would reject most if not all of these arguments, as did

30.
31.
32.
33.
34.

同上。, PP. 35–36.
同上。, p. 36.
Bergson, Creative Evolution, p. 12.
同上。, p. 177.
同上。, p. 7.

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Vertov: Between the Organism and the Machine

Soviet Marxists in general during the 1920s. To begin with, the claim that it is
intuition that enables us to access the true nature of reality is antithetical to the
Marxist faith in reason and science. So is the argument that reality is constantly
changing in unpredictable ways, which runs counter to the Marxist belief in a
Communist utopia as the inexorable telos of history conceived of as a dialectical
过程. Bergson’s philosophy was also accused by Marxists of being, like Kant’s,
too idealist, as allowing the human mind too great a role in our knowledge of real-
性. It is for these reasons that it was increasingly attacked by Soviet intellectuals in
the 1920s, and that, as the Communist party increased its control over artists in
the late 1920s and socialist realism became the ruling artistic orthodoxy, its inﬂu-
ence on artists waned.35

尽管如此, there are several tantalizing similarities between Vertov’s argu-
ments and Bergson’s, which suggest that Vertov, whether consciously or not, 尝试过
to ﬁnd a rapprochement between Marxism and the theurgic conception of art as
ﬁltered through Bergsonianism by his Futurist predecessors. Like Bergson, Vertov
emphatically and repeatedly argues that the true nature of reality is hidden from
human beings due to the limitations of human perception, particularly vision.
And he conceives of these limitations in much the same way as Bergson does,
arguing that the fundamental problem with human perception is that it is “immo-
bile,” conﬁned to one spatial-temporal section of reality. 同时, the cinema is
“free of the limits of time and space,”36 and Vertov repeatedly emphasizes its
greater mobility in comparison to the human eye: “The position of our bodies
while observing or our perception of a certain number of features of a visual phe-
nomenon in a given instant are by no means obligatory limitations for the
camera.”37 In terms of space, the cinema can “put together any given points in the
宇宙, no matter where [it has] recorded them.”38 And just as it can traverse
large expanses of space quickly (though camera movement) or instantaneously
(through editing), so it can move backward and forward in time. This can be
achieved by way of editing: “The cofﬁns of national heroes are lowered into the
坟 (shot in Astrakhan in 1918); the grave is ﬁlled (Kronstadt, 1921); cannon
salute (Petrograd, 1920); memorial service, hats are removed (莫斯科, 1922).”39
Or it can be achieved by fast, slow, and reverse motion: “[The camera] experi-
评论, distending time, dissecting movement, 或者, in contrary fashion, absorbing
time within itself, swallowing years, thus schematizing processes of long duration
inaccessible to the normal eye.”40 Because of its mobility, the cinema, Vertov
asserts, allows for “the possibility of seeing without limits and distances.”41

35.
36.
37.
38.
39.
40.
41.

See Fink, Bergson and Russian Modernism, 小伙子. 5, PP. 101–11.
Vertov, “Kinoks: A Revolution” (1923), in Kino-Eye, p. 18.
同上。, p. 15.
同上。, p. 18.
同上。, p. 17.
同上。, p. 19.
Vertov, “The Birth of Kino-Eye” (1924), in Kino-Eye, p. 41.

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OCTOBER

What the mobility of the cinema reveals, according to Vertov, is precisely
what is hidden through the immobility of human perception, 即, the connec-
tions between things throughout time and space. 然而, because of his Marxist
信仰, Vertov conceives of these connections as social in nature, and it is in this
way that he reconciles Marxism and the theurgic conception of art. As Vertov puts
它, the cinema, due to its mobility, “opens the eyes of the masses to the connection . . .
between the social and visual phenomena interpreted by the camera.”42 In other
字, the camera (or cinema) reveals various social connections between things
that the eye is too weak to see because it is immobile.

一般来说, as Michelson has shown, these social connections come in many
different shapes and sizes in Vertov’s ﬁlms: relations of economic interdependency
between town and city, between different types of labor and sectors of the econ-
奥米, and between different ethnicities, 地区, and nationalities within the
苏联. The cinema is able to reveal these social connections because of its
mobility, its capacity to move through space and time between citizens engaged in
different activities in different places, at different times throughout the Soviet
联盟, and to link them together.43

It is precisely this dimension of Vertov’s work that is so important to Deleuze,
who follows Vertov in arguing that the cinema is more mobile than the human
eye. According to Deleuze, Vertov’s ﬁlms are able to represent the ceaseless inter-
action between things at the core of Bergson’s metaphysics because of the
cinema’s mobility, its capacity, through camera movement and editing, to move
from “a point where an action begins to the limit of the reaction, as it ﬁlls the
interval between the two, crossing the universe and beating in time to its inter-
vals.”44 Following Bergson’s theor y of the epistemic limit at ions of human
洞察力, this capacity to reveal actions and reactions throughout space and
time means that the cinema in Vertov’s hands escapes its limitations and is there-
fore “superhuman.” “This is not a human eye—even an improved one. 为了,
although the human eye can surmount some of its limitations with the help of con-
traptions and instruments, there is one which it cannot surmount, since it is its
own condition of possibility.”45 This condition is of course immobility because, 作为
we have seen, for Bergson “to perceive is to immobilize.” Vertov’s cinema, 在
Deleuze’s view, reveals within the domain of social reality the surroundings that
are of necessity subtracted when human perception cuts what it perceives out of
现实: everything it interacts with throughout the universe spatially and temporally.
Where one could perhaps disagree with Deleuze is over his earlier quoted
claim that “Whether there were machines, landscapes, buildings or men [存在
ﬁlmed] was of little consequence: each—even the most charming peasant woman

Vertov, “On the Film Known as Kinoglaz” (1923), in Kino-Eye, p. 35.
同上.

42.
43.
44. Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement Image, p. 40.
45.

同上。, p. 81.

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Vertov: Between the Organism and the Machine

or the most touching child—was presented as a material system in perpetual inter-
action.” Without getting into the vexed issue of precisely what Deleuze means by
materialism, what this comment implies is that Vertov is much more concerned
with the interaction between the human beings in his films than the human
beings themselves, which are simply “at the service of variation and interaction.”
But is it really of “little consequence” what Vertov depicts as interacting through-
out time and space? Does Vertov’s real interest lie in a “material system in
perpetual interaction”? I think not. As we have seen, Vertov depicts the social con-
nections between human beings that are revealed by the mobility of the cinema as
an organic continuum, and it is in this notion of an organic continuum or whole
that we can once again hear echoes of Bergson’s philosophy. For Bergson also con-
ceives of reality, “the totality of the material universe,” as an organic whole, A
“living organism.”46 The breaking down of reality into separate entities by mecha-
nistic physical theories in order to measure and predict it is a principle of
organization that is external to reality, argues Bergson, one imposed on it by the
human intellect. In truth, 现实, like an organism, is a whole that consists of parts
that are internally organized and interdependent rather than separate.47

Vertov’s use of the organism as a model for Soviet society points to an impor-
tant dimension of his work, which is its propagandistic function, its attempt to
make citizens of the new Soviet society want to participate in its construction. 在
“Artistic Drama and Kino-Eye,” a text from 1924, he argues that “to follow the
growth of the young Soviet organism, to record and organize the individual char-
acteristics of life’s phenomena into a whole, an essence, a conclusion—that is our
immediate objective” because of its “high propagandistic pressure.”48 In other
字, Vertov sees the task of revealing to his Soviet viewers that they are indis-
pensable parts of a larger organic whole as a way of making them want to
participate in the building of the new Soviet society. Rather than being dispens-
able cogs in an indifferent, impersonal machine, they are indispensable, organic
parts of the new society. 因此, Deleuze is wrong, I think, to argue that “every-
thing is at the service of interaction” in Vertov’s ﬁlms. It is precisely the opposite.
Interaction, the revelation of the social connections between human beings and
human activities throughout the organic continuum of the new Soviet society, 是
in the service of making human beings want to participate in its construction, 到
overcome the division between art and life by engaging in creative labor and
becoming artists, to “build what is already present all around,” namely, 最棒的
work of art of the Marxist utopia.

But regardless of Deleuze’s interpretation, there are echoes of Bergson’s phi-
losophy in Vertov’s work, which suggests not that Vertov was in some sense a

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Bergson, Creative Evolution, p. 15.
同上。, PP. 12–15. See also Ruth Lorand, “Bergson’s Concept of Art,” British Journal of Aesthetics 39,

46.
47.
不. 4 (十月 1999), p. 402.
48.

Vertov, “Artistic Drama and Kino-Eye” (1924), in Kino-Eye, PP. 47, 48.

OCTOBER

Bergsonian, but that Bergson’s ideas, including his organicism, were very much
“in the air,” as Fink puts it, in Russian modernism, and that they might have con-
stituted one source of the organic model that was exerting an inﬂuence on Vertov
by the end of the 1920s.49 It would be wrong to argue that the machine and mech-
anism were not also continuing to play a vital role in Vertov’s work during this
时期,50 or that there were not other sources for the organic model.51 Not only
would such an argument attribute too much coherence to Vertov’s work, a com-
mon interpretative fallacy committed routinely by scholars and critics of art, 但它
would do a disservice to Vertov himself, whose artistic brilliance lay partly in his
ability to creatively synthesize a number of different, even contradictory para-
digms and models, including the organism and the machine.

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49.
This conﬁrms Bowlt and Matich’s observation that, although the post-revolutionary generation
of artists ostensibly repudiated much of their predecessors’ work as “bourgeois” and “reactionary,“ 在
fact they inherited many of their ideas, even as they adapted them to the needs of revolutionary art.
See Bowlt and Matich, introduction to Laboratory of Dreams, p. 4.
50.
Mimesis in Man with a Movie Camera,” October 89 (夏天 1999), PP. 25–50.
51.
Another source might be the poetry of Walt Whitman, as Ben Singer demonstrates in his
“Connoisseurs of Chaos: Whitman, Vertov, and the ‘Poetic Survey,’” Literature/Film Quarterly 15, 不. 4
(1987), PP. 247–58.

I examine the role of the machine and mechanism in Vertov’s work in my “Can the Camera See?
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