Energy: Key Concept of the Soviet Avant-garde

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Susanne Strätling
• Subject Area: General and Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies
• Term: since 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 507821188

While researchers agree that energy is a "key concept of the 21st century" (Gronau 2012:7), addressing not only political-economic and ecological challenges but also cultural and artistic developments, it has so far remained largely obscure how the polyfunctionality of the concept of energy has emerged. This project challenges this desideratum. It explores the transfer movements of the concept of energy between the sciences and the arts at a historical point of intense transdiscursive engagement with energy concepts. In the Soviet avant-garde, political and socio-economic conditions create a heightened virulence of energetic questions. Russia's electrification plan (GOĖLRO), which was launched immediately after the October Revolution, not only triggered a surge in energy technology and power plant construction, but also had a strong resonance in the sciences and arts. In addition, we observe significant changes in the history of knowledge: While the thermodynamic 19th century has already led to an increased interest in problems of energy, energetic debates become broadly popular through the so-called energetic monism since 1900. In the vital milieu of the avant-garde, the concept of energy rapidly took off, catapulting it from technical and scientific fields of knowledge far into the humanities and social sciences. The project explores this resonance space with a focus on two central discursive interfaces: on the one hand, the migration of the concept of energy between labor sciences, organizational sciences, and aesthetic theories of space and image; on the other hand, the role of energetic concepts of affect as a hinge between neurophysiology, psychology, and poetics. Systematically, the focus is on three hypotheses and questions: 1. the career of energy as a collective symbol of the 20th century feeds significantly on the avant-garde. What knowledge about energy circulates here between the disciplines? 2. the arts of the avant-garde have in turn become reflective media of energetic concepts. What poetics and aesthetics of energy are formed here? 3. The discursive flexibility of the concept of energy in the avant-garde corresponds to a high degree of semantic openness. How does poetic, scientific, and popular speech about energy address the uncertainties of determination that arise here?

• DFG Programme: Research Grants