The Skill of Utopian Vision: Photojournalism in the Last Soviet Decades

Abstract

The article examines the “utopian reception,” that is, occurrence and reproduction of the common understanding of the utopian. Attention is paid primarily to the visual experience, that is, the “utopian vision,” which means here a special social skill of the perception and interpretation of space as having being assigned the status of 'utopian'. Thus, a certain inertia of vision encourages the observer to link visual materials produced in the Soviet period to the media construct of “Soviet utopia”. Here, two patterns of spatial description are especially popular, those of “totalitarian place,” and “queer place.” The article focuses on both patterns of “utopian vision” in detail. The first implies intensive rationalization and semiotization of space, while the second implies semantic crash and affectivity. The space is characterized within the former pattern by the metaphor of text, while within the latter by metaphors of night dreams or memory. The author refers to the semiotic, and, at the same time, the spatial analysis of the classic utopia within the framework offered by Louis Marin in 1973, and demonstrates that space perceived by the “utopian view” ceases being social. The reverse side of the imaginary construction of a perfect society is, paradoxically, the blocking of any intersubjective relationships.