Some material on factography, a strain of the 1920s Soviet avant-garde…

1) In Benjamin Buchloch’s 1984 essay “From Faktura to Factography,” he uses factography to generally describe the second-period of the Soviet avant-garde and its “descriptive, self-styled journalistic ideal of art” as opposed to the first period, characterized by Malevich and others whose experiments were focused on abstract painting.

2) The most comprehensive source on factography I’ve found is October 118 from Fall 2006, committed entirely to the movement and its main figure Sergei Tret’iakov. (Download entire 62 mb issue here). Soviet avant-garde scholar Devin Fore has a lot of relevant passages in the Introduction:

Despite indisputable filiations between factography and practices outside of Russia which were similarly engaged in the project of chronicling modernization and its concomitant transformations to the conditions of human experience, there are critical distinctions to be made between the Soviet factographic avant-garde and documentary as it is traditionally conceived. The chief divergence is one of epistemological disposition: if the term “documentary,” which was created in 1926 by filmmaker John Grierson (who derived it, it seems, from the French word “documentaire”), came to designate work that strives to create the most objective depiction of realitypossible, then this passive and impartial representational practice could not be farther from factography’s ambitions. Indeed, Sergei Tret’iakov, the most famous figure in the movement and the focal point of this issue of October, founded his entire praxeology on the notion of “operativity,” on the claim not to veridically reflect reality in his work, but to actively transform reality through it. The objectivism of an indifferent documentary had no place in the interventionist practices of the factographers….

As Benjamin H. D. Buchloh demonstrated in his formative essay “From Faktura to Factography,” the factographers engaged not just with physical and dimensional bodies, but also with bodies of collective social knowledge and networks of communication. Within this reorientation of artistic practices toward information and discourse, moreover, they conceived of signification not as a mere system of mimetic reflection, but as an act of productive labor….

This sweeping reconceptualization of the relationship between work and semiosis belonged to a specific historical moment in the 1920s, that of the precipitate transformation of the Soviet Union into a modern media society. It is indeed impossible to comprehend the factographic project without taking into account the concurrent explosion of new media technologies and their attending mass cultural formations. This decade not only underwent a media revolution effected by the advent of radio broadcasting, the introduction of sound into film, and the photomechanical procedures which enabled the proliferation of the illustrated press, but it also witnessed the emergence of popular photography organizations, widespread literacy campaigns that drastically changed the lived relationship to language, and a worker-correspondent movement which aspired to transform the consumer of information into its author. New media became ordinary facts of life. That factography began to reach the apogee of its influence and methodological cogency around 1927, the year which Guy Debord later established as the inaugural year of the society of the spectacle,4is thus in no way incidental, for factographic practices presupposed a society on the cusp of the modern media age. In this society, where the distinction between the object and its image grew increasingly tenuous, the factographers understood actsof signification not as veridical reflections or reduplications of an ontologically more primary reality, but as actual and objective components of everyday, lived experience. The era that saw the closure of the gap between life and its representation challenged the Soviet avant-garde to develop models of production and manufacture that encompassed physical and psychic experience alike….

By thinking through its objects rather than theorizing axiomatically about them, this empirical, sociological science reestablished points of contact between the chaotic contingency of material phenomena and the speculative logic of abstract cognition. Their efforts to redress the gap between abstract knowledge and lived quotidian existence situate the factographerswithin the current of “phenomenological Marxism,” which thrived in the 1920s and which undertook the construction of what Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge have described as a comprehensive “context of living” [Lebenszusammenhang] — a framework for human experience that is cognitively coherent yet experientially concrete and sensuous….

Like Borges’s story about a seventeenth-century cartographer who tried to create a map of the Empire that was the exact size of the kingdom itself — a sprawling representation of the world that coincided at every point with it — the factographers went about constructing a vast archive that was coextensive with reality itself. Perennially “in search of the present tense,”20these projects engaged operatively in their own historical moment and expired with the passage of the reality to which these interventions corresponded.

This issue…will not advance a master theory of factography, nor will it even propose the actuality or direct applicabilityof these projects for the present day. The texts assembled here are as old as yesterday’s newspaper. But insofar as they uncover a forgotten response to the media of modernity, these fossils possess a certain archaeological value for us. They return us to a critical juncture in the development of spectacle society and point out a path that was not taken: in contrast to the technological determinism that today increasingly dominates contemporary theoretical perspectives on the media, factography insisted that these media are historically variable constructions that are the precipitates of concrete social and political systems; and against the positivist approaches that currently underwrite this determinism, factography recalls a moment when technologies of representation such as photography did not constitute a discrete medium or a stable genre. The case of factography reminds us that the information media which continue to structure experience to this day are in no way ontological givens, but are themselves generated through operative acts of congitive and perceptual labor. A production art fit for a media age, Soviet factography shows us that the consumption of information is never simply a passive act.

3) In his essay “The Sun without a Muzzle” on Russian art photography from the 1970s, Victor Tupitsyn writes about factography and what he’s calling neo-factography. He writes,

The neo-factographers of the seventies and eighties documented manifestations of marginal practices and activities. Moreover, if the fixation of the events of the twenties and thirties can appropriately be described in terms of factography as affirmation, then the neofactography under discussion here is factography as resistance. In essence, the neofactography of the seventies and eighties was an attempt to provide new answers to the questions: what is fact and what is reality? Is it whatever has received the grace of mass representation, or can phenomena pinned down by means of amateur snapshots, typewritten descriptive texts, letters, diary notes, and so forth, be referred to as true factuality? Adopting the latter viewpoint,”factography as resistance set out to implement the principle that, in becoming facts of linguistic reality and therefore communicable, idiomatic narratives are endowed with a destabilizing potential capable of shaking faith in the invincibility of the affirmative culture of Socialist Realism (read metanarrative) and in the totality of its self-representation. (81)