Uzbekistan is in Central Asia, south of Kazakhstan, north of Afghanistan. At present, it is considered the cheapest production country for the Western textiles industry, even cheaper than Pakistan or Vietnam. This article is however not intended as a stocktaking of the present economic and political situation, but as a culturo-historical digression going back to the early days of the Soviet Union. In 1924, a socialist republic was founded in Uzbekistan. In 1931, the Russian psychologist and Marxist Alexander Romanovitch Luria (1902-1977) travelled to Uzbekistan to interview cotton workers who had taken part in a state-run educational programme to combat illiteracy. He later published transcripts of these interviews in his book »Cognitive Development. Its cultural and social foundations« (1976). The video artist Jacqueline Goss has used these interviews as the basis for her video work »How to Fix the World« (2004).

With his interviews, Luria wanted to assess the results of the centrally organised education programme that Moscow had launched at the end of the 1920s for the Muslim regions at the fringe of the Soviet alliance of states. He was interested in the cognitive differences between the illiterate and the educated. In particular, he was concerned with finding a proof for the historical dependency of individual processes of knowledge, not only in order to establish the connection between psychology and Marxism at a theoretical level, but also to demonstrate its existence as a practical necessity of life. On the basis of the interviews, Luria claimed to have discovered that the Uzbeks who had been taught were able to change their way of thinking from practical, situationally dependent strategies to logical and taxonomic patterns.

But before Goss picks up the thread of the interviews, she shows, in the opening shot of the video, the massive mountains in Fergana Valley 1 as a series of landscape backdrops extending in rows to the horizon, with lines of clouds scudding over them. In between, white, graphic circles fall like snow, a stylised depiction of »white gold«, cotton, which was and is the main export of Uzbekistan. In the interviews that follow, Goss takes over Luria’s role as the questioning voice from off-screen: »I spoke the voice-overs myself to admit to myself my identification with him, as an author, but also as an educated person. In this way, I also connect up with my other videos, in which the voice is always important as a medium for subjective experience.«

Luria’s simple tests included arranging objects according to categories, describing shapes, and solving logical problems. However, the uneducated argued, for example, that a hammer, saw, axe and tree trunk all belonged in one group, because these three tools were useless without the object of their application (the tree trunk). Indeed, what was missing, they said, was a worker. In response to the question »Cotton can only grow where it is hot and dry. In England it is cold and wet. Can cotton grow there?«, one interviewee replied: »I don’t know. I’ve been to Kashgar, but I don’t know about anywhere else.« An old man, shown in the video with a parrot on his shoulder, gives a defiant answer to the question of whether there were camels in Germany: »If there are big cities there, then probably there are.« And, when the interviewer persisted: »If they’re big cities, they probably don’t have enough room for camels.« One woman refuses to describe a tree, because, she says, everyone knows what one is; after all, there are trees everywhere.

Goss uses photographs taken by the Soviet photographer Max Person, who recorded everyday life in Uzbekistan between 1925 and 1945, as a montage basis for the interviewees in the video. She alienates the people in the photos stylistically in the tradition of socialist realism, animating their eyes, for example, in the style of comics, as seen in Flash animations. This reduction to monochrome colours and minimal movements visually evokes the restrictive nature of the Stalinist system. The figures are like reflections of ideal Soviet citizens as Luria wanted to see them. His prejudiced perception is exposed by the two-dimensional depiction of his interview partners. The aim of the education programme was to change Muslim culture in keeping with the socialist theory of society. But the people were only receptive for socialist indoctrination when they were able to read.

In the course of Stalinist imperialism, a newly invented culture collided with an old one; the two communicated a different logic. The interviewees seem clever and cunning in the way they resist the interview questions. In the video sequence »Studying the writing of Lenin«, one sees a teaching room in which pupils are gathered together, bent over Stalin’s writings. An animated circle moves over it like a magnifying glass and changes the Latin letters into Cyrillic ones. Goss scans documentary images and translates their messages. In the middle of the video, a poem of praise to Stalin is recited, »Be immortal, great Stalin.« This constructed text, as an extreme example of »writtenness«, stands in stark contrast to oral relativism. The political indoctrination is also made clear in a concrete question-answer situation. In response to the question of whether all people were equal, an old man answers, as if quoting from the Party programme, that he only sees a difference between landowners and agricultural workers.

With »How to Fix the World«, Goss reminds us what role language plays in the attempt by governments to influence the future of their country and other countries. The succinct title of her work can also largely be read as a reference to the endeavour, as absurd as it is crass, to want to change cultural individualities. The video thus ends with a spoken chorus: »Precious metals do not rust. Gold is a precious metal. Do precious metals rust? Precious metal rusts.«
The political relevance of Luria’s work is made clear by another anecdote. After he had shown illiterate people trompe l’oeil pictures, he is said to have sent a telegram to a colleague in Moscow with the message »Uzbeks have no illusions.« The Soviets interpreted this telegram as a political commentary, with the result that, it is said, Luria was called back to Moscow immediately and forbidden to undertake journeys to Central Asia for a few years.

 

Translated by Timothy Jones

 

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