In this text Mikhail Lylov explains how a Soviet avant-garde group called The Projectionist Theater developed exercises and techniques in response to Leon Trotsky's call for “psycho-physical self education”. Theater was utilized as a tool for social construction, not as much through methods of critical thinking, as through intervening into the affective and bodily dimensions of actors – aiming to produce new subjectivities for socialism without a state. The workshops developed by the Projectionists involved diagrams used to abstract habitual gestures and speech, in order to achieve an estrangement from oneself, and decompose old forms of subjectivity based on subjection and resentment. Lylov argues that the projectionist social aesthetics for self-governance is still relevant as potential techniques of empowerment today.
Illustrations by Uliana Bychenkova after Solomon Nikritin's diagrams.
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