"Imperfections Attract and Protests Appeal": the Natalia Samutina Memorial Lecture by Ellen Rutten

The lecture is held in memory of Natalia Samutina, a talented scholar and lecturer, founder of the Research Center for Contemporary Culture at IGITI. As a researcher, she studied those strata of modern society that were on the periphery of public interest and professional expertise. Natalia Samutina's projects were focused on the cinematic experience and urban spaces, fan cultures and new forms of reading. She revealed the forms of creativity and communication through which various communities mark the space of modernity in their own way, find their place in it, playing with traditions and bringing to life their imaginary worlds. We would like the annual Natalia Samutina Memorial Lectures to attract the attention of colleagues to those new areas of today's culture that are significantly changing our times. We also hope that the lectures will facilitate the participation of Russian researchers in the international contemporary culture studies.

Lecture abstract

Imperfections Attract and Protests Appeal

Ellen Rutten

In this lecture, I share recent research related to two projects on which I have worked and am working at the University of Amsterdam between 2015 and today: Sublime Imperfections and Protest Appeals. For both projects, I cooperated closely with Natalia Samutina, to whose memory this lecture is dedicated.

In part 1, I use historical analyses to ponder a question that I studied in detail in recent years: why do imperfections attract people? Ideally, spellcheckers, photo filters, and other digital technologies allow us to perfect everyday lives with each day. In practice, they not only boast bugs, but their ‘politics of perfection’ (Hale 2016) also evoke fierce social and creative counterpolitics. Contemporary filmmakers, writers, programmers, composers, designers, and social media users often engage critically with perfection and flawlessness. With, say, torn jeans, shaky camera work, or glitch music, they embrace the imperfect, which they frame as hallmark for authenticity and wholeness in a digitized age. My talk scrutinizes present-day dreams of imperfection by exploring their historical genealogy. Central to their cultural-historical lineage are the Romanticist ‘triumph of imperfection’ (Nemoianu 2006) and ‘the aesthetics of imperfection’ (Gioia 1988) of early twentieth-century jazz music, which each responded to drastic technological transitions. How do contemporary pleas for the glitchy and imperfect relate to these historical ‘imperfection cults’? What do pleas against perfection say about the social dreams and fears that technological progress invokes? And how can older stories help us unpack how calls for imperfection shape cultural production processes today – across different world localities, and Russia in particular? In exploring these questions, I draw on a selection of music & art reviews, literary texts, theoretical writings and social media posts.

In part 2 – the shorter final part of my talk – I lift a tip of the veil of new research, devoted to the question: why do protests appeal to people, and how do protesters mobilize public support? For the research-project-in-the-making Protests Appeal, scholars from the University of Amsterdam will team up with museum experts, artists, and activists. In comparative studies of (1) the renowned Eastern-European avant-garde collections of the Dutch Stedelijk Museum and the Van Abbemuseum and (2) new protest objects from Belarus, Russia, and Ukraine, the team aims at an integration of transnational theorizing of protest aesthetics and studies of cultural protest forms across Eastern Europe. Protest Appeals thus contributes to the important ongoing but far from completed project of deprovincializing scholarship of protest aesthetics. 

Ellen Rutten is Ellen Rutten is Professor of Literature and chair of the department of Russian and Slavic Studies at the University of Amsterdam. Her latest book, Sincerity after Communism: A Cultural History, was published by Yale University Press in 2017. Rutten is coordinator of the research project Sublime Imperfections: Creative Interventions in Post-1989 Europe, and editor-in-chief of the academic journal Russian Literature, devoted to the study of Russian and Slavic literatures.