Figuration:Collaboration
Inasmuch as hand-made books during the early Russian Avant Garde (1910-1915) were a uniquely collaborative effort--in that multiple artists, writers, and thinkers etc. were involved in the production of each text--so too were these books replete with figures and forms beyond simple geometrics. Collaboration, therefore, operates as a uniquely literary concept-- even in syntax, layout, and signification. Even more, the development and representation of collaboration as a radical literary action is evident in these text's construction of temporality.
Principally marked in one of the earliest hand-made books of the era, Mirskonsta ('world-backwards'), the concept of a theory of language uniquely distinct from past, present, and future models of sound-ing emerged in this era and opened the possibility for a powerful intervention in what philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty would later call The Phenomenology of Perception.
In the new linguistic undertaking of the Russian Avant Garde, the past and the future are not in some innocently new relation; instead, this occasion represents the reality that temporalities collaborate with each other to signify meaning in the immediate present. In the everyday relationships of artists, hauntingly sovereign female forms, and sense-restructuring poetry, these handmade books offer a new consideration for a literary theory that accounts for more than the author, the reader, and the narrative: A fourth dimension (temporality) of corporal intertextuality.
