Zero and the Machine: The Metaphysics of the Mechanical Voice in the Russian Avant-Garde

This article offers a novel reading of the legacies of Kazimir Malevich and Daniil Kharms through the lens of Jacques Derrida's philosophy of the voice. The focus shifts from a traditional analysis of plastic and poetic forms to an investigation of their fundamental project to deconstruct and reinvent the very act of utterance. We argue that a central problem for both artists was that of the mechanical voice – a voice alienated from the living presence of the speaker, a voice as technique. In his work Ulysses Gramophone, Derrida demonstrates how recording devices radically separate the voice from its source, turning speech into a quotation, an archival trace. Malevich and Kharms, however, do not lament this loss of authenticity but see in it a liberating and creative potential. The analysis begins with Malevich, whose Black Square is interpreted not only as a “zero of forms” but also as a voice-zero – the final result of an operation of economy that reduces utterance to its suprematist minimum. The futurist opera Victory Over the Sun, in whose creation Malevich participated as an artist and co-author of the libretto, is understood as the triumph of this new, machine-like, and dehumanized sonic landscape over the logocentric voice of classical culture. Daniil Kharms develops and complicates this program in the field of literature. His poetics of dysgraphia, malfunction, and absurdity constitutes a systematic sabotage of routineized speech machines – the printing press, the gramophone, and logical syntax. In his texts, the voice splinters, becoming a set of mechanical signals and autonomous phonemes, which finds its culminating expression in the enigmatic ritual poem “On the Death of Kazimir Malevich.” The theoretical depth of the study is ensured by drawing on key concepts from media archaeology and the philosophy of technology: the media-archaeological approach of Friedrich Kittler and Valery Savchuk allows us to consider the voice as a product of material carriers; Steven Connor's ideas on ventriloquism shed light on the phenomenon of the alienated voice; Boris Groys's analysis helps place the avant-garde's quest within the ideological context of the era. Ultimately, the project of Malevich and Kharms appears not as a technocratic utopia but as a radical metaphysical and medial program for the creation of a new auditory episteme – a program whose prophetic power is revealed in the age of artificial intelligence and synthetic speech.