Science & Tech Quote by El Lissitzky

For El Lissitzky, the machine was never just hardware; it was a moral problem and an aesthetic opportunity. Calling the constructor an "artist" collapses the old hierarchy where art decorates and engineering builds. In the Soviet avant-garde moment, that merger was the point: the new society would be designed, not merely represented. "Constructor" is a loaded word from Constructivism, signaling a break from easel painting and private genius toward collective, functional creation - posters, exhibitions, architecture, typography - art that behaves like infrastructure.

The phrase "develops the power of the machine" carries a quiet provocation. Machines already have power in the obvious sense (speed, scale, force), but Lissitzky is arguing that power is incomplete until it's directed, composed, given purpose. That's where the constructor comes in: not to romanticize technology, but to discipline it, to turn raw industrial capacity into a language.

Then he swerves: "a spiritual organism". It's startling because it grafts mysticism onto metallurgy. Subtext: modernity doesn't have to mean soullessness. The machine can be made "spiritual" when its forms and functions align with a collective ideal - a living system that organizes perception, labor, and social relations. In Lissitzky's world of Proun spaces and revolutionary graphics, spirituality isn't religion; it's coherence, a felt sense that the new forms of life have an inner necessity.

Read this way, the line is both utopian and controlling: if the machine becomes an organism, someone decides its spirit. Lissitzky is selling design as governance - the artist-engineer as the custodian of modern power.