Trotsky and bare life

Just read through part of Trotsky's Literature and Revolution. There's an interesting turn in the essay from reflections on art and its relation to (the) Revolution and socialism, to a kind of Jetsons-esque future boosterism. The division runs throughout most socialist/Communist/revolutionary writing and corresponds roughly to the difference between 'actually existing socialism' and Utopian socialism. As it happens, something like the citizen's bare life provides the turning point from hatracks and radio towers to cities under the Atlantic and on top of Mont Blanc. First the difference between art and nature, we could say culture and nature, is dissolved by the technological and social transformation of socialism:

The wall will fall not only between art and industry, but simultaneously between art and nature also. This is not meant in the sense of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, that art will come nearer to a state of nature, but that nature will become more “artificial”. The present distribution of mountains and rivers, of fields, of meadows, of steppes, of forests, and of seashores, cannot be considered final. Man has already made changes in the map of nature that are not few nor insignificant. But they are mere pupils’ practice in comparison with what is coming.

"What is coming" proves to be pretty wild, much more than Bauhaus office buildings Trotsky seems to be thinking of a few pages earlier. The reference to external phenomena (rivers and mountains) creates a bridge from an industrial-technical vision of revolutionary redistribution to a reformation of the subject as no longer split between art and culture. The subject will still be split: Trotsky talks about the various 'parties' that will form around all topics of dispute (art schools, farming methods, pedagogical practices) and will extend into individuals. But this new split will not be one of art versus culture, but the temporal schism internal to that new unity. Thus we come to the new human:

He will try to master first the semiconscious and then the subconscious processes in his own organism, such as breathing, the circulation of the blood, digestion, reproduction, and, within necessary limits, he will try to subordinate them to the control of reason and will. Even purely physiologic life will become subject to collective experiments. The human species, the coagulated Homo sapiens, will once more enter into a state of radical transformation, and, in his own hands, will become an object of the most complicated methods of artificial selection and psycho-physical training.

Basic life operations will be marshalled in the socialist future. One can see in this either the reducibility of socialism to biopolitics, or that the discourse of biopolitics does not foreclose the possibility of socialism. Trotsky's vision of total mastery seems pretty untenable--and in fact, though Trotsky claims at the end of the essay that the New Man will overcome psychological structures, he earlier argues that a form of sublimation will be vital to socialism even as it takes on different life content--but the more basic points concerning the split between art and nature, and what we could call zoe and bios, are as relevant today as ever.