Edith W. Clowes.pdf

American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages 

Simulacrum as S(t)imulation? Postmodernist Theory and Russian Cultural Criticism 

Author(s): Edith W. Clowes 

Source: The Slavic and East European Journal, Vol. 39, No. 3 (Autumn, 1995), pp. 333-343 

Published by: American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages 

Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/308235 

Accessed: 07/11/2008 22:51 

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at 

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless 

you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you 

may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. 

Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at 

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=aatseel. 

Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed 

page of such transmission. 

JSTOR is a not-for-profit organization founded in 1995 to build trusted digital archives for scholarship. We work with the 

scholarly community to preserve their work and the materials they rely upon, and to build a common research platform that 

promotes the discovery and use of these resources. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. 

http://www.jstor.org 

American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages is collaborating with JSTOR to 

digitize, preserve and extend access to The Slavic and East European Journal.

SIMULACRUM AS S(T)IMULATION? 

POSTMODERNIST THEORY AND RUSSIAN 

CULTURAL CRITICISM 

Edith W. Clowes, Purdue University 

In the last quarter century post-structuralist (and post-Marxist) thinkers 

have developed a vocabulary to describe contemporary Western culture. 

This language of ideological sabotage, welcoming the collapse of valuative 

polarities and stressing epistemological and ontological shiftiness, has be- 

come a hallmark of what we have come with Lyotard to call the "postmod- 

ern condition." First conceived to probe the dominanta of so-called "late 

capitalism," especially in French, British, and American cultures, terms 

such as "deconstruction," "totality," "difference," "simulacrum," "hyper- 

reality" have gradually gained currency in all kinds of non-Western or non- 

capitalist cultural milieux-from the Caribbean to Africa to the Arab 

world to China and the former Soviet Union. This essay examines the ways 

in which a number of Russian cultural critics have employed postmodernist 

theory to generate models for analyzing Stalinism, late Soviet, and post- 

Soviet culture. A chief concern here is to ask whether postmodernist think- 

ing serves as a stimulus to Russian self-definition or whether it is just 

another in a long line of Westernizing simulacra that fix and repress the 

shifting and strange Russian experience in an inadequate theoretical mold. 

Is Russian "postmodernism," indeed, yet another mirage, a word game, 

another label that has no referent? 

At first glance, official Soviet culture with its firm rituals, its self-assured 

movement toward definite goals, its authoritarian hold on social discourse, 

seems the very opposite the postmodernist crumbling of "Ideology"-the 

collapse of long-held valuative opposites, the reduction of the Saussurian 

model of referentiality to a mere signifier, and the failure of aesthetic 

representation. But in the 1970s and 1980s the cultural underground and 

particularly its extensions in exile developed a rich language of play as a 

response to this stifling Soviet culture. We think of Dmitrii Prigov's paro- 

dies of children's poetry, the apartment art movement, the conceptualist 

SEEJ, Vol. 39, No. 3 (1995): p. 333-p. 343 333

334 Slavic and East European Journal 

play with Socialist Realist painting by Erik Bulatov, Komar and Melamid, 

and others, and the "historical" fantasies of Voinovich, Sokolov, and 

Aksenov. More recently, the collapse of Soviet Marxism into its opposite, 

fascism, in the loose communist/fascist alliance of the krasnokarichnevye 

("red-browns"), the rapid disintegration of the Soviet empire, the emer- 

gence of genuine pop culture and the diminution of the cultural elite-all 

suggest that there are at the very least interesting comparisons-in-contrast 

to be drawn between the postmodernist West and postcommunist Russia. 

As Mikhail Epstein maintains in his essay, "The Origins and Meaning of 

Russian Postmodernism," although the term postmodernism was until re- 

cently a signal of mutual recognition among the super-elite of the Russian 

intelligentsia, it is now on everyone's lips, welcomed as "topical" and "the 

most vital, the most aesthetically relevant constituent of contemporary 

culture."' Has this term caught on so fast because it is the latest fad from 

the West or because it suggests a cultural condition that is somehow close to 

Russians' own post-Soviet experience? 

In the last five years a number of Russian critics (and a few Western 

Russianists) have been borrowing that amalgamated language of post- 

structuralist and post-Marxist thought that comprises postmodern theory- 

taken from Lyotard, Derrida, Foucault, Baudrillard and Lacan, among 

others-as a new window into both Stalinist culture and the unofficial post- 

Stalinist subculture. What distinguishes one critic, Mikhail Epstein, from 

the rest is his effort to probe broadly what he believes to be the postmod- 

ernist nature not only of unofficial art, but of Socialist Realism, Soviet 

Marxist "ideolanguage," and, indeed, of Russian culture itself. This essay 

will focus on the appropriation of postmodernist thinking in the work of a 

small number of Russian critics, giving most attention to its most provoca- 

tive, and perhaps problematic, extension in Epstein's recent work. 

The emigre intellectual historian, Boris Groys, and the art critic, Marga- 

rita Tupitsyn, were among the first to invoke French post-structuralist 

thought. Groys' essay, "Gesamtkunstwerk Stalin," written in 1988 ("The 

Total Art of Stalinism," 1991), views Stalinism in the light first of the 

modernist avant-garde, then in juxtaposition to postmodernist positions. 

Groys finds a number of parallels between what he calls "postutopian" 

Russian art and Western postmodernism: "Linking Russian literature and 

art of the 1970s and 1980s with similar phenomena in the West are a shared 

aspiration to erase the boundary between 'high' and 'low' in art, interest in 

the myths of the everyday, work with extant sign systems, an orientation 

toward the world of the mass media, the rejection of creative originality, 

and a great deal more" (Groys, 105). In her book on countercultural art 

movements entitled Margins of Soviet Art (1989), Tupitsyn describes sots 

art parody as "deconstruction" of the "divine claims and utopian assump- 

tions" inherent in Soviet culture (Tupitsyn, 65). Like Groys she brings

Simulacrum as S(t)imulation? 335 

conceptualist art into line with Western contemporary culture by talking 

about the "erasure" of difference in Soviet culture between valuative pairs 

such as art and reality, ideology and fact, high and low culture. The possibil- 

ity of an "erasure" of the boundary between high and low art is problematic 

for Soviet culture where both high and low culture were themselves 

"erased" (to use a euphemism) by the late 1930s and replaced by force with 

a homogenized culture. Still, Tupitsyn and Groys do draw attention to the 

vital interaction between the imported American pop art and the Russian 

underground, an interaction that stimulated renewed experimentation with 

popular forms.2 

Another characteristic usually associated with the postmodern concerns 

the ambiguous relationship of the artist to authority. Both Groys and 

Tupitsyn raise this issue in terms of the complicity between experimental 

art and the reigning ideology, and in terms of being simultaneously "inside" 

and "outside" of the system. Anti-Stalinist or dissident art that openly 

opposed or exposed Stalinism (one could point, for example, to Solzheni- 

tsyn or Rasputin) could never escape the singlemindedly utopian mentality 

that is the heart and soul of Stalinism. Such metaesthetic art as concep- 

tualism, in Groys' view, "incorporates the Stalin myth into world mythol- 

ogy and demonstrates its family likeness with supposedly opposite myths" 

(Groys, 115). They understand that one can never be fully "outside" or free 

of the system of values with which one was raised. By acknowledging the 

force of Stalinism as part of one's heritage, but according to it a place in 

one's past (and not anathematizing it), one can, perhaps against all expecta- 

tion, cope with it most effectively. Only in this way can one gain distance 

and be able to see the "artificial unconscious" created by the Stalinist 

experiment and rework it as an object of play or, as Groys puts it, an object 

of "frivolous amusement" (Groys, 120). 

Epstein is the most persistent of all three critics in his application of 

postmodernist concepts to the late Soviet and post-Soviet scene. His focus 

is on the loss of "reality" in a culture dominated by one Ideology, the loss of 

the referent in a sea of floating signifiers. Epstein's critic of choice is Jean 

Baudrillard whose writing is oriented toward electronic culture, the com- 

puter, and the media, and their seemingly referentless proliferation of 

information and images. Like many French post-structuralists Baudrillard 

is fixated on Saussure's linguistic model as a model for cultural criticism 

and for talking about strategies of meaning and interpretation. If the mod- 

ernist project was oriented toward unearthing the relationship between 

sign and concept, between signifier and signified, Baudrillard in "The Politi- 

cal Economy of the Sign" insists that signifier, signified, and referent exist 

as one "compact unit." The point here is that the signifier is the dominant. 

There is no "deeper" concept to be unearthed and there is no "reality" 

independent of the sign. There is only a "hyperreality" created from the


proliferation of "simulacra" of reality on computer and television screens. 

To cite the tinselly tennis star, Andre Agassi, in his camera commercial: 

"Image is everything." And so it is in Baudrillard's postmodernist world. 

All is surface. There is nothing to interpret (which leads us to wonder why 

Baudrillard is indeed interpreting). Epstein in his recent essays, "After the 

Future" (1991) and "Relativistic Patterns in Totalitarian Thinking" (1991), 

makes an interesting case for relating the ideas of "simulacrum" and 

"hyperreality" to Soviet culture. In "Relativistic Patterns" he sees the fol- 

lowing fundamental contradiction in Soviet culture: 

The Soviet world view is characterized by extreme materialism in theory and extreme idealism 

in practice. We could even say that Soviet Marxism's overstated materialism is nothing but an 

ideological phantom, in the postmodernist sense of the word. Such 'hypermaterialism' is a sort 

of simulacrum, the product of pure mentality. The self-serving raison d'etre for such countless 

Soviet simulacra as hyperunity, hyperlabor, hyperparty, hyperpeople, hyperpower, and 

hyperfuture does not differ much from that of Western media. If in the west visual simulacra 

bring great profit, in the Soviet Union ideological simulacra have long brought great power 

(Epstein, "Relativistic Patterns," 42, n.54). 

Thus, this extreme, though officially denied contradiction between theory 

and practice leads to "hypermaterialism," a simulacrum of materialist phi- 

losophy behind which there is no real acknowledgment of material condi- 

tions. Indeed, Soviet citizens subsisted for decades on ideas and ideals, 

since very little else was offered. 

It is important to note that, while Baudrillard claims that the American 

public is in the grip of hyperreality, these Soviet-era simulacra have long 

since lost their power to convince even the simplest worker. Soviets' sur- 

vival skepticism is borne out in the widely held view that "if you pretend to 

pay us, we will pretend to work." Similarly, the old joke s borodoi about 

the "eye-ear" doctor tells us the same thing: the woman comes to the clinic 

and says she wants to see the eye-ear doctor. She is told that the clinic has 

eye doctors or ear-nose-and-throat doctors but not what she wants. The 

nurse asks what her symptoms are. When she answers, "Well, I see one 

thing and hear another," the nurse replies, "We can't cure you of Soviet 

ideology." These anecdotes do point to a difference between Baudrillard's 

conceptualization of postmodern culture, based largely on his observation 

of the American "utopia," and the Soviet situation. Baudrillard argues that 

the postmodern condition persists because consumers are seduced by the 

surface, by image. This is not at all the case in Russia where not only 

intellectuals but others, as well, have known for a long time that they were 

being lied to, cheated, and coerced by brute force. 

In "After the Future," Epstein poses the question of the relation be- 

tween "post-future" Russian culture of the late 1980s and Western postmod- 

ernism. Here again he finds in the sphere of politics, ideology, political 

advertising, and propaganda another simulacrum. This is the figure of


Brezhnev and the practice of what turned out to be "late-Soviet" ideology. 

He writes: 

In contrast to the figure of Stalin, ominously modernist and Kafkaesque, Brezhnev is a typical 

simulacrum: a postmodernist surface object, even a kind of hyperreal object behind which 

stands no reality. Long before Western video technology began to produce an overabundance 

of authentic images of an absent reality, this problem was already being solved by our ideol- 

ogy, by our press, and by statistics that calculated crops that would never be harvested to the 

hundredths of a percentage point ("After the Future," 440). 

What is a key to Soviet hyperreality and makes it similar to Baudrillard's 

Western high-tech culture is that not only do ideological icons refer to no 

substantially existing actuality but the icons' signifier and signified do not 

interact. Everything has become pure surface, a proliferation of images 

that in its very repetition belies any claim to a signified and ultimately 

represses all signifieds. The lack of depth or even apparent depth means 

the impossibility of interpretation, that is, something hidden that can be 

teased out and revealed. Since everything is equal only to itself, meaning 

becomes impossible. Such is the condition to which Baudrillard alludes in 

"The Political Economy of the Sign" and develops in his later work. Ep- 

stein claims in "The Origins" that the Soviet Union was "poor not in 

commodities, comfort, hard currency, but in reality itself. All its shortcom- 

ings and deficiencies are only symbols of this fading reality; and symbols 

themselves comprise the only genuine 'reality' that survives" (Epstein, 

"The Origins," 8). This nonsensical situation returns "consumers" of So- 

viet ideology to the same Nietzschean realization to which Baudrillard has 

arrived in "Simulacra and Simulations" about the "desert of the real itself": 

the real in and of itself is without meaning (Baudrillard, 166). 

In "The Origins and the Meaning of Russian Postmodernism" Epstein 

ambitiously expands his critique of Russian culture. Here he finds what he 

argues are Russian equivalents for the concept of simulacrum. If in "After 

the Future" he claims that Potemkin villages are the epitome of Russian 

simulacra, then here he adds the terms "pokazukha" and "prezentatsiia." 

Interestingly, he characterizes Russia's as a "nominative civilization" in 

which the sign, the name of an object, is more important than the referent, 

the object itself (Epstein, "The Origins," 4). Real, material existence is 

cynically claimed for an object if its label is "presented" to someone whose 

opinion matters and if, having seen the label, that person accepts the 

existence of the object behind the label. The assumption of those perpetrat- 

ing pokazukha (again, throughout Russian history perpetrators might be 

grandees facing Westerners or, as in War and Peace, peasants facing their 

masters or, as in any number of works by Gogol, one person posing in front 

of another) is that reality without the labels is mere emptiness, a desert. 

The labels that Epstein discusses all distort the abstract concept to which 

they claim to pay homage and give reality. For example, the Soviet-era


subbotnik claimed to be an enactment of the notion of free labor. In fact, 

under this program nearly all Soviet citizens were coerced in one way or 

another into working for free on Saturdays. There was little voluntary 

action or free choice in the matter. Thus, insofar as it gave the lie to free 

labor, it became a "hyperevent." Its actual "signified" was unfree labor or 

servitude. In the post-Soviet era the new business culture suffers also from 

what one might call a will to simulation. Epstein describes (unfortunately 

without any documentation) how new enterprises come into being: a select 

group of people is assembled to watch the "prezentatsiia" of the new 

venture (Epstein, "The Origins," 8). He claims that the young businesspeo- 

ple (who, it should be added, are in general ignorant of the lively and rapid 

capitalization and industrialization of Russia in the five decades before 

1917) have no business heritage or business ethic to rely on. Thus, they are 

to a large degree playacting before a chosen audience that is expected to 

affirm the reality of the new business. In Epstein's view, this will to simula- 

tion is so deeply embedded in Russian culture that it is entirely thinkable 

that a "market simulacrum" imposed from above might be the next step in 

Russia's move toward capitalism. This market simulacrum would be a 

pretend market created by force in place of a real market. Epstein does not 

elaborate on the reasons why such a hyperevent might occur except to 

imply that Russians are hopelessly hooked on simulacra. 

While Epstein's observations and speculations are certainly fresh and 

with additional documentation would certainly shed new light on the Soviet 

and post-Soviet scene, there are some instances in which he overempha- 

sizes similarity and deemphasizes differences between the former Soviet 

Union and Baudrillard's West when the differences are considerable and 

even dominant. For example, he argues in "Relativistic Patterns" that 

Soviet totalitarianism is a specific mode of postmodernism (Epstein, "Rela- 

tivistic Patterns," 2). Soviet Marxist ideology or "ideolanguage," he sug- 

gests, shares with postmodern culture a relativist posture. Epstein proceeds 

to show how in Soviet ideological word games the same concept can be 

presented in a negative or a positive light, depending on the words one 

selects. For example, one can seem to be for an internationalist outlook, 

international "peace and friendship," for one audience and yet characterize 

that outlook as "rootless cosmopolitanism" for the next audience. 

This phenomenon is not convincing as "postmodernism." Such word 

games have little to do with any particular era in history and everything to 

do with political gamesmanship. It is merely a rhetorical tactic meant to 

keep one's allies and opponents in their "right" places by verbally establish- 

ing and enforcing one's own political hierarchy. This kind of sport is age- 

old and has little to do with the project of teasing out "other" voices and 

points of view in a situation in which one ideology claims total dominance 

and total truth-such is the relativism central to postmodernist feminism,


ethnic studies, New Historicism, deconstruction. If one wants to speak of 

"postmodernist" and relativist aspects of perestroika, then we must point 

to the fundamental contradiction that Gorbachev introduced: a "free" mar- 

ket economy involves a loosening of grassroots initiative and some allow- 

ance for competition, something that the Soviet Communist Party (in dis- 

tinction, seemingly, to the Chinese Party) showed itself as unwilling to 

allow. Centralized planning, privilege, and the central chain of command 

were all threatened by the possibility of grassroots enterprise, a more fluid 

economy in which money had real value, and a hierarchy different from the 

old command structure. All these considerations suggest that Soviet com- 

munists were exhibiting not a postmodernist temper, but rather extreme 

principle or "printsipial'nost'." 

This argument for the postmodernity of Soviet Marxism stands in stark 

contrast to Groys' contention that Stalinism fulfilled the ambitions of Rus- 

sia's modernists (not to mention Russia's Godbuilders, Bogdanov, Luna- 

charskii, and Gor'kii). According to Groys, Stalin was the "artist-ruler" or 

leader-creator that modernists such as Malevich, Khlebnikov, Maiakovskii 

wished to be-who seemed to have the power to take the material of 

human nature and transfigure it, to make a complete break with the past 

and construct a new society. Groys' claim that Stalinism represented the 

"complete triumph of modernism" is certainly lopsided (Groys, 11). Less 

problematically, as Tupitsyn shows, Stalinism unwittingly provided excel- 

lent raw material for the kind of postmodernist parody brought later by the 

conceptualists with their "after-cultural" sensibility of living after a great 

event, in this case, the demise of "utopia." 

Another area in which Epstein overextends the claim to a Russian post- 

modernism is in his discussion of socialist realism. In "The Origins" he writes 

that "socialist realism may be regarded as an essentially postmodernist trend 

destined to balance all opposites and to create a new space for the interaction 

of all possible stylistic devices" (Epstein, "The Origins," 18). By contrast, 

Groys argues that socialist realism may have won the position that the avant- 

garde coveted, but in its style and outlook it is neither modernist nor post- 

modernist. It is some strange throwback to what Zamiatin called the outlived 

realism of Gor'kii, eclectic and-a much more serious criticism-inwardly 

self-contradictory, as Terts pointed out in "On Socialist Realism" (1959). 

There is none of the self-conscious, semi-humorous postmodernist quota- 

tion or parody of a variety of styles in order to expose the "totalizing" value 

system inherent in it. In socialist realist writing, instead of the admission of 

the artist's complicity with the system, there is the assumption of complicity 

and, indeed, in practice, bald, open, shameless complicity itself. It is cer- 

tainly possible to argue, as Tupitsyn does, that the socialist realist tradition 

left rich raw material for a postmodern response. As Terts showed 35 years 

ago, the inept contradictions and awful mixtures of sensibility inherent in it


foil belief and eventually feed skepticism and a desire to play. Socialist 

realism did indeed help to create a hyperreality, but the general conscious- 

ness of hyperreality is a late-Soviet, post-socialist-realist phenomenon, bur- 

geoning forth in the underground since the 1960s. 

We can see remarkable differences between a postmodern sensibility and 

that inherent to a slight degree in Groys' and quite strongly in Epstein's 

work. The postmodern sensibility is resigned to being "inside" an overrid- 

ing system of value but still presses for an "outside" perspective. It admits 

its own complicity. It is meta-aesthetic and "meta-utopian": it is shocked 

and amused at the collapse of left and right politics one into the other 

(Clowes). Finally, the postmodern is resolutely present-oriented, rejecting 

the nostalgia for the past of the right and the faith in the future of the left. 

Something closer to a "modernist" impulse is apparent in both Groys' and 

Epstein's writing. For example, if postmodernism stands for the collapse of 

opposing ideologies, one into the other, and the erasure of major valuative 

differences between them, then Groys' choice of stark military metaphors 

for this process sounds incongruously modernist. Groys emphasizes a 

"war" of value systems in conceptualist art. He claims, in my view, errone- 

ously, that this art "delights in the spectacle of antagonistic semiotic and 

artistic systems destroying each other" (10). Komar and Melamid and oth- 

ers are really showing in a humorous vein the complicity of opposing sys- 

tems and the structural similarity between their mentalities. War of the 

worlds and the shock of the abyss are the idiom of Maiakovskii, Malevich, 

and their avant-gardes. 

Epstein's work has a strong orientation toward the future-his is a 

predictive criticism that presses beyond an unacceptable present. For ex- 

ample, in "After the Future" he predicts that, after the culture of 

simulacra and after the loss of meaning so familiar in the present, an art 

of silence in which "verbalized silence" and the "silenced word" can "pre- 

serve literature at the bottom of language" will develop (Epstein, "After 

the Future," 443-444). In an unpublished essay, "After Carnival, or the 

Eternal Venichka," he offers a refined culture of hangover and of "the 

morning after" from Venichka Erofeev's Moskva-Petushki as the answer 

for post-postmodern times! Then, to repeat, he also foresees a "market 

simulacrum" in Russia's future. This continual denial of the present in 

favor of the future is not just modernist but a quality deeply ingrained in 

Russian intellectual discourse. Or perhaps better put, accepting and work- 

ing with the present, seeing its good sides as well as bad, is alien to the 

Russian tradition. In any case, a postmodernist sense of time is oriented 

toward the present and pulls both past experience and future possibility 

very much toward the present. All three temporalities are closely intercon- 

nected, not fragmented as in a modernist sensibility. 

All of these points are made simply to stress what I see as some major


differences between contemporary Russian culture, in which modernist 

and postmodernist (or more accurately and not necessarily parallel: commu- 

nist and postcommunist) sensibilities coexist, and French and American 

cultures, where probably a postmodernist sensibility is paramount. While 

postmodernist theory is certainly useful for characterizing contemporary 

culture, it is by no means adequate. The economic cultures of East and 

West from which a "post-something" culture emerged are different one 

from another. If the West lives on a capitalist consumer economy in which 

everything can be bought or sold and emphasis is placed on creating "need" 

for new products, then in the East there was a poorly working centralized 

command economy where, as Epstein points out, non-economic "ideologi- 

cal" considerations always came first. Now what exists is neither Baudril- 

lard's so-called "second-order" simulacrum of industrial "production" and 

replication of goods-at most there are in Russia the tiniest sprouts of a 

"first-order" culture of basic reproduction and trade (Baudrillard, 135). 

The "third-order" simulacrum of "simulation" that Baudrillard claims is 

predominant in the United States today emphasizes not the product itself 

but the proliferation of its image on the electronic media and the computer. 

This order of simulacrum has started to make some inroads into post- 

communist Russian life and, given the Soviet precedent, should have an 

easier time of it than the first- and second-orders simulacrum which actu- 

ally depend on producing something concrete. If Soviet ideology had as its 

"product" the radiant future, Soviet "advertisers" (that is, propagandists) 

had a much easier time talking about it and proliferating images of it than 

producing or, much less, reduplicating versions of it in real life. Such is the 

situation with the first sprouts of the market economy in Russia-actual 

rational, effective production is still largely blocked by bureaucrats and 

old-style directors and by popular apathy, but it is relatively easy to project 

a picture of a bubbling economy on television and in the newspapers, 

through advertisements, thumb-nail sketches of success stories, and the 

like. If this picture of the economic situation is true, then once again we 

find Russia "skipping" what in the West are historical stages, now repre- 

sented in Baudrillard's theory as the three "orders" of simulacrum. It is 

slipping easily into an absurd economy of the code, the sign, without even 

imagining the first order (that is, the concept of competing or mobile signs 

that emerged first in the Renaissance, according to Baudrillard) or enact- 

ing the second-order simulacrum. 

Epstein and Groys are both sensitive to Russian precedents for post- 

modernist thinking and as well to the particular conditions that have given 

rise to a sense of irreality and ideological collapse in late Soviet culture. 

The question now needs to be asked: is it sufficient to speak of a Russian 

postmodernism or should we be talking of a postcommunist culture that 

fits under a larger "post- cultural" rubric along with postmodernism and


perhaps postcolonialism. There are so many clear differences that sepa- 

rate Soviet and Western experience. Despite Groys' implication that Sta- 

linism was in some ways the realization of the dreams of the modernist 

avant-garde, in fact the culture of esthetic play, of philosophical, social 

and artistic experiment, and ideological revolt at the heart of modernism 

was forcibly quashed, only in the last two decades to be revived in the less 

combative and more humorous post-Soviet sensibility. In an effort to clear 

space for postmodernism, recent treatments of modernism, Groys' among 

them, have focused too singlemindedly on modernists' nostalgia for a 

comprehensive system of belief, their nativism, their cultural regressive- 

ness, when, in fact, significant ground is shared between the two. This 

view of modernism would gladden the heart of any orthodox Soviet critic 

but flies in the face of canonical Western definitions of modernism such as 

Howe's in The Decline of the New (1970) or that implied in the aggregate 

of excerpts from "modern" writers and thinkers collected in Ellmann and 

Feidelson's The Modern Tradition (1965). In any case, Russia's modern- 

ism was truncated more severely than other European countries' modern- 

isms. Stalinism was in so many ways such a decisive break from the 

modernist past that contemporary artists and intellectuals have experi- 

enced a considerable nostalgia for modernist experiments. And this at a 

time when in the West modernist skepticism, the modernist rejection 

of canon, its personal rebelliousness was becoming vulgarized, con- 

sumerized, and, thus, "postmodernist." 

Western postmodernist theory is certainly being applied to Russian 

culture in a number of very promising ways. Nevertheless, the exhorta- 

tion bears repeating that it be used as stimulation to develop an accurate 

model of economy and culture in late-Soviet and post-Soviet Russia, not 

as a simulation that disguises more than it reveals. In this exercise, we 

will very likely be able to find in the Russian experience grounds for a 

productive dialogue with and serious critique of postmodernist thinking. 

Perhaps it is well to end with Groys who claims that Stalinist culture 

anticipates such postmodernist characteristics as stylistic eclecticism, a 

penchant for citation, and, much more seriously, the moral-philosophical 

discreditation of the subject (Groys, 108). He ends his remarks with an 

earnest critique of post-structuralist psychology of art. In particular, he 

finds in Deleuze and Guattari's manipulations in Anti-Oedipus of the 

unconscious and discreditation of the subject and consciousness as such a 

"repaving [of] the way for the [Stalinist] 'engineers of human souls'. . . 

The privilege of the context over the text, the unconscious over con- 

sciousness, the 'other' over the subjective . . . merely means the domi- 

nance of the person who speaks about, or even more precisely, the 

person who actually works on, this context, this unconscious, this other" 

(119-120).

NOTES 


1 Epstein is citing Viacheslav Kuritsyn, "Postmodernizm: Novaia pervobytnaia kul'tura." 

Novyi mir 2(1992): 227, 232. 

2 Nonetheless, as Svetlana Boym makes abundantly clear in her new book, Common- 

places, a culture of kitsch has certainly emerged in the last few decades, one that such 

artists as Larisa Zvezdochetova make use of in their work. 

WORKS CITED 

Baudrillard, Jean. The Baudrillard Reader. Ed. M. Poster. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1988. 

Boym, Svetlana. Commonplaces. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1994. 

Clowes, Edith W. Russian Experimental Fiction: Resisting Ideology after Utopia. Princeton: 

Princeton UP, 1993. 

Epstein, Mikhail. "After the Future: On the New Consciousness in Liturature," South Atlan- 

tic Quarterly. 90.2(Spring, 1991): 409-444. 

."The Origins and Meaning of Russian Postmodernism," unpublished manuscript. 

. "Posle karnavala ili vechnyi Venichka," Zolotoi vek (Moscow), 4 (1993), 84-92. 

. "Relativistic Patterns in Totalitarian Thinking." Kennan Institute for Advanced Rus- 

sian Studies. Occasional Paper, 243. 

Groys, Boris. The Total Art of Stalinism. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1991. 

Tupitsyn, Margarita. Margins of Soviet Art: Socialist Realism to the Present. Milan: Giancarlo 

Politi Editore, 1989.

Edith W. Clowes.pdf

Create successful ePaper yourself

Delete template?

Save as template?