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Simulacrum as S(t)imulation? 341 differences between contemporary Russian culture, in which modernist and postmodernist (or more accurately and not necessarily parallel: communist 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 "ideological" 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 postcommunist Russian life and, given the Soviet precedent, should have an easier time of it than the first- and second-orders simulacrum which actually 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 postmodernist 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
342 Slavic and East European Journal 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 modernism 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 consciousness, 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).
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