Edith W. Clowes.pdf

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SIMULACRUM AS S(T)IMULATION? POSTMODERNIST THEORY AND RUSSIAN CULTURAL CRITICISM <strong>Edith</strong> W. <strong>Clowes</strong>, 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 "postmodern 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 thinking 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 recently 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 postmodernist 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
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