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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 computer, 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
336 Slavic and East European Journal 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 between "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
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