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Simulacrum as S(t)imulation? 337 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 ideology, 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
338 Slavic and East European Journal 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 simulation 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,
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