Edith W. Clowes.pdf

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Simulacrum as S(t)imulation? 339 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" market 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 postmodernism 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 postmodernist. 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 certainly 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
340 Slavic and East European Journal 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 (<strong>Clowes</strong>). 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 systems 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 example, 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
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