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American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages
Simulacrum as S(t)imulation? Postmodernist Theory and Russian Cultural Criticism
Author(s): Edith W. Clowes
Source: The Slavic and East European Journal, Vol. 39, No. 3 (Autumn, 1995), pp. 333-343
Published by: American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/308235
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AS
SIMULACRUM S(T)IMULATION?
POSTMODERNIST THEORY AND RUSSIAN
CULTURAL CRITICISM
Edith W. Clowes, 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 have
we come with to call the
ern condition." First conceived to Lyotard "postmod-
probe the dominanta of so-called "late
capitalism," especially in French, British, and American cultures, terms
such as "deconstruction," "difference," "simulacrum,"
have "totality," in all kinds "hyper-
reality" gradually gained currency 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 examines the
in essay ways
which a number of Russian cultural critics
have
to models for employed postmodernist
theory generate analyzing Stalinism, late Soviet, and post-
Soviet culture. A chief concern to
here is ask whether postmodernist think-
ing 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 Russian in an theoretical mold.
Is Russian strange experience inadequate
"postmodernism," indeed, yet another mirage, a word game,
another label that has no referent?
At first official Soviet culture with its firm its
glance, rituals, self-assured
movement toward definite goals, its authoritarian hold on social discourse,
seems the very opposite the postmodernist of
of valuative crumbling "Ideology"-the
collapse long-held 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
its extensions in exile a rich of as a
particularly developed language play
response to this stifling Soviet culture. We think of Dmitrii Prigov's paro-
dies of children's poetry, the apartment art movement, the conceptualist
Vol. No. 3 343 333
SEEJ, 39, (1995): p. 333-p.
334 Slavic and East Journal
European
play with Socialist Realist painting by Erik Bulatov, Komar and Melamid,
and others, and the "historical" fantasies of Voinovich, Sokolov, and
Aksenov. the Marxism
More recently, collapse of Soviet into its opposite,
fascism, in the loose communist/fascist alliance of the krasnokarichnevye
("red-browns"), the rapid disintegration of the Soviet empire, the emer-
of culture and the diminution of the cultural
gence genuine pop 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 re-
cently a signal of mutual recognition among the super-elite of the Russian
intelligentsia, it is now on everyone's welcomed as and "the
most the most lips, "topical"
vital, aesthetically relevant constituent of contemporary
culture."' Has this term caught on so fast because it is the latest fad from
or it
the West because a condition
cultural that is
suggests 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 that
post-Marxist
thought comprises
taken from postmodern theory-
Lyotard, Derrida, Foucault, Baudrillard and Lacan, among
others-as a new window into both Stalinist culture and
the unofficial
Stalinist subculture. What one post-
distinguishes critic, Mikhail Epstein, from
the rest is his effort to probe broadly what he believes to be the postmod-
ernist 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 in the work of a
small number of Russian most thinking
critics, giving attention to its most provoca-
tive, and perhaps problematic, extension in Epstein's recent work.
The intellectual Boris and
historian, the art
rita emigre were Groys, critic, Marga-
Tupitsyn, 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: Russian literature and
art "Linking
of the 1970s and 1980s with
similar in
the West are a
phenomena shared
to erase the between and 'low' in interest in
aspiration boundary 'high' art,
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), describes sots
art as "deconstruction" Tupitsyn
of the "divine
parody claims and utopian assump-
tions" inherent in Soviet culture (Tupitsyn, 65). Like Groys she brings
Simulacrum as 335
S(t)imulation?
conceptualist art into line with Western contemporary culture by talking
about the "erasure" of difference in Soviet culture between valuative pairs
The
such as art and and and low culture.
reality, fact, high possibil-
of ideology and low art is
of an "erasure" the between
ity boundary high problematic
for Soviet culture where both high and low culture were themselves
use a the and
"erased" late 1930s force with
(to by
euphemism) by replaced
a culture. Still, and do draw attention to the
homogenized Tupitsyn Groys art
vital interaction between the imported American pop and the Russian
underground, an interaction that stimulated renewed experimentation with
popular forms.2
Another characteristic associated with the concerns
the usually postmodern
ambiguous relationship of the artist to authority. Both Groys and
raise this issue in terms of the between
Tupitsyn complicity experimental
art and
the and in
reigning terms of "inside"
and of ideology, being simultaneously
"outside" the system. Anti-Stalinist or dissident art that openly
opposed or exposed Stalinism (one could point, for example, to Solzheni-
or could never the
tsyn Rasputin) escape singlemindedly utopian mentality
that is the heart and soul of Stalinism. Such metaesthetic art as concep-
tualism, in Groys' view, the Stalin into world
and "incorporates myth mythol-
ogy demonstrates its family likeness with supposedly opposite myths"
understand that one can
never be "outside" or
(Groys, 115). They fully 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 not one all
past (and anathematizing it), can, perhaps against 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
and rework it an
as of as an
experiment object or, it,
of "frivolous amusement" play Groys puts object
is the most (Groys, 120).
Epstein persistent of all three critics in his application of
postmodernist concepts to the late Soviet and scene. His focus
is on the loss of in post-Soviet
a culture
"reality" dominated one the loss of
the referent in a sea of by Ideology,
floating signifiers. Epstein's critic of choice is Jean
Baudrillard whose writing is oriented toward electronic culture, the com-
puter, and the media, and their seemingly referentless proliferation of
information and images. Like many French Baudrillard
is fixated on Saussure's model post-structuralists
linguistic as a model for cultural criticism
and
for about of and If
talking strategies meaning interpretation. the mod-
ernist project was oriented toward unearthing the relationship between
and between and Baudrillard in
"The
sign concept, signifier signified, Politi-
cal Economy of the insists that and referent exist
Sign" signifier,
as signified,
one unit." The here is that
"compact point the is the dominant.
There is no to be signifier
"deeper" concept unearthed and there is no "reality"
independent of the sign. There is only a created from the
"hyperreality"
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