Russian Postmodernism

New Perspectives on Post-Soviet Culture

Mikhail N. Epstein, Alexander A. Genis, Slobodanka Millicent Vladiv-Glover

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781782388654
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Estudios regionales

Recent decades have been decisive for Russia not only politically but culturally as well. The end of the Cold War has enabled Russia to take part in the global rise and crystallization of postmodernism. This volume investigates the manifestations of this crucial trend in Russian fiction, poetry, art, and spirituality, demonstrating how Russian postmodernism is its own unique entity. It offers a point of departure and valuable guide to an area of contemporary literary-cultural studies insufficiently represented in English-language scholarship. This second edition includes additional essays on the topic and a new introduction examining the most recent developments.

Part I

THE MAKING OF RUSSIAN POSTMODERNISM

Chapter 1

THE DIALECTICS OF HYPER

From Modernism to Postmodernism

Mikhail Epstein

1. The Modernist Premises of Postmodernism

In contemporary discourse postmodernism is usually interpreted as a profoundly Western phenomenon whose appearance in non-Western cultures, such as the Japanese, is but part of an inevitable and growing process of Westernization. This chapter proposes to treat those laws of twentieth-century cultural development as shared by the West and Russia, in spite of the fact that Russia was isolated from the West and in fact set itself in vigorous opposition to it during this period. Indeed Russia’s own “revolutionariness” is part of the global revolutionary paradigm of the twentieth century.

To a large extent, the first half of the twentieth century marched under the banner of numerous revolutions, whether “social,” “cultural,” or “sexual.” There were also revolutionary changes in physics, psychology, biology, philosophy, literature, and the arts. Although the momentous changes that took place in Russia occurred in different spheres than in the West, both worlds were united by a common revolutionary model. This fact explains the typological similarities that have emerged by the end of the twentieth century between Western postmodernism and contemporary Russian culture, itself evolving, as is its Western counterpart, under the sign of “post”: as postcommunist or postutopian culture.

Revolutions are certainly part of the modernist project. In the broadest sense of the term “modern,” this project is a quest for and (re)construction of an authentic, higher, essential reality to be found beyond the conventional, arbitrary sign systems of culture. The founding father of modernism in this sense was Jean-Jacques Rousseau, with his critique of contemporary civilization and the discovery of a primal, “unspoiled” existence of man in nature. Then Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud exposed the illusion of an ideological consciousness and discovered an “essential” reality in the self-motion of matter and material production, in the life instinct, in the will to power, in the sexual drive, and the power of the unconscious. These discoveries were all creations of modernism. As Lionel Trilling wrote in his work “On the Modern Element in Modern Literature”: “I can identify [the modern element] by calling it the disenchantment of our culture with culture itself … the bitter line of hostility to civilization that runs through [modern literature].… I venture to say that the idea of losing oneself to the point of self-destruction, of surrendering oneself to experience without regard to self-interest or conventional morality, of escaping wholly from societal bonds, is an ‘element’ somewhere in the mind of every modern person.”¹

James Joyce, with his discovery of the “stream of consciousness” and the “mythological prototypes” underlying the conventional forms of the “contemporary individual,” was also modernist. The same can be said of Kazimir Malevich, who erased the multiplicity of colors of the visible world in order to uncover its geometric foundation, the “black square.” As for Velimir Khlebnikov, he insisted on the essential reality of the “self-valued,” “trans-sense” word (samovitoe and zaumnoe slovo), such as the shamanistic incantation of the type “bobeobi peli guby,”² rather than the conventional language of symbols. Although antagonistic to artistic modernism, the communist revolution was a manifestation of political modernism. It strove to bring to power the “true creators of reality” who “generated material well-being”—namely the working masses. These masses would bring down the “parasitic” classes, who distort and alienate reality, appropriating for themselves the fruits of the labor of others by means of ideological illusions and the bureaucratic apparatus.

On the whole, modernism can be defined as a revolution that strove to abolish the arbitrary character of culture and the relativity of signs in order to affirm the hidden absoluteness of being, regardless of how this essential, authentic being was defined: whether as “matter” and “economics” in Marxism, “life” in Nietzsche, “libido” and “the unconscious” in Freud, “creative élan” in Bergson, “stream of consciousness” in William James and James Joyce, “being” in Heidegger, the “self-valued word” in Futurism or “the power of workers and peasants” in Bolshevism. The list could go on.

Postmodernism, as is known, directs its sharpest criticism at modernism for the latter’s adherence to the illusion of an “ultimate truth,” an “absolute language,” a “new style,” all of which were supposed to lead to the “essential reality.” The name itself points to the fact that postmodernism constituted itself as a new cultural paradigm in the very process of differentiating itself from modernism, as an experiment in the self-enclosure of sign systems, of language folding in upon itself. The very notion of a reality beyond that of signs is criticized by postmodernism as the “last” in a series of illusions, a survival of the old “metaphysics of presence.” The world of secondariness, that is, of conventional and contingent presentations, proves to be more authentic and primary than the so-called “true reality.” This critique of the “realistic fallacy” has nurtured diverse postmodern movements. One of these, Russian conceptualism, exposes the nature of Soviet reality as an ideological mirage and a system of “supersignificant” signs projected by the ruling mind onto the empty space of an imaginary “signified.”

Our task here will be to explore the intricate relationship of modernism and postmodernism, seen as two complementary aspects of a single cultural paradigm subsumable under the general concept of “hyper.” If Russian and Western postmodernism have common roots in their respective modernist heritage, then both share a parallel search for ways out of an analogous “revolutionary” past. For it was revolution, as a quest for, and affirmation of, a “pure” or “essential” reality, that led to the formation of those pseudo-realities or hollow, non-referential signs with which postmodern culture plays in both Russia and the West.

What follows is an attempt to analyze “the modernist premises of postmodernism in light of postmodern perspectives on modernism” or, put more simply, the interdependence of these two historical phenomena. My argument will focus on a variety of modernist approaches: in physics (quantum mechanics), in literary theory (new criticism), in philosophy (existentialism), across psychoanalytic theories and practices (sexual revolution), and across Soviet social and intellectual trends, such as “collectivism” and “materialism.” All these trends manifest the phenomenon of “hyper” in its first stage, which is constituted by the revolutionary overthrow of the “classic” paradigm and an assertion of a “true, essential reality,” or “super-reality.” In the second stage, the same phenomena are realized and exposed as “pseudo-realities” thus marking the transformation of “hyper” itself, its inevitable transition from the modernist to the postmodernist stage, from “super” to “pseudo.” I will argue that the development of the twentieth-century cultural paradigm depends on a necessary connection between these two stages of the “super” and the “pseudo.” The concept of “hyper” highlights not only the lines of continuity between modernism and postmodernism, but also the parallel developments in Russian and Western postmodernisms as reactions to and revisions of a common “revolutionary” legacy.

2. “Hyper” in Science and Culture

A variety of phenomena in the arts, sciences, philosophy, and politics of the twentieth century can be united under the category “hyper.” This prefix literally means “heightened” or “excessive.” Its popularity in contemporary cultural theory reflects the fact that many tendencies of twentieth century life have been brought to the limit of their development, thereby revealing their own antithesis.

The concept of “hyperreality” has been advanced by the Italian cultural semiotician, Umberto Eco, and the French sociologist and philosopher, Jean Baudrillard, both of whom relate it to the disappearance of reality brought about by dominance of the mass media. Although mass communication technologies appear, on the surface, to capture reality in all its most minute details, on a deeper level the technical and visual means themselves construct a reality of another order, which has been called “hyperreality.” Though this hyperreality is a phantasmic creation of mass communication, it emerges as a more authentic, exact, “real” reality than the one we perceive in the life around us.

An illustrative example is so-called hyperrealism, an influential art movement of the 1970s and early 1980s. Works produced by this movement included giant color photographs, framed to function as paintings. Details, such as the skin of a man’s face, were rendered in such detail and on such a scale that it was possible to see every pore, every roughness of surface, and every protuberance not normally visible to the naked eye. This is the “hyper” effect, which allows reality to acquire an “excessively real” dimension thanks entirely to the effects of its technical reproduction.

According to Baudrillard, reality, which is firmly entwined in the web of mass communication, has disappeared completely from the contemporary Western world, ceding its place to a hyperreality produced by artificial means:

Reality itself founders in hyperrealism, the meticulous reduplication of the real, preferably through another reproductive medium, such as photography. From medium to medium, the real is volatilised, becoming an allegory of death. But it is also, in a sense, reinforced through its own destruction. It becomes reality for its own sake, the fetishism of the lost object …: the hyperreal.³

This paradox was discovered by scientists in quantum physics, long before the advent of the theoreticians of postmodernism: elementary particles, that is, the objects of observation, were largely determined by the instruments that measured them. The reality revealed to physicists from the late 1920s onwards came to be increasingly recognized as a hyperreality, since it was constituted by the parameters of the measuring equipment and the instruments of mathematical calculation. In the words of the American physicist Heinz Pagels,

it is meaningless to talk about the physical properties of quantum objects without precisely specifying the experimental arrangement by which you intend to measure them. Quantum reality is in part an observer-created reality … with the quantum theory, human intention influences the structure of the physical world.⁴

The most challenging methodological questions for present-day physics, engaged in the modeling of such speculative entities as “quarks” and “strings,” are the following: What in fact is being investigated? What is the status of so-called physical objects and in what sense can they be called “physical” or even “objects” if they are called into existence by a series of mathematical operations?

Quantum mechanics became the first discipline to confess its hyperscientific character or, more precisely, the hyperphysical nature of its objects. In getting ever closer to the elementary foundations of matter, science has discovered the imaginary and purely rational character of that physical reality, which it allegedly describes but which in fact it invents. In the past, discoveries and inventions could be clearly distinguished: the former revealed something that really existed in nature, the latter created something that was possible and useful in technology. Today the categories of discovery and invention are not easily delimited, since all discoveries tend to become inventions. The difference between discovery and invention has become blurred, at least as far as the deepest, originary layers of reality are concerned. The more one penetrates into these layers, the more one finds oneself in the depths of one’s own consciousness.

Similarly, the more perfect the instruments used for the observation of physical reality, the less reality itself can be detected in a proper sense, as something different from the conditions of its observation. This is precisely how “an observer-created reality” comes into existence, as expressed in Baudrillard’s concept of hyperreality. This concept, in relation to cultural objects, was first introduced by Baudrillard in his book Symbolic Exchange and Death (1976), half a century after Niels Bohr laid the foundation for a new understanding of physical objects as “influenced” by human intention (1927). It is the improvement of instruments for the observation and reproduction of physical and cultural reality that obscured reality as such and made it interchangeable with its own representations. In his statement “From medium to medium, the real is volatilised,” Baudrillard is referring to the most authentic and sensitive means for the reproduction of reality, such as photography, cinema, and television. Paradoxically, the more truthful the methods of representation, the more dubious becomes the category of truth. An object presented with the maximum authenticity no longer differs from its own copy. Hyperreality supplants reality as truthfulness makes truth unattainable.

This process is not limited to the field of hyperphysical objects but can be seen in literary criticism, philosophy, ideology, and in the theory and practice of the social and sexual revolutions. These spheres of “hyperization” are so diverse and at such a distance from one another that it is impossible to speak of a direct influence among these processes. Rather, they embody a new limit of cultural construction and “reality simulation,” at which both Russia and the West simultaneously arrived.

3. Hypertextuality

Along with hyperphysical objects, what might be called hypertextuality has also emerged, altering the relationship between criticism and literature.⁵ Modernist criticism of the 1920s and 1930s, as represented by its most influential schools, such as Russian formalism and Anglo-American New Criticism, and later structuralism, attempted to free itself of all historical, social, biographical, and psychological elements in order to isolate the phenomenon of “pure” literariness. This literariness of literature is analogous to the “elementary particles” of the texture of literature, its ultimate and irreducible essence. Criticism thus saw itself as engaged in a process of purifying literature by separating out all those “additional,” “extraneous” layers introduced by earlier schools of criticism: the Enlightenment, romanticism, realism; biographical, psychological, and historical criticism; naturalism and symbolism, and all other critical fashions of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Criticism now wanted to free literature from an imposed content in order to turn literature into pure form, to reduce it to the “device as such,” to the text in itself. Everything that was formerly valued in literature—the reflection of historical reality, the author’s world view, the influence of the intellectual trends of the times, the inferred higher reality of symbolic meanings—now seemed naive, old-fashioned, and extraneous to literature.

But as the process of purification of literature from all non-literary elements continued, reducing literature to the text itself, so the process of appropriation ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• CONTENTS
• Preface to the First Edition
• Preface to the Second Edition: Postmodernism and the Explosive Style of the Twenty-First Century
• Introduction: “New Sectarianism” and the Pleasure Principle in Postmodern Russian Culture
• Part I: The Making of Russian Postmodernism
• Part II. Manifestos of Russian Postmodernism
• Part III. Socialist Realism and Postmodernism
• Part IV. Conceptualism
• Part V. Postmodernism and Spirituality
• Conclusion: On the Place of Postmodernism in Postmodernity
• Select Bibliography
• Index of Names
• Index of Subjects