Postmodernist thought of the late Soviet period: three profiles

The following article, written by Mikhail Epstein, was first published in Studies in East European Thought volume 73 (2021) and is republished here with the permission of the author.

Abstract

This article introduces postmodernist trends in late Soviet thought through the prism of the three generations: the philosopher and writer Aleksandr Zinoviev (1922– 2006), the poet, artist, and theorist Dmitrii Prigov (1940–2007), and the youngest Soviet conceptualist artistic group “The Medical Hermeneutics Inspectorate” as represented by Pavel Peppershtein (b. 1966; the group’s most active theorist), Sergei Anufriev (b. 1964), and Yurii Leiderman (b. 1963). The article shows how Conceptualism, an influential artistic and intellectual movement of the 1970s–1980–s, used the Soviet ideological system as a material for philosophical parody and pastiche, often characterized also by a lyrical and nostalgic attitude. Conceptualism was not merely an artistic trend: its metaphysical significance is revealed in Aleksander Zinoviev’s “satirical” treatises, in Dmitrii Prigov’s “shimmering” aesthetics, and in “heremeneutic” performances of younger artists who demonstrate the emptiness of all existing canons and the canon of emptiness itself.

Postmodernism · Conceptualism · Concepts · Ideology · Communism ·
Metaphysics · Aesthetics · Aleksander Zinoviev · Dmitrii Prigov · Hermeneutics ·
Irony · Satire · Emptiness

The concept of postmodernism has often been deployed to explain such peculiarities of late-Soviet and post-Soviet culture as the post-utopian mentality, a critical attitude toward traditional notions of truth and reality, and ironic playfulness with regard to the sign systems of various ideologies. [1] Postmodernism exposes the “reality fallacy” of all “master discourses,” discloses the contingency of all concepts, and refuses to ground itself in any one “Reality.” In Russia, the artistic, literary, and intellectual movement most directly related to postmodernism became known from the mid 1970s onward as “conceptualism” ( kontseptualizm ), a term initially borrowed from the artistic school founded in the late 1960s by the American artists Joseph Kosuth and Sol LeWitt. Conceptual art was connected from the very beginning with philosophy and even claimed to be more genuinely philosophical than philosophy itself. In conceptualism, both as art and philosophy, concepts are self-referential units of thinking, ideas presented as ideas. The Russian kontsept as an aesthetic term has a more particular meaning than the English “concept” (whose less “marked” Russian equivalent, indeed, would be poniatie ). Kontsept is not just a concept, but more specifically a work of art or element of such a work that presents a concept in its purity, as a self-sufficient entity. According to Ilya Kabakov, one of Russian conceptualism’s founders: “Precisely because of its self-referentiality and the lack of windows or a way out to something else, [the kontsept ] is like something that hangs in the air, a self-reliant thing, like a fantastic construction, connected to nothing, with its roots in nothing” (Kabakov, 1992).

Conceptualism, as it emerged in the West in the 1960s, remained a narrowly artistic device and had a more limited scope, since its substitution of concept for object proceeded from visual art’s need for deeper self-reflection, without some implicit criticism of Western civilization as a whole. By contrast, in Russia, kontseptualizm revealed much broader philosophical and critical potential, because it took aim at a logocentric and ideocratic society intoxicated with texts and concepts. The Russian version of conceptualism, which flourished in the 1970s and 80 s, established a theoretical and aesthetic distance toward the ideological discourse that dominated Soviet culture. From the start, conceptualism was not a purely artistic movement, but relied heavily on a philosophical foundation. Conceptualist poetry and visual art were theoretically self-conscious, presuming a premeditated and ironic attitude toward the language of ideas. Insofar as people’s thinking was unconsciously conditioned by ideological stereotyping in the Soviet period (as it is, to some extent or other, everywhere and at all times), conceptualists proposed to undermine this process of indoctrination by revealing it to consciousness; in a sense, that is, conceptualism worked as a psychoanalytic instrument for deconstructing the repressive Soviet superego. If psychoanalysis involves curing neuroses by bringing repressed impulses to the light of individual consciousness, the conceptualist project represented an “ideo-analysis” meant to cure the trauma of ideological obsessions by bringing them to the awareness of the collective subject.

Conceptualists view totalitarian thinking, with its claims to all-encompassing truthfulness, as a kind of madness: a network of internally connected, though arbitrary, propositions presumed to coincide with external reality. When turning its attention to more properly philosophical ideas, conceptualism playfully relativizes or paraphrases metaphysical discourse, using its rhetorical models to describe such trivial objects as flies or garbage. This is not merely an attempt at the ironic deconstruction of traditional philosophy; it is also a project for the proliferation of new, multiple metaphysics, each of which consciously demonstrates the contingency of its central concept, be it Absolute Spirit in Hegel’s writings, or a housefly in Ilya Kabakov’s treatise “The Fly as a Subject and Basis for Philosophical Discourse.”

Russian conceptualists, not unlike their Western allies, emphasize the moral implications of philosophical contingency, which undermines dogmatic and hegemonic discourse, and promotes self-irony as a mode of epistemological humility.

Postmodernist thinking reveals the futile aggressiveness of the human mind, which imposes its own ideological schemes on a reality that is inaccessible as such, and yet is continually pursued via a process of representational substitutions and innumerable references without verifiable referents. In this view, any attempt at mental coherency ultimately devolves into obsession and madness, if we define the latter as the state of consciousness divorced or isolated from reality. The method for relating philosophy to reality in postmodernist thought involves not the positive correspondence or identification of concepts with objects, but the revelation of an inexorable and irreducible disjunction between them, a gap bridged only by self-referential, hence, self-ironic conceptualizations. Irony becomes the only possible form of truth for this kind of philosophy, inasmuch as it lacks any criteria for verification but has innumerable criteria for philosophical self-falsification. [2]

This article introduces postmodernist intellectual tenets through the prism of the three generations: the philosopher and writer Aleksandr Zinoviev (1922–2006), the poet, artist, and theorist Dmitrii Prigov (1940–2007), and the youngest Soviet conceptualist artistic group “The Medical Hermeneutics Inspectorate” as represented by Pavel Peppershtein (b. 1966; the group’s most active theorist), Sergei Anufriev (b. 1964), and Iurii Leiderman (b. 1963).

The satirical metaphysics of Aleksandr Zinoviev

Although Zinoviev (1922–2006) never described himself as a postmodernist, his inclusion in this rubric is justified by the kinds of intellectual work that made him famous. Zinoviev emerged on the Soviet intellectual scene as a professional philosopher in the field of formal logic. He worked for 22 years (1954–76) as a professor at Moscow State University and as a senior researcher of the Institute of Philosophy of the Academy of Sciences. His early publications included the monograph Philosophical Problems of Many-Valued Logic (1960) and numerous other investigations of a highly specialized nature. However, Zinoviev’s international renown followed the publication of his philosophical novel-treatise The Yawning Heights (1974; published 1976), and his forced emigration to the West in 1978. He would go on to publish about 30 books of fiction and theory that brought him the reputation of a Russian Swift. Zinoviev’s literary works do not belong to the genre of fiction in a conventional sense but are rather a mixture of philosophical discussion and idle chatter between semifictional characters who represent various outlooks held by Soviet intellectuals.

In the view of Michael Kirkwood, a most diligent explorer of Zinoviev’s work, he exemplifies

a writer who fits, more closely than anyone else I can think of, the model adumbrated in that school of literary criticism associated with Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault…. [H]e writes on matters literary, historical, political, sociological, philosophical, aesthetic, moral and religious, in a mode which defies genre classification. In that sense, he is indeed a ‘scriptor’ producing ‘écriture’. (Kirkwood, 1993, xi)

Zinoviev’s method is described by the prominent Italian specialist in Russian literature Vittorio Strada as

an absurd intermingling of voices making a parody of the dialogues of Plato. The voices didn’t arrive at a definite catharsis: they remained a tangle of viewpoints revealing facets of a single logos: the logos of real-life communism. In moments of crisis, communism goes into a series of modulations of its inner essence which constitute a kind of tragi-comic nonsense. (Cited in Janson, 1988, p. 11)

Several features of Zinoviev’s style qualify him for classification as a postmodernist thinker. Like all conceptualists, Zinoviev addressed his works predominantly to the ideological and social codes of Soviet communism, rendering their absurdity and self-contradictory nature in the form of parody. He also made broad use of pastiche, incorporating clichéd formulas of Soviet propaganda, philosophical abstractions, and psychological stereotypes, and mimicking the (il)logic of bureaucratic style. Most of his works take the form of a seemingly endless series of dialogues attributed to characters whose ideological and philosophical positions are indeterminately related to the author’s own. Zinoviev exemplifies the postmodernist axiom concerning the ubiquity of citation, which goes so far as to enclose every expression in quotes to emphasize the transpersonal nature of thought, which depends more on linguistic structures of discourse than the subjective intentions of the thinker. Zinoviev’s works frequently treat the trite phenomena of Soviet reality, such as the practice of ritualistic official meetings, with incongruously lofty scientific discourse. Thus, he proposes a “newly created science of meetingology,” which is to analyze the typical division between “open” and “closed” meetings. Contrary to its designation, the open meetings generally pass unnoticed by virtue of their very openness, while the closed ones attract the attention of those excluded from them, and their proceedings end up being disclosed to all interested parties. Such paradoxes, revealing the discrepancies between signs and referents, are typical of Zinoviev, whose entire philosophical project is to analyze the artificial and conceptual character of reality.

Extracting Zinoviev’s own views from the discourse of his characters is surely as complicated as identifying Kierkegaard’s views in his pseudonymous works. In Zinoviev’s own words:

The point is that my position really is embodied in the book [The Yawning Heights], but in such a way that the author is eliminated and characters are given the opportunity to speak and argue. That’s why I don’t accept everything they say. And concerning much of what I do accept, they remain silent. Nevertheless, I think that, given sufficiently attentive and repeated readings of the book, a reader can figure out the author’s position…. I can in one context express and defend one judgement and in another something opposite to it. This is not a lack of principle, it is a desire to look at an issue from a different point of view, to regard another aspect of the problem…. I live in the language as in a specific reality, which is complicated, contradictory, fluid. (Zinov’ev 1979, pp. 16–17)

Thus, despite the problem of determining the constantly shifting distance in the relation of narrated speech to the author’s own perspectives, Zinoviev does not preclude an attempt to interpret these “fictions” as representative of his own views.

Zinoviev’s logical treatises are usually ignored by critics, who focus rather on his later creative work. But one can draw curious parallels between his interest in “many-valued logic”—as opposed to two-valued logic, or the logic of mutual exclusion—and his conceptualist vision of ideology. In his treatise Philosophical Problems of Many-Valued Logic, Zinoviev argues that.

a whole series of reasons can be given why the number of truth values is in principle unlimited…. [F]rom an epistemological point of view there are no natural reasons which could prevent man from introducing into the number of his tools of knowledge many-valued constructions and a many-valued conception of logic…. Either human knowledge is evaluated only as true or false, or, other evaluations besides truth and falsity are possible. (Zinoviev, 1963, pp. 122, 123)

This notion of many-valued logic presupposes that a statement may be both (or neither) true or false, opening it to a potentially endless array of interpretations.

Significantly, the same kind of logic is applied to the concept of ideology in The Yawning Heights, in which Chatterer argues:

There are no false ideologies. Nor are there any true ones. Its role in society must be described according to a quite different system of concepts. A society like ours would be unthinkable without some form of ideology. It is ideological at its very base. (Zinoviev, 1979, p. 289)

Thus, Zinoviev’s preoccupation with the many-valuedness of logic extends also to his philosophy of ideology, and in a quite postmodernist way. To designate an ideology as true or false would presuppose the existence of some external reality with which it could be compared. Such is certainly not the case with totalitarian society, where ideology is the reality from which reality is produced. One cannot argue about the truth or falsity of such ideological manifestations as the collective farm or communal apartment—they are forms of an imitative reality constructed by the ideological activity of the Party; they become indistinguishable from reality despite their illusory origin. Zinoviev’s Chatterer expresses this ubiquitous artificiality: “These forms of imitation activity are so convenient and effective in our society … that our entire life takes on the character of an imitation of civilization…. Imitation may take on some form of reality” (Zinoviev, 1979, p. 317). These imitative constructs clearly correspond to what Jean Baudrillard called “hyperreality,” suggesting that Western civilization has produced, in its postmodern condition, a complex of simulations that substitute for reality itself. For this French thinker, it is primarily the visual realm that produces hyperreality; but in the Soviet Union, ideology, primarily in its verbal form, was the vehicle of simulation.

A curious parallel may also be drawn between Zinoviev and another French contemporary, Louis Althusser, famous for his reinterpretation of Marxism from a structuralist and partly postmodernist perspective. Both men independently and almost simultaneously arrived at a definition of ideology as an imaginary realm that lies at the foundation of society. Althusser, in his criticism of the concept of ideology as a purely intellectual activity, writes:

Ideology in general has no history …, or, what comes to the same thing, is eternal, i.e. omnipresent in its immutable form throughout history…. Ideology represents the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence…. [T]his imaginary relation is itself endowed with a material existence. (Althusser, 1971 pp. 160–62, 167)

What is postulated here is the “objectivity” and even “materiality” of ideology, which is not just composed of “beautiful lies” forged by despots or priests to enslave human minds, but presents a structural inevitability of human society. Zinoviev’s Chatterer discusses ideology in much the same way:

The birth of ideology is not within the control of human beings…. That is why ideology comes into the world complete, in possession of all its attributes. The texts have a history. But ideology of itself has no history, for its birth in this sense is an act of realization of its social function…. Ideology is accepted as a fact; it is taken into account or not as is a natural need, and not as a product of human reason or folly. (Zinoviev, 1979, p. 290)

Thus, ideology is not the false consciousness that, according to Marx, has no substance of its own and appears only as an illusory and parasitic distortion of real production relations—it is, to the contrary, the most real thing ever. “[N]othing in history is so durable as something which has no inner foundations, such as a myth, a religion or popular prejudice” (Zinoviev, 1985, p. 75). Zinoviev’s supposition of materiality as subordinate to the conceptual sphere is, again, close to Althusser’s notion of “overdetermination” ( surdétermination ), which stipulated, contrary to orthodox Marxist theory, that under certain historical conditions, the ideological superstructure may be primary , and determine the material base. For Zinoviev, this historical condition is Soviet communism, which attempted to create the base from the superstructure; in other words, to create a socioeconomic system from ideological premises.

To the same extent that ideology becomes a system of material institutions and economic practices, material life becomes a series of ideological actions. In The Yawning Heights, Zinoviev illustrates this comprehensive substitution with a fictional communist city called “Ibansk,” where people “do not live in the old-fashioned and commonplace sense of the word as it is applied to other people in other places. The Ibanskians do not live but carry out epoch-making activities [istoricheskie meropriiatiia]. They carry out these experiments even when they know nothing about them and take no part in them” (Zinoviev, 1979b, p. 13). Such is the suprapersonal nature of ideology, which transforms even ordinary events into signs of historical progress or regress, without the knowledge of its participants. The satiric metaphysics of Aleksandr Zinoviev originates from this discrepancy between the everydayness of subjective existence and the grandiose implications drawn therefrom by a system that attaches ideological value to every occurrence. For example, the Soviet routine of the queue is vaunted by one of Zinoviev’s characters as “the highest form of social communion, expressed in deeds, not words, an absolute social equality between individuals” (Zinoviev, 1979b, p. 748).

The predominance of concept over reality is not confined to the Soviet Union but seems to be symptomatic of a general postmodern predisposition. At the end of Zinoviev’s Homo Sovieticus, the hero, having fled the ideocracy of his homeland for the promised reality of the West, discovers that he has not escaped at all. Initially mesmerized by the magnificence of a huge glass tower in Munich, which he conceives of as the longed-for embodiment of the truly free world, he comes to a sudden disillusionment: “I remembered my Edifice and rushed to the window. It glittered in a blue heaven with such unprecedented beauty that it took my breath away. But what is that? In the most prominent place, a gigantic four-letter word shines forth in all its glory: BANK” (Zinoviev, 1985, p. 206). Thus, even the “pure form” of this architectural wonder is subordinated to the flat concept that gives it meaning.

This is not to say that the relationship between concept and reality was the same in the Soviet Union and the West. Some investigators put a special emphasis on the use of active—as opposed to passive—negation in Zinoviev’s depiction of the Soviet mentality. Taking a given assertion, for example, “I believe in God,” one can oppose it with two negations: (a) “I don’t believe that God exists” (passive negation); or (b) “I believe that God doesn’t exist” (active negation). One can easily equate these respective positions with Western agnosticism in the first case and Soviet atheism in the second. Jon Elster, the political scientist who pioneered the logical analysis of Zinoviev’s “fiction” (Elster, 1988, pp. 118–44), cites several convincing examples of active negation as it relates to Zinoviev’s preoccupation with the absurdity of Soviet ideology. In particular, from The Yawning Heights, Elster cites this: “The objective of the measure was to discover those elements which did not approve of putting it into practice” (ibid., p. 119). [3] Thus, the action pursues no other end than to provoke its own negation.

In fact, this kind of active negation was typical of the Soviet mentality, which was absolutely dependent on what it sought to negate. It struggled against bourgeois conspiracies and “enemies of the people,” creating these illusory targets in order to justify its own activity. Active negation is the type of negation that, depending upon its object, paradoxically maintains it rather than annihilates it. As Elster observes, ideology may be described in Hegelian terms as a kind of consciousness that is “unable by its negative relation to the object to abolish it; because of that relation it rather produces it again, as well as the desire.” [4] Thus, for example, the denial of God by official Soviet atheism became an obsession that represented a constant reminder of God for a people that might otherwise have forgotten about religion altogether.

As a logician, Zinoviev is especially sensitive to the potential absurdity of active negation and also to the danger of failing to discriminate between it and its passive counterpart. “We merely have to distinguish between the absence of desire to do something and the presence of a positive disinclination to do it. Those aren’t the same thing. One can be indifferent to something—i.e. one can lack both the inclination and the disinclination to do it” (Zinoviev, 1979b, p. 105). [5] This sort of indifference, argues Chatterer—who seems in many instances to represent Zinoviev’s own opinion—is quite natural, and should not be confused with hypocrisy or cowardice. Passive negation is the middle way between active assertion and active negation, and for Zinoviev, it represents the optimal alternative to both conformity and outright dissidence, insofar as the latter effectively upholds official ideology (albeit unintentionally). Passive negation, indeed, might even be called the essence of conceptualism, its method, in the sense that conceptualism imparts to ideology neither positive nor negative value, but demonstrates its absurdity and irrelevance, the zero-value of its meaning. Characteristically, Zinoviev, in spite of his longtime opposition to the communist regime, never spoke in support of dissidents, believing that their behavior could even contribute to the consolidation of the repressive system. “What is most curious is the organic need of the society itself for such renegades. Whereas fighting them, the society necessarily engenders them” (Zinoviev, 1979a, p. 112). [6]

But while Zinoviev implicitly seems to argue in favor of a “conceptualist politics” of passive negation, his explicit political stance, as evidenced in journalistic and sociological writings, is decidedly more one-dimensional. Already in his early public pronouncements after his emigration to West Germany (1978), he warns the West against the superficial opinion of communism as a system that maintains itself by force and deception. In his view, communism, as realized in the Soviet Union, responds to the deepest needs of human nature, such as the need for equality, collectivism, and social stability. Certainly one has to pay for these benefits with a modest standard of living, but without this relative poverty, communism’s advantages could not be instantiated. “The merits of communism are its shortcomings and its shortcomings are its merits…. It is under the conditions of collectivism and on its basis that such tendencies develop as to undermine the very collectivist way of life, destroy this great achievement of history” (Zinov’ev, 1983, p. 74). Thus, shortly after his emigration, Zinoviev, in the spirit of his many-valued logic, looked upon communism as a mixed bag of pluses and minuses.

This “dialectical” approach is seen especially in The Reality of Communism, in which Zinoviev analyzes the real manifestations of communism in contrast to its ideological images publicized both by Soviet and Western propaganda. First of all, Zinoviev assumes that the Soviet system is not a deviation from the “correct” or “genuine” communism, “not one of the possible ‘models,’ but the naked essence of communism” (Zinov’ev, 1983, p. 104).

According to Marxist dogma, full Communism does not yet exist in reality, yet a science of it—‘scientific Communism’—does. But in reality, the situation is exactly the opposite: real-life Communism already exists in the form of numerous societies of a particular type, whereas a science of it does not. (Zinoviev, 1984, p. 17)

Zinoviev regards communism as a specific type of civilization, potentially more powerful than capitalism: it is currently in its infancy but promises a formidable future. The West is capable of providing a high standard of living only to some millions of people, while the majority of humanity—“the billions”—cannot achieve it, and communism offers them the best alternative: lower living standards than in the West, but sufficient for survival and, most important, available to all. “What exists in the West is only an arbitrary zigzag of history. Humanity is irritated by this deviation from the norm. Humanity feels that this [comfort and wealth] is not available to everyone and attempts to destroy it” (Zinov’ev, 1983, p. 104). Communism is appealing to “everyone”; this is why it cannot satisfy anyone in particular. The same collective that provides social defense for an individual, restrains the individual’s right to self-assertion. Communist society is a well-balanced system of coercion that is beneficial to the overwhelming majority of its members, to society in general. Individual discontents with communism can never grow into a unified opposition because people are united by their attachment to the communist system and divided by their disagreements with it.

Zinoviev argues that even the deficiencies of the communist system work for its increasing stability, which also includes “a systematic ideological conditioning of the population” that “sets the socio-biological evolution of mankind in a certain direction.” (Zinoviev, 1984, p. 259). Therefore, Homo Sovieticus is “the highest form of civilization. He is superman. He is universal. If need be, he can commit anything frightful. Where it is possible, he can possess any virtue” (Zinoviev, 1985, p. 199). This blatant valorization might be interpreted as ironic, but in his later works, Zinoviev increasingly speaks from the perspective of a true communist believer. The books Zinoviev wrote in the perestroika period evince an increasing nostalgia for the “classic communism” of the Stalinist type (Zinoviev, 1988; Zinov’ev, 1990). This nostalgia is a conventional mood in conceptualism, which tends to reproduce totalitarian models with a subtle mixture of lyricism, irony, and the grotesque. [7]

In later works, however, Zinoviev, would abandon this ambivalence and speak as a straightforward antiliberal and anti-Westernist. If he lets any contradictions slip into his discourse now, it is not because of a love of paradox, but because his intentions are indeed mutually contradictory. Thus, he blames Gorbachev and his “acolytes,” on the one hand, for careerism and phony pretensions to liberalism; on the other, for too much liberalism, which led to the disintegration of the great communist state. Zinoviev famously labels perestroika “katastroika” (with the same prefix as in catastrophe), and in these writings is even more disdainful of Boris Yeltsin’s stumbles into full-scale Western-style capitalism. Zinoviev returned to Russia occasionally in the 1990s, though he did not move there permanently until 1999 when his professorship was reinstated and he could again teach at Moscow University.

In The Crisis of Communism (1990), his last book written before the fall of the USSR, Zinoviev professes an inexhaustible faith in the tenets of Marxism-Leninism, which “could as never before serve as a guiding star in the contemporary confused state of the world” (cited in Kirkwood, 1993, p. 234). [8] Typically, when Zinoviev leaves the confines of his own ironic worldview, he falls victim to the objective irony arising from the ineluctable logic of historical events, which continually seem to undermine his prophecies. One of the staunchest assumptions of his previous work was the unflappable stability of communism, but now that the disintegration of the USSR has mockingly refuted his prognoses, Zinoviev is bound to qualify his previous assertions, albeit unready to abandon them altogether. The result is unintended parody, permitting one commentator to describe Zinoviev’s position just as satirically as had Zinoviev himself treated his whimsical characters: “Communist society is highly stable, except when it is not” (ibid., p. 229). Now it is Zinoviev’s turn to become a target of “Zinovievism” (to coin, or recoin, a term), the type of relentless paradoxicalism he had invented to disclose the irrationality of communist society.

Since Zinoviev’s writing deals with such conceptualized reality as communism, his refusal to take a consciously ironic, “conceptualist” position toward this reality reduces his directly authorial statements to the level of his characters; the effect proves absurdist and grotesque, but now in respect to the author himself. Zinoviev is a conceptualist thinker only in that part of his writing—presumably, the most successful and compelling—that treats the myths of mass consciousness, the sophistications of enslaved intellectuals, and the paradoxical logic of ideology. As soon as Zinoviev digresses from the phantasms of communism to its reality and strikes the pose of its rigorous investigator, this pretension turns against the author, landing him in the ranks of his fictive nonsensical reasoners and philosophizers. The logic of absurdity, which Zinoviev brilliantly discloses in his so-called “sociological novels,” like The Yawning Heights and The Madhouse, converts into the “absurdity of logic” when he tries to master it solemnly and “scientifically” in his articles and sociological treatises. As one of his commentators remarks, there are two types of clowns: those who “mourn life’s deep and tragic absurdities,” and those who behave like enfants terribles and unconsciously make themselves ridiculous (Janson, 1988, p. 23). One cannot but agree with the critic that Zinoviev belongs to both these kinds, respectively, as the author of and a character in his philosophical parodies.

Shimmering aesthetics: Dmitrii Prigov

Conceptualist creativity embraces all sorts of discourse, from abstract theorizing to various forms of artistic and literary production. From the 1970s on, Dmitrii Aleksandrovich Prigov (1940–2007) was the acknowledged leader of Moscow conceptualism, as a writer, sculptor, painter, theorist, and organizer. His theoretical statements, composed in a highly rhetorical scholarly jargon, sometimes reminiscent of structuralist discourse, are at the same time subtle parodies of this philosophical genre. Prigov is the brightest example of the “foolish philosopher,” whose pronouncements seem to be quotations of some quite serious and ambitious—and often intentionally obscure—theoretical text.

Despite his parodic mode, Prigov offers a substantial contribution to conceptualist theory. Like Kabakov, he emphasizes the organic ties between conceptualism and the Russian cultural tradition, which is predominantly verbal and ideologically charged. “[T]he entire local [i.e., Russian] culture was fundamentally conceptualist and had been so for a long time. Moreover, this local conceptualism had arrived at a comprehension of language as stratified layers and had fixed the level of nomination as the object of description” (Prigov, 2015, pp. 1161–1162). The novelty of conceptualism, according to Prigov, is that it realizes the nominative bias of Russian culture and makes it an object of conscious aesthetic play. A conceptualist writer does not pretend to deal with human characters: the subjects of his or her work are linguistic constructions and stereotypes. “The heroes of my poems have become the different linguistic layers (quotidian, state, high cultural, low cultural, religiophilosophical), representing within the limits of the poetic text corresponding mentalities and ideologies which reveal in this space mutual ambitions and pretensions” (Prigov, 1992, p. 102). Thus does the conceptualist author establish distance between himself and the linguistic positions manifested in his works. He is no longer an actor who transforms himself into a character, but a director who is absent from the scene of his poems. The implication behind all of Prigov’s poems is that they are imagined quotations of other poets who have nothing to do with Prigov himself. Like Kabakov, who produces paintings on behalf of fictional characters, Prigov produces verses as if they were written by, for example, a Chinese poet, or a woman poet, or a Soviet conformist requisitely extolling the beauty of Moscow and condemning Reagan’s imperialist policies.

However, the distance between Prigov and his masks is indeterminate and flexible—hence his term for his method: “shimmering aesthetics.” The reader never knows in advance whether the poet is sincere or parodic in his pronouncements, because the degree of his identification with his character changes from line to line, from word to word.

Taking the place of the conceptual, a shimmering relationship between the author and the text has developed, in which it is very hard to define (not only for the reader but for the author, too) the degree of sincerity in the immersion into the text and the purity and distance of the withdrawal from it. I.e., the fundamental content becomes the drama between the author and the text, his flickering between the text and a position outside of it. (Prigov, 1992, p. 102)

Prigov identifies “shimmering aesthetics” as an advanced stage of conceptualism, even referring to it as “post-conceptualism,” since the parody and pastiche traditionally associated with conceptualism are now enriched with “new sincerity.” This kind of sincerity is post-conceptual insofar as it never clearly distinguishes itself from an ironic simulation of sincerity. In other words, “shimmering aesthetics” presupposes a tension between conceptual and nonconceptual modes of expression. Whereas early conceptualism was “hard,” its later permutations have “softened”: there has been a movement away from a strict preoccupation with ideological codes and their alienating ironic reproduction, and toward a more lyrical engagement with the way ideology is manifested in the idioms of poetic characters, whom Prigov calls “heraldic heroes” (“the Federal Agent, Reagan, the Fireman, the Jew,” etc.) (Ibid, p. 102).

This postconceptualist tendency could be seen as a rapprochement between poststructuralist and existential modes since they are both opposed to the hard codes of structuralism. “[O]ur relation to the word is rife with personal-existential tension, [and] local [i.e., Russian] conceptualism—even during its most heroic period—was tinged with personality and emotionalism” (Prigov, 2015, p. 1162). Prigov’s theory postmodernizes existentialism by intensifying personal sincerity to the point of mania or absurdity, where it becomes a linguistic cliché. Thus, many of his poems are variations on topics from Russian classic poetry, with Prigov inserting his own personality into the position of Pushkin’s or Lermontov’s lyrical heroes and pushing their lyricism to the self-parodic extreme of heart-rending confession. This device “permits not only the authenticity of each of them to be revealed within the limits of the axiomatics postulated by them, but also the absurdity of the total ambitions inherent in the desire of each of them to capture and describe the entire world in their terminologies” (Prigov, 1992, p. 102). At the same time, this melodramatic absurdity not only ridicules the heroes’ lyrical excesses but becomes an element of the author’s lyrical self-revelation—even as it is well-nigh impossible to pinpoint the moment where the conceptual and existential merge. [9]

In the light of Prigov’s theorizing, two important stages in the formation of Russian conceptualism can be distinguished and applied to the evolution of postmodernism as a whole. In its first stage, postmodernism sharply opposes itself to modernism in its attempt to demystify its ideological codes and totalizing claims. But this very project of demystification still bears the imprint of modernist radicalism and utopianism; by fighting fire with fire, postmodernism remains captivated by its vanquished enemy. In its second stage, postmodernism establishes an independent identity precisely through its lyrical and nostalgic empathy with all stylistic systems, past and present, including modernism. Instead of a “hermeneutics of suspicion,” which is still modernist in its presupposition of a privileged perspective, postmodernism develops a hermeneutics of trust, of semi-ironic empathy, which approaches all texts and codes with a presumption of their existential authenticity and therefore rejects the demystification project as a matter of hubris. Mature postmodernism is suspicious of suspicion itself because it sees the entire network of cultural symbols as a multilayered play of mystifications.

The canonization of emptiness: the medical hermeneutics inspectorate

The conceptualist movement generated such an abundance of philosophical and quasi-philosophical theories that we have space to discuss only a few of them. Among other artist-thinkers, mention must be made of Andrei Monastyrsky (b. 1949), the leader of the “Collective Actions” group, and Sven Gundlakh (b. 1959) of the “Death-Caps” (Mukhomory) group, whose work in the late 1970s and 1980s significantly influenced the development of later conceptualism.

Among the conceptualist groups of the succeeding generation, the Medical Hermeneutics Inspectorate ( Inspektsiia ‘Meditsinskaia germenevtika’; 1987–2001) was—as its name suggests—the most philosophically motivated. For its three founding members, Pavel Peppershtein (b. 1966; the group’s most active theorist), Sergei Anufriev (b. 1964), and Iurii Leiderman (b. 1963; separated from the group in 1991), hermeneutics is not so much a theory of exegesis as a mode of behavior, encompassing self-reflection and self-interpretation. The group seeks to restore hermeneutics to its original status as one of the medical disciplines, a practical diagnostics focused on bodily symptoms rather than artificial, conventional signs. Instead of taking texts as their objects of interpretation, they concentrate on real things and situations, performing what they call “inspections.” Any experience or behavior can function as an inspection of itself, insofar as it includes self-reflective and self-descriptive components. It is both diagnostic and pathological as it attempts to reveal an abnormality as well as conceptualize it. However, inspection is not merely psychological introspection; it presupposes collective participation in the hermeneutic process, according to which members of the group reinterpret the entirety of a given situation as a text with specific rules of grammar. For example, the “inspectors” might spend time drinking wine with their friends in a restaurant, but this pastime simultaneously constitutes a hermeneutic procedure, an “inspection” of the restaurant and of the wine. The inspection culminates in a real text—a report describing the semiotics of the situation or object under examination, including evaluations of each element, such as waiters, napkins, and glasses, in terms of their relative merits, using the traditional Russian system of grading from one to five. The absurdity of assessing such minutiae offers a parody of ideological and pedagogical gestures, which proceed from a typically totalitarian mania for evaluation. Inspection is meta-ideological discourse—“ideological” because it adds a connotative plane to any denotation, and “meta” because these connotations (evaluations) themselves become the objects of description.

For noninspecting participants of such outings, the practice of inspection can result—since it is never disclosed in advance and therefore cannot be distinguished from “normal” behavior—in a kind of permanent doubling of experience, a total hermeneutization of the world. Once subjected to inspection, every ensuing action reveals a potential for self-reflection and description; every gesture can be interpreted as an exegesis of the gesture itself; by drinking wine, one also assesses what it means to drink wine. Hence, inspection might be said to have a quasi-messianic potential: like angels, who introduce the invisible transcendental dimension into earthly life, inspectors introduce the invisible semiotic, metalinguistic dimension to routine reality. Unlike angelic mediation, however, inspection has no privileged or fixed criterion for evaluation, since every judgement is contingent on the properties of the given situation or object: the “wineness” of the wine, and so on. Curiously, this activity restores the primordial etymological meaning of the term “hermeneutics,” derived from the name of Hermes—but inspectors play messengers to no gods.

Medical hermeneuts do not self-identify as philosophers or theoreticians of aesthetics, but call themselves specialists in the area of “evolving aesthetic categories.” They are not interested in concepts whose theoretical status is already established, but in such elements of everyday life and colloquial language that have the potential to become aesthetic categories. For example, they theorize the category of “the small,” such that the phenomenon of medical hermeneutics itself can be identified as “a big, thick discourse-narrative about the small” (Anufriew et al., 1990, p. 66). According to these hermeneuts, in classical antiquity, the small was categorized as something unworthy of attention, but with Christianity, it came to be counterposed to the world of the large as a domain of specific value. Consider, for example, the place of the child in the Christian tradition, or the image of the “little man” ( malen’kii chelovek, the socially humiliated and intellectually limited) in nineteenth- century Russian literature. In the twentieth century, however, large things, such as superpowers, messianic ideas, and colonial expansions, have so compromised them- selves, proved so dangerous and oppressive, that the small has replaced the large in terms of its significance and value. For example, the rights of minorities have become a central issue of social justice, and local traditions have had an increasing influence on the formation of cultural identities. Now it is the small that is really large, and therefore the very distinction between small and large loses its relevance.

Now that this difference is erased, the category of nothingness takes precedence in culture. Medical hermeneutics proclaims the “empty canon” as the center of contemporary civilization, since postmodernism has drained it of all substance by demonstrating its relativity. If postmodernism, in its revolutionary forms (deconstruction, multiculturalism), did its best to undermine and empty the grand Western canon, now the time has come to emphasize the canonical nature of emptiness itself. [10] We must recognize “the role of the classicizing principle in schizophrenic space” (Anufriew et al., 1990, p. 54). The accent is to be put not on heterodox alternatives to the dominant canon, such as multicultural challenges to Eurocentrism, but on the orthodox observation of the canon of emptiness, or the rules of desemantization. “Empty canon” implies a grammatically correct and pragmatically effective, albeit semantically blank, discourse that maintains the spirit of “orthodoxy.”

Orthodoxy is one of medical hermeneutics’ key concepts, designating the correctness of discourse as such, without any verifying or falsifying relationship to reality or other discourses. “Orthodox practice is the behavior of language on the border; the canon of emptiness is the border unfolding not in the direction of ‘unknown’ or ‘known’ but within itself” (Anufriew et al., 1990, p. 55). In other words, the border, as the semantic difference between objects, concepts, and words, now functions not as a mode of organization of cultural information, but as absolutely empty space in need of its own cultivation. Difference is different from what it differentiates and has no cultural or informational meaning; it is the “zero modality” of discourse that enables all signs but is devoid of any specific significance. If deconstruction works with existing texts and demonstrates their ambivalence or obscurity, what medical hermeneutics proposes is the construction of texts within this emptiness, a place its proponents call the “orthodox hut” (ortodoksal’naia izbushka), presupposing that it has an inner space that itself must be filled and canonized. This practice of construction within emptiness is designated by the Russian word obustroistvo (“arrangement”), which is different from other politically loaded words with the same root— for instance stroitel’stvo (“construction,” used Sovietly especially in the context of “building communism”) or the famous perestroika (“restructuring”)—in that it emphasizes not constructing, deconstructing, or reconstructing anything outside, but structuring inner space, literally “constructing around from within.” Only after the positive meanings of culture are deconstructed can the genuine construction within emptiness recommence.

This process can lead to a new ideologization of the cultural canon, as well as its historization, lyricization, and utopianization, which are principally different from ideology, history, lyricism, and utopianism in themselves, as these have already been deconstructed. “Emptiness is a characteristic of the ‘unknown’ after the desacralization of the Empty Center that was produced by postmodernism. Ideologization can occur only after the critique of ideology made by postmodernism. Therefore, we locate ourselves in a zone of cultural self-knowledge that is only possible after postmodernism” (Anufriew et al., 1990, p. 56). The relationship of ideologization to ideology can be compared with the relationship of inspection to participation: it is a double-action that includes its own hermeneutic assessment.

Furthermore, ideologization, and other possible “-izations,” like historization or lyricization, indicate a new, postinspectional stage of hermeneutics, where the very form of participation, such as ideology, exists only as the projection of a hermeneutic mind that is grounded in emptiness. Ideology is produced as one of many elements in “orthodox” practice; that is, according to the rules governing the relationship of ideological signs. Medical hermeneutics is concerned not with ideology as such, but with an ideological canon, as well as historical and lyrical canons— purely grammatical structures devoid of any political or psychological meaning. In this case, hermeneutics abolishes, “emptifies” the textual object that had still been present in deconstruction, and produces its own textual armature as a system of rules for correct writing. Any genre, any type of discourse, can be reproduced hermeneutically as an empty canon, thus realizing the Kantian idea of the aesthetic as a pure form of purposiveness without purpose. What hermeneutics produces, therefore, is not a new ideology, designed to influence politics and transform reality, but artistic forms of ideologization, devoid of any specific content. In the same way, the lyrical verses produced by hermeneuts have nothing lyrical about them; rather, they inspect and expose the textual strategies of lyricism. They are devoid even of the parodic or ironic intention characteristic of earlier conceptualism and certainly avoid the nostalgic overtones and “new sincerity” of later conceptualism. For hermeneuts, these canons of irony or sincerity are already empty, and what is intended is the mere restoration of the canon of lyricism as a purely formal matrix.

Postmodernism was justified as a self-critical stage in the development of Western culture, but now that practically everything has been deconstructed, a new constructivism can come into play: the construction of ideological, historical, and lyrical worlds that cannot be deconstructed, since their “default meaning” is no meaning at all. To canonize emptiness means to reinstate the entire richness of world culture in a new modality impervious to deconstruction; the variety of canons having been stripped of their validity, now, devoid of meaning and purpose, all forms of culture can be recanonized in their emptiness, resurrected into the afterlife. Pavel Peppershtein and Sergei Anufriev’s subsequent evolution toward “psychedelic realism” manifests this trajectory of their art and theory: reality itself turns out to be one of many hallucinations, and far from the most reliable and convincing one. [11]