Michael Epstein

January 1994, Atlanta
Emory University
russmne@emoryu1.cc.emory.edu

 

1. The Modernist Premises of Postmodernism

 

The first half of the 20th century evolved under the banner of numerous revolutions, such as the “social,” “cultural” and “sexual,” and revolutionary changes in physics, psychology, biology, philosophy, literature and the arts. In Russia, momentous changes took place in spheres which were not the same as those in the West. But both worlds were united through a common revolutionary model. This fact explains the typological similarities, which have emerged in the second half of the 20th century, between Western postmodernism and contemporary Russian culture, which is evolving, like its Western counterpart, under the sign of “post”: as post-communist or post-utopian culture.

 

Our analysis will deal with the laws of cultural development of the 20th century which are shared by the Western world and Russian society, nothwithstanding the fact that this was Russia’s epoch of tragic isolation from and aggressive opposition to the West. It was Russia’s revolutionary project which distinguished her from the West, but it was precisely through this “revolutionariness” that Russia inscribed herself into the cultural paradigm of the 20th century.

 

Revolutions are certainly a part of the Modernist project. In the widest meaning of the term “modern,” this project is a quest for and reconstruction of an authentic, higher, essential reality, to be found beyond the conventional, arbitrary sign systems of culture. The founding father of Modernism was in this respect Jean-Jacques Rousseau, with his critique of contemporary civilization and discovery of a primal, “unspoilt” existence of man in nature. The thought of Marx, Nietzsche and Freud, which exposed the illusion of an ideological self-consciousness, discovered an “essential” reality in the self-propagation of matter and material production, in the life instinct, in the will to power, in the sexual drive and in the power of the unconscious. These discoveries were all creations of Modernism.

 

In this same sense, James Joyce, with his discovery of the “stream of consciousness” and the “mythological prototypes” underlying the conventional forms of the “contemporary individual,” was a 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.” Velimir Khlebnikov, who insisted on the essential reality of the “self-valuable,” “trans-sense” word, affirmed the shamanistic incantation of the type “bobeobi peli guby” in place of 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 labour of others by means of all manner of ideological illusions and the bureaucratic apparatus.

 

On the whole, Modernism can be defined as a revolution which 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 one defined this essential, authentic being: whether as “matter” and “economics” in Marxism, “life” in Nietzsche, “libido” and “the unconscious” in Freud, “creative elan” in Bergson, “stream of consciousness” in William James and James Joyce, “being” in Heidegger, the “self-valuable 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 criticised by Postmodernism as the “last” in a series of illusions, as 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,” in fact, “transcendental” world. This critique of “realistic fallacy” nurtures diverse postmodern movements. One of these, Russian Conceptualism, for instance, exposes the nature of Soviet reality as an ideological mirage and as a system of “supersignificant” signs projected by the ruling mind onto the empty place of the imaginary “signified.”

 

Our task is to explore the intricate relationship of Modernism and Postmodernism as the two complementary aspects of one cultural paradigm which can be designated by the notion “hyper” and which in the subsequent analysis will fall into the two connected categories, those of “super” and “pseudo.” If Russian and Western Postmodernism have their common roots in their respective Modernist past and the revolutionary obsession with the “super,” so also the current parallels between Western Postmodernism and its Russian counterpart, their common engagement with the “pseudo,” allow us to glimpse the phenomenon of Postmodernism in general in a new dimension. This new depth, which it acquires through the comparison, is projected as the path leading out of a common revolutionary past, whose heritage both postmodern paradigms — the Russian and the Western one — are striving to overcome.

 

Paradoxically, it was the revolution as a quest and an affirmation of a “supersignified,” a “pure” or “essential” reality, which has led to the formation of the pseudo-realities, constituted by hollow, non-referential signs of reality, with which postmodern culture plays in both Russia and the West.

 

What follows is an attempt to analyze “the modernist premises of postmodernism in the light of postmodern perspectives of modernism,” or, simply speaking, the interdependence of the two historical phenomena. My argument will focus on the variety of modernist approaches, in physics (quantum mechanics), in literary theory (new criticism), in philosophy (existentialism), in psychoanalytic theories and practices (sexual revolution), in Soviet social and intellectual trends, such as “collectivism” and “materialism” — which expose the phenomenon of “hyper” in its first stage, as a revolutionary overturn 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 modernist to postmodernist stage, from “super” to “pseudo.” What I want to argue is the necessary connection between these two stages, “super” and “pseudo,” in the development of 20th century cultural paradigm. 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 common “revolutionary” legacy.

 

2. “Hyper” in Science and Culture

 

A series of diverse manifestations in the arts, sciences, philosophy and politics of the 20th 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 20th century life have been brought to a limit of development, so that they have come to reveal their own antitheses.

 

The concept of “hyperreality” in the above sense of the prefix “hyper” 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 in the face of the dominance of the mass media. On the face of it, mass communication technology appears to capture reality in all its minutest details. But on that advanced level of penetration into the facts, the technical and visual means themselves construct a reality of another order, which has been called “hyperreality.” This “hyperreality” is a phantasmic creation of the means of mass communication, but as such it emerges as a more authentic, exact, “real” reality than the one we perceive in the life around us.

 

An illustrative example is the influential movement in the art of the 1970’s and early 1980’s, called Hyper-Realism. Works produced by this movement included giant color photographs, framed and functioning as pictures. Details, such as the skin on a man’s face, appeared in such blow-ups that it was possible to see every pore, every roughness of surface, and every protuberance not normally visible with the naked eye. This is the “hyper”-effect, which allows reality to acquire an “excessively real” dimension due entirely to the means of its technical reproduction.

 

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

 

Reality itself founders in hyperrealism, the meticulous reduplication of the real, preferrably through another, reproductive medium, such as photography. From medium to medium, the real is volatilized, 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.¹

 

This paradox was discovered by quantum physics long before the advent of the theoreticians of postmodernism. It was the scientists who first discovered that the elementary particles, that is, the objects of observation, were largely determined by the measuring instruments. The reality which was revealed to the physicists from the late 1920’s onwards came to be increasingly recognised as a “hyperreality,” since it was constituted by the parameters of the measuring equipment and the mathematical calculations. In the words of the American physicists 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. . . . [W]ith the quantum theory, human intention influences the structure of the physical world.”²

 

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

 

Quantum mechanics became the first discipline to admit to its hyper-scientific character or, more precisely, the hyper-physical nature of its objects. In getting ever closer to the elementary foundations of matter, science is discovering 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. In the present, there are no such strictly delimited categories of discoveries and inventions, 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.

 

In the same way, the more perfect instruments for the observation of physical reality are used, the less can it be detected as reality in a proper sense, as something different from the very conditions of its observation. This is precisely the creation of “an observer-created reality” which makes the case for Baudrillard’s concept of hyperreality. The notion of “hyperreality,” in relation to cultural objects, was introduced by Baudrillard in his book Symbolic Exchange and Death (1976), half a century later than Niels Bohr laid foundation for the 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 dimmed out reality as such and made it interchangeable with its own representations. In his statement “From medium to medium, the real is volatilized . . .” Baudrillard refers to the most authentic and sensitive means for the reproduction of reality, such as photography, cinema, and television. Paradoxically, the more truthful are the methods of representation, the more dubious the category of truth becomes. An object presented with the maximum authenticity does not differ any more from its own copy. Hyperreality supplants reality as truthfulness makes truth unattainable.

 

Alongside the hyperphysical objects, there are several other parallel processes generating the “hyper,” emerging particularly in the timespan of 1920’s to the 1930’s. These spheres of “hyperization” are so diverse and at such distance from one another that it is impossible to speak about a direct influence between these processes. Rather, they describe a new limit of being and perception, at which Russia and the West had simultaneously arrived.

 

3. Hyper-Textuality³

 

In the human sciences the same thing takes place as in the natural sciences. Along with hyperphysical objects emerges what could be called hypertextuality. The relationship between criticism and literature undergoes a change. The Modernist criticism of the 1920’s and 1930’s, as represented by the most influential schools, such as Russian Formalism and Anglo-American New Criticism, and later Structuralism, attempts to free itself from all historical, social, biographical and psychological moments, integrated into literature, in order to separate 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 is engaged in purifying the stuff of literature by separating from it all those additional layers, with which it was encumbered by schools of criticism of earlier times: the Enlightenment, Romanticism, Realism, the biographical, psychological and historical criticism, the criticism of Naturalism and Symbolism, and all other critical fashions of the 19th and early 20th century. That is, 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 which was 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 — all of this now seemed naive and old-fashioned and extraneous to literature.

 

But as the process of purification of literature from all non-literary elements continued to reduce literature to the text itself, so the process of appropriation of that text by criticism developed alongside it, until the text was transformed into a thing wholly dependent on and even engendered by criticism. The literary work thus becomes a textual product, created in the modernist critical laboratory by means of the splitting of literatures into “particles” or structural elements and by virtue of the separation of literature from the admixtures of “historicity,” “biographicality,” “culturalness,” “emotionalism,” “philosophicalness,” considered alien and detrimental to the text.

 

In the same manner as textual criticism, quantum mechanics splits the physical object — the atom — into so many minimal component parts whose objective existence fades into ideal projections of the methods of observation and the properties of the physical measuring appartus. Pure textual signs, excised from literature in the manner of the smallest irreducible particles or quants, are equivalent to ideal projections of the critical methodology. Since these signs are purified of all meanings, supposedly imposed by the author’s subjectivity and extraneous historical circumstances, the critic is the only one empowered to read them as signs carrying meanings or signs with potential meanings. It is the critic who determines the meanings of those signs, intially purified of all meanings.

 

The paradoxical result of such a purification of literature has been its increasing reliance on criticism and on the method of interpretation. Both Formalism and Anglo-American ‘new criticism’ make literature accessible to the reader through the intermediary action of criticism itself. Literature thus becomes a system of pure devices or signs, filled with meanings by a criticism according to one or another method of interpretation. In other words, criticism bans literature from its own territory and substitutes the power which the writer used to exercise over the mind of the reader by the power of the critic.

 

In the mid-60’s, the result of this modernist overturn was reflected in the words of the English critic George Steiner who complains about this new status of a critic as the Master of a hyper-textuality: “The true critic is servant to the poet; today he is acting as master, or being taken as such.”⁴ Similarly, Umberto Eco remarks that “at present, poetics are coming more and more to get the upper hand of the work of art. . . .”⁵ And according to the writer Saul Bellow, “criticism tries to control the approaches to literature. It confronts the reader with its barriers of interpretation. A docile public consents to this monopoly of the specialists — those ‘without whom literature cannot be understood.’ Critics, speaking for writers, succeeded eventually in replacing them.”⁶

 

Certainly, all these negative responses to the modernist revolution in criticism belong themselves to anti-, rather than postmodernist consciousness; more precisely, they designate the very limits of modernism. Postmodernism emerged no sooner than the reality of text itself was understood as an illusionary projection of a critic’s semiotic power or, more pluralistically, any reader’s interpretative power (“dissemination of meanings”). The critical revolution which began with Russian formalism in the 1920’s and continued with structuralism in the 1950’s-1960’s ended with a brief reaction in the 1960’s when lamentations about “the critical situation” and the domination of critic over creator became popular. With the advent of postmodernism, both modernist enthusiasm for the “pure” reality of text and antimodernist nostalgia for the “lost” reality of literature became things of the past.

 

4. Hyper-Existentiality

 

Hypertextuality as a phenomenon of literary criticism parallels the phenomenon of the hyper-object created by physical science. Another form of “hyper” can be found in one of the leading Western philosophical trends between the 1920’s to the 1950’s. European Existentialism turned to the authentic reality of individual existence, to “being as such,” which precedes any categorization, every rational generalization. With this, Existentialism seemed to subject the “abstract,” “rationalistic” consciousness of idealistic systems from Plato to Descartes and Hegel to crushing criticism.

 

Yet it is the case that as early as Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground, Russian literature pointed to the process of the production of being or of “pure existence” from a[n] [abstract] consciousness which dissolved all concreteness and formalness of being. This “pure being” was constituted by the temporal duration of a permanence. Existence thus became a pure abstraction of being, produced by consciousness and deprived of all characteristics which might impart concreteness to it. In his concreteness, a man is either one or another entity, he is either lazy or diligent, a clerk or a peasant and so on. Dostoevsky’s underground man, one of the first Existentialist (anti)heroes in world literature, is not even capable of rising to the definition of a good-for-nothing, or an insect. His consciousness is infinite and even “sick” in its “excessiveness”; it destroys the definitiveness which enslaves the “dull,” “limited” people of action, pushing towards that ultimate limit of existence at which a human being is nothing concrete but only is, simply exists.

 

Not only couldn’t I make myself malevolent, I couldn’t make myself anything: neither good nor bad, neither a scoundrel nor an honest man, neither a hero nor an insect. . . . [A] wise man can’t seriously make himself anything. . . . After all, the direct, immediate, legitimate fruit of heightened consciousness is inertia. . . . I practise thinking, and consequently each of my primary causes pulls along another, even more primary, in its wake, and so on ad infinitum. That is really the essence of all thinking and self-awareness. . . . And finally, “Soon we shall invent a method of being born from an idea.⁷

 

Thus existentialist critique of routine forms of existence (“neither a hero nor an insect”), paradoxically, brings forth even more abstract kind of existence, “a method of being born from an idea.” The quest for such absolute being, which precedes all rational definitions and general classifications — such as psychological traits or the attributes of belonging to a profession — is not less abstract and rational than such classifications. It is even more abstract. It is the limit of the abstraction of being, which is also an abstraction of singularity, resulting in a kind of “hypersingularity,” which is only itself and which is alien to all forms of typicality. Such is the result of the existential quest. This “hypersingularity,” based on the “in-and-for-itself” (to borrow a Hegelian term), is the highest possible abstraction, which clings to the “tip” of the self-conscious consciousness, dissolving all qualitative determinateness. This it does in the same way as quantum physics dissolves the determinateness of matter to obtain elementary particles as projections of mathematical description. Precisely because of its “elementariness,” existence thus becomes the metaphysical “quant,” the ultimate, indivisible particle of “matter” or existence-as-such — a derivation of the most speculative type of consciousness, which objectifies itself in the form of “being as such.” The existentialist self-definition “I am” is much more abstract than “essentialist” definitions like “I am a reasonable being” or “I am a lazy man.”

 

In Hegel, the Absolute Idea develops through its embodiment in increasingly concrete forms of being, according to the principle formulated as “the progression from the abstract to the concrete.” Starting with Kierkegaard, being itself becomes a form of abstraction. This is the abstraction of “the particular,” the unique “this one here,” which applies equally to any concrete form of existence, from insects to human beings, from the peasant to the artist, who are completely dissociated from any typical features of the genus, which Hegel still endows with the concreteness of the manifest idea. Contrary to a conventional opinion, Kierkegaard is a much more abstract thinker than Hegel. Hegel’s thought proceeds from the abstract idea to its specific manifestations, whereas Kierkegaard’s thought proceeds from concrete idea to abstract singularity. Hegel’s Idea goes through the process of concretization through being; the Existentialists’ being itself goes through a process of abstraction through the ultimate generalization of the idea of “being.” Thus being becomes “pure being” or an almost empty abstraction, a “hyperbeing,” the form of Heidegger’s and Sartre’s “nothing.”

 

Sartre’s La Nausee demonstrates how the “unhappy” consciousness of Roquentin, not bound by anything and raised to the highest degree of abstractness, suddenly encounters — but in reality engenders — the abstract texture of being, of the roots and of the earth, stubborn in its absurdity and inducing nausea. This absurdity, which the Existentialist consciousness discovers everywhere as the revelation of a “true” reality, which has not been distorted or generalised, and which is given anterior to any act of rationalization, is in fact “hyperreality.” It is the product of a rational generalisation, which singles out in the world such an all-embracing trait as the “irrational.”

 

Existentialism is not a negation of rationalism but rather its ultimate expansion, a method of rationalistic construction of the universal principle of irrationality, designated as “will” by Schopenhauer, as “life” by Nietzsche, as “existence” and “the individual” by Kierkegaard. This irrationality is much more cerebral and abstract than all the forms of rationality which divide being into concrete types, into essences, into laws and into concepts. Rationality always contains at least a certain dose of concreteness because it is always in a determinate relation with “some thing,” it is “the sense of a concrete thing,” the rationality of something which needs to be defined or specified from a rational point of view. “Irrationality” does not demand such concretisation, it is “irrationality as such,” “the absurdity of everything,” it represents “an all-embracing absurdity.” It betrays its ultimate generality precisely through its totally and nausiatingly indiscriminate relationship to the concrete things. The irrational world, which ostensibly eschews rational definition, is a product of the most schematizing rationality, which negates all concrete definitions of things and which finds its ultimate expression in abstractions such as “existence as such,” “the particular as such.”

 

At this ultimate level of abstraction, being is only the opposite of non-being. As Sartre asserts in Being and Nothingness, consciousness, or being-for-itself, in its freedom from all ontological determinations, is pure nothingness emerging from itself and nullifying, or, to use a Sartrean term, “nihilating” the substantial definitions of the exterior world.

 

The type of existence of the For-itself is a pure internal negation. . . . Thus determination is a nothing which does not belong as an internal structure either to the thing or to consciousness, but its being is to-be-summoned by the For-itself across a system of internal negations in which the in-itself [the world of objects] is revealed in its indifference to all that is not itself.⁸

 

As Hazel E. Barnes comments, in Sartre “consciousness exists as consciousness by making a nothingness arise between it and the object of which it is consciousness. Thus nihilation is that by which consciousness exists.”⁹Therefore, the phenomenon of existence is determined by the series of “internal negations,” proceeding from the consciousness as pure nothingness. In this case, the absurdity of being, as it appears to the nullifying consciousness, can be understood as the derivative of this nothingness, of this abstraction that strips concrete things of their meaning. One would imagine that there is nothing more abstract than “nothing,” since it is draws itself away from all peculiarities and specificities of being; but being, as it is posited in Existential philosophy, is even more abstract than non-being, since it emerges as the second order projection of this nothingness. This is no longer that nothingness which has a reality in-and-for-itself, like the self-effacing nothingness of self-consciousness. This is a nothingness which has lost that intimate relationship to its for-itself and which is turned towards the absurd Being which surrounds it, which is pure abstraction, deprived of even the concreteness of self-consciousness and of self-negation. This Being is simple nonentity — a being-for-no-one.

 

Behind the apparently authentic and self-evident “existence as such” postulated by Existentialism, one can detect the hyper-reality of a reason abstracted from itself in the emptied form of ultimate irrationality. It is a conceptual abstraction to such a degree that it abstracts itself from its own rational foundation in order to affirm itself as its own opposite — as Being as such, ungraspable by reason, unconcretizable and untypifiable. There are two degrees of abstraction: a moderate abstraction, which is confined to the sphere of reason, and an extreme abstraction, which goes beyond the limits of reason. When rational abstraction goes as far as to abstract from rationality itself, it converts into the concept of universal irrationality. This form of abstracting reason from reason is the one which gives rise to the notion of the non-sense of pure Being.

 

5. Hyper-Sexuality

 

In the 20th century, the “hyper” phenomenon is also in evidence in the sphere of intimate personal relationships, in which experimentations with sex come to the fore. War is declared on the Puritanism of the 19th century and the entire Christian ethics of “asceticism.” The sexual instinct is set up as the primordial reality, underlying thought and culture. The Nietzschean celebration of the life of the body prepared European society, which had experienced the trauma of the First World War and the explosion of aggressive emotions, for the acceptance of psychoanalysis, which becomes the dominant intellectual trend of the 1920’s. The scientific work of Sigmund Freud and Wilhelm Reich and their pupils, the artistic discoveries of surrealists, Joyce, Thomas Mann, D.H. Lawrence, Henry Miller and others, the new freedom of sexual mores characteristic of the culture of jazz and cabaret — all of these things placed the 1920’s under the banner of the so-called “sexual revolution.” The “basic instinct” is sought in theory and art, and extracted in pure form as the “libido.”

 

But, as already noted by many critics, in this pure form, the “basic instinct,” abstracted from all other human capabilities and driving forces, is nothing but an abstract scheme, the fruit of the analytic activity of reason. In the words of the English novelist and religious writer, C.S. Lewis, “Lust is more abstract than logic; it seeks (hope triumphing over experience) for some purely sexual, hence purely imaginary conjunction of an impossible maleness with an impossible femaleness.”¹⁰ Moreover, the notion of an “abstract lust” emanates from a bookish, post-logical conception of desire, generated by the theorizing of the sexual revolution. The passionate dionysiac ecstasy of the “flesh as such” thus becomes like the burning fantasy of the onanist, who through pure mental effort separates this flesh from the great diversity of the individual spiritual and physical qualities of the desired “object.” On an individual level, such exaggerated fantasies may lead to the exhaustion of physiological potency. On the scale of Western civilization, it was a construction of still another level of hyper-reality: the artificial reproduction of bodily images, more bright, tangible, concentrated, hypnotically effective than the physical reality of the body, and therefore evoking mental ecstacy while eroding the properly physical component of attraction. Thomas Eliot noticed about Lawrence’s novels: “His struggle against over-intellectualized life is the history of his own over-intellectualized nature.”¹¹ As is the case with existentialism, the struggle against rationalism is an expression of over-rational approach, an abstraction of “existence of such” or “flesh as such.”

 

Critics often point to this internal contradiction of Lawrence’s creativity: “[H]is world of love [is] more strangely and purely abstract than that of any other great author. The more intense and urgent it is the more it is a world inside the head. . . . [T]he ‘phallic consciousness’ seems a hyper-intellectual, hyper-aesthetic affair, making Lady Chatterly one of the most inflexibly highbrow novels ever written.”¹² It is interesting that Bayley still uses the prefix “hyper” to characterize the intellectual component of Lawrence’s erotic images, while today we would rather identify them as “hypersexual.” In the first case, hyper means “super,” while in the second case “pseudo” or “quasi”: the critic’s implication is that Lawrence’s images are super-intellectual, but pseudo-sexual. This evolution of hyper‘s predominant meaning from super to pseudo constitutes the very core of hyper‘s dialectics, as will be discussed in the last section of this chapter.

 

Hypersexuality, as one might call this “rationally” abstracted and hyperbolised sexuality, emerges in the theories of Freud and in the novels of D.H. Lawrence, as well as, on a more basic level, in the upsurge in the circulation of pornographic writing. Pornography is the very bastion of hypersexuality which presents the condensed simulacra of sexuality: glossy photographs and screen images of unthinkable sex, of unimaginably large breasts, powerful thighs and violent orgasms.

 

Even the theory of psychoanalysis, for all its scientific caution and sophistication, reveals this hyper-sexual, and more broadly hyper-real, tendency. The world of the unconscious, proclaimed by Freud to be the primal human reality, was discovered or invented by consciousness, as its internal, in-depth “self-projection.” This invention assumed the proportions of another reality, preceding and exceeding the reality of consciousness itself. True to its ultimate destiny in the 20th century, consciousness thus creates something other than itself out of itself in order to surrender to this other as something primal and incontestably powerful. A more likely explanation of this phenomenon is that it is not at all a primary or “pre-existing” reality, opposed to consciousness from within, but that the unconscious is constructed by consciousness itself as a form of self-alienation of consciousness, which then sets itself up as a “super-real” entity dominating the latter. Hyperreality is a mode of self-alienation of consciousness. The Freudian unconscious thus becomes one of the most pronounced and hypnotically convincing projections of consciousness “outside itself.” As Derrida remarked, “the ‘unconscious’ is no more a ‘thing’ than it is a virtual or masked consciousness,” the continuously delayed consciousness which can never come to terms with itself.¹³

 

Even Freud admitted that the discovery of the unconscious as a force dominating consciousness must serve the overall increase in the power of consciousness itself. Psychoanalysis is a process of decoding and illuminating the unconscious, which would allow consciousness to regain control over this “boiling cauldron of desires.” In other words, consciousness discovers the unconscious in its ‘underground’ in order to resume dominance over it. Thus psychoanalysis is the method of penetrating into those spheres of consciousness which consciousness itself had declared to be beyond its penetration; through the symbols of the unconscious, consciouness plays hide-and-seek with itself.

 

As distinct from quantum mechanics, which recognizes its physical object to be prestructured by consciousness a priori, psychoanalysis sets up the conscious structuring of its psychical object as its final goal. But in both cases the physical and psychic realities prove to be at least partially projections or functions of the intellect, which observes and analyzes them. Perhaps psychoanalysis would benefit methodologically if it followed the example of quantum mechanics and recognized that the observed attributes of the unconscious were primarily determined by or even derived from the very conditions of its observation and description.

 

The significance of the sexual revolution, theoretically dominated by psychoanalysis, did not consist of the fact that organic life and instinctual life changed the modes of their existence from one being dominated by consciousness to one of dominance. That was only the ideological intention, the “wishful thinking” of the revolution. Where instinct dominated — in the intimate sphere, in real-life sexual relations — there it had always been dominant. The sexual revolution was in fact a revolution of consciousness, which had learned to produce life-like simulations of a “pure” sexuality, which were all the more “ecstatic” the more abstract and rational they became. The result of the sexual revolution was not so much a triumph of “natural” sex as a triumph of the mental over the sexual. Sex thus became a spectacle, a psychological commodity, reproduced in infinite phantasies of seduction, of hypersexual power, of a hyper-masculinity and a hyper-femininity. This “hyper,” which renders sexual images into mass products of popular culture, is a quality missing from nature. It is a quality introduced by a consciousness with infinite powers for abstraction and generalization.¹⁴

 

6. Hyper-Sociality

 

The four processes indicated so far, which led to the creation of hyperobjects — namely: the hyperparticles of quantum mechanics, the hypersigns of literary criticism, the hyperbeing of Existentialism and the hyperinstincts of psychoanalysis and the sexual revolution — were processes taking place in the advanced Western societies of the 20th century. Within the communist world, however, similar processes of “hyperization” were taking place at the same time, during the 1920’s and 1930’s, and these extended over the whole social sphere. Even communism itself, its theory and practice, could be viewed as the typically Eastern counterpart of the “hyper”-phenomenon.

 

Soviet society was obsessed with the idea of communality, of the communalization of life. Individualism was castigated as the gravest sin and a “cursed remnant of the bourgeois past.” Collectivism was proclaimed the highest moral principle. The economy was built on the communalization of private property, which came under the jurisdiction of the entire people. The communal was placed infinitely higher than the individual. Communal existence was considered to be prior and determinative in relation to individual consciousness, in full accordance with Karl Marx’s formula: “It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness.”¹⁵ In factories, in kolkhozes, in party meetings, in penal colonies, and in urban communal apartments, a new man “of communist future” was produced — a conscientious and effective cog in the gigantic wheel of the collectivist machine.

 

But this new type of sociality, infinitely tighter and denser in its imperatives compared to the earlier (pre-revolutionary) one, was nothing but another instance of hypersociality and a simulacrum of communality. In fact, the social bonds which unite people were rapidly being destroyed. Towards the middle of the 1930’s, even people in familial relationships, like husbands and wives, parents and children, could no longer trust one another in all respects; their Party loyalty and social obligations forced them to denounce and betray even their closest friends. The civil war and the process of collectivization destroyed the natural ties among members of the same nationalities and professional communities. “The most tightly-knit society in the world” (a cliché of Soviet propaganda) was an aggregate of frightened, alienated individuals and tiny, weak social units of families and friends, each of which was trying on his or her own to survive and to withstand state pressure.

 

Even the base of the entire state pyramid rested on the will of a single individual, who regulated according to his own needs or judgement the work of the whole gigantic social mechanism. And it is curious that it is precisely communism, with its will to communality, which always and everywhere gave rise to the personality cult: in Russia, in China, in North Korea, Roumania, Albania and Cuba. This is not accidental but is the expression of the hypersocial nature of the new society. Communism is not a natural, primary sociality, arising on the basis of biological and economic connections and needs, which unite people. It is a sociality constructed consciously, according to a plan, emanating from the individual mind of the “founder,” and enacted by the individual will of “the leader.”

 

The “pure” sociality of the communist type is similar to all those modernist models of “hypers” described above: the “pure” sexuality of psychoanalysis, the textuality of new criticism, and the elementariness of quantum mechanics. Communism thus represents some sort of hypnotic quintessence of the social body, which excludes and destroys everything individual and concrete by virtue of its exclusive abstractness — and for this very reason reveals, in the final analysis, its purely individualistic and speculative origin. If we conventionally qualify the pre-modernist state of civilization as “traditional,” then traditional sociality made provisions for the whole gammut of individual diversity and for private forms of property, just as traditional sexuality included the physical, emotional, social, and spiritual intimacy of two people, and just as the traditional work of art gave expression to the views of the author and the spirit of the age. But the “hyper,” by virtue of its artifically constructed character, is the “extract,” the “quintessence” as it were, of one particular property or sign to the exclusion of all others. Hypertextuality excludes all illusions of a separable, distinct content (opposed to form), hypersexuality excludes the notion of a “spiritual intimacy,” or “sexual relation.”¹⁶ In similar fashion, hypersociality excludes the “illusion of independence and personal freedom.” “Hyperization,” the process enacted by modernism and realized by postmodernism, achieves this exclusion precisely because it represents the hypertrophy of an abstract property, its heightening to an absolute, “super” degree.

 

7. Hyper-Materiality

 

The same applies to the basis of the basis of the Soviet Weltanschauung — “scientific materialism.” From its point of view, physical matter comes first, is primary while consciousness and spirit are secondary. Reality is through and through material and even thought represents only one form of the “movement of matter,” along with physical, chemical, and biological forms of the same movement. Such is the postulate of this philosophy, aspiring towards a completely sober, scientific approach to reality, verified by experience. “The world is moving matter, and nothing exists which would not be a specific form of matter, its property or a form of its movement. This principle took shape on the basis of the achievements of scientific cognition and Man’s practical mastery of Nature.”¹⁷

 

But as is well-known, in practice Soviet materialism never tried to conform to the laws of material reality but strove instead to refashion this reality. The material of nature was subjected to merciless exploitation, pollution and destruction, the material life of the people was brought into decline, the economy was subordinated not to the material laws of production but to entirely idealistic five-year plans and ideological edicts of the successive party congresses. As Andrei Bely remarked at the beginning of the 1930’s, the dominance of materialism in the USSR brought about the voiding of matter itself. Materialism was, in essence, a purely ideological construct, which raised the primacy of material into a theoretical absolute. In practice, materialism annihilated the material. “Matter,” which is thus aggrandized and separated from the principles of spirituality, consciousness and aim-orientedness, becomes a simulacrum of matter, destructive of matter as such. Just as hypersociality served the cult of the singular personality, so hypermateriality became a means of legitimating abstract ideas in their scholastically enclosed finality. The materiality of this materialism was thus the same “hyper” phenomenen as “collectivism,” “the libido,” “the elementary particle” and “the pure text.”

 

It is significant that out of the six spheres of “hyperization,” three are traditionally subsumed under the term “revolution”: the social, sexual and scientific. But three other “hypers” — hyperexistentialism, hypermaterialism and hypertextuality — can equally well be qualified by the term “revolution,” since they, too, developed in a movement of complete reevaluation of values: from essentialism to existentialism (the revolution in Western philosophy); from idealism to materialism (the revolution in Soviet philosophy); from “idea” and “content” to form and device and text (the revolution in criticism). To this we can add the revolution in the means of communication — the mass media revolution — which led to the birth of TV, video and computer technologies, producing a reality on the screen, perceived as more real than the world beyond the screen.

 

8. From Super to Pseudo

 

The very nature of the revolution appears in a new light — as the means or force productive of hyperphenomena. In its straightforward aims, the revolution is a coup — it sets up one antithesis in the place of another: matter in the place of thought, the collective in the place of the individual, the text in place of its content, the instinct in the place of the intellect. . . . But paradoxically it is revolution itself which demonstrates the impossibilty of reversal and expands, rather than eliminates, the power of the “suppressed.” That which is victorious in a revolution, gradually turns out to subordinate itself more and more to the very thing which it was supposed to have vanquished. Materialism has thus turned out to be much more detrimental to the notion of matter and much more scholastic and abstract than any idealistic philosophy anterior to it. Communism has turned out to be more favorable for the abolute affirmation of a singular, almighty individuality than any kind of individualism which preceded it. Literature reduced to a text and to a system of pure signs turns out to be much more dependent on the will of the critic than “traditional” literature, filled with historical, biographical and ideological contents. Matter, reduced to elementary particles, turns out to be a much more ideal entity, mathematically construed, than matter in the traditional sense of the term, having a certain inertia mass. Sexuality reduced to pure drive turns out to be much more cerebral and phantasmagorical than the ordinary sexual urge, which results in a total state of enamouredness in the physical, emotional and spiritual sense. It is the “purity,” the “quintessentiality” as the goal of all the above-named revolutions — pure sociality, pure materiality, pure sexuality and so on — which transforms them into pure antithesis and negations of themselves. That is why pure reality is ultimately a simulation — a simulacrum — of the property of “being real.”

 

Let us return to the initial meaning of the prefix “hyper.” Unlike the prefixes “over-” and “su[pe]r-,” it designates not simply a heightened degree of the property it qualifies, but a superlative degree which exceeds a certain limit. (The same meaning is found in words like “hypertonia,” “hypertrophy,” “hyperinflation,” “hyperbole” . . .) This excess is such an abundant surplus of the quality in question that in crossing the limit it turns into its own antithesis reveals its own illusionary nature. The meaning of “hyper,” therefore, is a combination of two meanings: “super” and “pseudo.” “Hyper” is such a “super” that through excess and transgression undermines its own reality and reveals itself as “pseudo.” By negation of a thesis, the revolutionary antithesis grows into “super” but finally exposes its own derivative and simulative character.

 

Certainly, it is neither the classic Hegelian dialectics of thesis and antithesis with subsequent reconciliation in synthesis, nor the modernist model of negative dialectics elaborated in the Frankfurt school (Theodor Adorno and Herbert Marcuse), with an irreducible opposition of a revolutionary antithesis to a conservative thesis. Postmodernist dialectics (if it is still possible to combine such heterogeneous terms) implies neither reconciliation nor revolution but the internal tension of irony. Antithesis, pushed to an extreme, finds thesis inside itself, moreover, exposes itself as an extension and intensification of this very thesis. Revolutionary negation proves to be an aggrandizement, a hyperbole of what is negated. Antithesis circles back on thesis, as its disguised and exaggeratated projection.

 

In this way, materialism proves to be not a negation of idealism, but its most radical and militant form, ruthlessly destructive in regard to materiality. Communism proves to be not a negation of individualism, but its most voluntarist form ruthlessly destructive in regard to communality. The “hyper” is the “other” of the initial quality (“thesis”), its “second order” reality, its virtual intensity. The excess of quality turns into the illusion of this quality whereas its opposite which was intently negated actually becomes heightened.

 

Thus hypersociality heightens the power of an individual over society. It is a sociality raised to a political and moral imperative, to an absolute degree of “oughtness” or “duty,” which is no longer connected to any particular being, like mother, father, child, one’s neighbour and so on, but which, instead, destroys all such particulars in order to absolutize an ultimate individuality or particularity in the “personality cult.” The meaning of “hyper” in this instance subdivides further into the following: “super” and “pseudo.” Hypersociality is thus simultaneously a supersociality and a pseudosociality. That is, the social factor is subject to such a degree of intensification that it exceeds and negates all the particularities which initially made up the social. Thus the social becomes the virtual “other” of the social, which through its phantasmic growth fills a space which does not belong to it — the space of the particulars and, therefore, of the social itself, which it stifles.

 

Historically, intensity and illusion, “super” and the “pseudo” evolve in the development of “hyper” only gradually, as two successive stages. Its first “revolutionary” phase is represented by the “super.” This is the phase of the enthusiastic discovery or construction of new realities: of the socialist “supersociety,” of the emancipated “supersexuality,” of the elementary “superparticle,” of the self-referential “supertext,” of the self-propelled “supermatter.” The first half of the 20th century was mainly preoccupied with the revolutionary advancement of all these “super” phenomena. They germinated in the 1900’s to 1910’s in the theoretical soil of Marxism, Freudianism and Nietzscheanism; in the 1920’s and 1930’s, these “super” theories take on practical form — as the social, sexual, scientific, philosophical and critical revolutions.

 

This is followed in the second half of the 20th century by a gradual realization of the virtuality of all these ubiquitous superlatives. “Hyper” flips to its other side and second stage — “pseudo.” The transition from the “super” to the “pseudo,” from the ecstatic illusions of pure reality to the ironic realization of this reality as a pure illusion, accounts for the historical transformation of European and Russian culture in the 20th century which can also be described as the movement from modernism to postmodernism.

 

From this standpoint, Gorbachev’s perestroika (meaning literally, “reconstruction”) and Derrida’s deconstruction can be seen as isomorphic stages in the development of Soviet hyper-sociality and Western hyper-textuality.¹⁸ Both exemplify a transition from the “super” stage, manifested in the rise of communism and formalism (“new criticism”) in 1920’s-30’s, to the “pseudo” stage of 1970’s-1980’s. Both demonstrate that “structuredness” (in the form of ideally structured society or structuralist conception of textuality), which was the goal proclaimed by communist and formalist-structuralist movements, manifests only the illusion of social integrity or logical coherence. In the same way that Gorbachev revealed the illusory character of socialism, which proved to be a utopian communality of alienated individuals, Derrida exposed the illusory character of structuralism, of the very notion of “structure” which proved to be a utopian communality of actually decentered, dispersed, disseminated signs.

 

The “pseudo” phase is the common denominator for all the crises taking place at the end of the 20th century in place of the constructs of the early 20th century: social, scientific, philosophical and other revolutions. Under the sign of the “pseudo,” all of the following phenomena undergo a crisis: the crisis of structuralism in the human sciences, the crisis of the concept of elementariness in physics, the crisis of Leftist projects and Freudian Marxism in political ideology, the crisis of materialism, existentialism and positivism in philosopy, the demise of Soviet ideocratic system and communist society — such are the consequences of world-wide metamorphosis of “hyper” from “super” to “pseudo.” It is a crisis of the utopian consciousness as such, followed by the construction of parodic “pseudo”-utopian discourses.

 

In its historical evolution from the “super” to the “pseudo,” the “hyper” only now becomes revealed in its full significance, as the necessary connection and succession of its two phases, modernism and postmodernism. Modernism viewed its revolutionary accomplishments as a breakthrough into metaphysically “pure” reality of the super: supersexuality, supermateriality, supersociality — whereas postmodernism reveals the full range of the hyper’s dialectics, as an inevitable conversion of “super” to “pseudo.” From a postmodernist perspective, socialist revolution, sexual revolution, existentialism, materialism are far from being those liberational insights into the highest and “truest” reality they claimed to be. Rather they are intellectual machines designed for the production of pseudomateriality, pseudosexuality, pseudosociality, etc. Thus postmodernism finds in modernism not only the target of criticism, but also the ground for its own play with hyperphenomena. These hyperphenomena would be impossible if not for those revolutionary obsessions with the “super” that gave rise to the tangible “voids” and flamboyant simulacra of contemporary civilization, including non-sensical, empty forms of totalitarian ideologies which gave rise to Russian postmodernism.

 

In the final analysis, every “super” phenomenon sooner or later reveals its own reverse side, its “pseudo.” Such is the peculiarly postmodernist dialectics of “hyper,” distinct from both Hegelian dialectics of comprehensive synthesis and Leftist dialectics of pure negation. It is the ironic dialectics of intensification-simulation, of “super” turned into “pseudo.”

 

Every revolution of the first half of the 20th century is doubled and cancelled out with its own “post” of the century’s end. These “posts” are sprouting in all cultural spaces where the most radical changes and dramatic reversals occurred in the modernist era. Contemporary society is postmodern, postcommunist, post-utopian, post-industrial, post-materialist, post-existential, and post-sexual. At this point, the dialectics of “hyper,” which shaped the ironic wholeness of 20th century culture, comes to its complete self-realization.

Notes

 

*This essay is an excerpt from the forthcoming book, Russian Postmodernism: New Perspectives on Late Soviet and Post-Soviet Literature, written by Mikhail Epstein, Alexander Genis, and Slobodanka Vladiv-Glover, and published by Berghahn Books (Providence, Rhode Island and Oxford). Publication is scheduled for Spring, 1997. The ISBNs are as follows: 1-57181-028-5 (cloth) and 1-57181-098-6 (paper). Thanks to Dr. Vladiv-Glover, who translated and edited the original Russian language version of this essay. It was then revised and extended by the author.

 

1. Jean Baudrillard, Selected Writings, ed. Mark Poster (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1988) 144-145.

 

2. Heinz R. Pagels, “Uncertainty and Complementarity,” The World Treasury of Physics, Astronomy, and Mathematics, ed. Timothy Ferris (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1991) 106.

 

3. As a reader will see, the concept of “hyper-textuality” in the context of this article has nothing to do with the “hyper-text” in commonly-understood, “electronic” sense of the word. “Hyper” is used here in the sense “super” and “pseudo” which relates it to the concepts of “hyper-sexuality,” “hyper-sociality,” etc.

 

4. George Steiner, Human Literacy, in The Critical Moment. Essays on the Nature of Literature (London, 1964) 22.

 

5. Umberto Eco, “The Analysis of Structure,” ibid. 138.

 

6. Saul Bellow, “Scepticism and the Depth of Life,” The Arts and the Public, ed. James E. Miller Jr. and Paul D. Herring (Chicago-London: U of Chicago P, 1967) 23.

 

7. Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes From Underground/The Double, Trans. Jessie Coulson (London: Penguin Books, 1972) 16, 26, 27.

 

8. Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (New York: Washington Square Books, 1966) 256, 257.

 

9. Sartre 804.

 

10. C.S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love (New York: Oxford UP, 1958) 196.

 

11. Cited in D.H. Lawrence: A Critical Anthology, ed. H. Coombes (Harmondsworth: Penguin Education, 1973) 244.

 

12. John Bayley, The Characters of Love (New York: Basic Books, 1960) 24, 25.

 

13. Jacques Derrida, “Différance,” A Derrida Reader. Between the Blinds, (New York: Columbia UP, 1991) 73.

 

14. In more detail the phenomena of hyper-textuality and hyper-sexuality, though in different terms, are considered in my articles “Kritika v konflikte s tvorchestvom” (“Criticism in Conflict with Creativity”), Voprosy literatury (Moscow, 1975) 2: 131-168; and “V poiskakh estestvennogo cheloveka” (“In Search of a Natural Human Being”), Voprosy literatury, (1976), 8: 111-145. Both articles are included in my book Paradoksy novizny. O literaturnom razvitii XIX-XX vekov (“The Paradoxes of Innovation. On the Development of Literature in the l9th and 20th Centuries”) (Moscow: Sovetskii Pisatel’, l988). The affinity between these two modes of hyper (hyper-textuality and hyper-sexuality) is formulated in the following way: “What is the general meaning of the paradoxes examined in the articles about ‘critical situation’ and ‘sexual revolution?’ In one case criticism attempts to extract from its object, literature, the most ‘literary’ essence and to isolate it from non-literature; as a result, it takes up the priority that was designed for the text purified from all ‘metaphysical’ contaminations. In another case, literature (and art in general) attempts to extract from its object, a human being, the most ‘natural’ essence, to purify it from all ‘intellectual’ contaminations; the result is the devastation of nature itself and the triumph of pure rationality” (Paradoksy novizny 249).

 

15. K. Marx. “Marx, Engels, Lenin: On Dialectical Materialism,” Preface, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1977) 43.

 

16. Compare Lacan’s “There is no sexual relation.” “A Love Letter (Une Lettre D’Amour),” Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the école freudienne, ed J. Mitchell and J. Rose, trans. J. Rose (London: Macmillan, 1983) 149-161.

 

17. A Dictionary for Believers and Nonbelievers, trans. Catherine Judelson (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1989) 336. The same formulation can be found in all Soviet textbooks of dialectical materialism.

 

18. Derrida’s own comments on the relationship between the concepts of “perestroika” and “deconstruction” can be found in his small book on his trip to Moscow in 1990. Zhak Derrida v Moskve: dekonstruktsiia puteshestviia (“Jacques Derrida in Moscow: a deconstruction of the journey”) (Moscow: RIK “Kul’tura,” 1993) 53.