Barrett Watten

University of California, San Diego

 

While it has often been said that since the purported “fall of communism” the Soviet Union has become in reality a collection of Third World countries with nuclear weapons and a subway system, this is an untruth. It is the “Second World”–and what is that?

 

(Watten, in Davidson, 23)

 

 Subjectivity is not the basis for being a Russian person. . . . “Protestants,” said Arkadii, “go to church to mail a letter to God, the church, it’s like a post office. The Orthodox church–the building is not symbolic–it is considered to be the real body of God, and Orthodox people too are God because they are together here, not alone, and speaking, by the way, has nothing to do with it.”

 

(Hejinian, in ibid., 34-35)

 
The break-up of official culture, even the “official/unofficial” dialectic that was a part of it, in the Soviet Union led to aesthetic developments characterized by an intense, utopian, and metaphysically speculative subjectivity that I am going to call “post-Soviet” even if it had its origins in earlier periods. Beginning in the 1960s with the optimistic horizons prior to the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, extending through the Brezhnev “era of stagnation” of the 1970s with its fully articulated counterculture, through the opening to the West and the influence of emigration in the 1980s, a series of these developments anticipate their reception as “postmodern culture” in the West. Identifying these “post-Soviet” developments with postmodernism would be to misunderstand them, however; as poet Dmitrii Prigov has said of the Moscow conceptual art of the 1970s, “When [Western conceptualism] entered our part of the world, [it] discovered the total absence of any idea of the object and its inherent qualities or of any hint whatsoever of fetishism” (12). The subsequent valorization of Andy Warhol would have has yet-to-be-determined (though not unimaginable) consequences; so the “Women Admirers of Jeff Koons Club” I encountered in Leningrad in 1989 would be the sign of an emerging feminism as much as an acceptance of the Reagan-era consumerism of Koons’s work. Even the culture of Russian modernism, refracted through Western connoisseurship, has been reinter- preted in the new post-Soviet context in a way discontinuous with its historical origins. In order to understand these developments as not simply the colonization of Western postmodernism, it will be necessary to develop models for Second World discourses of subjectivity. A prospective conclusion is that contemporary post-Soviet culture, once it has expanded to integrate both unofficial and international influences, does not simply mean an uncritical embrace of Western postmodernism but reveals a post-Soviet “subjectivity” that is not simply reducible to the various national identities now contesting the ground of the former Soviet state. I see aspects of this subjectivity in Moscow conceptual art, originating in the 1970s and producing internationally recognized figures such as Komar and Melamid, Erik Bulatov, and Ilya Kabakov, and in the 1980s “meta” literature from Moscow and Leningrad, now being translated in the West, exemplified by poets Arkadii Dragomoshchenko, Ivan Zhdanov, Alexei Parshchikov, Ilya Kutik, and Nadezhda Kondakova.

 

A Metapoetics of Memory

 

Arkadii Dragomoshchenko’s poetry, it was said, “is unlike anything else being written in the Soviet Union today” (Molnar, 7), and direct observation bears this out. At the Leningrad “Summer School” of 1989, Dragomoshchenko was unique in abandoning the (often complex) metrical forms and performative theatricality that, however inflected by skewed and difficult sound patterns and semantics, look back to a precedent “classical tradition . . . as in the Acmeism of Akhmatova or early Mandelstam, [which] stood for heroically distanced emotion and a European cultural intertext” but which often led to poetic norms reduced to “ruthless metricality and relentless rhyming” (Molnar, 10). Dragomoshchenko read his poems as if they were written texts rather than oral presentations of cultural memory embodied in the poet as much as in the poet’s rhymes–unlike Ivan Zhdanov, who declaimed the highly wrought language of his richly textured and difficult lyrics as if ab eterno, directly from memory, to great effect. One listener afterward complained to Dragomoshchenko, “What you are doing isn’t poetry”–because it lacked the generic markers by which poetry had been set apart, in ways directly related to Osip Mandelstam’s memorization and embodiment of his poetry as a standard of truth set against ideological lies. While equally based in an internalized self-consciousness, Dragomoshchenko’s poetry rips a hole in the lyrical fabric of tradition’s modernist authority–not simply for anti-authoritarian motives but to create a new poetics that challenges conventional meaning and its entailments of common knowledge. It would be hard to underestimate the radical effect of this break with the overdeterminations of sound and sense that have provided the standards for Russian verse–and the resulting demand it conveys for a redefinition of collective memory and objective truth.

 

A poetics of collective memory in opposition to official history (often meeting at a middle ground in official/unofficial poets such as Yevgenii Yevtushenko, Andrei Voznesensky, and Bella Akhmadulina) is one of the implicit goals of Russian modernism–the poet (seen as survivor) becomes a living embodiment of memory. But in Dragomoshchchenko’s poem “Nasturtium as Reality,” memory is fractured and refigured by means of a relentless epistemological critique toward a more complicated horizon. The poem begins by essaying “An attempt / to describe an isolated object / determined by the anticipation of the resulting whole– / by a glance over someone else’s shoulder” (93). Spatial and temporal vectors specify the dynamics of this attempt: the poem predicates a temporal series on a “missing X” that precedes it, presumably the nasturtium but also a grammatical “there exists.” This predicative address likewise introduces the “nasturtium” in the second stanza as parallel and equivalent to the “attempt”–with both to be resolved in the “resulting whole” that will make either possible. Equally determining, however, is the opacity of the “glance over someone else’s shoulder”–that which interferes with vision equally motivates it. The nasturtium is seen as if a window were both transparent and opaque, not to the nasturtium but to itself–the “window” is an opaque analogy to transparent language through which a nasturtium normally would be seen: “A nasturtium composed / of holes in the rain-spotted window–to itself / it’s `in front,’ // to me, `behind.'” This “rain-spotted window” is the language of the poem, through whose constructed elisions occurs the possibility of description; on the surface of language, description is “in front,” though from the point of view of subjectivity in the poem the nasturtium is “behind” language (from an easier perspective, of course, “in front” and “behind” mean the nasturtium’s relation to the window). Where a window, like description, is conventionally transparent, here it is a shattered opacity of perspectives, interfering with and determining the gaze much like “someone else,” that leads to grounds of certainty and belief posed grammatically as a question: “Whose property is the gleaming / tremor / of compressed disclosure / in the opening of double-edged prepositions / in / a folded plane / of transparency which strikes the window pane?” Anything but transparently, we begin to see the nasturtium as if in double-edged language that predicts a “resulting whole” of description preceded by “an isolated object.” In the ensuing working through of the poem, memory is displaced and refigured in the spaces opened up by such knowledge through similar means; the poem is a construction of memory and knowledge between a past and a future it will formally embody. Futurity will have accounted for the nasturtium that preceded the poem, making possible the “compressed disclosure” of an intensely sub- jective continuity of memory and perception taking place in and of its language.

 

In stages of approach, the poem sharpens the edges of prospective meaning figured in the nasturtium, often defining the space where it would exist by negation, in terms of its absence from other spaces: “A sign, inverted– not mirror, not childhood. // (A version: this night shattered apart / by the rays of the dragonflies’ concise deep blue / drawing noon into a knot of blinding / foam” (94). In this way, the poem typically shifts “thematic” address to noncontiguous objects of a fractured nature such as this dragonfly (later a specific tree, a flight of “swifts”). Occasional eruptions of what V. N. Voloshinov would have called ideological speech (“A sign sweats over the doorway: `Voltaire has been killed. Call me immediate- ly”) likewise shift the poem away from its “object,” but they cannot detract from its expanding subjective truth: “the knowledge, which belongs to me, / absorbs it cautiously, tying it / to innumerable capillary nets: / the nasturtium–it is a section of the neuron / string” (96). This knowledge is presented not as a report to some transcendent observer–a comparison with Marianne Moore’s aesthetics of natural grandeur in “An Octopus” would fail at this point–but through the substance of language produced from a variety of sites. So shifts away from the ostensible subject of the poem are “only a continuation / within the ends’ proximity” (97); the poem expands to include fragments of dialogue, self-reference (“Arkadii / Trofimovitch Drago- moshchenko describes / a nasturtium, inserts it in his head”; 99), along with its observation of spatial and temporal discontinuities. An increasing axis of meta-commentary is created through the language of the poem by means of such semantic shifts: “The nasturtium / and anticipation rainy as the window and wind- / ow behind wind- / ow / (he in it, it in him) / like meanings smashing each other / [I don’t say, metaphor . . .] / drawn / by emptiness / one of the distinct details–“; 100). Through its insistent reduction of similarity to contiguity– description turning to language–poetry becomes virtually a kind of physics (“The mechanism / of the keys, extracting sound, hovering over / its description // in the ear, // protracted with reverberation into the now”) which depends, for its assertion of palpable reality, on a continual undermining of language by itself (“When? Where? / Me? Vertigo conceives / `things'”; 101). In this expanding horizon of meaning, sense is made “only / through another / (multiplication tables, game boards, needles, a logarithmic / bird,” i.e., anything presentable in language, “and the point isn’t which kind” (103). The poem oscillates between intensely subjective states and objective properties of description, attempting both in either’s negation: “I contemplated the truth behind events listening to the vivid- ness / of the erased words / ready to expound on the defects of precision” to become definitive of poet’s self-canceling voice: “And here in the 41st year of life / A pampered fool, whose speech continually / misses the point” (106). “The Nasturtium” is an account of subjectivity seen through such intensities of language: “I follow from burst to burst, from explosion to explosion, / faces, like magnesium petals floating by, which permit those who remain a misprint in memory / to be recognized” (108), but it makes no assump- tions about a continuity of nature behind the poem as the basis for these effects. Rather, the poem moves directly from the negated description of objective reality to expanded systems of meaning encompassing it: “Conjecture is simple– / the nasturtium is not /// necessary. It is composed from the exceptional exactness / of language / commanding the thing–`to be’ / and the rejection of understanding” (110-11). The poem locates the objective world by placing the language of description under erasure, opening language to many languages and in this way deter- mining what its relation to nature is going to be: “The nasturtium–it is the undiminished procession / of forms, the geological chorus of voices crawling, / shouting, disclosing each other” (112).

 

It is through this clash of languages tending toward future objectivity that a space for refigured subjectivity, seen in purely material strands of memory, can be located. In that futurity is connected here to a poetics of many languages, it is important that Dragomoshchenko is by birth Ukrainian (born in postwar occupied Potsdam, raised in multilingual environs of Vilnitsa, now living in St. Petersburg), although he writes in Russian. He has, in other poems, shifted to Ukrainian as poetic counterpoint specifically to bring up a kind of archaic subtext under the surface of ordinary language, thus allying his epistemological concerns with those of cultural memory. In “The Nasturtium,” such archaic subtexts appear in two autobiographical narratives that emerge out of its nonnarrative continuum. In one such vignette, a typically cinematic moment of self-knowledge, “tossing her skirt on the broken bureau / with wood dust in her hair / a neighbor girl, spreading her legs / puts your hand where it is hottest” (103)–which leads, not quite as typically, to anxious spasms of linguistic cross-cutting. It is as if the eruption of the feminine demands a release of poetic authority, as it does in the next section in a more measured way where an account of the death of a woman close to the poet, again in and of language, locates another range for the outer horizons of the poem: “and all the more unbearable the meaning of `her’ ripened in you / while the quiet work went on revealing / thoughts / (you, her) from the sheath of feminine pain / the silent symmetry crumbling in the immense proximity of the end” (105). In this way “the meaning of `her'” aligns with both memory and objectivity; while there is a difficult cultural truth in this admission of women only at the extremes of authorizing self-knowledge, at least the Russian poetic convention of transcendent nature (think of waving fields of grain as equivalent to verse in a Sovkino documentary of Yevtushenko) is being broken down in its assumptions.

 

This location of a poetics in a refiguring of memory through the limits of objectivity aligns Dragomoshchenko’s work with related projects in post-1960s Soviet culture. So the films of Andrei Tarkovsky, a prior reference point for the semantically shifting world of Dragomoshchenko’s work, crop up in his recent article on poetic subjectivity. Making a figure for collective knowledge, Dragomoshchenko says that the poet may return, like a blind bee, to a “hive” of understanding, but there is no hive. It disappears at the very moment when understanding comes close to being embodied in itself and its “things,” which to all appearances is really the “hive.” We wander through a civilization of destroyed metaphors: road, home, language, a man on a bicycle, embraces, Tarkovsky’s films, moisture, “I,” memories, history, and so forth. (“I(s),” 130)For Dragomoshchenko, “the problem of subjectivization is tautological,” fractally reproduced in the dispersion and refiguring of a collective center, “the hive,” in culture’s unreified objects. Wandering through this “civilization of destroyed metaphors,” one can only figure the holistic tenor from its dispersed vehicles. Such a demetaphorization occurs similarly in a film such as Tarkovsky’s The Mirror (by means of techniques intended as the opposite of Eisenstein’s constructed film metaphors). Nonnarrative, intuitive sequences displace memory, continuity, futurity onto a fragmented world of objects comprising several registers of image. In one, the burning house in the countryside to which mother and son have been removed during the war stands as mnemonic placeholder for the future return of the father that is always to come (there is a question for the viewer if it “really” takes place). In another, the multiple, sidelong, disjunct views down corridors of the state publishing house where the mother worked in the 1930s as proofreader enacts the moment where the collective “hive” dissolves into “things”; millennial horizons become fragments of presence, as in the hinted propaganda poster barely glimpsed on the way to other rooms. Finally, the insertion of documentary footage of the Spanish Civil War argues the film’s subjectivity against the intrusiveness of represented history, which takes on memorial value as loss. Images in Dragomoshchenko have similar organizing dynamics; so “the nasturtium bearing fire” which closes Dragomoshchenko’s poem stands in place of memory’s anticipated return; the overlapping and mutually contradictory frames of descriptive language dissolve certainty into isolated moments; and the interruptions of narrative displace subjectivity toward expanded horizons. Closure–the father’s return or the nasturtium as realized object–is distributed through these registers as partial resolution.

 

The relation between empirical reality and a deferred future that exceeds nature but in terms of which it can only be known (figured here in the form of the poem) is also a central theme in recent discussions in Soviet (and post-Soviet) science. The opening invocation of our “Summer School” was to “be scientific,” but what followed led rapidly away from any question of empirical verification toward a prospective, metaphysical hyperspace in which, for example, “futurist art [like that of Khlebnikov’s post-Euclidean mathematics of world correspondence] has its own dominant in consciousness” (Watten, in Davidson, 43). So a recent article by Moscow philologist Mikhail Dziubenko describes a scientific project that would unite the problem of “new meaning” in poetry and art with an idiosyncratic branch of Soviet science known as the “Linguistics of Altered States of Consciousness”–a quest for a new approach to method characteristic of a wide range of Soviet science. For Dziubenko, “At deep levels of consciousness (which acquire primary meaning in the creative process) the ability to penetrate into the logic of other languages is established. Artistic creativity, then, involves a break- through into another language, which uses the character- istics and lacunae of the original” (27). Such a language, in addition, is based in material, sensed reality, but only for its future potential:

 

We must understand that there is only one linguistic universum, uniting all world languages in the massive entity of their historical development and functional applications. This universum is not a scientific abstraction. It is manifested concretely, on the lowest, phonetic level, in naming, where moreover language differentiations do not play any definitive role, and on the highest, grammatical-syntactic level, in art, which is only possible by virtue of the existence of different languages and which is itself an unconscious borrowing of foreign language structures.(29-30)

 

Here, “the knowledge of one language is knowledge of all languages,” leading to a research program in which “there is no doubt that a Persian specialist could contribute a great deal to the study of Khlebnikov’s works” (30-31). Creativity expands language into a utopian “linguistic universum” in a romantic philology that recalls Wilhelm von Humboldt’s fantasy of whole nations thinking in each of their various languages. There are several points to this excursus into late-Soviet discussions of scientific method: the first is that creativity is thought to have ontological implications; the second is that as material reality, crea- tive language extends, “through characteristics and lacunae,” into a greater reality that contains it; and a third would be that, structuring language in the variety of its altered states as well as being structured by it, subjectivity is not permitted the transcendent distance of the observer but instead experiences loss due to an expanded suprasubjectivity whenever the grounds for language (altered states, presumably) historically change. So the impact of the creative on scientific method is to open a space of loss of certainty that can then be aligned with a need for a reconstituted memory–as it is for Dragomoshchenko. “Nasturtium as Reality” is not only a reconstitution of lyric subjectivity but a parallel text to post-Soviet considerations of collective memory and empirical truth. Clearly “an authoritarian complex” involving several strands in Soviet culture–lyric voice, embodied memory, and scientific objectivity–is being dismantled as the occasion of poetic address.

 

The Fall of Soviet Man

 

The theatricality of Ilya Kabakov’s conceptual albums, paintings, and installations is at a polar remove from Dragomoshchenko’s expansive interiority. Ten Characters, a series of installations with accompanying narratives published as a book of the same name based on the theme of the kommunalka or communal apartment, was presented by Kabakov at the Ronald Feldman Gallery in New York and the Institute for Contemporary Art, London, in 1988-89. These projects had been under development since at least the early 1980s, but one imagines their everyday materials to have been collected, and various components worked on, over the preceding decade. Installation itself, understood as one of the forms by which traditional genres such as painting and sculpture have become destabilized in postmodernism, takes on a culturally hybrid value in Kabakov’s work as most of what was seen in the active Soviet underground of the 1970s was itself “installed” in some nongallery setting such as an apartment or open-air happening; the bulldozer art exhibition of the late Brezhnev era in this sense could be the outer social horizon for the form. The genre continued in Moscow conceptual art in what has been called “Aptart,” which was characterized as uniting a social scale of presentation based in everyday life with a diverse and often aggressively dissonant range of issues, materials, and strategies. This work seems more a cultural breeding ground for new ideas than a finished product, while Kabakov’s installations have all the finish and framing of the most professional work in the genre as it has developed as a component of museum programs over the last fifteen years in the West–witness his inclusion in the recent Dislocations show at the Museum of Modern Art. It would be interesting to chart Kabakov’s movement from Soviet oppositional scale to that of Western postmodernism; this could be read, thematically, in his work as a movement from the simultaneously millennial and dystopian horizons of the Soviet context through to another kind of transcendence implied in Kabakov’s showing, outside the Soviet Union, works that depict its deepest, most interior reality.

 

Subjectivity in Kabakov, rather than being read along some razor’s edge of language in nonnarrative forms addressed to metaphysical horizons, is narratively defined in the life histories of disjunct, created personae configured around the communal apartment seen from a transcendent perspective (even if it is still linked to the metaphysical as an enabling point of reference for the work). Transcendence is really the only option for a social reality modeled on such living arrangements, which, from the Revolution through the Khrushchev housing boom and into the present, typically crammed the urban working class into multi-family dwellings, often one family per room, where everyone shared the collective amenities and, according to Kabakov, life was open-ended verbal abuse. Given this premise, Kabakov has created a world of discontinuous, extreme personality types to be imagined as somehow, impossibly, sharing the same communal space while inventing wildly adventurous behaviors and systems of belief to accommodate themselves to their world. The short narrative accounts that accompany Kabakov’s meticulously detailed physical installations are anything but anecdotal; rather, these narratives form a template through which the realities of Soviet systems of belief can be represented as they would be experienced in everyday life (or byt, a central term in Kabakov’s work, and one that evinces from many post-Soviets an unutterable horror: “Our everyday life, you cannot imagine how boring it is!” once remarked poet Alexei Parshchikov). There is a system of interlocking, mutually supporting belief systems in Kabakov’s byt, a structuring intersubjectivity that gives an accurate value to the represented world of May Day parades, the Moscow Metro, Soviet theme parks outside. “The kommunalka presents a certain collective image, in which all the ill-assortedness and multileveledness of our reality is concentrated and vividly revealed” for Kabakov (Tupitsyn, 50), a reality figured as an “autonomous linguistic organism,” “an extended childhood,” “a repressive sea of words,” “the madhouse,” and so on (51-54). Alternatives emerge: one can go into oneself (“Some of the inhabitants of the communal apartment lead a mysterious, even secretive existence”; Kabakov, 52) or “leap out of oneself,” as Kabakov himself says he did (“While formally I haven’t ceased to live inside myself, I observe what happens from repeatedly shifting positions”; Tupitsyn, 55). Beyond either possibility, “some powerful, lofty, and faraway sound is clearly audible. A higher voice” (54) for both artist and communal residents. Listening to the voice of the “beyond” will be one of the organizing metaphors of Kabakov’s project–it is simultaneously the voice of collective life and the position of transcendence from which the komunalka‘s voices can be heard.

 

So in “The Man Who Flew into His Picture,” subjectivity is drawn as if by a magnet to a negating white space, a ground for pure projection: “He sees before him an enormous, endless ocean of light, and at that moment he merges with the little, plain figure that he had drawn.” At this moment of self-undoing, however, “he comes to the conclusion that he needs some third person, some sort of witness [to be] present to watch him `from the side'” (7). Such a witness is given embodiment as merely the case of delusions in the next room, where “The Man Who Collects the Opinions of Others,” “standing behind the door, immediately writes down in his notebook everything which is said, no matter what” (9). This quest for objectivity yields only another structured fantasy:

 

According to his view, opinions are arranged in circles. Beginning at any point, they then move centrifugally and as they move away from the centre they meet "opinions" moving from other centres. These waves are superimposed, one on top of another; according to him, the entire intellectual world is a gigantic network, a lattice of similar dynamic intersections of these waves. He compared all this to the surface of a lake, where 10-20 stones are randomly and uninterruptedly thrown all at once. (9)

 

“In talking about this, it was as though my neighbour actually saw these magical, shining circles” (10); Kabakov visualizes them likewise in his installation of tidy mock-ups of the character’s notebook pages arranged around the “objects” that gave rise to the “opinion waves.” While this is clearly high satire of venerable Russian literary pedigree, there is an identification with these delusional modes of organizing reality that makes Kabakov’s project unlike the realist mode of describing the subject positions of, say, the flophouse in Gorky’s The Lower Depth (which Kabakov cites in an interview). The meticulous details of Kabakov’s miniature mock-up and full-scale realization of the scene from “The Man Who Flew into Space from His Apartment” reveal a complicity with monumental obsessiveness, as do his “characters'” collections of objects and albums of kitsch postcards. It is Kabakov himself who assembled these Soviet versions of Trivial Pursuit, reframing his activities through the various personae. In each of these works, the space of culture and everyday life is seen as the opposite of the transcendental perspective and monumental organization of Soviet society’s official self-presentation (given the dominant red of numerous cheap posters covering the walls). The explosion that rips a hole in the top floor of the communal apartment, sending its resident into orbit, creates a negative space from Soviet monumentalism, while the orbits of Yuri Gagarin and followers ironically mimed here stand for state-sponsored transcendence purveyed to the masses at large. The desire to substitute material reality for ideological abstraction created this negative space: “I asked him why there were metal bands attached to the model and leading upward from his future flight” (13). Such kitsch futurism–the mechanical predictability of “We are Going to Communism”–seems to have created, in this char- acter, a highly developed metaphysics to explain how it will be:

 

He imagined the entire Universe to be permeated by huge sheets of energy which "lead upwards somewhere." These gigantic upward streams he called "petals." . . . The Earth together with the sun periodically crosses through one of these enormous "petals." If you knew this precise moment, then you could jump from the orbit of the Earth onto this "petal," i.e., you could enter, join this powerful stream and be whirled upwards with it.

 

Fabricating a contraption made of rubber “extension wires” and explosive charges, the resident realizes his objective and blasts into orbit, thus creating a monumental gap in the explanatory fabric of everyday life which others rationalize in a characteristic way: “Maybe he really did fly away, that sort of thing happens.” In the ideological space vacated by monumental trajectories and transcendent goals one can see a cultural breeding ground for rumors, speculations, and theologies of all sorts.

 

Such systems of belief, orbiting as it were around a vacant belief, are made equivalent, in yet another irony, to the material culture that was supposed to provide them with normative expectations. So a metaphorized collecting, a simple accumulation of bits and pieces of culture, becomes the activity of the artist; material reality replaces a more conventionally redemptive collective memory. In works like “The Short Man,” “The Collector,” “The Person Who Describes His Life Through Characters,” and “The Man Who Never Threw Anything Away,” Kabakov makes his art an inductive process adding up to indeterminate but compelling horizons that motivate his fractal characters. The “short man’s” project of accumulation and re-presenting cultural detritus in fold-out albums is a parodic version of realism seen as representing the world “in little”: “Everything that goes on in our communal kitchen, why, isn’t that a subject, it’s actually a ready-made novel!” (20); however, the only people who can stoop so low as even to read this little world are, like its author, little (as the poet Louis Zukofsky wrote, “Strabismus may be of interest to strabismics; those who see straight look away!”); others invited in to view the work merely step over it as an obstacle. The substratum of material culture, reinterpreted as past not present reality, initiates a process of individuation and recuperation in “The Man Who Never Threw Anything Away”: “A simple feeling speaks about the value, the importance of everything. This feeling is familiar to everyone who has looked through or rearranged his accumulated papers: this is the memory associated with all the events connected with each of these papers” (44). So this character initiates a project of collecting, preserving, and labeling all the discarded items found in the kommunalka‘s hallway in order to recover this value: “An enormous past rises up behind these crates, vials, and sacks. . . . They cry out about a past life, they preserve it” (45).

 

“The Person Who Describes His Life Through Characters” continues this process of induction to uncover a principle of individuation through his subjects: “that even these variegated fragments belonged not to his single conscious- ness, his memory alone, but, as it were, to the most diverse and even separate minds, not connected with each other, rather strongly different from each other” (34), while “The Untalented Artist” modulates this effect of individuation through structures of the state that in fact produce it; the paradoxical success of his paintings (in the actual installation an excessively beautiful group of large-scale, ideologically inflected works by Kabakov) is described as based equally in the artist’s partly realized native talent and in the lacunae of official projects (various official notices and posters) he was commissioned to paint: “What re- sults is a dreadful mixture of hackwork, simple lack of skill, and bright flashes here and there of artistic premonitions and `illuminations'” (17)–a kind of suprasubjective intention. In “The Collector” a similar suprasubjective horizon looms as the dissociation of identity through collective culture proceeds; arrangements of numerous color postcards on state tourist and memorial themes become “enormous, complex pictorial works which are worthy of a very great professional talent” (31). Recombining disparate strands of the culture produces an effect of “the power of ORDER”; “This is the triumph of the victory of order over everything.” There is a paradox here, however; while it is the artist who in fact created this order by making his arrangements of cultural materials, the voice of order points beyond individuality: “It seemed to me that in some terrible way, some kind of, how shall I say it, idea of COMMUNALITY, was expressed in [the arrangements], that very same thing which surrounded us all in our common overcrowded apartment” (32). This drawing out of the collective voice is pursued in “The Composer Who Combined Music with Things and Images,” whose staged mass productions in the kommunalka hallway, like a miniature version of a Stalinist sports extravaganza, trades the sovereignty of the artist who arranges reality for a collective voice heard by all: “Gradually those who are reading the [arranged] texts begin to notice that beyond the sound of their voices is a faintly heard, special kind of sound” (27)–a transcendent moment reproducing, I would argue, an idea of communality.

 

So we have come full circle, from an obsessively material collocation and implicit satire on Soviet collective life to the question of higher, transcendent, metaphysical perspectives. In “The Rope,” a piece that serves as a comment on his “characters,” Kabakov essays the point at which materialism breaks off and spirituality begins: “So these empty ends of rope . . . represent the soul before and after `our’ life, and in the middle is depicted its life, so to speak, in its earthly segment” (48). Working out from these middles toward the open ends of the soul, Kabakov recuperates the multiple identities of his communal apartment in terms of a single, collective destiny–albeit otherworldly. His project here could not be less like George Perec’s description of multiple lives in the same building in La Vie mode d’emploi, where each life means a separate history, a different outcome rendered in the reified space of owned or rented individual dwellings. Kabakov, in his ironic rejection of Soviet culture, still maintains a totalizing attitude toward history–at the risk of a virtual nihilism in regard to the things of this world, an attitude necessary, it would seem, to maintain a totalizing coherence. In a short text on the status of the “beyond” in relation to material reality, Kabakov speaks of “emptiness” as conditions of his work: “First and foremost I would like to speak about a peculiar mold, a psychological condition of those people born and residing in emptiness . . . . Emptiness creates a peculiar atmosphere of stress, excitedness, strengthlessness, apathy, and causeless terror” (Ross, 55). In the negated space once occupied by a a transcendent, materialized state, there is now the inescapable horizon of a totalizing “stateness”:

 

The stateness in the topography of this place is that which belongs to an unseen impersonality, the element of space, in short all that serves as an embodiment of emptiness. . . . A metaphor comes closest of all to a definition of that stateness: the image of a wind blowing interminably alongside and between houses, blowing through everything by itself, an icy wind sowing cold and destruction. . . . What sort of goals does this wind, this stateness, set for itself, if they exist at all? These goals always bear in mind the mastery of the scope of all territory occupied by emptiness as a SINGLE WHOLE.(58)

 

From this single whole of Soviet reality it is but one step to a profound nihilism (and one that is more socially significant than simply the attitude of an artist): “Nothing results from anything, nothing is connected to anything, nothing means anything, everything hangs and vanishes in emptiness, is born off by the icy wind of emptiness” (59). These collective emptinesses interpret the nonexistent fullnesses, the pasts and futures at both ends of Kabakov’s individual, material rope.

 

Values for transcendence in the project would thus seem to refer importantly to two diverse registers: the this-worldly perspective of the artist-as-character who organizes reality in some compensatory way, and the other-worldly vision of the collective/individual subject, who would seem to have no other option than to await the dystopian millennium. Kabakov, in his position outside and beyond Soviet reality in commenting on his installation for the Museum of Modern Art, explicitly resolves these two versions of transcendence:

 

The installation as a genre is probably a way to give new correlations between old and familiar things. By entering an installation, these various phenomena reveal their dependence, their "separateness," but they may reveal as well their profound connection with each other, which was perhaps lost long ago, which they at some time had, and which they always needed. And particularly important is the restoration of that whole that had fallen into its parts [the separation of art from the "mystical"] I had spoken of.

 

The “mystical” union of restored parts within a formal whole would be one that Kabakov had induced from the ideological horizons of his characters but which, as artist working as it were “outside” the kommunalka, can realize in his chosen form. There is an explicit self-contradiction here; so when Kabakov says in an interview, “Upon discharge from the madhouse, I cease to exist. I exist only insofar as I am the resident of a kommunalka. I know no other self” (Tupitsky, 54), it is clear that his “outside” position as installation artist in the Museum of Modern Art, Kabakov’s position as quasi-Soviet emigre’ (he maintains studios in France and in Moscow), can only be another version of the transcendence strategized from within the confines of collective life. Re-sited within the museum’s horizon, however, this insistence on wholeness becomes reinterpreted as tragic separation and loss, as the Fall of Communism that so comforts the curatorial perspective of Dislocations:

 

Kabakov's reconstruction of the Tenants' Club of Moscow Housing Project No. 8 gives one a sense of the dreary mediocrity of Soviet society. . . . This unwelcome gathering place has been set up for an official lecture on the demerits of unofficial art, examples of which are propped against the drab gray walls between oxblood banners. Although the work of artists outside the system, the paintings nonetheless exemplify some of the bleakness and awkwardness of mainstream Soviet life to which they are the oppositional exception.(Storr, 16-17)

 

Nothing in Kabakov’s work could be construed as endorsing such a view of “opposition”; indeed, it is explicit purpose is to induce a metaphysical wholeness that reinterprets “the unity of opposites we learned about in school.” How then to understand the central conceit of Kabakov’s MOMA installation, that “apparently, someone or something was to appear in the city that evening, and not just anywhere, but right in the middle of the club hall.” The appearance and disappearance of this person occurs: “There is no single description of what happened–the reports of various witnesses maintain the most adamant discrepancies” but leading to a negative vision of sorts: “After all the commotion had subsided, the entire floor in the center of the hall was littered with groups of little white people, constantly exchanging places.” It is almost too easy to view this moment as an allegory for the collapse of central authority leading to a negative social space in which the masses circulate aimlessly, without direction. The too-availability of this reading does seem to indicate an influence of the Museum’s interpretative horizons, trading on Soviet history in a representative installation of Kabakov’s totalizing process. This is the crisis of emigration, of the literal materialization of the transcendent position outside a totality it organizes, and here it leads Kabakov’s partial, metaphysically sited narratives to a grand narrative of somewhat lesser interest. However, it may be said here, as elsewhere, that nothing is lost even in translation, for the likewise evident effect of Kabakov’s piece is to make each of the other installations in this mainstream extravangza–by Adrian Piper, Chris Burden, David Hammons, Louise Bourgeois, Bruce Nauman, and Sophe Calle, indeed the entire permanent collection of MOMA used by Calle as the site for her work–interpretable as the compensatory projects of other residents of an expanded communal apartment. This sovietization of cultural horizons–an opening up from the oppositional politics of the Cold War to the reality of collective horizons–is a hopeful reason to reject Kabakov’s integration into the MOMA show as an imperial trophy collected under the banner of Western postmodernism.

 

Whose Subject?

 

Two aspects of post-Soviet subjectivity are evident in the examples of Dragomoshchenko and Kabakov. In the former, authority is impossibly sited from immanent horizons that entail voices of lyric subjectivity, collective memory, and scientific objectivity. The entire activity of the poem– its creation of new meaning in and of itself–is central to its implicit thesis that subjectivity, while everywhere in its own undoing, cannot be known from a transcendental position. The formal dimensions of Dragomoshchenko’s work– nonnarrative, fractal, predicative, and continually metaleptic–are an instance of a “world-making” poetics that works out of a continuity of fabricated worlds. Central to these constructions is their conveyance of futurity; the lyric voice will have been the authority of present address from a point in the distant future; both collective memory and scientific truth will have been revealed in similar ways. In order to understand the implications for post-Soviet culture here, it will be necessary to develop an account of Soviet subjectivity in relation to such utopian, transcendent, and immanent horizons–survivals, as indicated in the epigraph above, of an embodied collectivity (not necessarily national) preceding the state.

 

In Kabakov’s constructions, a converse implication for the subject may be descried, one that is more amenable to the international horizons of postmodern culture simply because it dismantles transcendence in the process of post-Soviet emigration. These displacements of subjectivity and authority are literally enacted in Kabakov’s shows in the high-rent collective apartments of the West, and in so doing take part in the process by which Soviet authority has been undermined through the foreign contacts that the Stalinist state did so much to prohibit. This new horizon is nothing if not ironic, and the emptying out of the “full presence” of the collective apartment into the nihilism of “stateness” illustrates an eerily dystopian moment. The difference from Western discourses of the postmodern, with their anchoring in rationality and critique, should equally be apparent–with the unforeseen result that the post-Soviet project makes the postmodern one appear even more qualified by an imaginary totality. Here the construction of the postmodern as an effect of Cold War oppositions–hinted at by Fredric Jameson’s citing of it as consequence of the “era of national revolutions” and to that extent inflected by their lost horizons–shows its “cultural specificity” to the West when compared to the emerging post-Soviet horizons.

 

Works Cited

 

• Davidson, Michael, Lyn Hejinian, Ron Silliman, and Barrett Watten. Leningrad: American Writers in the Soviet Union. San Francisco, 1991.
• Dragomoshchenko, Arkadii. Description. Trans. Lyn Hejinian and Elena Balashova. Los Angeles, 1990.
• —. “I(s).” Trans. Lyn Hejinian and Elena Balashova. Poetics Journal 9 (June 1991): 127-37.
• —. “Syn/Opsis/Taxis.” Trans. Lyn Hejinian and Elena Balashova. Poetics Journal 8 (June 1989): 5-8.
• Dziubenko, Mikhail. “`New Poetry’ and Perspectives for Philology.” Trans. Lyn Hejinian and Elena Balashova. Poetics Journal 8 (June 1989): 24-31.
• Jameson, Fredric. Introduction to Postmodernism; or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham, N.C., 1991.
• Kabakov, Ilya. Artist’s statement and text for installation, Dislocations, Museum of Modern Art, 1991.
• —. “Dissertation on the Cognition of the Three Layers . . . ” In Margarita Tupitsyn, Margins of Soviet Art, 144-47.
• —. “On Emptiness.” In Ross, Between Spring and Summer, 53-60.
• —. Ten Characters. London, 1989.
• Molnar, Michael. Introduction to Dragomoshchenko, Description, 7-16.
• Parshchikov, Alexei. “New Poetry.” Trans. Lyn Hejinian and Elena Balashova. Poetics Journal 8 (June 1989): 17-23.
• Perec, Georges. La Vie mode d’emploi. New York, 19xx.
• Prigov, Dmitrii. “Conceptualism and the West.” Trans. Michael Molnar. Poetics Journal 8 (June 1989): 12-16.
• Ross, David, ed. Between Spring and Summer: Soviet Conceptual Art in the Era of Late Communism. Boston, 1990.
• Storr, Robert. Catalogue essay on Kabakov in Storr, ed., Dislocations. New York, 1991.
• Tarkovsky, Andrei. Sculpting in Time: Reflections on the Cinema. Trans. Kitty Hunter-Blair. Austin, Tex., 1986.
• Tupitsyn, Margarita. Margins of Soviet Art: Socialist Realism to the Present. Milan, 1989.
• Tupitsyn, Victor. “From the Communal Kitchen: A Conversation with Ilya Kabakov.” Trans. Jane Bobko. Arts 66, no. 2 (October 1991): 48-55.