This article was downloaded by: [Northeastern University]

On: 26 October 2014, At: 16:31

Publisher: Routledge
Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House,
37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK

Third Text
Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information:
http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/ctte20

The body‐without‐a‐name
a
Victor Tupitsyn
a
Professor of Peace , University of Westchester , New York
Published online: 19 Jun 2008.

To cite this article: Victor Tupitsyn (1999) The body‐without‐a‐name, Third Text, 13:48, 3-15, DOI:
10.1080/09528829908576804

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09528829908576804

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the “Content”) contained
in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and our licensors make no
representations or warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the
Content. Any opinions and views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors, and
are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Content should not be relied upon and
should be independently verified with primary sources of information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for
any losses, actions, claims, proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoever
or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to or arising out of the use of
the Content.

This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic
reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any
form to anyone is expressly forbidden. Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://
www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions
 Third Text 48, Autumn 1999

The Body-Without-a-Name
Procrastination as a cultural phenomenon
Downloaded by [Northeastern University] at 16:31 26 October 2014

Victor Tupitsyn

The only thing I was sure of was my name.

Luigi Pirandello *

From the early 1960s to the late 1980s, western perceptions were based on a
rather crude model of Russian culture, reduced to the opposition between
Soviet orthodoxy and dissent. The triviality of this model was balanced by the
fact that dissidents' perceptions of the West were based, in turn, on a pre-
sumption of identity — which was imagined as something beyond dichoto-
mies, devoid of the differences and contradictions that generate ideological
discourses. In alternative Soviet circles, the division of the inhabitants of
foreign (bourgeois) countries into liberals and conservatives, left-wing and
right-wing radicals, and so on, was received sceptically and, as a rule,
attributed to official propaganda. This situation was reminiscent of the Victo-
rian era, when the procrastination of the image of the Other (for example, the
1 Luigi Pirandello, The Late Orient) was accompanied by its substitution — as with children in the mirror
Mattia Pascal. This 1923 stage — with some sort of illusory universality of image.
novel translated by Familiarity with western art of the post-war era was made possible by
Livingstone, opens with
the words, 'My name is several exhibitions of American and European painting in Moscow, and also by
Mattia Pascal. One of the an influx of coffee-table books and catalogues published abroad.2 Curiously,
few things, in fact about the heritage of Kandinsky, Larionov, Goncharova, Malevich, Tatlin, Rodchenko
the only thing I was sure
of was my name...' and Lissitsky had far less influence on the Soviet artists of the Sixties than did
western modernists, who sheltered the spectre of the Russian avant-garde
2 These exhibitions took
place between 1956 and unwanted at home. Knowledge of this 'ghost of Hamlet's father' was displaced
1962. from individual and institutional memory; this was equally true of cultural
 4
Downloaded by [Northeastern University] at 16:31 26 October 2014
3 See Louis Althusser and
Etienne Balibar, Reading
Capital, Verso, London/
New York, 1979, pp 243-247.
4 See my conversation with
Kabakov in V Tupitsyn, The
Other of Art,' Ad Marginem,
Moscow, 1997, p 106.
consciousness and of the cultural unconscious. In psychoanalysis (Lacan and
his school), this kind of radical displacement is known as foreclosure (forclusion,
Verwerfung). Foreclosure results in paranoid ruptures in the fabric of memory
and language. Generally, this applies to patients who, as young children,
became witnesses to, participants in, or victims of, crimes. Such memories
evoke discomfort (horror, shame) and must be eradicated, leaving irreplaceable
gaps, clearances, 'empty centres'. And even though the eradication of memory
is usually analysed in terms of individual rather than collective psychic
defence, the analogy vnthforeclosure also works for mass, or societal, catalepsy.
The consequences of foreclosure can be traced in the example of the socialist
modernists, who came back from 'procrastinated time' only partially, if at all.
The socialist modernism of the 1930s, which pleased neither the pure avant-
garde zealots nor the Stalinist art mavins, existed simultaneously with socialist
realism but, unlike the latter, was able to create a style of its own. The
architecture of Moscow's first metro stations, book and magazine design,
posters, photography and photomontage, the decoration of workers' clubs —
this is only a partial list of the areas in which the socialist modernists (Klutsis,
Lissitsky, Rodchenko and Stepanova in their late periods, as well as Senkin,
Kulagina, Telengator, Gruntal and many others) worked. The proto-postmod-
ernist course of their position, compared to the traditional avant-garde, is in the
dialectical transcendence (removal) of negation, that is, in the transition from
negation to affirmation. Giving this fact due credit, socialist modernism may be
viewed as an affirmative avant-garde.
The reading of Marx undertaken by Louis Althusser in the 1960s makes the
persuasive argument that society's economic T is organised according to the
same principle as the psychic subject in Freud or Lacan. Althusser makes an
analogy between the developmental stages of productive capacity and the
developmental stages of the libido. He describes the transition from one stage
to another in terms of displacement, Vershiebung3 — which does not mean that
the libido is determined (or even informed) by economics. The economy only
supplies a portion of referential 'raw material', projected onto the inner world
of the subject in the form of unconscious representation (imagoes). Thus, this is
not a question of conversion but of (repeatedly mediated) correlation. While
Lacan regards the unconscious as the discourse of the other, Marxism eclipses a
similar subtext in the relationship between the base and the superstructure.
During Khrushchev's thaw, the base and superstructure of alternative art
production were separated. Superstructural referents were imported from the
West, while the infrastructure (art materials, studios) retained its local address.
The gap between the aforementioned base and superstructure — or, as
Althusser would have said, between somatic and psychic dimensions of
culture, between flections and reflections — contributed to the emergence of
additional empty spaces in the artistic psyche. These gaps were filled with
incarnations of alienated or procrastinated superstructural referents (iconic
hallucinations). Due to these vacuums, non-socialist realist art differed from
the socialist realist kind not only in its creative premises but also in its
diagnosis.
II
In the wake of the successful 1988 Sotheby's auction in Moscow, Russian artists
began to travel regularly to the West, where they had exhibitions and sold their

5 Admirable in theory,
multiculturalism (American
style) has never been
realised on a serious level,
ie beyond the talk show
medium. For the situation
when many people talk
simultaneously and nobody
is given enough time to
present the issuess, is hardly
comparable with what
Habermas called an 'ideal
speech situation'.
In today's Russia, the period
of the procrastination of the
Downloaded by [Northeastern University] at 16:31 26 October 2014
body is over in mat the
bodily, until now crushed
under an institutional press, who can hardly be suspected of fascination with 'pure' form invariably limited
has begun to liberate itself.
Lenin's Biography, 1922, lithograph, artist unknown.
Courtesy Zimmerli Art Museum, New Jersey
5
works to well-known and nameless collectors alike. In museums and exhibition
spaces of varying calibre and importance, they hung their taciturn paintings
and erected installations that attested to the impenetrability of their context. As
for western connoisseurs and sympathisers, their (fleeting) alliance with
Russian art deserves special psychotherapeutic attention. In the years of
perestroika, this was an expression of the centre's curiosity toward the peri-
phery. Russian protégés were given the pre-assigned part of those who could
not be denied patronage and solicitude. Their revelations were worthy of
understanding only if they followed the rules of the game and did not
generalise or theorise. 'Man Friday' was given the role of supplier of the raw
material of events whose discursive processing was licensed by 'Robinson
Crusoe'. But the real paradox is the absence (or, once again, the procrastination)
of reciprocal interest in the context of art on the part of the visitors, from West
to East or from East to West. When approaching foreign exhibitions, even those
themselves to the strictly formal, aesthetic angle of artistic representation. And
this despite the fact that for many of them,
'visuality is skin stretched over the
skeleton of words'.4
When travelling abroad, a work of art
from the former Soviet bloc countries is
often viewed as a 'partial object', an organ
available for donation (with or without
content). Taken as an exotic commodity,
such a work of art loses its critical charge
and, thus, becomes more commercially
oriented than its western analogue. As for
the latter, it faces very similar problems in
Moscow, Warsaw or Budapest. This crude
aesthetic objectification is due to the
critical function's procrastination which
follows migration from one context to
another. Paradoxically, cultural (or
multicultural)5 exchange and artistic
colonisation of the Other tend to result in
the diffusion of our critical vision.
However useful (for example, as a
medicine against stagnation), this carniva-
lesque diffusion seems unfit as a long-term
project. As an anti-stagnation pill, cultural
(read optical) exchange fits the definition
of pharmakon: remedy and poison at the
same time. This was the case for American
and French exhibitions in Moscow at the
end of the 1950s: on the one hand both
events carnivalised the rigid and stale art-
life of the Soviet capital; on the other hand
they manifested the triumph of the
signifier at the expense of the referent.
The juxtaposition of what is happening
in post-Soviet Russia,6 with the metamor-
phoses of cultural life across the ocean,
 6
Downloaded by [Northeastern University] at 16:31 26 October 2014
El Lissitsky, Photomontage of Lenin, c. 1931
7 At the 1993 Whitney
Biennial, it was the claus-
trophobia-ridden, agonised
coupling of two goat-like
creatures. One can also
include in this list the
artistic 'misalliance' of Jeff ranging from self-pity to self-hatred. In fact, the President's severe health
Koons andCicciolina,as
well as the series of Cindy
Sherman's photographs
mediated by that event
The following paragraph is
borrowed from my previous
writings published in
Russian and in English (see,
for example, V Tupitsyn,
'Icons of Iconoclasm',
Parachute, no 91, Montreal,
1998, pp 14-18). Also, see
Hal Foster, "Death in
America,' October, no 75,
1996, pp 37-58.
shows that both paradigms of the
Spectacle (in Debord's terminology)
are becoming less and less suited
for textual meditation, for dis-
course. The viewer's seat ceases to
be a discreet place where one can,
from a distance and without risk,
peer into the horrors of a gilded
past or sigh fragrantly in antici-
pation of the 'coming' apocalypse.
The world of artistic representation
has become as bodily, toxic and
uncomfortable as reality itself. This
is partly illustrated by the
photographs of Nan Goldin, Jack
Pierson and Mark Morrisroe, and
also by the objects and installations
of Damien Hirst, Dinos and Jake
Chapman or the video perfor-
mances of Matthew Barney.7
Another example is the young
African American artist Nari Ward
(the Whitney Biennial, 1995), who
uses autochthony to accentuate
social issues.
Autochthony can be linked to a
variety of body politics. In Russia,
like in many other countries, the
masses still strive to recognise
themselves in the icon of the leader.
The most recent example is Boris
Yeltsin, who was elected twice to
the office, not for being uniquely
qualified, but because he befitted
the stereotype — the 'collective image' of people in their deplorable current
condition. Although this stereotype is not fully reflective of what the Russian
population is really like, it nonetheless betrays some notorious qualities — such
as, for example, drunkenness, bodily ruination and arrogance. It seems that in
casting their votes for Yeltsin, people displayed a variety of odd emotions,
condition — which his opponents tried to emphasise in order to invalidate his
candidacy — only helped Yeltsin to be re-elected in 1996. Thus, in a desperate
attempt to hold on to its vanishing entirety, the entire nation painfully, if not
masochistically, revealed its sickness by identifying with the entirely sick
leader. If Yeltsin were sober and healthy, albeit wanting to succeed, he would
probably have to fake drunkenness, a heart condition and his consequent
surgery!
The same is, in part, true of Bill Clinton. Regardless of (and, simultaneously,
due to) numerous sex scandals involving the President, the public's desire to
identify with him seems to have been reinforced, rather than lost: his troubles
remind people of their own. The fact that thé President's life is a mess makes
him no different than most of his contemporaries from all over the world.

Downloaded by [Northeastern University] at 16:31 26 October 2014
Gustav Klutsis, Let's Carry Out the Plan of the Great Works,
poster design, 1930.
John Heartfield, Every Fist Becomes One Clenched Fist,
AIZ,1934
7
Therefore, a mess turns out to be the unifying
factor. This comes as no surprise, considering that
unlike other (regional) means of unification —
languages, traditions, national borders — a mess
is easier to globalise. Perhaps, this is the only
universal identity we will be left with.
Refering to historic mass identification,' we
can inform ourselves that it is one thing when an
individual perceives himself as a composite ('the
composite image of the masses'); it is another
when the masses see themselves embodied in a
single individual's image. There is, of course,
nothing new about this: suffice it to recall
Khomyakov's notion of 'sobornost' (ecclesiastical
communality); Solovyov's idea of 'God-
manhood'; and Karsavin's 'all-embracing subjec-
tivity'.' What is of interest here is not the verbal
but the visual inventory of the identification of
the particular with the whole and of the whole
with the particular. It is worth mentioning here
the frontispiece of Hobbes's Leviathan (1651), in
which the body of the monarch is stuffed with
little human figures. The same idea is used by El
Iissitsky in his c.1931 photomontage of Lenin, by
Xanti in his poster of Mussolini (1934) and by
Heartfield in Every Fist Becomes One Clenched Fist
(1934).10 In each of these pictures, the political is
quaintly combined with the corporeal: the 'masses'
are either written onto the body of the sovereign,
or restrained into the form imposed upon them —
a hand raised to vote (Klutsis) or a clenched fist
(Heartfield). An example of reversed nature is
Sergei Sen'kin's Herald of Labor (1925). In this
photomontage the procrastinated proletariat (an
allusion to Benjamin's 'unconscious proletariat')
becomes de-procrastinated. The fact that the
worker's figure is constructed out of the leaders'
portraits enables us to observe not only the King's
celestial body (as did Ernst Kantorowicz in 1957),
but also that of the proletariat.
Today, the dichotomy 'body-intellect' appears
to be outworn. But there were times, to be sure,
when it seemed intriguing, especially when the
minds of a handful of individuals were occupied
with the needs and concerns of the collective
body (the masses). For an intellectual who
dedicates him/herself to thinking, the Other is
the one who either lacks the same ability or is
deprived of it due to social (class, racial, and so
on) injustice. This is true of those historical
figures whose lives were chiefly cerebral, but who
nonetheless encouraged the workers and the rest
 8
Downloaded by [Northeastern University] at 16:31 26 October 2014
9 Alexei Khomyakov
(1804-1860), eminent
Slavophile philosopher;
Vladimir Solovyov
(1853-1900), major Russian
philosopher; Lev Karsavin
(b 1882), religious
philosopher.
10 This work by Heartfield
echoes the earlier poster
by Klutsis, Let's Cany Out
the Plan of Great Works
(1930).
11 'Telesniks' are those who
embrace 'telesnoe,' ie the
bodily (in Russian).
12 In the communal world
Freudianism is considered
to be an alien force.
Apparently, the prospect
of non-reciprocal
confession to a figure of
authority (eg the analyst)
evokes memories of the
years of terror and purges.
of the needy to gain
access to material welfare
and bodily comfort. The
latter, regardless of how
it was envisioned by
Marx, Lenin or Mao,
subsequently turned out
to be not the comfort po-
se, but the idea of it, its
replacement in the form
of a 'comforting' mental
construct. Perhaps, the
failure to enjoy bodily
wholeness and totality in
a visual image, which we
all experience in early
childhood (the mirror
stage), prompts some of
us to compensate. The
compensation, however,
occurs much later (in the
Symbolic register). Some-
times, it takes a disas-
trous form which history
bares witness to.
The bodily is far from
being a harmless figure of
identity. In the light of
the recent perturbations
of Russian life, those in
the art world who defend
the right of art to be
autochthonic can be fairly
compared to the pillars öf Sergei SenTcin, Herald of Labour, 1925
affirmation: the Caryatids
and Atlantes who uphold
the status quo. Even
though 'the bodily' is now interpreted as 'national in form', this quality (that is,
the bodily) was almost completely absent from socialist realism, which, in turn,
had nothing to do with socially engaged art. The latter assertion also applies to
today's 'telesniks'11 who are mislabelled as 'social artists' in Moscow (for
example, Oleg Kulik, Alexander Brener and Anatoly Osmolovsky). If the Afri-
can American telesniks (Nari Ward, Adrian Piper et al) represent the minority's
resistance against the majority (of the object of repression against the subject),
this cannot be said of the 'New Russians'. Swept by a wave of crime and
mercantilism, the entire country is now preoccupied with physical (bodily)
survival. The same is true of the artistic milieu which is partly explained by the
equanimity with which, for two decades, the Moscow conceptualists flirted
with the bodily implications of speech practices, thereby assisting in the
'immaculate conception' of the telesniks' generation. Such an act of
'annunciation', which heralded the thermidor of the bodily — the period of (its)
de-procrastination—is what I would define as psycholexical heterogenesis: the

13 A term, coined by Antonin
Artaud and later
appropriated by Gilles
Deleuze and Félix Guattari.
14 Cornel West The New
Cultural Politics of
Difference', in Maurice
Berger (ed). Modern Art and
Downloaded by [Northeastern University] at 16:31 26 October 2014
Society, Icon Editions/
Harper Collins, New York,
1994, pp 1-24. With all due
respect to Cornel West, one
may recall that Soviet art
was defined (by Stalin) as
'socialist in content and
national in character'.
Aleksandr Rodchenko, USSR in Construction, 1933
9
production of the Other based on borrowing the physiognomic plasticity of the
text and on the utilisation of its bodily resources (a 'psychomimetic event', in
the terminology of the Moscow philosopher Valéry Podoroga).
To the extent that a Utopia which gravitates toward the creation of artificial
superbodies is subordinated to the Cartesian (mental) eye, dystopia is
governed by corporal impulses (the anti-Cartesian visual paradigm). Along
with bodily jouissance, this includes impulses whose deprocrastination can
occur only when Utopian time has elapsed. Under the impact of these impulses,
Utopian superbodies begin to disintegrate so that they can come together again
— on the basis of a different, autochthonic logic, in accordance with which the
'thermidor' of the bodily in the countries of the former Soviet bloc is
accompanied by increasingly vicious partiality. The body of eastern Europe is
dispersing nomadically. In some cases (Bosnia, Chechnya), the separation of
republics and regions can be compared to surgical intervention. And in this
sense, the surgery undergone by the Russian president (the severing of arteries,
the grafting of new veins) fits these events very well. If, in the United States, the
pragmatism of relations between regions is a result of oversight by Harvard-
educated bureaucrats, in Russia the process of immersion in autochthony
proceeds parallel to the contortions and agonies of territorial secession. Thus,
establishing its position in the culture, the bodily
becomes a protagonist in the geo-political arena.
III
An essential characteristic of Russian intellectual life
and, simultaneously, its psychopathological symptom,
is a sense of awkwardness felt toward psychoanalysis12
and feminism; their continued rejection in Russia can
also be discussed in terms of procrastination. Feminism
is suspected of a desire to expand beyond the
boundaries of the communal 'body-without-organs'."
The latter is tolerant only toward the 'bodily optic', that
which Emmanuel Levinas called the 'caressing' vision.
In such bodies, critical responsibility is procrastinated:
it gives way to an affirmative responsibility which
contributes to abstention from judgements which lie
outside communal identity. This, in turn, does not
preclude internal conflicts: on the path of confession,
everything is allowed — from repentance of one's own
sins to accusations against one's neighbour — in order
to avoid a critical distance toward the principle of
confessionality itself. (A similar position, related to the
'modem black diaspora problematic of invisibility and
namelessness', is characterised by Cornel West as
'moralistic in content and communal in character'.)14 In
other words, we are talking about responsibility from
within, which does not allow either Shklovsky's
'ostranenie' or Brecht's 'alienation effect'. If the
'alienation effect', for example, is rife with the potential
of apology for averted vision, in the world of communal
traditions such vision is viewed as irresponsible. This
 10
Downloaded by [Northeastern University] at 16:31 26 October 2014
15 Differences between
androgynes and hermaph-
rodites as metaphoric
constructs have been
discussed by Plato,
Aristophanes, Ovid,
Friedrich Schlegel, Freud
and Lacan.
16 Hennaphroditism can be
defined as procrastinated
androgyny. On the border
between the former and
the latter are located the
two-sex images of the
three-eyed builders of a
new life. See Lissitsky's
Zurich poster Russische
Ausstellung (1929) or
Klutsis's poster Let's Speed
Up the Tempo of
Industrialization (1930).
world is bodily and homogenous; it does not allow clearances for critical
manoeuvres whose purpose is to divert attention from interpersonal evaluation
to extrapersonal criticism of institutions.
In the communal world, speech is constantly in motion: one has to leap into
it as one jumps onto a moving streetcar. Considering the instantaneous nature
of speech acts, the communal T aspires not toward maximum ethical adequacy
(which would be impossible) but toward a behavioural strategy which
minimises responsibility for irresponsible moral judgements — from labels to
personality cults. The combination of the immediacy of ethical intervention
with its inevitable procrastination (delay, loss of tempo) puts in doubt the
effectiveness of spontaneous moral decisions formulated in terms of maxima
moralia.
The subject of communal speech is speech itself. It is also the object of
speech acts. That is why there is something hermaphroditic in the relationship
between the subject and object of 'logogyratioh', or 'texturbation.' This is
confirmed by the permanent use of impersonal and indefinite forms ('it', 'as if'),
and also by the figures of blocking the referent, or silencing, through which one
can see the silhouettes of displaced traumas and unfulfilled or procrastinated
desires. The sphere of the conspiratorial, coded 'it' (ono in Russian) also
includes the unknown, a category exploited exclusively by the 'Moscow
communal conceptualism' — .the apotheosis of impersonality, non-binding-
ness, diffuse sexuality, of Tiermaphroditism'. This latter term should not be
confused with 'androgyny': androgynes are adepts of the sadistic superego,
while hermaphrodites are representatives of masochistic discourse.15
If the concept of androgyny is offered here as a Utopian construct, as the
triumph of unity over contradictions — extending to the possibility of symbolic
copulation with 'oneself', necessary to the reproduction of the totality — the
hermaphroditic libido suffers defeat in the attempt to invest itself in itself, since
it is unable to overcome the crisis of identification. Unlike socialist modernism,
which retained some links to the international modernist project until the mid-
19303 and from which Moscow conceptualism inherited its hermaphroditic
incompleteness, androgyny is akin to the Stalinist cultural heritage."
IV
The thermidor of the bodily which I mentioned before is accompanied by
attacks on intellectualism. This is true not only of Russia: the same, in different
forms and on a somewhat different scale, is happening in western Europe and
North America. Critical theory and critically engaged cultural practices are
being displaced from the art scene and from the pages of the art press. (One
example is the attack to which conservative authors subjected Documenta X).
Flections, not reflections, turn out to be negative at this time. The affirmation of
the body and affirmation through the body is what characterises the present
situation in Russia and beyond. Accordingly, the genre of those who write
about Russian art at home is not criticism but affirmation. The diagnosis leaves
much to be desired: the procrastination of critical responsibility continues, and
the revival of interest in the critical function is yet to happen. So far, references
to Brecht, Adorno, or Benjamin do not resonate in the 'collective soul' of critics
in Moscow or St. Petersburg. 'Responsibility for what? Art is a completely
useless thing', one Moscow artist declared in a conversation with me. Another
opined that the important thing about any ('true') work of art is that 'it cannot

Downloaded by [Northeastern University] at 16:31 26 October 2014
17 An excerpt from my
conversation with
Kabakov (about 'Medical
Hermeneutics'), printed in
Mesto Pechati (Moscow,
May 1998).
18 Jacques Lacan, Ecrits: A
Selection, trans. Alan
Sheridan, W W Norton,
New York, 1977, p 15.
19 Ibid, p 16.
20 V Misiano's letter
defending the destruction
by A Brener of the works
of other participants of the
1996 Interpol exhibition in
Stockholm can be
regarded as apologetic for
accident See Flash Art,
no 188, May-June 1996,
p 46. In 1996, Brener
performed yet another
'accident' by drawing a
dollar sign on a Malevich
painting in the Stedelijk
Museum. See V Tupitsyn,
'Batman and the Joker:
Thermidor of the Bodily",
Parachute, Montreal,
October 1997.
11
be used in any other way'. The infantilism of such declarations is explained by
the extreme childishness of the male half of the Russian population, including
the artistic intelligentsia. This phenomenon can be described as a procras-
tination of adulthood. In the words of the artist Hya Kabakov:
A man who feels like a child is able to escape the canons and boundaries of being
in which he is, as it were, assigned a place. You develop an entirely different
attitude toward reality. It is perceived as a theft, even though it is, in fact, not
limited by anyone and therefore belongs to you in unlimited quantities... This is
space without dimensions: it can be shortened but can also be expanded. In my
case, everything revolves around fear and panic that if I don't do something,
something horrible will happen. The indeterminacy of the connection between
these efforts and the horrifying consequences is precisely what is at the centre of
this structure. Starting from such attitudes (or criteria), I arrive at the conclusion
that the prospect of completed happiness and eternal childhood scares me to death.
I shudder at the thought of such worlds and I hope they don't exist There is only
one world, a world in which you get smacked if you don't do something.17
'Be ye therefore as children', Christ urged his followers, 'for theirs is the
Kingdom of Heaven. Verily I say unto you: whosoever does not accept the
Kingdom of God as a child will not enter the Kingdom of God.' Self-perception
as an eternal child (a phenomenon which demonstrates the similarity of Soviet
traditions not only to Christian but to Zen Buddhist ones) goes back to a time
when the burden of adulthood was placed on government bureaucracy.
Everyone else was inculcated from early on with the idea that 'the only
privileged class in the USSR is children'. Therefore, the prospect of loss of such
(class) privileges, anticipated by the communal unconscious, caused the tempo of
maturation to slow down. Something similar is happening today, the difference
being that the role of housing committees, art councils and purchasing
commissions has been taken over by curators, critics and art dealers. It would
seem that if the creative personality is an enfant terrible, to enter a professional
relationship with such a person is to exploit child labour, and therefore to
violate moral and legal norms. That is why relations between the child (enfant)
and the adult usually do not go beyond the 'symbolic economy': the former is
expected to be diligent and well-behaved, in exchange for gifts and praise from
the latter. Such, in general terms, is the 'compulsory assortment' of socio-
cultural infantilism. Nonetheless, the inconveniences that burden permanent
childhood, are more than adequately compensated by the conveniences
acquired as a result of abdicating social responsibility.
The infantile vision of reality is conservative and, in a sense, reactionary,
especially when practised by adults. In relation to this, one can introduce
(paraphrasing the philosopher Mikhail Ryklin) the term 'terroro-optic'. The
child, after all, is simultaneously a prince and a pauper, a sovereign and a vas-
sal, persecutor and persecuted. The infantile model of communal subjectivity
rests on the presumption of the wholeness of the world, on belief in the totality
and continuity of being, while representing, at the same time, an example of
aggressive egocentrism. Following Lacan, one can maintain that 'the charac-
teristic modes of the agency of the [communal] moi in dialogue are the
aggressive reactions'1' and that 'aggressivity is the correlative tendency of a
mode of identification that we call narcissistic'.1' Hence, the notion of a 'world-
wide' cultural context as a quasi-sintagmatic chain of events, combined with
naive longing for accidents — accidents equated with de-procrastination of
Lacan's le réel — as normative event.20 Among the paradigms of childishness is
 12

the carnival-like (festive) perception of acts of violence: the conviction that

'even dying is good if the world is watching' best illustrates this. Translated
into the language of urban problems, immaturity is the ghetto, whose contri-
bution to culture is nothing other than kitsch. Those who came out of the ghetto
often turned out to be the most zealous keepers of convention and orthodoxy,
the angelic host entrusted with guarding the authoritarian power. As a psycho-
drome of forcible territorialisation regulated from the outside, childhood is a
machine of retribution, a compressed spring of de-procrastination. To this, one
can add that among the recent manifestations of the terroro-optic is the cri-
minalisation of the Russian infrastructure. From this standpoint, the post-
Soviet Mafia, despite its lawlessness, is the lawful heir to communal tradition.
Despite their chronological proximity, the contexts of childhood and youth
are not metonymically close: unlike childhood, youth does not feel comfortable
Downloaded by [Northeastern University] at 16:31 26 October 2014

in the position of an onlooker fascinated by the conflict and unity of opposites.

It is characterised by social altruism, rebellion and intolerance toward
everything invested with 'paternal' prerogatives. On the other hand, the ico-
noclastic gesture does not befit childhood (eternal, stagnant childhood), for
which inertia and a taste for an apocalyptic vision of the world are
'appropriate' — whereas youth is aflame with desire to change the existing
order of things. In other words, youth and the youthful are missing from
present-day Russia, where childhood and adulthood remain the principal
psychosocial niches.
Sometimes in the course of a conversation, one surprises oneself by saying
or agreeing with something that contradicts one's convictions. The compart-
mentalisation of viewpoints and principles characteristic of verbal interaction
does not apply to the written word, which, as we know, once written, cannot
be erased. This happens, firstly, because oral contact reserves for itself the
privileges and exemptions granted to 'the only privileged class', and secondly,
because of the communal engagement of the audile signifier. In contrast to the
non-binding and immediate nature of the latter, the written and printed word
cries out for responsibility, political correctness and the necessity to connect
infantile speech acts with the mature textuality. One example of this can be
found in the census taken to measure the passenger load of the Moscow metro
in the early 1970s. At the entrance, everyone was handed a printed form which
explained the census, and which had to be presented at exit. One passenger
was in a state of extreme inebriation. He staggered, balancing miraculously on
the edge of the platform. At the end of the line, the drunken passenger had to
be helped out of the car by others. However, upon ascending the escalator and
seeing representatives of the registration service, he was instantly transformed.
He produced the document in question and performed a 'socially responsible
act'. The return from childhood to adulthood happened in seconds (the de-
procrastination effect). The printed word of the form was a sobering (maturing)
factor.
For many representatives of alternative art, from flya Kabakov to Victor
Pivovarov, illustrating children's literature was not just a matter of earning a
living. The force lines that ensure the metabolism of the body-without'Organs go
through this genre. One can talk about the experience of working in Detgiz
(Qüldren's Publishing) or the Malysh (Little One) publishing house in terms of
schizotherapy; without this experience, modern Russian art would look very
different. The infantilisation of iconography which also characterises these
artists' 'grown-up' drawings is a symptom of the dulling of the will to
representation. The same can be said of the textual heritage of Moscow concep-
 13

tualism with its characteristic borrowing of names and terms from children's
books or Russian folk tales ('kolobkovost', 'neznaika', etc.). In other words, in-
fantilism is not an ornament or a carnival suit but a defining, main aspect of
communal subjectivity.
In.the space of communal speech, one feels like Gulliver among the
Lilliputians. This is due in part to the infantile babble of adults, filled with
words like 'smertushka' (little death), 'mogilka' (little grave), 'bozehnka' (little
God), 'tvorozhok so smetankoi' (little cheese with little sour cream), and the like.
On the lips of grown-ups, babyish lexicon manifests itself in diminutive
suffixes as well as borrowings, imitations and repetitions. Repetition is the
mother of learning, says the well-known truism imported from the school
practice of memorising the sayings of great men, slogans and literary texts. Part
of the same tradition is our ability to merge with our objet petit 'a' (be it a real
Downloaded by [Northeastern University] at 16:31 26 October 2014

or fictional object of love, envy, fear or fascination), to 'move in' with him/her,
'move him/her in' with us and so forth — right up to 'moving in' with one's
own self as a literary character. Continuing on the subject of borrowing,
imitation, and repetition as attributes of schoolboy manners and infantilism,
one has to mention postmodernism, for which these are key concepts.
Regardless of the borders, any 'Spectacular order' that presently exists in the
West (including Russia) can be contemplated as the play of similarities and
differences between postmodernist infantilism and its transcendence (the
youth paradigm).
For those who are in a state of 'institutional' childhood, age is counted
differently than it is for 'grown-ups'. Among the most striking example of this
is the dissonance between the status of modern Russian artists and their age. In
the West, the works of older artists (who succeeded career-wise) are
represented in national and private collections open to the public, and they
don't need to fight their lesser-known contenders for gallery space. Kounellis
and Rauschenberg are compensated for their absence on the 'front line' by
other ('retirement') forms of participation in cultural life. Everyone
understands that museums and textbooks are an equivalent of retirement
benefits without which old age is illegitimate, it doesn't exist. In the eyes of
society, an old man who is not entitled to a pension is a child. The alternative
Soviet art of the Fifties, Sixties and Seventies has not yet found peace in
museums, and its financial situation leaves a lot to be desired. That is why
artists in their sixties often appear in tandem with twenty-year-olds — that is,
they remain 'peers' of their younger colleagues.
The procrastination of adulthood is not just a Soviet, but a post-Soviet
phenomenon. Thus, with the crumbling of the Soviet State in 1991, many
adults (including artists) felt derived of parental protection. This created the
phenomenon of overgrown orphans — 'children' abandoned by 'parents',
brutalised and grown wild. In 'Becoming-Animal', Gules Deleuze appeals to a
'zone of indétermination or uncertainty where... an inhumanity [is]
immediately experienced in the body as such'.21 He argues, that 'not only in the
case of autistic children, but for all children... there is a reality of becoming-
animal even though one does not in reality become animal'.22
21 Gilles Deleuze, 'Becoming-
Animal'. See The Deleuze
Reader, (ed) C V Boundas,
Columbia University Press,
New York, 1993, p 122.
If we agree that in the 1990s, 'all things Russian' are out of fashion or going out
22 Ibid, p 123. of fashion in the West, we have to recognise another, no less obvious fact: the
 14
Downloaded by [Northeastern University] at 16:31 26 October 2014
23 See Walter Benjamin,
Moscow Diary, Harvard
University Press,
Cambridge, Mass., 1986,
and Louis Althusser,
L'avenir dure longtemps,
suivi de les faits. Edition
STOCK/IMEC, 1992.
24 See Peter Sloterdijk,
'Critique of Cynical
Reason', Theory and History
of Literature, vol 40. Trans.
Michael Eldred, University
of Minnesota Press,
Minneapolis, 1987, p 74.
dwindling of interest in the Russian social and cultural experiment outside its
territorial boundaries is the sad culmination of the drawn-out love affair
between the Soviet regime and its fans in Europe and the United States. It is
enough to look at the reminiscences of intellectuals intoxicated with Russia
(from Benjamin to Althusser and others)23 to understand to what extent the pre-
and post-war western intelligentsia was mesmerised not only by the chronicles
but also by the artistic representation of Soviet life, by each triumph of socialist
construction, by each unmasking of the enemies of the people, by each nuance
of the ideological struggle. Now that it is dear to everyone that Russia is a
sunken Titanic (the Titanic of Utopia), everyone is shrinking from it the way a
vampire shrinks from the cross. The coldness and haughtiness are payback for
seventy years of unlimited spiritual and mental investment in the bank of the
Soviet Utopian project, which has collapsed. Once, those who looked to the
future looked to Moscow; now that life in Moscow increasingly reminds
Americans and Europeans of their own past, it is mainly the would-be
guardians of time gone by — that is, essentially, retrogrades — who are
interested in it. That is why literature and art of a nostalgic stripe still have
some (limited) appeal abroad.
In Europe and in America, 'art for art's sake' and its corollary myths are, to
a large extent, depreciated. However, everyone who professed such beliefs in
the USSR, emphasising the principle of the 'autonomy of aesthetics', became
drawn into resistance to the giant machine of depersonalisation by the very fact
of their existence, and often against their will. And even though, compared to
the legions of devotees of 'socially disengaged' art in the West, their numbers
in the Soviet Union were minuscule, the idiom of the artistic language they
cultivated was a stumbling block on the road to the total stereotypisation of
culture, to 'monolexism'. In other words, the denizens of the 'ivory tower' were
paradoxically healing a world that was trying to corrupt them.
The history of oppositional modernism echoes the myth of Odysseus, who
was able to blind the Cyclops holding him (and his companions) prisoner, not
only literally but figuratively: to Polyphemus's question, 'Who are you?',
Odysseus responded with his usual foresight, saying that his name was
'Nobody'. The blinded Cyclops turned for help to his seeing brethren; but
when, to their questions about the name of the offender, he replied, 'Nobody',
the collective sanctions did not follow. Commenting on this subject, Peter
Sloterdijk2* gives credit to the positive aspect of physical survival, which, in the
case of Odysseus, was made possible by a 'negative' aspect, that is, at the price
of repudiating the definition (naming) of one's identity.
For Odysseus, convincing Polyphemus of his namelessness was a
'minimum goal', while the 'maximum goal' was to exit from the cave. To
discover 'Being-as-Nobody' in the context of the Cyclops' optic is not
equivalent to liberation, since the cave itself serves as a metaphor for form, for
definition, for naming, and, ultimately, for identification. Insofar as the absence
of a name is fixed on its 'non-possessor', the name vacuum becomes non-
identical to itself: Ulysses' 'nobody' becomes 'nobody from the cave of
Polyphemus', essentially acquiring a name and address defined by a place, by
circumstance, by limitations. Thus, in the context of extra-cavital (beyond-the-
cave) vision which is not involved in home-grown myths, 'nobody' is read as
'nobody from the USSR,' 'nobody from Russia', 'nobody from the Moscow art
underground'. It is possible, incidentally, that 'rumours' of the physical
blinding of Polyphemus by Odysseus are the result of mythological banali-
sation. The defect of mental vision is another matter: that is why the Cyclops

25 The fact that procrastination
is truly a 'cultural phenome-
non' in Russia today is
confirmed by the absence of
contemporary art
institutions in that country.
Such an absence, as well as
the delayed interest in art on
the part of 'the New
Russians'/ generates a
psychological discomfort
that requires this gap to be
compensated. Especially
hopeless is the situation of
the alternative modernism
of the 1960s and '70s, which
has yet to find a 'retirement'
Downloaded by [Northeastern University] at 16:31 26 October 2014
niche under the roofs of
museums or private
collections. This begs the
question: is there any point
in creating a 'museum of
missed opportunities' for
purely ethical reasons, as a
form of historical compen-
sation - particularly since
the museum is synonymous
with natural (rather than
artificial) displacement, and
given that the criteria that fit
the temps perdu are irretriev-
ably lost?
15
would not let his captives out of the cave, knowing that it was the last bastion
of the identitarian eidetics. Here, one can refer to the Cartesian allegory of
blindness and, accordingly, of the cave. Criticising the antagonists of the new
science, Descartes compared them to the militant blind man who lures his
opponents into the dark of the cave and thus deprives them of their sole advan-
tage: vision. The repudiation of (self-)naming is remarkable in that, under the
influence of such denominalisation, the Ijody-without-organs' becomes a
Tjody-without-a-name'. That is precisely what happened to the Polyphemus of
totalitarian power, discouraged by the Ulyssean cunning of three generations
of Russian nonconformists who avoided social identification. The pro-
crastination of the moment of (self-)naming is the strategy enabled them, until
the early 1990s, to dodge contact with society and the authorities.
In the post-perestroika years, the situation changed radically. The
apologetic motivations which reconcile us to the 'politics of non-politicality' of
the art underground of the Sixties, Seventies and Eighties do not extend to the
present generation of artistically concerned people. The over-abundance of
metaphor has given way to over-abundance of reality. And yet, the death of
ideologies announced by Lyotard seems to be an artistic exaggeration,
especially during the stabilisation of capitalism and its corollary structures and
institutions. It is precisely in these extremely complex conditions that the
/
body-without-a-name' loses the Tniffer zone' which other art cultures have,
and which protects them from collisions with the external world, from instan-
taneous contact with it. As a 'secondary modelling system', art spreads the idea
of secondariness to everything that surrounds it. Hence, the necessity of
'second-hand' interaction mediated, on the one hand, by federal, municipal
and private sponsors, and on the other hand, by hosts of enthusiasts,
sympathisers, commentators and interpreters who function as a link to society
and form an isolation belt around the 'body-without-a-name.' In affluent
bourgeois societies, such an isolation belt, which protects both the avant-garde
and its Other from mutual aggression, is a given, something that is taken for
granted.25 Members of the Moscow or St. Petersburg scientific and literary
milieu who sympathised with the dissidents in the Khrushchev and Brezhnev
years also made up a significant portion of the audience for alternative art.
Their present-day impoverishment has deprived the artists of a supportive
environment. For these and other reasons, the world of reflections has found
itself squeezed against the world of flections, face to face with the destitute
population and the nouveau riche. This situation casts doubt not only on the
viability of experimental artistic practices in Russia, but also on the
predicaments of art as such. At any rate, the situation requires the redefinition
(or deprocrastination) of the basic functions of visual art, including its critical
function.