Necro-Utopia: The politics of indistinction and the aesthetics of the non-Soviet

Current Anthropology

Volumn 49, Issue 2, 2008, Pages 199-215

  Yurchak, Alexei ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA   (United States)

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EID: 45849099851     PISSN: 00113204     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/526098     Document Type: Review

References (34)

1. Felix Dzerzhinskii, one of early leading revolutionaries, died in 1926.
2. This subculture made a distinction between different types of truth similar to that described by Dovlatov: its representatives saw their pursuit of music "as expressions of istina [deep truth], as the embodiment of elemental truths about the human condition, and were utterly uninterested in the political stance that searching for pravda [clear truth] implied" (Cushman 1995, 107-8).
3. For a discussion of death-related genres in late Soviet and post-Soviet literature and film, see Alaniz (2003).
4. Other groups of the 1980s and '90s include the experimental theater Derevo, the art group Mit'ki, music groups AVIA and Popular Mechanics, the musician and philosopher-provocateur Sergey Kuryokhin, the performance artist Oleg Kulik (man-dog), Timur Novikov and his art movement Neoacademism, the art duo Oleg and Viktor, and the performance artist Vladislav Mamyshev "Monroe."
5. The Necrorealists were not unique in developing an aesthetics of public provocations first and conceiving of it as an "artistic" activity or "performance art" only much later. A similar trajectory was followed by the infamous U.S. duo The Yes Men, who explained in an interview: "For a long time we didn't realize we were doing 'theater' or performance art - we didn't know it at first, but after a while we figured it out. Now we've gotten some grants from the Creative Capital Foundation, the Herb Alpert Foundation" (Vale 2006, 38). This progression from the spontaneous aesthetics of everyday action to organized "art" is an important element of the politics that I am discussing.
6. This aesthetics was an important difference between the various late-socialist artistic scenes of Eastern Europe and those of the Soviet Union. The unofficial artistic scene that emerged around the same time in East Berlin also developed aesthetic forms based on absurdity and outrageous spectacle, but it provided these absurdist aesthetic forms with elaborate commentaries about how and why they challenged the East German state (Boyer 2001). This discursive difference may be grounded in the different discursive conditions under which the two artistic scenes emerged. The Soviet politicalsphere was dominated by a binary political discourse that divided every statement into official-unofficial, supporters-dissenters, friends-enemies, and there was no political analysis other than those of the Party and the dissidents. In contrast, in East Berlin unofficial artists and intellectuals were engaged with a robust political and theoretical discourse of poststructuralism that transcended the binary divisions of the socialist political sphere. This discourse came in German translations of (mostly) French works published in West Germany and smuggled into East Berlin. It can be said that both the Soviet and the East German artists developed poststructuralist critiques of their political systems: they both exposed the hidden absurdities behind the system's "coherent" discourse by constructing a discursive space that transcended that discourse - that did not fit its coherent structure. However, the ways in which they constructed that space differed: in the Soviet case it was usually characterized by the breaking down of all language, while in the East German case (though the breaking down of language was also important) it was also characterized by the language of poststructuralist theory (see Boyer 2001).
7. The practice of positioning the image of a corpse vertically is by no means universal in the medical literature. However, it was also commonly used in the Soviet books on legal medicine. In Kustov's opinion, this positioning deemphasizes the idea of death, reanimating the corpse and allowing the viewer to repress the feeling of disgust and awe. In the Soviet case it also probably had an ideological component, enhancing the eradication of the theme of "death" from Soviet public discourse.
8. For example, in Russian "ethnic jokes" about Georgians, Zurab was often a homosexual.
9. He pursued this occupation and by the 1990s, after the reforms of perestroika, had become a famous film director.
10. In the 1990s, when the Necrorealists achieved fame, their pictures, photos, and installations were regularly exhibited in the Museum of Forensic Medicine (part of the St. Petersburg Medical School), blurring the boundary between "art" and "medical reference materials."
11. Von Hoffman described the case of an officer of the English Expeditionary Corps in Austria who invented elaborate methods that would kill him by delivering multiple complex injuries. In one method, he put a heavy metal cask filled with inflammable liquid in the second-floor window of his house. He tied a rope with a noose at the end of it to the cask's handle, put the noose around his neck, shot at the cask with a revolver, and then jumped out of the window. The liquid ignited and the burning cask followed him to the ground. He received multiple injuries simultaneously - asphyxiation, severe burns, a heavy blow, and fractured bones - but still survived the incident (Mazin 1998, 130).
12. There he made his first 35-mm full-length film, Knights of Heaven (Rytsari podnebes'ia, 22 min.), which had a relatively well-defined narrative. The plot contains a secret experiment, an idyllic and brutal male brotherhood, irrationality, and absurd heroic behavior.
13. Yufit's photographs and films have been shown at many international festivals and museums (e.g., St. Petersburg's Russian Museum, Amsterdam's Stedelijk Museum, Dusseldorf's Kunsthalle, New York's Museum of Modern Art). The 1991 film Papa, Father Frost Is Dead (Papa, umer ded moroz, 81 min.) has been the most recognized of Yufit's films, having received the Grand Prix at the International Film Festival in Rimini; his 2002 film Killed by Lightning was shown at Manifesta-5 in San Sebastian, Spain, and his 2005 film Bipedalism was shown at the 34th Film Festival in Rotterdam. Vladimir Kustov's painting and installations were shown at the same range of international galleries and museums.
14. Andrei used a favorite Necrorealist verb, zamateret'- (to become materyi), where materyi means a combination of "coarse," "manly," "bearish," "hardened," "old," "seasoned," etc.
15. Through these actions they create a community that is profoundly different from that of "regular" people. As Cronenberg (2005) explains, Crash "is a metaphor for those people who undergo life-shattering experiences, whether it's being comrades in arms in a war, or whether it's people who have to fight off the same disease as you have. Finding people who are almost a subculture, who are the only ones who can understand what you have gone through, and finding strange ways to relive that experience and so come to understand it." This explanation is relevant to the Necrorealists but only partially. Rather than reliving/repeating a certain common traumatic experience in order to come to terms with it, the Necrorealists' goal was to invent a completely new experience - something that would make them profoundly (and "organically") different from ordinary people (or even from "people" of any kind).
16. On the erasure of a boundary between mask and reality in an aestheticized practice of living in the Soviet context, see Yurchak (2006, 1999). See also Andrew Lakoff's (2005) discussion of a fin-de-siècle Buenos Aires movement of "oversimulation" of madness as a combination of true madness and imposture of madness and Žižek's (1993) discussion of "overidentification" with ideology as an artistic practice of Laibach and NSK in Tito's Yugoslavia.
17. This approach was perfected by another famous provocateur and practitioner of the politics of indistinction at that period, Sergei Kuryokhin, who turned his discourse into highly articulated and intellectual-sounding nonsense. Another example of this genre is poet Prigov. Among earlier Soviet examples of this approach are the literary works of Daniil Khiarms.
18. Therefore I cannot accept the argument that for the Necrorealists "death" is the main object and organizing metaphor of all visual representation (see Alaniz and Graham 2001, 7, and also Miller-Pogacar 1993). Life and death are equally uninteresting for the Necrorealists; they are important to them only as two (among many) external referents vis-à-vis which they construct their real object and metaphor of visual representation - an alternative vitality that dwells in the blurry zone of inbetweenness (between life and death, between human and animal, between sane and insane, etc.) (see also Demichev 2001).
19. Vitalism holds that the processes of life cannot be explained simply by the laws of physics and chemistry because they also include very different vital principles (variously referred to as "vital energy," "vital forces," "the soul," etc). For a genealogy of vitalism see Lash (2006). On contemporary versions of neo-vitalism in religious and ecological movements in the United States, see Faubion (2004), and in academic theories of ethnic history in post-Soviet Russia, see Oushakine (2005).
20. This conceptualization has a long history: in The Birth of the Clinic Foucault (1973, 196) argued that starting with the late eighteenth century the concept of "death" in Western medical discourse became multiple, dispersed in time, and seen as a process "embodied in the living bodies of individuals" like disease.
21. This indistinction is exacerbated by the fact that a brain-dead body, unlike a cadaver, is not passive but active: it remains warm and in good color for a long time; its breathing, metabolism, and excretion continue; its nails and hair grow; and an infant can still be delivered from it (Lock 2004, 39).
22. In the Russian original the song, called Zhirovosk (Fatwax), goes like this: "Nashi trupy pozhiraiut razzhirevshie zhuki/Posle smerti nastupaet zhizn' chto nado, muzhiki!"
23. I use the term "bare life" differently from Agamben. In the USSR in the 1980s, there were subjects who were much closer analogies to what Agamben describes as bare life - camp prisoners, psychiatric clinic inmates, people living in forced internal exile. It is productive, however, to apply the term "bare life" also to such groups as the Necrorealists, for whom the suspension of political life and the focus on naked existence was a particular strategy of living within that state. Although, unlike the state's inmates, in the eyes of the state the Necrorealists retained their citizens' rights, their citizenship was devoid of the necessary "political" component.
24. Russian writer Andrei Bitov (1997) argues that such groups in the 1970s and '80s invented an "organic" version of freedom "that had nothing to do with accepting or not accepting a given political order." This "organic" freedom cannot be understood in terms of a binary opposition of freedom and unfreedom, nor can it be reduced to the survival instinct or fear of the KGB; it can rather be compared with the freedom that is achieved, according to the anthropologist Talal Asad (2003, 85), by means of martyrdom in a religious context (i.e., also by emphasizing bare life): the martyrs of early Christianity, instead of "shunning physical suffering," in fact "actively sought to live it." Such a relation to the world may be interpreted in a religious context not as an example of defeat but as symbolic of "victory over society's power" (or over the state's political sphere) and therefore as a sign of freedom.
25. In the Soviet case the politics of opposition was practiced by far fewer dissidents.
26. In fairness to Agamben, he does discuss a possibility of an alternative politics that would subvert sovereign power precisely from the grounds of bare life. This kind of alternative politics, he argues, would require that bare life be "transformed into the site for the constitution and installation of a form of life" (1998, 188) that escapes the sovereign's definition. However, Agamben's discussion contains a paradoxical slippage: suggesting that bare life may be the potential ground for articulating a new kind of politics, he simultaneously insists that bare life is nothing imbut a product of sovereign power (see discussion of this point in Genel 2006, 61; see also Lemke 2005 and Norris 2005).
27. For example, discussing the management of organ transplantation in India, Lawrence Cohen (2005, 82) argues that the Indian state recognizes as legitimate organ donors only four classes of kin: spouses, siblings, parents, and children. With this law the state seeks to legitimize those who may donate organs "out of familial love" and simultaneously to protect those who "in the conditions of everyday poverty or extraordinary debt" may be forced to sell their organs. However, argues Cohen, this law also erases the political subjectivity of these latter, poorest citizens by refusing to recognize that they may also perform their desperate acts of trading in bare life "out of familial love." Although the state does not recognize these sacrificial acts as political, they constitute an alternative biopolitics - as acts framed in terms of an ethical exception to the state's sovereign law and therefore as acts that redraw the boundaries of the political sphere. See also Farquhar and Zhang (2005, 305) on biopolitical self-cultivation in today's China, which involves a strategy of minimizing one's ability "to contribute to the polity," Fassin (2001, 5) on "biopolitics of otherness," which amounts to an "extreme reduction of the social to the biological" in which the body, is treated as "the ultimate refuge of a common humanity," Callon and Rabeharisoa (2004) on the "politics of refusal" practiced by the incurably ill when they refuse to engage with the state and with activist groups, instead focusing on bare life as a means for constituting alternative selves and socialities, and Rose (2001) on the "politics of life itself."
28. Elsewhere I argue that the experience of the system's immutability was a defining feature of late socialism (Yurchak 2006).
29. This point is different from Benjamin's (1969) view that in the age of mass reproduction politics becomes "aestheticized." Rancière sees politics as a process that always contains an aesthetic component because it is involved in producing a particular "distribution of the sensible."
30. By exposing, describing, and representing forms of domination and inequality, argues Rancière, "politicized" and "politically correct" art can achieve certain political change but not a kind of change that is unimaginable in the terms of the current ideological frame.
31. Freud defines the uncanny (unheimlich) as something familiar, intimate, connected to home (1919, 245). The feeling of the uncanny is related to the disgust and horror experienced when the coherent appearance of the familiar and intimate world is suddenly disrupted by evidence of its unnatural, constructed quality. Among the objects that usually invoke this feeling are "death and dead bodies . . . the return of the dead . . . spirits and ghosts," inexplicable forms of behavior, epileptic seizures, and manifestations of insanity. When one recognizes inexplicable behavior as "the working of forces hitherto unsuspected in his fellowmen" one gets a feeling that one has been always "dimly aware of them in remote corners of his own being" (p. 243). This feeling is the uncanny.
32. Internationally renowned bio-artists include members of the Critical Art Ensemble (U.S.A.), Natalie Jeremijenko (Australia), and Eduardo Kac (Brazil). For more on bio-art see Anker and Nelkin (2003), Hauser (2003), Greenfield (2002), Levy (1996, 2001), Tomasula (2002), and Haraway (1998).
33. The term "bioaesthetics" is sometimes used to mean different things. For example, Campbell (2006), discussing Evgenii Yufit's films, uses it to refer to a kind of art that employs a traditional artistic medium (e.g., cinema) to produce commentary about biology. In contrast, Steven Shaviro and contemporary bio-artists use this term to refer to radical art practice whose very medium is biological science. For them, the point is not to use traditional art practice to create a critical commentary about the practices of biological science but rather to practice biological science as art, as a new form of critical intervention. I use the term here in this latter sense.
34. A similar form of bioaesthetic rather than bioethical critique is found in other forms of bio-art, including David Cronenberg's movies. A reviewer wrote about Cronenberg's Crash: "What it hasn't got - and this is what's liberating - is a judgmental point of view. The film's sensibility is neither moral nor immoral" (Dougherty 1997).