Mikhail Epstein | Emory University (original) (raw)
Papers by Mikhail Epstein
Berghahn Books, Dec 29, 2017
The formation of Russian postmodernist thought can be traced to the theoretical works of Andrei S... more The formation of Russian postmodernist thought can be traced to the theoretical works of Andrei Siniavsky, in particular to his treatise ''On Socialist Realism'' (1959). Instead of praising socialist realism as the ''truthful reflection of life'' (as did official Soviet criticism), or condemning it as a ''distortion of reality and poor ideologized art'' (as did dissident and liberal Western criticism), Siniavsky suggested the artistic utilization of the signs and images of socialist realism, while introducing a playful distance from their ideological content. This project was realized in the 1970s and 1980s in the form of Sots-Art and Conceptualism, influential artistic and intellectual movements that transformed the Soviet ideological system into material for parody and pastiche, often characterized also by a lyrical and nostalgic attitude. Conceptualism is not merely an artistic trend; its philosophical significance is revealed in the art and programmic statements of Ilya Kabakov and Vitaly Komar and Aleksandr Melamid, in Alexander Zinoviev's fiction, in Dmitry Prigov's poetry, articles and manifestos, and in Boris Groys's theoretical works. As a philosophy, Conceptualism presupposes that any system of thought is self-enclosed and has no correspondence with reality. The relationship between Conceptualism and Marxism is somewhat reminiscent of the dispute between nominalists (whose moderate version was also called ''conceptualism'') and realists in the epoch of the Medieval scholastics: whereas Marxists assert the historical reality of such concepts as collectivism, equality, and freedom, Conceptualists demonstrate that all these notions are contingent on mental structures or derived from linguistic structures. Therefore, from a Conceptualist standpoint, a ''concept'' is any idea-political, religious, moral-presented as an idea, without any reference to its real prototype or the possibility of realization. That is why Conceptualism, as a philosophy, is so strongly connected with art: the idea is used in its aesthetic capacity, as a verbal statement or visual projection of idea as such, so that all its factual or practical extensions are revealed as delusions. For example, conceptualists view totalitarian thinking, with its claims of all-encompassing truthfulness, as a kind of madness: a network of self-referential signs and internal consistencies forcefully imposed on external reality. When considering more properly philosophical ideas, Conceptualism creates parodies of metaphysical discourse, using, for example, Hegelian or Kantian rhetorical models for the description of such trivial objects as flies or garbage. This is not merely an attempt at the ironic deconstruction of traditional philosophy-it is also a project for the proliferation of new, multiple metaphysics, each of which
Berghahn Books, Dec 31, 2022
Berghahn Books, Dec 31, 2022
Common Knowledge, Aug 1, 2020
In examining the reception of Western imports in the Soviet Union, I have drawn on a vast array o... more In examining the reception of Western imports in the Soviet Union, I have drawn on a vast array of commentary from citizens, including 1,100 letters from viewers and readers to central institutions and cultural figures and more than 6,000 entries in comment books from art exhibitions. The letters include responses to the new cultural exchange policies, translated prose, radio programs, travelogues, and Western films in the context of Soviet ones and vice versa. The authors of these letters were teachers, librarians, doctors, engineers, and students. Students comprised nearly 30 percent of respondents to radio concerts of the French singer and actor Yves Montand in 1954-1956. Most of them were studying pedagogy and engineering. Secondary school teachers and engineers made up another 18 percent of letter writers. Among Ilya Ehrenburg's 206 correspondents about modern art, one hundred listed their professions. The majority (41 percent) were engineers and teachers (24 and 17 percent, respectively). Others were doctors, bookkeepers, and agronomists. They graduated from five-year colleges and specialized institutes of, for instance, forest management in Briansk, metallurgy in Magnitogorsk, water transport engineering in Leningrad, and construction in Odessa. Overall, of 550 letter writers who specified their jobs, the intellectual elite-writers, artists, filmmakers, translators, professors, doctoral students, researchers, and foreign affairs specialists-comprised a minority of just 12 percent. By contrast, teachers and engineers made up 23 percent, or twice as many. Only 9 percent of 550 letter writers with known occupations were workers. Letter writers were primarily urbanites; among the letters I examined, those from the countryside typically were penned by village teachers, librarians, bookkeepers, and agronomists. The letters in my sample came from across the Soviet Union. Out of 808 letter writers who supplied their addresses, Muscovites and Leningraders accounted for 40 percent. Their share was lower among respondents writing about cinema (27 percent), translated lit er a ture (29 percent), and international affairs (27 percent). Moscow and Leningrad were home to the country's most prominent theaters, film studios, museums, libraries, and universities. Not surprisingly, these population-dense Appendix: Assessing Responses to Cultural Imports
Berghahn Books, Dec 29, 2017
Palgrave Macmillan US eBooks, 1999
Transcultural theory needs to articulate its own ethics, which can be called an ethics of the ima... more Transcultural theory needs to articulate its own ethics, which can be called an ethics of the imagination. Traditionally, imagination was considered to be the capacity least bound to ethical responsibility, incompatible with or even antagonistic to ethical imperatives. The long-standing debates between ethics and aesthetics targeted exactly this opposition between moral norms and free imagination, between duty and desire, between reason and fantasy.
Russian Postmodernism
N ow we can hardly doubt that the last third of the twentieth century will enter cultural history... more N ow we can hardly doubt that the last third of the twentieth century will enter cultural history under the name of postmodernism. The beginning of the twenty first century reacted ambivalently to this heritage. Many concepts that postmodernism introduced into global culture are now undergoing revision in attempt to reappropriate what was lost or rejected during the previous thirty years. The practices of quotation, allusion, intertextuality, and the traits of irony and eclecticism are still current, as well as skepticism toward the universality of canons and hierarchies of all kinds. However, postmodernism, as it is perceived now, got stuck at the level of language games: it was obsessed with overcoding, subtexts, and metatextuality, and did not recognize anything outside this domain. By the early twenty-first century, this game continued by inertia alongside the new realities that challenged it: the Iraqi War, Chechnya, the dismemberment of Yugoslavia. … All these events took place far away from the United States, however, and major theoreticians such as Jean Baudrillard still were inclined to interpret them as postmodernist phenomena, including the mass media's control over the world scene and the information industry's games. The limits of the game suddenly became starkly defined on September 11, 2001. The entire postmodernist era ended with deadly Preface to the Second Edition | xv Preface to the Second Edition | xvii Preface to the Second Edition | xxi Slobodanka Vladiv-Glover's introduction "'New Sectarianism' and the Pleasure Principle in Postmodern Russian Culture." The selected bibliography has been expanded and updated.
The Culturology Ideas
The authors of the article, using a transdisciplinary method of research from the standpoint of c... more The authors of the article, using a transdisciplinary method of research from the standpoint of cultural studies, art history, philology, philosophy, religious studies, psychology and social philosophy, try to comprehend and identify the main meanings and symbols of Lars von Trier's film "Nymphomaniac", to find the main purpose of this film. At the same time, M. Epstein draws attention, first of all, to the aspect of the pathological sensuality of the main character - Joe, her nymphomania and, appealing to a woman and a man before the fall in the Bible, whom God blessed to be fruitful and multiply, shows an unusual angle of sexual relations, gradually reveals stepping the way to love and holiness through debauchery and makes a shocking conclusion, which at the same time has the right to exist, about the purifying role of hellish debauchery for gaining holiness. N. Shelkovaya pays more attention to the disclosure of symbols in the film: trees, dry leaves, a mountain, Jo...
The Editorial Board asked scholars specializing in social and human sciences two questions regard... more The Editorial Board asked scholars specializing in social and human sciences two questions regarding jointness – the focus of the journal Koinon. We were in particular seeking their views on, firstly, the state of being-in-common of human existence in the present-day world and the most urgent problems that complicate the collectivity and cohesion of human communities today. Secondly, we wanted to know their opinion on the significance of the concept and the problem of jointness in their research field. The editorial board received answers that differed not only in subject-field specifics but also in methodological approaches and even individual psychological colouring, emotional tone. Prominent representatives of various social and human sciences (philosophers -historians of philosophy and philosophers of culture, anthropologists, ethnologists, political scientists, historians, and psychologists) responded to the questions raised by the editorial board. All the respondents noted the...
Philosophy Now, May 23, 2013
Ivan Igorevich Soloyov (1944–90), philosopher, essayist, theorist of literature and art, lived in... more Ivan Igorevich Soloyov (1944–90), philosopher, essayist, theorist of literature and art, lived in Moscow. He graduated from the philological faculty of Moscow State University, but he chose not to compromise himself with the ideological establishment of Soviet academia and preferred the life of independent scholarship and writing; he also taught high school Russian language and literature. He did not succeed in publishing any of his many works during his lifetime. Some of his writings appeared posthumously and are available in English translation.2
The concept of genre as a cultural (rather than a narrowly literary) category was developed by Mi... more The concept of genre as a cultural (rather than a narrowly literary) category was developed by Mikhail Bakhtin in his works of the 1920s and 1930s. For Bakhtin, a genre is a stable, conventional form of social communication that does not depend on the individual message or intention of interlocutors. “Certain features of language take on the specific flavor of a given genre: they knit together with specific points of view, special approaches, forms of thinking, nuances and accents characteristic of the given genre.”1 The same mechanisms of “generic,” interpersonal communication transmit a cultural heritage from generation to generation. As is an archetype, a genre is a reservoir of a cultural unconscious, and it transcends the limits of personal meaning and individual creative imagination. A novelist invests her work with personal vision, but the genre of the novel possesses its own experience and world view that is communicated to the reader beyond any authorial intentions or effor...
Berghahn Books, Dec 29, 2017
The formation of Russian postmodernist thought can be traced to the theoretical works of Andrei S... more The formation of Russian postmodernist thought can be traced to the theoretical works of Andrei Siniavsky, in particular to his treatise ''On Socialist Realism'' (1959). Instead of praising socialist realism as the ''truthful reflection of life'' (as did official Soviet criticism), or condemning it as a ''distortion of reality and poor ideologized art'' (as did dissident and liberal Western criticism), Siniavsky suggested the artistic utilization of the signs and images of socialist realism, while introducing a playful distance from their ideological content. This project was realized in the 1970s and 1980s in the form of Sots-Art and Conceptualism, influential artistic and intellectual movements that transformed the Soviet ideological system into material for parody and pastiche, often characterized also by a lyrical and nostalgic attitude. Conceptualism is not merely an artistic trend; its philosophical significance is revealed in the art and programmic statements of Ilya Kabakov and Vitaly Komar and Aleksandr Melamid, in Alexander Zinoviev's fiction, in Dmitry Prigov's poetry, articles and manifestos, and in Boris Groys's theoretical works. As a philosophy, Conceptualism presupposes that any system of thought is self-enclosed and has no correspondence with reality. The relationship between Conceptualism and Marxism is somewhat reminiscent of the dispute between nominalists (whose moderate version was also called ''conceptualism'') and realists in the epoch of the Medieval scholastics: whereas Marxists assert the historical reality of such concepts as collectivism, equality, and freedom, Conceptualists demonstrate that all these notions are contingent on mental structures or derived from linguistic structures. Therefore, from a Conceptualist standpoint, a ''concept'' is any idea-political, religious, moral-presented as an idea, without any reference to its real prototype or the possibility of realization. That is why Conceptualism, as a philosophy, is so strongly connected with art: the idea is used in its aesthetic capacity, as a verbal statement or visual projection of idea as such, so that all its factual or practical extensions are revealed as delusions. For example, conceptualists view totalitarian thinking, with its claims of all-encompassing truthfulness, as a kind of madness: a network of self-referential signs and internal consistencies forcefully imposed on external reality. When considering more properly philosophical ideas, Conceptualism creates parodies of metaphysical discourse, using, for example, Hegelian or Kantian rhetorical models for the description of such trivial objects as flies or garbage. This is not merely an attempt at the ironic deconstruction of traditional philosophy-it is also a project for the proliferation of new, multiple metaphysics, each of which
Berghahn Books, Dec 31, 2022
Berghahn Books, Dec 31, 2022
Common Knowledge, Aug 1, 2020
In examining the reception of Western imports in the Soviet Union, I have drawn on a vast array o... more In examining the reception of Western imports in the Soviet Union, I have drawn on a vast array of commentary from citizens, including 1,100 letters from viewers and readers to central institutions and cultural figures and more than 6,000 entries in comment books from art exhibitions. The letters include responses to the new cultural exchange policies, translated prose, radio programs, travelogues, and Western films in the context of Soviet ones and vice versa. The authors of these letters were teachers, librarians, doctors, engineers, and students. Students comprised nearly 30 percent of respondents to radio concerts of the French singer and actor Yves Montand in 1954-1956. Most of them were studying pedagogy and engineering. Secondary school teachers and engineers made up another 18 percent of letter writers. Among Ilya Ehrenburg's 206 correspondents about modern art, one hundred listed their professions. The majority (41 percent) were engineers and teachers (24 and 17 percent, respectively). Others were doctors, bookkeepers, and agronomists. They graduated from five-year colleges and specialized institutes of, for instance, forest management in Briansk, metallurgy in Magnitogorsk, water transport engineering in Leningrad, and construction in Odessa. Overall, of 550 letter writers who specified their jobs, the intellectual elite-writers, artists, filmmakers, translators, professors, doctoral students, researchers, and foreign affairs specialists-comprised a minority of just 12 percent. By contrast, teachers and engineers made up 23 percent, or twice as many. Only 9 percent of 550 letter writers with known occupations were workers. Letter writers were primarily urbanites; among the letters I examined, those from the countryside typically were penned by village teachers, librarians, bookkeepers, and agronomists. The letters in my sample came from across the Soviet Union. Out of 808 letter writers who supplied their addresses, Muscovites and Leningraders accounted for 40 percent. Their share was lower among respondents writing about cinema (27 percent), translated lit er a ture (29 percent), and international affairs (27 percent). Moscow and Leningrad were home to the country's most prominent theaters, film studios, museums, libraries, and universities. Not surprisingly, these population-dense Appendix: Assessing Responses to Cultural Imports
Berghahn Books, Dec 29, 2017
Palgrave Macmillan US eBooks, 1999
Transcultural theory needs to articulate its own ethics, which can be called an ethics of the ima... more Transcultural theory needs to articulate its own ethics, which can be called an ethics of the imagination. Traditionally, imagination was considered to be the capacity least bound to ethical responsibility, incompatible with or even antagonistic to ethical imperatives. The long-standing debates between ethics and aesthetics targeted exactly this opposition between moral norms and free imagination, between duty and desire, between reason and fantasy.
Russian Postmodernism
N ow we can hardly doubt that the last third of the twentieth century will enter cultural history... more N ow we can hardly doubt that the last third of the twentieth century will enter cultural history under the name of postmodernism. The beginning of the twenty first century reacted ambivalently to this heritage. Many concepts that postmodernism introduced into global culture are now undergoing revision in attempt to reappropriate what was lost or rejected during the previous thirty years. The practices of quotation, allusion, intertextuality, and the traits of irony and eclecticism are still current, as well as skepticism toward the universality of canons and hierarchies of all kinds. However, postmodernism, as it is perceived now, got stuck at the level of language games: it was obsessed with overcoding, subtexts, and metatextuality, and did not recognize anything outside this domain. By the early twenty-first century, this game continued by inertia alongside the new realities that challenged it: the Iraqi War, Chechnya, the dismemberment of Yugoslavia. … All these events took place far away from the United States, however, and major theoreticians such as Jean Baudrillard still were inclined to interpret them as postmodernist phenomena, including the mass media's control over the world scene and the information industry's games. The limits of the game suddenly became starkly defined on September 11, 2001. The entire postmodernist era ended with deadly Preface to the Second Edition | xv Preface to the Second Edition | xvii Preface to the Second Edition | xxi Slobodanka Vladiv-Glover's introduction "'New Sectarianism' and the Pleasure Principle in Postmodern Russian Culture." The selected bibliography has been expanded and updated.
The Culturology Ideas
The authors of the article, using a transdisciplinary method of research from the standpoint of c... more The authors of the article, using a transdisciplinary method of research from the standpoint of cultural studies, art history, philology, philosophy, religious studies, psychology and social philosophy, try to comprehend and identify the main meanings and symbols of Lars von Trier's film "Nymphomaniac", to find the main purpose of this film. At the same time, M. Epstein draws attention, first of all, to the aspect of the pathological sensuality of the main character - Joe, her nymphomania and, appealing to a woman and a man before the fall in the Bible, whom God blessed to be fruitful and multiply, shows an unusual angle of sexual relations, gradually reveals stepping the way to love and holiness through debauchery and makes a shocking conclusion, which at the same time has the right to exist, about the purifying role of hellish debauchery for gaining holiness. N. Shelkovaya pays more attention to the disclosure of symbols in the film: trees, dry leaves, a mountain, Jo...
The Editorial Board asked scholars specializing in social and human sciences two questions regard... more The Editorial Board asked scholars specializing in social and human sciences two questions regarding jointness – the focus of the journal Koinon. We were in particular seeking their views on, firstly, the state of being-in-common of human existence in the present-day world and the most urgent problems that complicate the collectivity and cohesion of human communities today. Secondly, we wanted to know their opinion on the significance of the concept and the problem of jointness in their research field. The editorial board received answers that differed not only in subject-field specifics but also in methodological approaches and even individual psychological colouring, emotional tone. Prominent representatives of various social and human sciences (philosophers -historians of philosophy and philosophers of culture, anthropologists, ethnologists, political scientists, historians, and psychologists) responded to the questions raised by the editorial board. All the respondents noted the...
Philosophy Now, May 23, 2013
Ivan Igorevich Soloyov (1944–90), philosopher, essayist, theorist of literature and art, lived in... more Ivan Igorevich Soloyov (1944–90), philosopher, essayist, theorist of literature and art, lived in Moscow. He graduated from the philological faculty of Moscow State University, but he chose not to compromise himself with the ideological establishment of Soviet academia and preferred the life of independent scholarship and writing; he also taught high school Russian language and literature. He did not succeed in publishing any of his many works during his lifetime. Some of his writings appeared posthumously and are available in English translation.2
The concept of genre as a cultural (rather than a narrowly literary) category was developed by Mi... more The concept of genre as a cultural (rather than a narrowly literary) category was developed by Mikhail Bakhtin in his works of the 1920s and 1930s. For Bakhtin, a genre is a stable, conventional form of social communication that does not depend on the individual message or intention of interlocutors. “Certain features of language take on the specific flavor of a given genre: they knit together with specific points of view, special approaches, forms of thinking, nuances and accents characteristic of the given genre.”1 The same mechanisms of “generic,” interpersonal communication transmit a cultural heritage from generation to generation. As is an archetype, a genre is a reservoir of a cultural unconscious, and it transcends the limits of personal meaning and individual creative imagination. A novelist invests her work with personal vision, but the genre of the novel possesses its own experience and world view that is communicated to the reader beyond any authorial intentions or effor...