Springerin
Band XI Heft 4 / Band
XII Heft 1 – Winter 2006 – Kollektive Amnesien
P. 22-26
Marx’s Doctrine
Is All-Powerful Because It Is True
An
interview with the Russian artist Dmitri Gutov about the work and influence of the
philosopher Michail Lifschitz
David Riff
Dmitri
Gutov (born 1960) is one of the most important representatives of contemporary
Russian art. But it is precisely of contemporary art – a field in which he
works as an installation artist, video artist and painter – that he is so
sceptical. Since the end of the eighties, his main interest has been in the
Soviet thirties and the Marxist aesthetic that evolved during these years. And
that in its most conservative guise, as formulated by the orthodox Marxist
philosopher Michail Lifschitz (1905-1983).
In 1994 Gutov, together with the artist and curator Konstantin Bokhorov,
founded the »Lifschitz Institute«, which focuses on this passionate
anti-modernist. Conceived as a group for reading and discussion, the Institute
collects the works of Lifschitz, now rarities, puts them online, organises
seminars and discussions, and also runs exhibitions dedicated to Lifschitz and
his cultural theory. In the following interview, however, we have tried to find
out what is really at issue here.
David Riff: Over the past 30 years, artists from
Dmitri Gutov: At the end of the fifties, during the political thaw under
Khrushchev, the intelligentsia rediscovered modernism, but they completely and
utterly rejected everything that had to do with the »totalitarian« Stalin
epoch. It wasn’t until the start of the seventies that the conceptualists
started being interested in this period. The presentiment behind this endeavour
was not wrong: there is a lot to be researched in this epoch. But, in practice,
the conceptualists worked like archaeological thieves. They destroyed the most
valuable layers, and simply ignored phenomena that were less striking, but all
the more important. When trying to enhance the status of the Stalin epoch, they
focused on its most primitive, appallingly vulgar elements, Soviet trash.
What’s more, the conceptualists saw this epoch as a unified style. In this
regard, they barely differed from the preceding generation. The »Lifschitz
Institute« has made a completely different discovery (if you can speak of
discoveries at all here): that the unified appearance of the gesamtkunstwerk
Stalin was an illusion. We found an inner discontinuity in this epoch that had
simply not registered on the meters of the
Riff: So, to put things in the terms of the
Gutov: Yes. The debates on literature and art in particular were the
nervous centre of the thirties, and Michail Lifschitz was a central figure in
these debates.
Riff: But if you follow Boris Groys’ account this inner conflict seems
to have become conceivable again only when real existing socialism collapsed.
Why? And why Lifschitz?
Gutov: To understand how it became possible to read Lifschitz from a
different point of view, you have to think yourself back to the Perestroika. A
phantasmagoric epoch, completely unique. On the one hand, an enormous degree of
freedom suddenly arrived. The repressive state apparatus had neither the chance
nor the desire to intervene in the way things were spontaneously developing. On
the other hand, no one was really able to imagine what power money can actually
exercise. The Perestroika was, so to speak, a ray of hope between two
mechanisms of power; one had already disintegrated, the other was not yet
really evolved. Michail Lifschitz called such periods »intermediate spaces of
history«. In his philosophy, he paid a great deal of attention to such states.
For example, that is how he understands antiquity: as a rift between the
Archaic and the still undeveloped class contrasts of capitalist civilisation.
In such moments, everything that can deform people and culture is weakened. He
describes his life situation at the turn from the twenties to the thirties in a
similar way. Between the vulgar Marxism of the twenties and the sombre dogmatic
atmosphere of the second half of the thirties. Of course, the late eighties
that we experienced were only a pale imitation of much brighter periods of
hope, but still, there was something similar in the air.
At any rate, the discovery of Michail Lifschitz’s works was a shock. For my
generation - that is, for those people who were students during the seventies
and eighties -, Soviet Marxism was a murky soup, a sort of abracadabra. And
Lifschitz was known as its most orthodox champion. To use the words of
Dionysius the Areopagite: in the epicentre of this darkness we discovered
light. It turned out that there are texts about the very same wooden themes
that we had drummed into us ad nauseam, but they are subtle and refined despite
their apparent simplicity. As the background with which Lifschitz’s texts were
mingled disappeared, the key to his works was found: that they should not be
taken literally. But this was not immediately clear to everyone, to put it
mildly.
Riff: What exactly makes Lifschitz’s aesthetic theories so special?
Gutov: To explain more precisely what is at stake here, we can draw on
one of Marx’s best-known statements on art from the introduction to the
»Fundamentals«. Marx writes: »The difficulty does not lie in understanding that
Greek art and epos are coupled with particular forms of social development. The
difficulty is that they still give us artistic pleasure and, in a certain
regard, are considered as a norm and unattainable model.«
If we put aside all considerations of the normativity of Greek art, we see a
central problem in this sentence: the fact that an art work gives us artistic
pleasure at all, independently of the social circumstances under which it was
created. That sounds like a non-Marxist, metaphysical problem. Basically, this
quote postulates that art has an extra-historical component and that this
component is actually the most important part of the art. No form of sociology
can explain it.
In the thirties, some thinkers discovered a consistently anti-relativist
message in Marx’s legacy. This can be seen with the greatest clarity on the
margins, so to speak, of the classic Marx themes, in Marx’s cultural
philosophy. Before Lifschitz, it was thought that this philosophy didn’t even
exist. He reconstructed it using meticulously collected statements of Marx and
Engels on art and literature, which he published as an anthology. At the end of
his life, he said that he held this work in much higher esteem than his other,
original works.
Riff: But I still wonder whether the aesthetic debates of the twenties
and thirties were concerned with the »artistic pleasure« that Marx describes in
his introduction. And how did Lifschitz understand this pleasure? »Artistic
pleasure« sounds to me like late Romanticism, Biedermeier, a superficial
bourgeois luxury.
Gutov: The nature of this artistic pleasure is bound up with the fact
that a person sees the meaning of his own historical and personal life in the
mirror of art with greater clarity. As we know, Marx did not like to speak of
eternal matters. Since his early article »Debates on the Law on the Theft of
Wood« (1842), he concentrated his attention on material issues. However – and
this was the big discovery of the thirties: the extremely down-to-earth
language of Marx contains more pertinent approaches to issues traditionally
seen as metaphysical than doctrines that tackle such issues head on. One could
say that the old proverb from the Orient, »He who knows speaks not, he who
speaks knows not”, was projected onto Marx in the thirties.
Riff: In this sense, then, the debates of the twenties and thirties were
about truth and not about pleasure, that is, about Lenin’s dictum: »The
doctrine of Marx is all-powerful because it is true.«
Gutov: Precisely. Lifschitz puts his most important discovery as
follows: »An absolute standpoint is by no means alien to the true Marxist
classicism. It sees truth, justice and beauty not as things dependent on time,
but as the highest content of the class struggle, and true values are anyway among
the objective predicates of reality itself.« That was Marx, read not simply
through Hegel, but through Plato.
Riff: Another question: You say that Lifschitz understands Marx as
seeing the ultimate content of art as being extra-historical. But there is
another, no less interesting way to read this quote from the »Fundamentals«.
»The Greeks« Marx writes there, »were normal children.« For us, the fascination
of their art has to do with the fact »that the immature social conditions under
which it arose … can never return.« Like normal children, they anticipate
becoming adult, but the demagification of adulthood gives their hope no chance:
»What can Jupiter do faced with a lightning rod?« What still remains of the art
work, however, is its premonition of a coming truth, a redemption. But this
redemption is a long time in coming. The result. a cleft between a »coming
community« and reality, whose historical forces drive us together like cattle.
Precisely this expectation is palpable in every work of art, comprises its
worth and justifies its circulation as a product that, despite all its
unrepeatability, forces reproduction. So, in the end, we will always betray the
hopes of the »normal children«. Couldn’t we make a connection here to the
twenties and thirties? To the awareness of a catastrophic betrayal that is
taking place or will take place soon? If this is not the issue, all our
discussion about the unrepeatability of the twenties or thirties is nothing but
historicism.
Gutov: Well, the reflection on the Soviet twenties and thirties is not
historicism. The uniqueness of this period lies in its anticipation of the
future. If we put it more broadly, we could say the same about the whole of
Marxism. Interest in it is interest in a future that became visible for a short
moment with an intensity that is almost beyond perception. That is why it is
only with the greatest effort that historical memory has been able to record
this experience. Today, this experience has to be pieced together again from
fragments, from feeble traces in the ruins, from scraps, intimations and
shadows.
In this ephemeral view into the future, there was a huge contradiction. On the
one hand, it was a world after capitalism. The actualised presentiment of a
classless society. The materialisation of a theory of a higher form of life.
The found key to the mystery of history. Many aspects of everyday life already
bore the traits of real communism. But the other side of this experience was a
growing awareness during the thirties that the revolution had suffered a fatal
defeat. That it remained unfulfilled in its most important facets. That it had
turned into a completely irrational nightmare. The collapse of real socialism
that we experienced in the eighties was nothing but a weak echo of this defeat.
So the quintessence of the thirties was that communism was adopted, but at the
same time showed itself to be unviable. This unity – which shaped the inner
experience of a whole generation – will remain alive for an indefinite period.
Precisely because of this, we can still fall back on this experience, even if
the situation at the present day may seem hopeless. There was a time when it
was reality.
To return to amnesia: the shock of this unprecedented failure had its
post-traumatic consequences; the most valuable elements were deleted. It is
because of this that the Marx reading of the thirties appears so invaluable.
That which they noticed is invisible under other circumstances. The twilight of
the simultaneously victorious and dying revolution is unique. Our experience
has far less colour. As survivors of the end of illusions, the people of the
thirties were far more sober than us; but as witnesses of the realised
revolution, which was not illusory, they belong to tomorrow.
Riff: Nonetheless, Lifschitz was a conservative philosopher, a dedicated
opponent of modernism. Another contradiction! In what does his revolutionary
potential, his anticipation of the future, consist?
Gutov: To answer this question, I would have to explain Lifschitz’s
concept of conservatism, one that was central to his thinking. To reduce it to
its essence: every mechanical confrontation between the revolutionary and the
conservative is superficial and almost meaningless. There are
ultrarevolutionary forms in whose heart is concealed a reactionary
conservatism. Those possessing such an awareness often illustrate this idea
with their destiny, especially if they pass without any hiatus from a radical
break to religious obscurantism. But there is also a form of conservatism with
an inherent democratic content, with a colossal protest potential. That is how
Lifschitz understood Socrates, Aeschylus, Aristophanes, Dante, Shakespeare,
Goethe, Pushkin and Dostoevsky. This was also the source of his interest in the
conservative artistic ideal of Marx and Lenin. All of these considerations
should also be taken into account in the case of Lifschitz, who was mostly seen
as an archconservative obscurant and reactionary. He called this the great
restoration of the truth of old cultures without retrograde ideas.
Riff: Hence Lifschitz’s critique of avant-garde artists …
Gutov: One folder from the Lifschitz archive that was recently published
in part is called »The Meaning of the World«. In this folder there is a
fragment that sheds light on the rage with which Lifschitz fell upon the entire
aesthetic project of the 20th century. It sounds like this: »The idea of the
absurd is the most extreme expression of irrationalism (it exists already with
Dada). The absurd is the negation of the >logodicy<, adaequatio rei et
intellectus [the equation of things and the intellect]. Not irrationality as
the best way to gain insights into the world, but the irrationality of the
world per se, the dying of its reason – not only in this concrete form, but in
the form of possibility.« Lifschitz sees the finally direction taken by art
after Picasso’s »The Young Women of Avignon« as the artistic equivalent of the
»dying of the world’s reason in the form of its possibility.«
Riff: So, a complete rejection of contemporary art in the name of truth
and reason. But you are a contemporary artist and yet you find your most
important inspiration in Lifschitz, of all people. How is that possible?
Gutov: I see something in the project of contemporary art that is
unsatisfying. Particularly in the manifestations that are considered
successful. When leafing through art journals and taking part in exhibitions, I
feel an almost physical unease. But here I would like to use an observation
that I have made previously regarding the Soviet experience in the thirties.
Within this unity there is also an inner rupture. Something that is tantamount
to a deep discontent. But it is precisely this discontent that comes closest to
the art of a future communist society. My turning to the thirties is a turning
to a beginning that has found no end. At the level of artistic practice, this
corresponds to a reflection on the basics, elementary mimetic experiments, work
on pieces of art that depict something. After all the artistic and social
experiments of the past century, that is like wanting to turn a fish soup into
an aquarium.