From the issue dated November 22, 2002
A Cultural Hero of the Soviet Era Looks to the Future
Now at Emory, Mikhail Epstein envisions new modes of thought in the humanities
By PETER MONAGHAN
Atlanta
For the past decade, an intellectual and cultural hero from Soviet-era Moscow has been quietly producing ambitious and varied research here, on the edge of Emory University's leafy suburban campus, in a converted house that is the home of the Russian department.
Mikhail N. Epstein, whom the eminent Sovietologist Walter Laqueur has called "probably the most important figure in Russian literary theory" of recent decades, was a fabled figure among Moscow's intelligentsia in the 1970s and '80s.
The fact that he's rarely mentioned in literary and cultural-studies circles in America "is to the disgrace of the academy," says Thomas R. Epstein, a visiting professor in Slavic studies at Brown University. He's a friend (no relation) of Mikhail, but his opinion is echoed by other respected Slavists with a theoretical bent. The Russian may lack celebrity in part because his work is so hard to pigeonhole.
As it happens, now is a good time to wander belatedly into Mikhail Epstein's singular world, thanks to his latest book in translation. The bulk of Cries in the New Wilderness: From the Files of the Moscow Institute of Atheism (published this summer by Paul Dry Books) is a mock "spetsizdat," or classified document, on emerging spiritual sects, purportedly compiled in 1985 by a bureaucrat-scholar, R.O. Gibaydulina, Ph.D.
An atheist per state policy, Gibaydulina records with scientific dispassion the words of various preachers and prophets. Among the Everyday Sects are, for example, Thingwrights, who call for "a wholesale replacement of signs by things." The Philistine Sects include Folls, who disrupt the "rational projects" of the state. Among the Atheist sects, the Atheans "call upon man to act as if God exists, even if He doesn't."
Cries in the New Wilderness, says Thomas Epstein, "to paraphrase Voltaire, creates groups that, if they didn't exist – and they didn't – they would have to have been created just to fully enact the realities of Soviet life." It is a summa theologica of groups that tacitly disavow the Soviet disavowal of religions.
An earlier form of the book circulated in Moscow in the late 1980s as a classic samizdat – underground – manuscript before an American Russian-language edition was published in 1993. Its underground status derived from its wry, knowing humor: Mr. Epstein frames the Gibaydulina report with mock-scholarly book reviews and a preface (as well as an afterword, in the English edition) written by Mikhail N. Epstein – or a character of the same name – who expresses the belief that the "lonely voices of faith" are relieving the absurd "ideosphere" that gripped 20th-century life. They may even be "making room for a new freedom of thought which goes under the ancient name of 'wisdom.'"
The entertaining mystification of Cries only begins to suggest the scope of Mr. Epstein's writing. In Russia, and among alert American colleagues, he is known for his works on Russian postmodernism and totalitarian language, for his startling religious and philosophical writings, and for his extensive Internet projects. His 15 books and hundreds of articles range freely over historical, linguistic, literary, political, and religious ground.
"Of all the people that I know of in the East or the West who are doing cultural studies," says Michael Holquist, a professor of comparative literature and Slavic languages and literatures at Yale University, "he comes as close as anybody to weaving a seamless web between the different aspects of culture – high, low, spiritual ... It's the ars combinatoria that is so remarkable."
'Technohumanities'
On first meeting Mr. Epstein, who is 52, a visitor registers his Old World manners, his grayed sweep of hair, his steady gaze behind bifocals. But when he speaks, in nuanced English that bears only occasional traces of Russian syntax, concrete reality dissolves in the light of his abstract thought.
His new book, he says, is a "comedy of ideas," his response to a remark by the French poet and critic Paul Valéry (1871-1945) that the modern era called for a new "Intellectual Comedy" to succeed Dante's Divine Comedy, which was born of feudal society, and Balzac's Human Comedy, which sprang from bourgeois society. The right context for a third "comedy," says Mr. Epstein, is surely the rise and fall of Communism – a regime that sought to make ideology reality.
Cries is part of an attempt to create "a whole branch of what I call technohumanities" – a practical application of ideas to the humanities that he finds analogous to technology in the natural sciences and politics in the social sciences. To the ancient Greeks, he points out, techne meant "art." In his book, he says, "I see some nascent religious and philosophical modes, but I try to articulate them to such a degree that they become philology, the theoretical consciousness of these groups. This is the artistic component."
He also increasingly favors another mode of the book – the catalog of ideas, or encyclopedia: "I think this is the form for the comedy of our time."
"I feel myself not very in favor of consecutive writings," he says. "I feel this is a matter of the past, more and more, and I myself prefer what can be called hypertextual connections, parallel processing of variations of the same problem in several disciplines and languages."
After all, he continues, "time tends to evaporate in the contemporary world, and I think that our intellectual enterprise should somehow reflect that tendency."
Cries is part of a projected trilogy, another part of which is posted on InteLnet, his complex of Web sites (http://www.emory.edu/INTELNET/Index.html).
The posted portion is called the Book of Books – "a little pretentiously, I know," Mr. Epstein says, and is a growing compendium of ideas that diverge from paradigms in the humanities. He explains on the site: "Practically every generally accepted decision that is made in the humanities (philosophy, literature, ethics, linguistics) leaves room for an alternative yet unexpressed decision." Those theories and concepts "were never conceived and realized ... because they failed to find their exponents," in some cases because they were thwarted by "persecutions, totalitarianism, destruction of culture, of philosophy, of theology."
"To tell you the truth," Mr. Epstein says, "my favorite intellectual occupation is inventing new disciplines, new methods." The Book of Books is full of proposals for such disciplines, for new genres and concepts, and for new words to describe them. "Semionics," for example, would be the science of "how to produce new signs," and "silentology" the inverse of linguistics.
"This," he continues, "is what actually the humanities' enterprise may be: finding mutenesses and lacunae in the languages of existing disciplines and trying to fill them."
Postmodern on Its Own Terms
That reverie in some ways reveals the Russian tradition from which Mr. Epstein springs: that of the literary critic straddling the border of literature and philosophy.
In Moscow, Mr. Epstein made his biggest theoretical splash in the mid-1980s, when he presented the startling idea that the Soviet Union was postmodern – and that it (and, earlier, Russia) had been so even before the concept was coined in the West.
How could there be postmodernism when modernism itself had been so suppressed in the Soviet state? Well, he said, because in Russian culture, ideology – specifically, socialist realism, a compromised Marxism – stood in for the two underpinnings of postmodernism in its Western formulation: the "cultural logic of late capitalism," as Fredric Jameson put it, and the "tyranny" of visual simulation and hyperreality, as described by Jean Baudrillard.
The argument was all the more striking because the Russian humanities, while strong in such areas as textual studies and literary history, had avoided such galvanizing Western theories as poststructuralism, deconstruction, and psychoanalysis, writes Caryl Emerson, a highly regarded Slavist at Princeton University, in a recent essay in the journal Common Knowledge.
Mr. Epstein stood out in Russian academe thanks also to his after-hours activities. He held academic day jobs, beginning in the mid-1970s at Moscow's Institute of World Literature. But at night, he was associating with artists and writers, in a world that in Russia is traditionally set apart from academe. In particular he championed the Conceptualists, who used such elements as everyday objects, garbage, and blasphemy to produce shocking, anti-aesthetic art that showed how ideology infects independent thought. The group represented concepts, rather than objects, to show that in an ideocratic society, as Mr. Epstein puts it, "everything was ideologically infused and abused." In the Conceptualists, he located a parallel to a key ingredient in postmodernism: irony.
As the Soviet state staggered toward its dissolution in the 1980s, Mr. Epstein organized activities in Moscow that might, playfully but seriously, help build alternatives to Soviet ideocracy. He formed such groups as the Essayists Club, Image and Thought, and – the most celebrated – the Laboratory of Contemporary Culture, in which intellectuals and artists attempted to cross political, intellectual, and cultural borders – those set, for example, by the language of totalitarianism.
The attention he attracted caught up with him. As Sovietism petered out and economic hardships racked the state, nationalists of the Pamyat' movement took to harassing Mr. Epstein at his public appearances. "I received some threats, and there were some publications against my being a Russian writer with a Jewish name. My wife was afraid. When she tried to obtain food for our four children, she was threatened because she was the wife of a Jew. You understand."
He moved to the United States in 1990, teaching for a semester at Wesleyan University, then working as a research fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, in Washington, before settling at Emory.
His arrival in America caused great excitement among theory-oriented American Slavists, says Dale E. Peterson, a professor of English and Russian at Amherst College. Mr. Peterson hoped – perhaps too optimistically, he says now – for "the kind of really complicated cultural dialogue that has happened as, say, Western feminism has had to encounter alternative formulations of feminist positions."
'Age of Anticipation'
One of Mr. Peterson's expectations did bear fruit. "I was anticipating to find that while poststructuralist thinking in the West came largely out of an age of suspicion, of decentering of self, and, through deconstruction, of pointing out the indeterminacy of meaning, poststructuralist thinking in Epstein's case and generally in the post-Soviet period comes out of an age of anticipation."
Mr. Epstein agrees. In one of his central formulations, he suggests that while postmodernism may assert the death of time, history, authorship, originality, and God, "the epoch of deconstruction, demythologization, and so on is over." After an epoch of "post-" – poststructuralism, postmodernism – he says, we are entering an era of proto-, of "feeling as if we are at the very beginning of some new trends and tendencies that we are not yet able to preview or forecast, but we have to try."
Such an era would complete a drift in Western philosophy from the indicative mode (pre-Kantian thinkers describing what is), to the imperative mode (Kantian and post-Kantian thinkers describing what should be), to a now-emerging epoch of the subjunctive mode, the mode of possibility.
"All these tendencies to the imperative mode are exhausted," he says. "In the fall of Russian Communism, the activist approach is over, and in deconstruction, the critical thrust of Western thought also is exhausted. The epoch of the third mode, the subjunctive mode, is at the very beginning, and we should try to create aesthetics, ethics, metaphysics, some social and theological aspects of this new epoch."
Mr. Epstein discusses what that future might look like in The Philosophy of the Possible: On Modalities of Culture and Thought, published in Russian last year, and now under contract to be published in English. The book expresses "the most interesting thing about Epstein: He's just really optimistic," says Princeton's Ms. Emerson, "not naive."
His optimism resounds in his current work on the future of the humanities as a fellow of Emory's Center for Humanistic Inquiry, and in his development of InteLnet. In both undertakings, he emphasizes the benefit of new modes of thinking: mystery and amazement. With Conceptualist self-parody, he says his goal on the Web site is "to link everything to everything else," to see what "mysteries" emerge.
Mystery is at the core of his fascination with spiritualism, particularly with the Rus-sian tradition of "apophaticism," an elusive concept that emphasizes human inadequacy and might be described as godless godfulness, or a questing for a God who is an absence.
Mr. Epstein's emphasis on possibility is thorough. Toward his goal of new ways of thinking, he advocates the free, nonproprietary sharing of ideas. His colleagues compliment him on that unusual generosity, but they also wonder if it is too utopian.
Ellen E. Berry, an English professor at Bowling Green State University who co-wrote a 1999 book with Mr. Epstein on Russian and American styles of "creative communication," says: "We used to tussle quite a bit over his tendency to not see that this open interaction could sometimes lead to violence, to the negation of the other's point of view. For someone who's lived through violence, his thoughts don't turn to the possibility of violence and even, if you will, of evil."
Take also Mr. Epstein's simple theory of "transculture," which holds that while any society tends to be a trap, one can, through culture, liberate oneself. Contrary to Lenin's remark that "one cannot live in a society and be free of it," Mr. Epstein argues that "culture is not a product of society, but a challenge and alternative to society."
Not only Lenin, of course, but also Freud, Foucault, and even Bakhtin – whose shadows loom large in American humanities departments – were less sanguine about the possibilities of escaping society's shackles.
That may begin to explain why, as Mr. Peterson of Amherst College puts it, "the splashdown effect of Epstein in the American intellectual world has not been as large as I had hoped."
Now, Mr. Peterson says, "the time is either overdue, or ripe. It's hard to say."
He and other advocates of Mr. Epstein's work cite additional reasons for his relative obscurity. For one thing, among the last of the philologists, most Slavists are suspicious of "theory." For another, translations of his works into English have been slow in coming, not because of the difficulty of his Russian prose, which his translators call lapidary, but because of the unusual nature of his work.
The West has always been slow to pick up on Eastern European thought, often discovering it only through, say, a French lens, says Mr. Holquist. "In the American academy, anything that comes from east of the Seine is somehow not considered quite serious."
But Mr. Epstein's ability to glide from academe to beyond is unusual, even among Russian thinkers, says the Yale professor, and that confounds American academics. "By any standard," sums up Mr. Holquist, "Mikhail is a real original."
SOME PUBLICATIONS BY MIKHAIL N. EPSTEIN
After The Future: The Paradoxes of Postmodernism and Contemporary Russian Culture, translated by Anesa Miller-Pogacar (University of Massachusetts Press, 1995)
Transcultural Experiments: Russian and American Models of Creative Communication (St. Martin's Press, 1999; with Ellen E. Berry)
Russian Postmodernism: New Perspectives on Post-Soviet Culture, translated by Slobodanka M. Vladiv-Glover (Berghahn Books, 1999; with Alexander A. Genis and Slobodanka M. Vladiv-Glover)
Cries in the New Wilderness: From the Files of the Moscow Institute of Atheism, translated by Eve Adler (Paul Dry Books, 2002)
For a full list of publications, with some summaries, see http://www.emory.edu/INTELNET
/cv_books.html. Library catalogs generally list Mr. Epstein's Russian-language books under the spelling "Epshtein."
Copyright © 2002 by The Chronicle of Higher Education
