Under Suspicion

Translator’s Preface: Dead Man Thinking

As I said, I am solely interested in the politics of immortality—how one becomes a pure soul, an indestructible mummy, a living corpse.¹

Groys, Politik der Unsterblichkeit

East, West, and the Topography of Art

Boris Groys—philosopher and writer, art critic and curator, university administrator and public policy advisor—is known in Russia, Germany, and other parts of the world as one of today’s leading European intellectuals. His work covers a broad range of topics, including the history of art and philosophy, modern anthropology and ecology, twentieth-century politics, and contemporary media theory. Literally and metaphorically, Groys speaks many languages: he draws from epistemology and economics, aesthetics and politics, academic and public discourse. Although fluent in English and French, Groys has published most of his work so far in either Russian or German. Fortunately, over the last few years in particular, an increasing number of Groys’s books and essays have appeared in English, such as Art Power (2008), The Communist Post-Scriptum (2009), and History Becomes Form: Moscow Conceptualism (2010). The overall goal of Under Suspicion is to continue this trend and further familiarize the English-speaking public with this original and provocative thinker. Under Suspicion is ideally suited to this task: one of Groys’s most influential books, its first part revisits and expands his central thesis about the cultural economy of exchange. Groys originally developed this idea in his—still untranslated—monograph On the New: An Essay On Cultural Economy from 1999.² The second part of Under Suspicion examines this notion within a broad anthropological and philosophical context through detailed readings of Marcel Mauss, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Georges Bataille, Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida, and Jean-François Lyotard. Groys’s analysis of these thinkers is both lucid and entertaining, and there is little need to comment on them in the course of this introduction.

The book as a whole, however, is quite distinct from Groys’s other works due to its particular focus on the notion of subjectivity. Under Suspicion investigates what Groys calls the submedial space hidden underneath the phenomenological surface of our media apparatus. His crucial argument is that in examining any text, picture, song, or aesthetic object, we can focus either on its representational level of signification or on the underlying medium that literally carries or sustains this signification. But we can never see both dimensions at the same time. Given this incongruence between materiality and meaning, the human being, according to Groys, necessarily suspects the existence of a hidden power or mysterious force operating behind the scenes—a quasi subject secretly controlling our media and their pictures of reality. This suspicion regarding the existence of a superior power is as old as humanity itself, as Groys points out in the introduction of this book. Media theory is nothing but a new formulation of the old ontological question about the substance, the essence, or the subject possibly hiding behind the image of the world.³ In other words, our millenia-old ontological suspicion is simply being re-articulated through the rise of media theory and new technologies. And as long as this suspicion survives, the notion of subjectivity survives as well. This is because subjectivity is based on suspicion; it lives in its own unhistorical time of infinite doubt.⁴

This preface is less concerned with summarizing the main theses of Under Suspicion than with contextualizing them—biographically and philosophically, geographically and institutionally. This broad contextualization is crucial for two reasons: first, because it mirrors Groys’s own epistemological relativism and his emphasis on contextual thinking; second, because it enables us to address the multiple intellectual traditions that have shaped Groys’s work overall. Particularly in the United States and Canada, Groys is still best known as a curator and critic of modern art. This reputation is largely due to the international success—and fierce critique—of his first book, Gesamtkunstwerk Stalin, the English translation of which appeared in 1992.⁵ Unlike Western critics who dismissed Stalinist culture as kitsch or mere political propaganda without aesthetic value, Groys argued that socialist realism continued and radicalized the legacy of the European avant-garde. After the 1917 October Revolution and Stalin’s consolidation of power in the early 1930s, the Soviet regime, according to Groys, embarked on an official campaign to realize the dream of the Avantgarde, which was to organize all of social life according to an artistic and all-comprehensive plan.⁶ Although both the avantgarde and socialist realism unequivocally endorsed and advocated the sociopolitical use of art, the decisive difference between these two movements concerns the specific means by which they sought to realize this goal. Instead of continuing the Western tradition of representing the aesthetic transformation of reality, Russian artists and officials during the Stalinist era went directly to work on this reality itself. Under tight governmental control, aesthetic ideals were (said to be) immediately put into practice, and social life itself was considered to be what the avant-garde proclaimed it should become, namely art: This claim to have actualized the utopian project of the Avantgarde by using non-avantgardist, ‘realist’ measures is absolutely central to Soviet culture and hence cannot simply be dismissed as mere hype, Groys insists.⁷

Although highly influential, Groys’s first book was predictably criticized for its alleged equation of avant-garde aesthetics and Stalinist dictatorial politics. Art historians felt that Groys’s cultural revisionism erased crucial aesthetic and ideological differences between genuine art and political propaganda. Political theorists condemned what they perceived as Groys’s superficial analogy of Italian fascism, German National Socialism, and Soviet Stalinism.⁸ Regardless of whether one considers this critique justified or not, the charges themselves are symptomatic of the intellectual provocation characteristic of Groys’s work in general. All of his major publications share a stylistic aptitude for poignant—and often controversial—observations and a thematic focus on the relationship of art, philosophy, and power. Inspired by Foucault—Groys explicitly called his Gesamtkunstwerk Stalin a cultural archaeology—Groys’s notion of power, however, is by no means limited to the realm of politics, propaganda, and (totalitarian) forms of oppression. Instead, it encompasses the entire field of social, institutional, and economic forces that shaped modern art and culture in East and West alike. This methodological emphasis on sociohistorical contextualization dominated the last section of Gesamtkunstwerk Stalin, which examined the legacy of the avant-garde and socialist realism in the Soviet Union’s postutopian culture of the 1970s and eighties. Yet this chapter was largely ignored by Western critics. This oversight, in Groys’s view, is deeply symptomatic of the West’s reluctance to move beyond its stereotypical understanding of Russian history and culture, whose contemporary artistic achievements, he argues, continue to be dismissed by academic scholars and public audiences alike.

The rejection of Russian art, Groys argues, testifies to the Western public’s profound misunderstanding of both the nature of art and that of the cultural institutions supporting it: I now believe that the people living in the West, with only few exceptions, do not really understand their own system in which they live, Groys claimed during a conversation with his Russian friend the artist Ilya Kabakow in the early 1990’s.⁹ The Western public, in Groys’s view, remains committed to aesthetic autonomy and other antiquated notions of art. Most people essentially identify art with the art market and, therefore, denounce the socialist culture of the former East as mere propaganda. Yet the same people fail to recognize the de facto existing machinery of cultural production that regulates the so-called free art market in the West.¹⁰ If art is produced for and consumed by the public, then its apparent diversity today is but a secondary effect of the capitalist logic of economic exchange: The pronouncement of the cash price one is willing to pay for a particular work is the only hermeneutics appropriate for art, Groys quips.¹¹ This critique of contemporary art largely coincides with that of Marxist critics such as Fredric Jameson and Julian Stallabras, who likewise consider the constant yet superficial change of aesthetic appearances on the global art market a mere façade that hides the essential sameness of its products underneath.¹² Yet contrary to most cultural critics (of the left or the right), Groys insists that art is irreducible to a particular philosophical concept or specific material properties. For Groys, art has no essence or substance of its own. Anything can become art, because art depends solely on the topography of its sociohistorical contextualization: The artwork is an exhibited object—that is all. This, precisely, is the reason why today’s exhibition spaces have increasingly become part of the artwork they house and, at times, even usurp its place. Present-day art is not the sum of particular things but the topology of particular places,¹³ Groys argues, and he even considers the museum itself the actual origin of the modern work of art.¹⁴

The topological nature of art not only determines our cognitive and physiological responses to it but also annihilates the traditional distinction between original and copy, as Groys argues with reference to Walter Benjamin’s seminal artwork essay: Today, every work of art—even one produced in an original manner—is essentially a copy. Spatial distance alone, however close it may be, renders the art-work original.¹⁵ Original and copy are relative terms whose meaning depends entirely upon the spatial relationship between art and viewer, object and subject: If we make our way to the artwork, then it is an original. If we force the artwork to come to us, then it is a copy.¹⁶ Given this topological relativity of art, Groys concludes that [p]rivatization ultimately proves to be just as artificial a political construct as socialization was before it.¹⁷ The Western art market, in other words, is no more genuine or natural for the historical development of artistic forms of expression than the former East’s state-governed control. Instead, both systems—free art market and state-governed propaganda—function as socially constructed, rather than naturally given, spaces for the production and consumption of whatever we choose to call art.

Metanoia; or, The Loss of Self

The sociocultural divide between East and West remains a central theme throughout Groys’s writings. His critical, almost clinical gaze on Western art and its cultural institutions clearly reflects his unique personal and intellectual history. Boris Efimovich Groys was born in 1947 in East Berlin but grew up in Russia, where he studied philosophy and mathematics at Leningrad University from 1965 until 1971. During his subsequent employment as a research fellow at Moscow State University, he forged strong intellectual ties with underground Russian artists and intellectuals that continued to influence his thinking even after his eventual emigration to West Germany in 1981. In the mid-1980s, Groys received his doctoral degree and assumed a position at the University of Münster, where he remained until his appointment as Professor of Philosophy, Aesthetics, and Media Theory at the Karlsruhe State College of Design in 1994. Since then, Groys has given numerous lectures around the world and held visiting appointments at several American universities, most notably at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Southern California. His extended visits to the United States led him to accept a position as Global Distinguished Professor of Russian and Slavic Studies at New York University in 2009.

In spite of this considerable international success, Groys remains—or, at least, considers himself—an intellectual outsider in the West, as he emphasized in the late 1990s:

I am now an emigrant, a stranger in Germany—without any roots in German society, but also without any roots in Russian society. Hence I cannot speak in the name of any tradition, any country, any cultural space, nor can I represent anybody. I cannot even properly speak and write in my own name, because my name is spelled very differently in Cyrillic vs. Latin letters, and each time I am supposed to sign something, I once again ponder what my real name is—and each time I receive different answers to this seemingly simple question.¹⁸

This passage bespeaks a cultural uprootedness that extends to the very core of Groys’s personal identity: the lack of a proper name. It is, indeed, symptomatic that Groys’s academic writings rarely make use of the personal pronoun I. Instead, he prefers an impersonal style characterized by passive constructions, broad generalizations and truisms of various kinds—obviously,…; as is well known,…; there can be little doubt that…; and so on—that seem to hail from, and appear to be directed at, nobody in particular. Lacking a real name and writing as if he were, literally, beyond himself, Groys deliberately assumes the voice of a dead man.

This self-declared loss of self is paradigmatic of Groys’s aporetic mode of philosophical reflection. Its overall goal is to divest the process of thinking from the living body that sustains it. Groys’s thinking reduces the human body to a mummy—a living corpse that, although dead, continues to think. Referring to Plato and ancient Greek rhetoric, Groys identifies this methodology as metanoia, that is, a transition from an innerwordly to an otherworldly perspective, from the perspective of the mortal body to that of the eternal soul.¹⁹ In contrast to Plato’s, however, Groys’s metanoia replaces the immortal soul with the immortality of the body as corpse. This survival of one-self as corpse, Groys argues, can be anticipate[d] in precisely the same way one was able to anticipate the eternal life of the soul in earlier times.²⁰ How? By (imaginarily or literally) confining oneself to the cemetery, the library, the museum, or any other place removed from the daily struggle to secure one’s livelihood. Only by turning this heterotopic endpoint [of the cemetery] into the prism of our worldview can we hope to gain a new perspective on life.²¹ Only by leaving behind the realm of corporeal existence will a single individual be able to occupy, at the same time, a multiplicity of different—and often contradictory—points of view. By contrast, once metanoia becomes impossible, the individual loses the ability to change perspective…. If one is merely mortal, to escape one’s position in the world is impossible.²² The implication of Groys’ theory of metanoia in the philosophical context of twentieth-century Marxism is clear enough: it suggests that Groys, the disembodied thinker, is immune to the process of ideological interpellation, famously described by Louis Althusser as the subject’s turning around when publically hailed by its proper name.²³ Viewing life from beyond the grave, Groys turns a deaf ear to the call of ideology—in fact, he no longer has an ear, a body, or a name for ideology to grab hold of. What remains instead is a thinking mind freed from the material constraints of human embodiment. At least with regard to his disdain for the human body, Groys seems to be an idealist.

It would be a serious mistake, therefore, to reduce Groys’s theory about the loss of self to the postmodern cliché of the fragmented subject and its failure of linguistic (self-)representation. Groys’ goal is not to reflect on life toward death in Heidegger’s sense, nor does he embrace the other-as-self along the lines of Derrida, Levinas, or American cultural criticism. If anything, his call for social isolation reflects the centuries-old influence of monasticism in the Russian Orthodox Church. And yet, although Groys occasionally acknowledges his Russian heritage, he does so only in the belief that the absolute peculiarity of Russia consists in its lack of peculiarity.²⁴ In other words, Groys considers himself Russian only to the degree that being Russian means being nobody in particular. Thus, one might even apply Groys’s central claim about his native country—Russia is not a historically grown reality, but a project, a promise, a new beginning²⁵—to himself as a writer: instead of a living person, the name Boris Groys stands for the utopian project of thinking beyond the presence of (one’s own) life.

On the other hand, one might very well dismiss such high-flying metaphors about the pursuit of immortality and otherworldly perspectives as little more than rhetorical ploys on Groys’s part—a calculated scheme to avoid personal responsibility for his provocative theses by means of a ventriloquistic style of writing whose sudden reversals and counterintuitive formulations are intended to take his readers (and conceivably the author himself) by surprise. Groys’s abundant use of hyphens, colons, enumerations, and incantatory repetitions creates a subliminal persuasiveness most readers will find difficult to resist, and there is no denying that Groys’s deceptively colloquial prose conceals the skillful rhetoric that sustains it underneath. This tension between surface and depth, however, not only mirrors one of Groys’s central thesis in this book regarding the categorical distinction between media surfaces and submedial space. It also contributes to the seductive power of his writing and serves to undermine any critique of Groys’s style as personal escapism. In marked contrast to his academic texts, Groys’s published conversations with friends and critics openly acknowledge the rhetorical dimension of his work. Here, Groys speaks in a personal, at times even confessional, tone that reestablishes the connection between himself and his text: I am a craftsman of writing ["Ich bin ein Handwerker der Schrift"],²⁶ Groys admits in a wily gesture of self-exposure. It is precisely this self-contrariness that helps maintain the overall appeal of what reviewers call Groys’s unmistakingly independent, eccentric, untimely and unorthodox style of writing so often at odds with itself.²⁷ These quotes also demonstrate that Groys’s art of thinking²⁸ is no more reducible to the history of Western philosophy and Christian religion than to modern art and postmodern theory. Although Groys draws from all these traditions, his writings successfully manage to craft them into a genuinely original assemblage. Stylistically and thematically, Groys always speaks in his own voice—despite his protestation to the contrary.

This is most evident in Groys appropriation of twentieth-century phenomenology, a tradition he explicitly links with his own understanding of metanoia. Much like a living corpse, the phenomenological subject thinks as if it were not alive and thus realizes the infinite play of life’s possibilities, in Groys’s view.²⁹ Obviously, Groys’s metanoia has nothing in common with the existential or carnal strand of phenomenology and its increasing influence in contemporary media studies. Their differences notwithstanding, most of today’s media philosophers (e.g., Brian Massumi, Carolyn Jones, Katherine Hayles, Mark B. N. Hansen) agree that new media art enhances our visceral experience of embodiment. Groys, by contrast, claims that virtual space is essentially bodiless: The experience of corporeal presence, which has always been the goal of modern art, does not occur in virtual communication. As a computer-user, one gets absorbed into the lonely communication with the medium, enters the state of self-loss, body-loss—analogous to the practice of reading a book.³⁰ Whereas Maurice Merleau-Ponty embraces the prereflexive, visceral sense of human embodiment as constitutive of Being, Groys’s ideal is precisely to break free from and transcend what Merleau-Ponty calls the flesh of the world.³¹

Groys, therefore, considers his work basically a critical continuation of Husserlian phenomenology,³² because Husserl, like Groys, reduced embodied cognition to the mind’s pure, eidetic perception of the world. But again, Groys immediately qualifies this intellectual alliance. Far from being too Cartesian, Husserl’s transcendentalism, Groys argues, did not go far enough. Husserl failed to develop a proper phenomenology of metaphysics³³ and ultimately reduced the study of metaphysics to sociology and positivist science. Rejecting such scientific reductionism, Groys insists that the mind’s capacity for self-reflection can no more be scrutinized scientifically—through the use of neuroimaging, for example—than language, media, and the material world can be understood hermeneutically. Put differently: much as the immaterial infinity of the thinking mind is irreducible to scientific logic, the material finitude of communication media (e.g., paper and canvas, digital storage, and high-broadband cable) is immune to any kind of traditional, philosophical-humanist critique. But Groys goes even further than that: not only is the human subject irreducible to a third-person, scientific analysis of the brain, as many philosophers will agree, but it is equally irreducible to a first-person, philosophical self-introspection of the thinking mind. Groys’s key insight is that subjectivity does not have a positive existence in itself. It is neither objective nor subjective, but contextual and relative:

My subjectivity is not founded on self-consciousness, but on a suspicion by others that I am a subject…. My becoming human does not occur within me, but within context; it occurs in the comparison between me and other humans. How I design that context and which comparison I engage, that’s what matters as opposed to how I look and what kind of thing I am.³⁴

Groys’s notion of subjectivity thus moves beyond the binary juxtaposition of scientific reductionism versus existential phenomenology that characterizes today’s scholarly debate on consciousness.³⁵ Instead, he insists that literally no-body will ever attain the status of genuine subjectivity. Human subjectivity remains an impossible task, a utopian project every individual is called on to pursue in her own way. Groys’s own version, as we have seen, is to reduce the thinker to a mummy, a living corpse that both enables and prefigures the arrival of the new man and another form of human being. Groys’s metanoia, in other words, is a transitional phase that leads from premodern, traditional humanism and its belief in humanity as a natural, always already given entity to the contemporary reign of (post)humanism and its belief in humanity as the never-ending task of human self-creation. It follows that the term ‘human’ is a political concept, not a biological one.³⁶ Humanity needs to move beyond its anthropological assumptions and begin experimenting with different ideas—and different contextualizations—of what we call human. This includes granting human rights to nonhuman beings as well as acknowledging the utopian potential of genetic research: Maybe genetics provides us with the necessary tools and thus replaces hermeneutics and the human sciences with gene-technology. Instead of asking ourselves how to comprehend existing man, we now ask the question: How do we generate a new, a different human?³⁷ The move beyond traditional humanism inevitably leads Groys back to Soviet socialism and its vision of the new man, which he still considers the best starting point for a radical critique of the traditional, racist concept of the human.³⁸

The Cultural Economy of Exchange

Notwithstanding this emphatic embrace of socialist utopianism, Groys’s relation to Marxist philosophy—like his relation to religion, phenomenology, and postmodernism—is complex, ambivalent, even contradictory. On the one hand, Groys agrees with the left about the global market’s ability to shape contemporary culture. His critique basically coincides with what Jameson denounced as the becoming cultural of the economic and the becoming economic of the cultural in the postmodern era.³⁹ On the other hand, however, Groys does