> Pomo is quite the big thing here (it's called "conceptualism" here).
http://www.russ.ru/antolog/intelnet/ar_phoenix_philosophy.html
The Phoenix of Philosophy: On the Meaning and Significance of Contemporary Russian Thought
Mikhail Epstein
This article was first published in SYMPOSION. A Journal of Russian
Thought, Los Angeles: Charles Schlacks, Jr., Publisher, University of
Southern California, vol. 1, 1996, pp. 35-74.
> ...7. Poststructuralism. The latest trend worthy of mention corresponds
> to the post-structuralist paradigm in the West. One of its most original
> versions may be identified as conceptualism. This name usually refers to
> a well-known movement in Russian arts and literature of the 1970s and
> 1980s, but it can also be aptly applied to a broad spectrum of critical
> and philosophical ideas that complement and highlight this movement.
> Conceptualism assumes that certain conceptual schemes underlie the
> ideological construction of reality and determine its artificial,
> conventionalized character. Conceptual thinking is imbued with irony,
> parody, and a sense of relativity, since "truth" and "reality" are
> considered to be empty categories. The relationship between conceptualism
> and Marxism is somewhat reminiscent of the dispute between nominalists
> 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 these notions are either
> contingent on mental structures or derived from linguistic structures.
> Every cultural form is conceived in terms of combinations of pre-
> established codes, such as Soviet ideological language or the code of the
> Russian psychological novel. The general approaches of conceptualism can
> be found in theoretical and artistic works by Andrei Siniavsky, Ilya
> Kabakov, Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid, and Boris Groys.
Another version of philosophical poststructuralism is presented by the Laboratory of Non-Classical Philosophy at the Institute of Philosophy in Moscow, in particular, by such authors as Valery Podoroga, Mikhail Ryklin, and Mikhail Yampolsky. They publish a philosophical collection Ad Marginem (books and an annual) which was methodologically inspired by contemporary French thinkers (Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari and others). Podoroga's works represent an original combination of phenomenological, hermeneutical and deconstructionist readings of German philosophers and Russian writers, with a special emphasis on the corporeal and spatial quality of texts as "landscapes."
7. Conceptualism
Another major strategy that shares the contemporary intellectual scene with metaphysical radicalism is conceptualism. Like its counterpart, it suggests a universal mode of speculation: a critical attitude towards traditional notions of reality and an ironic playfulness with regard to the sign systems of various ideologies that empties all metaphysical assumptions of their contents to reveal the bare skeleton of abstract discourse contingent on a system of arbitrary beliefs. Conceptualism exposes the "realistic fallacy" of all "master discourses," discloses the contingency of all concepts and refuses to ground itself in any reality. As Ilya Kabakov, the leading representative of Russian conceptualism in art and theory, puts it, "Precisely because of its self-referentiality and the lack of windows or a way out to something else, it [the concept] is like something that hangs in the air, a self-reliant thing, like a fantastic construction, connected to nothing, with its roots in nothing."
Initially, the name "conceptualism" was borrowed from the international aesthetic school founded in late 1960s by the American artist Joseph Kosuth. Conceptual art from the very beginning was connected with philosophy and even claimed to be more intrinsically philosophical than academic philosophy itself. Kosuth insists that, "The twentieth century brought in a time which could be called 'the end of philosophy and the beginning of art.' [...] Art is itself philosophy made concrete."
Two lines of argument intersect in this statement. On the one hand, it implies that 20th century art is no longer limited to the creation of material forms but begins to question the very nature of art and to redefine it with each specific work. Art, therefore, becomes an articulation of ideas about art. "...'Conceptual Art' merely means a conceptual investigation of art." On the other hand, analytical philosophy, as Kosuth proposes, has refuted any claims by philosophy to enunciate the truth, to make verifiable propositions about the world, and reduced the task of philosophy to the analysis of its own language. Therefore, philosophy has lost its privileged "scientific" status and its claims to universal truth; in our "post-philosophical" age, its function passes to art, which creates new concepts, signs and languages without assuming their credibility. These two processes, the conceptualization of art and the aesthetization of philosophy, contribute to a mutual rapprochement and the redefinition of conceptual art as a concrete philosophy that objectifies and relativizes its own ideas.
Another source of the term "conceptualism," less evident but perhaps more decisive for the fate of this movement in Russia, is the medieval philosophical school of the same name. Among the European scholastics of the 13th and 14th centuries, conceptualism functioned as a moderate version of nominalism, which asserted that all universals have their being not in reality itself but in the sphere of purely mental concepts. As such, this school was opposed to realism, which posited one continuum of physical and conceptual reality, insisting on the ontological being of such universals as love, soul, beauty, goodness and other general concepts. Strange as it may seem, an analogous confrontation of two intellectual trends occurred in the late Soviet period, with Marxism insisting on the historical reality of such general ideas as "class," "the people," "collectivism," "equality," "history," and "progress," while conceptualism argued for the purely nominative and mental basis of these ideological constructions. Like its medieval counterpart, conceptualism attempts to expose the realistic fallacy that attributes objective existence to general or abstract ideas. Whereas the Soviet system gave the status of historical reality to its own ideological pronouncements, conceptualism attempted to expose the contingent nature of these concepts by unmasking them as constructions proceeding from the human mind or generated by linguistic practices.
The origins of Russian conceptualist discourse can be traced to the works of the philosopher, writer, and literary critic Andrei Siniavsky, particularly to his treatise "On Socialist Realism" (1959). Instead of either praising socialist realism as the "truthful reflection of life" (in the words of official Soviet criticism) or condemning it as a "distortion of reality and poor propagandistic art" (in the words of dissident or liberal Western criticism), Siniavsky suggested the artistic utilization of the signs and images of socialist realism, while maintaining a playful distance from their ideological content. Among leading representatives of Russian Conceptualism in the 1970s-1990s one could name, in addition to Andrei Siniavsky and Ilya Kabakov, artists and essayists Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid, poet and theorist Dmitry Prigov, and philosopher and art critic Boris Groys. Conceptualism may be viewed as a Russian version of postmodern and poststructuralist discursive strategy which undermines the credibility of any system of thought by exposing it as a self-enclosed chain of significations with no outlet to reality. From a conceptualist standpoint, a "concept" is any idea--political, religious, moral--presented as a pure idea, without reference to its real prototype or any possibility of its actual implementation. That is why conceptualism, as a philosophy, is so closely connected with art: the idea is used in its aesthetic capacity, as a playful and self-sufficient verbal statement or visual projection whose practical or political application are revealed as delusions. With conceptualism, any fact, gesture, object, or work of art is exposed as a "concept," i.e., a mental act which ironically contemplates its own materialization as contingent on speculative conventions. Thus the field of philosophical reflection expands infinitely, subsuming all kinds of concrete objects and facts and treating them as mental constructions, as general concepts, in such a way that these concepts claim their existential and material status and simultaneously expose the counterfeit behind these claims.
Conceptualists view totalitarian thinking, with its claims of all- encompassing truthfulness, as a kind of madness: a network of internally connected though arbitrary propositions presumed to coincide with external reality. When considering more properly philosophical ideas, conceptualism playfully paraphrases metaphysical discourse using Hegelian, or Kantian, or Marxist 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 consciously demonstrates the contingency of its central concept, be it Absolute Spirit in Hegel's work or a fly in Kabakov's treatise "The Fly as a Subject and Basis for Philosophical Discourse."
In contrast to radical metaphysics "in the imperative mood," conceptualist simulative systems of thought could be called "metaphysics in the subjunctive mood," which also serves to distinguish it from pre-Kantian dogmatism, or "metaphysics in the indicative mood," with its claims of adequately describing reality as such. Kabakov argues that any object, however ordinary and trivial, can rightfully be placed in the center of a philosophical discourse, becoming its master concept, the universal "first principle": "The work presented here, the treatise 'The Fly with Wings' almost visually demonstrates the nature of all philosophical discourse--at its base may lie a simple, uncomplicated and even nonsensical object--an ordinary fly, for example. But yet the very quality of the discourse does not suffer in the least as a result of this. In this very way it is proven (and illustrated) that the idea of philosophizing and its goal consists not at all in the revelation of the original supposition (if this can turn out to be an ordinary fly), but rather in the very process of discourse, in the verbal frivolity itself, in the mutual suppositions of the beginnings and ends, in the flow of connections and representations of that very thing."
In addition to demonstrating the contingency of metaphysical systems, Kabakov accomplishes two other closely related philosophical tasks. By contrasting the superficiality of the topic with the gravity of his chosen genre, Kabakov not only deconstructs the methodology of serious philosophy, but elevates the trivial to the status of a topic worthy of philosophical meditation. The same device that allows him to deconstruct traditional philosophy, also serves to construct a new range of philosophies that can assimilate the words and concepts of ordinary language in all its infinite richness. This pan-philosophical approach can also be applied to such concepts as "chair" or "table" or "wall," identifying them as potential universals that may provide a more vivid elucidation of the world than such traditional and almost empty concepts as Spirit or Life or Being. The proliferation of metaphysical systems within conceptualism is conceived as a way to overcome the metaphysical dimension of discourse, not by the means of serious analytical criticism (as in Wittgenstein or Derrida), but through the self-ironic, self-parodic construction of systems that deliberately disclose their own contingency.
Conceptualism, as postmodernism on the whole, is sometimes criticized for its aesthetic snobbery and moral indifference (consider Solzhenitsyn's invectives against "spiritually impotent" postmodernism in the early 1990s) . But Russian conceptualists, not unlike their Western allies, emphasize the moral implications of philosophical contingency, which undermines totalitarian and hegemonic discourse and promotes self-irony as a mode of epistemological humility. Russian culture proved to be a fertile ground for the application of conceptualist theory, owing to the prevalence of ideological schemes and stereotypes throughout its history, especially during the Soviet period. In the West, the correlation between sign systems and observable reality has been persistently validated through scientific research and economic practice; while in Russia, reality itself has traditionally been constructed from ideological signs generated by ruling minds. For this reason, conceptualism may be viewed as the predominant Russian-Soviet mode of thinking, as the self-awareness of nominalist and conceptualist practice underlying Russian history, especially its ideocratic institutions.
The Russian version of conceptualism established a theoretical distance between itself and a great number of metaphysical schemes, potentially totalitarian and hegemonic discourses that dominated late Soviet and early post-Soviet culture, including Marxist, nationalist, mystical-esoteric and other "grand" and "fundamental" discourses. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, as the official ideology lay in ruins, the critical sharpness and topicality of conceptualism diminished for a while, but conceptualists did not remain jobless for long: other ideologies (religious fundamentalism, national messianism, etc.) came to contend for the "yawning heights" of the State ideocracy, and their rhetoric escalated to such a degree of automatization and self-repetition that conceptualism could set about "working" with them. -- Michael Pugliese