Community as Device : Metonymic Art of the Late Soviet Underground

Abstract

In this paper I examine the interdependence of the late Soviet unofficial culture and the artist’s everyday communicative context, the underground scene, in which the individual and the social environment coalesce. The syntagmatically organized lifeworld of the Soviet underground was in contrast with the paradigm of state institutions that were structured in analogy with the party apparatus. Two axes of collective communication emerged, comparable to two different tropes: analogy and spatial proximity. Along this horizontal axis, the poetics and aesthetics of the unofficial literature and art can be traced back to the communicative and therefore systemic environment of the artists and authors. Much more than finished artifacts, their products were the result of an interactive process of creation within a very specific sociocultural domain, where shared sources, codes and aesthetics were combined with the possibility of direct influence. Many unofficial artifacts were born from the lively communication between writers and visual artists. In this context I discuss metonymy, intermediality and the phenomena of auto-reflexivity and metatextuality. My approach is situated between Boris Eikhenbaum’s sociology of literature, Iurii Tynianov’s cultural semiotics avant la letter, and Jürgen Habermas’ theory of communicative action.