Boris Groys: The Intruder

Only a handful of philosophers have managed to make a successful transition from Eastern Europe into the Western context and make their impact there over the last one hundred years or so - Alexandre Kojève, Julia Kristeva, Slavoj Žižek, Boris Groys. To come from another cultural context and philosophical tradition is to be haunted by the spectre of otherness and to act, inevitably, as an intruder in the host culture. Boris Groys has managed to turn these circumstances - his appearance on the Western philosophical scene after his immigration from Russia to Germany in 1981 - into one of the most distinctive aspects of his strategy of inquiry.

Holding professorial positions in Karlsruhe and New York universities, while also being part of the European Graduate School as well as acting as a curator of projects ranging from documenta to the Venice Biennale, Groys has attracted a growing following since his Gesamtkunstwerk Stalin (1988), published in English as The Total Art of Stalinism in 1992, urged a radical reconsideration of the relationship between Stalin's totalitarianism and the Russian avant-garde. Fredric Jameson described the book as 'a remarkable act of interpretation' and credited it with a much-needed reinvigoration of the field of utopian studies.¹ Groys's thesis in that book was that, instead of being a mortal enemy of the Russian avant-garde of Malevich and the Constructivists, Stalinism represented its logical outcome, fulfilling the most profound avant-garde inspiration: the total transformation of reality in accordance with an aesthetic plan. By claiming for itself the role of demiurge previously occupied by God, the avant-garde prepared the development that Stalin brought to a logical conclusion by merging art and politics and thus achieved a realisation of a utopian vision in practice. Groys's analysis in The Total Art of Stalinism reversed the established understanding of continuity and rupture, and set up paradox as the main methodology of his philosophical work, an impulse that becomes even stronger in his later writing.

Groys is fluent in English and French but writes mainly in Russian and German. The complicated history of translation means that Groys's works often reach their Anglophone readership belatedly. Prompted by Verso's recent publication of his new book In the Flow, this article reflects on its relationship with two earlier monographs by Groys: On The New (1992/2014) and Under Suspicion: The Phenomenology of Media (2000/2012). All three deal with one of Groys's primary fields of inquiry: the constant movement and change within the realm of what Yuri Lotman would call the semiosphere, which includes art objects as well as their interpretations, products of mass media, the circulation of theories, and linguistic expression in general. On the New investigates what constitutes innovation in art, theory and thought; Under Suspicion looks at what animates this dynamic of change, or which forces operate beneath the media surface; while In the Flow engages with the recent transformations in art and media brought about by the emergence of the Internet and digitisation more generally. Groys's overriding explanatory logic in these works is based on an economic paradigm, but one that differs in significant respects from both the market economy and the notion of 'creative economies' now favoured in cultural studies.

On the New takes as its point of departure postmodern critiques of truth and their insistence on the inaccessibility of 'the signified, reality, being, meaning, evidence, or of the presence of the present' (On the New, p7) - a critique that for Groys, rather than making the question of the new impossible, allows us to pose it adequately for the first time. For, as Groys understands it, innovation does not imply that something has been created or revealed that was previously absent or hidden, but rather that something which has always been seen, known and open is revalued. To explain how the process of revaluation unfolds, Groys mobilises an economic logic: 'As a revaluation of values, innovation is...