DR: As I was preparing for our conversation, I hit upon a link to a text “Justification of Art or the End of Intelligentsia”, written for “Flash Art” in 1996. Yet I was both disappointed and intrigued to find that this link was dead: I was only able to find its ephemeral digital artefacts. I thought this dead link as a point of departure for our conversation on intellectual labour. In how far do you see the crisis of the Russian intelligentsia during the 1990s as a concession to the ephemeral production of “concepts” and “projects”, which very soon lose their meaning? And does the fact that the link is dead mean that your views from 5 years ago have lost any of their original significance?
VM: As far as I can remember, the text you’re talking about provoked the enthusiasm of Marat Guelman. I don’t know whether Marat actually read the text or not, but he immediately became enthused with the term “post-intellectual”. He wanted to translate the text into Russian, and to publish it on his site, which is probably how the link appeared. But his interest faded as quickly as it came up, which might be why the link died very soon. This situation is very symptomatic and brings me to your question.
My view then was that Russia’s “thinking class” had departed from the idea of the “intelligentsia” without ever identifying itself with the conception of the intellectual (in the sense of Sartre). By the early 1990s, the dissident intelligentsia’s conception of intellectual labour had already become the subject of wide-spread criticism in the press, and the figure of the “intellectual” was something that was hardly understood or understood intuitively, but rejected as inappropriate to the social perspectives of neo-liberal reform. Members of the post-intelligentsia and pseudo-intellectuals opted for media that were far more fast-paced and, at the same time, more socially effective. This gave their “intellectual labour” a new temporality: it was necessary to work quickly, more superficially, with great flexibility. Determined by an exalted metaphysical view of money and an ethos of “standing up for one’s right to proper pay”, this new form of “post-intellectual” labour demanded a certain kind of anti-fundamentalism and plasticity, an ability to adjust to new tasks, epitomized most compactly by the political technologist. Such highly talented individuals are willing to sell their intellectual services to political groups or leaders with views that differ drastically from his-her own. By now, Russia’s political technologies have actually become one of Russia’s main export goods, although they have very little in common with the quality of a classical European intellectual’s products; the European intellectual’s production actually means something because it is firmly based in a ethos of convictions. This is something that the “post-intellectual” has not reached. Е ven if the neo-liberals organized rock-concerts and commercials on TV; “post-intellectual” production has not yet established one serious analytical or scholarly institution. Furthermore, what makes me wary is that all the deconstructions of the intelligentsia’s codex were quite obviously motivated by the authorities: in the situation of ethical relativism, as the critical senses of the “thinking class” dulled to the point of social dissolution, it was much easier to conduct radical reforms and whole-sale privatization.