World Upside Down: A Soviet Philosopher on Pop Art

This essay is a commentary on “What’s Through the Looking Glass” by Evald Ilyenkov.

In Through the Looking-Glass (1871), Lewis Carroll’s sequel to Alice in Wonderland, Alice takes a voyage through the mirror hanging above her mantle. She discovers a world like her own, but completely inverted: frightened by this upside-down world, yet struck by a sense of wonder and mystery, she ventures further and further into the looking glass. Alice’s desire for adventure is spurred by her sense of uncanny familiarity; the world within the mirror is eerily like her own yet turned on its head. For example, scattered books in the mirror world at first appear entirely inscrutable, but Alice quickly recognizes that she is in fact reading familiar works, only written in reverse script. Reading the story of the Jabberwocky, she exclaims that “it seems very pretty, but it’s rather hard to understand! Somehow it seems to fill my head with ideas—only I don’t exactly know what they are!” Carroll reveals, in an aside to us, that Alice “didn’t like to confess, even to herself, that she couldn’t make it out at all.”

In the late twentieth century, similar journeys “through the looking glass” took the shape of cultural adventures across the Iron Curtain. These mirror-world voyages became increasingly feasible with the death of Stalin and the onset of the Thaw period, when a relaxed political culture enabled intellectuals to more easily travel between East and West. Much like Carroll’s tale, these trips presented a new world to the traveler, often an inversion of their own. One such discreet crossing took place in 1964, when Soviet Marxist thinkers, on a visit to Vienna for a philosophy conference, happened upon an exhibition of American art that had long been maligned (but unseen) in the Soviet press; the show featured works of pop art by Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein, among other artists.

The travelling exhibition, titled “Pop, etc.,” was held at the Museum of the Twentieth Century (Museum des 20. Jahrhunderts), now known as mumok, or Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, from September 19 to October 31, 1964. It later toured West Berlin and Brussels, leaving a lasting mark on the reception of European postmodernist art. In Vienna, the Soviet delegation fortuitously visiting the museum included the philosopher Evald Ilyenkov (1924–79), one of the most influential figures in Soviet philosophy. Ilyenkov was particularly renowned for synthesizing Vygotsky’s activity theory with Spinoza, Hegel, and Marx, as well as for his radical pedagogy and his experimental instruction of deaf-blind children. His philosophy focused on a materialist theory of the ideal, and on the dialectic of abstraction and concreteness within Marx’s method in Capital.

Having been denied admission to art school in Moscow after World War II, Ilyenkov nevertheless maintained a lifelong interest in aesthetics. Although his strictly philosophical work often confined itself to dialectical systems of logic, his interest in the interplay between material social relations and transmaterial phenomena (culture, art, intellectual life, the “ideal,” etc.) lent itself to a sustained analysis of culture from a Marxist philosophical perspective. In this approach, cultural phenomena are not only determined by diverse, interrelated socioeconomic conditions, but are themselves concrete and socially operative, helping to shape our shared human reality. Ilyenkov’s engagement with culture proper, which he viewed as an active social force rather than a passive byproduct of material life, found a receptive audience both at home and abroad among those who sought to rescue Marxist philosophy from economic determinism and reductive theories of culture. Untranslated writings illustrate Ilyenkov’s further elaboration of his theory of concreteness and its relevance for the philosophy of art, including such essays as “On the ‘Specificity’ of Art” (1960) and “On the Aesthetic Nature of Fantasy” (1964), the latter of which was reworked into a chapter in one of his most important books, On Idols and Ideals (1968).1

Ilyenkov’s encounter with Western pop art was one of shock and revulsion, a voyage into a mirror world in which his foundational beliefs about society and the nature of art were entirely inverted. He recorded his impressions in an unusual review of the exhibition, titled—in a nod to Carroll—“What’s Through the Looking Glass?” (Chto tam, v Zazerkal’e?). His strongly emotive rejection of pop art might resonate with the unease that some experience in our own age of AI-generated art, where, much like Warhol’s Mona Lisa, a faceless reproduction of artistic styles strips artworks of their individuality, transforming images into an automated spectacle.

In the context of Soviet culture, Ilyenkov’s “Through the Looking Glass” is furthermore consonant with a broader reaction against modernist art within Soviet society. In 1962, Nikita Khrushchev was notoriously scandalized after attending a show of abstract art at the Manege in Moscow, resulting in the persecution of abstractionism within the Soviet artistic establishment. In the last gasps of the Thaw, several members of the intelligentsia stepped forward to defend abstract art as a viable practice within socialist modernity. Others, however, agreed with the notion of the incompatibility between Soviet culture and modernist art modeled on Western abstractionism; such opinions were even held by those with a more adversarial relationship to the Soviet authorities, such as Ilyenkov.

The most notable Soviet intellectual to articulate his own philosophical aversion to modernism was undoubtedly the philosopher Mikhail Lifshits, himself a colleague of Ilyenkov.2 In 1963, Lifshits published his own critique of modernist art in the essay “Why Am I Not a Modernist?”3 In the essay, Lifshits describes modern art as a “slave’s revenge”—an expression of domination suppressing the freedom of the mind. Modernism, he concludes, is twentieth-century “primitivism” as a new mythology, an ugly formlessness masquerading as a form of liberation. Lifshits turns instead to the Communist Manifesto, stating that the free development of each is the condition for the freedom development of all. Aesthetically, this meant that communist society would produce art in developed, universal forms rather than in the “abandonment of form” found in abstract, nonfigurative art.

Ilyenkov, too, saw the true goal of communism as a society that endows all its members with the capacity for an active, cultivated imagination and, in artistic terms, the creation of universally legible aesthetic forms. In On Idols and Ideals, Ilyenkov developed a sharp critique of capitalism and technocratic culture from the point of view of dialectical materialism. He argued that “the work of a communist transformation of social relations is fundamentally opposed to any ‘art’ that cultivates and fosters within individuals the tyranny of individual imagination by disguising it under the name of an artist’s ‘freedom of fantasy.’”4

Ilyenkov described the need for artistic expression as one of the key aspects of human imagination (voobrazhenie)—the transformation of raw matter into legible forms or images (obrazy). He credits Marx and Engels with the initial discovery of the collective, social power of creative imagination, since they

realized that the very process of the sensory perception of things was not a simple mirror imprint of one body onto another body, but rather an active act by which visual impressions … “mysteriously” transform into the form of an external object and into the seeing of its shapes and colors.5

In other words, the act of seeing is a socially determined and collective process, the same one employed in artistic creation.

With the help of our imagination, freed from alienation, we can see things as they could be, not just as they are. Both vision and thinking are collective activities. As Ilyenkov stresses time and again, neither happens in the skull; they are socially mediated. Art, as collective imagination, is a way of seeing through the eyes of another person—even through the eyes of all people. “A person with a developed imagination,” Ilyenkov wrote, “sees a thing in the eyes of all other people (including people from generations past) ‘immediately,’ integrally, directly, without having to ‘imagine’ oneself in someone else’s place.”6

While Ilyenkov critiques the monstrosity of Picasso, who inadvertently “replicated” the disjunction and dissection of human forms under capitalist modernity, he appreciates

the imagination that allowed Picasso’s eye to penetrate the polished veil of the bourgeois world and into its frightening bowels, where maimed individuals writhe in agony, in the hell of Guernica, scorched bodies without eyes and legs, still alive and yet warped beyond recognition in the terrifying meatgrinder of war—this inevitable consequence of the capitalist way of life.7

For Ilyenkov, the truly free and developed personality is both unique and wholly embedded within collective life-activity.

On his trip “through the looking glass” and into the inverted world of the capitalist West, Ilyenkov encountered that very same deformed, disjunctive world in which formlessness was not a fault but a virtue. In capitalist society, free imagination exists only in museums, not in real life, yet the recent trends of pop art reduced the creative imagination to mere physiological processes: not only neurological responses and dissected human bodies, but also raw consumption and market instincts. Communist art, by contrast, reflects the harmonious development of the whole person in society. This was not only theory for Ilyenkov but also practice.

As a teacher in the radical school for deaf-blind children in Zagorsk (which became known as the “Zagorsk experiment”), Ilyenkov developed his philosophical ideas into theories of learning as a collective, embodied activity. As part of this pedagogical process, Ilyenkov often took his students to the studio of the Soviet sculptor Vadim Sidur, whose works dealt with the traumatic experience of World War II, something Ilyenkov had himself experienced firsthand as a Red Army soldier. Art was not just an escape for Ilyenkov. Rather, it became a tool to envision a truly developed, communist personhood, flourishing in a peaceful and harmonious society. Or, to put it differently, only through a universal capacity for imagination—the free creation of new forms—is communism made a reality.