Научная статья на тему 'Victor Pelevin’s Homo Zapiens and “ideology Pepsi”'

Victor Pelevin’s Homo Zapiens and “ideology Pepsi” Текст научной статьи по специальности «Философия, этика, религиоведение»

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Ключевые слова
ИДЕОЛОГИЯ / СИМУЛЯКР / РЕАЛЬНОСТЬ / ВЕЧНОСТЬ / РЕКЛАМА / ПОТРЕБИТЕЛЬСТВО / РУССКАЯ ЛИТЕРАТУРА / РОССИЙСКОЕ ОБЩЕСТВО / IDEOLOGY / SIMULACRUM / REALITY / ETERNITY / ADVERTISING / CONSUMERISM / RUSSIAN LITERATURE / RUSSIAN SOCIETY

Аннотация научной статьи по философии, этике, религиоведению, автор научной работы — Gerhard Julia

Viktor Pelevin in his novel “Homo Zapiens” depicts a Russian society in the 1990’s under a magic spell of a new type of ideologyIdeology Pepsi” that quickly and effectively substituted the communist ideology and produced a new myth of reality. However, unlike the traditional concept of ideology that subjugates and controls its populace through coercive practices, this new ideology accesses people on a subliminal level, focusing on their libidinal desires hidden deeply in the unconscious. Through a perpetual bombardment of commercials, the new ideology promotes mindless consumerism and creates a new myth of eternity that dupes people into thinking that by buying a certain product they will somehow attain the myth of eternity and ultimate freedom associated with it. Thus, people live in a simulated reality that eventually leads to the simulacrum of reality a non-existent world, a copy that has no original and yet appears to be real. In contrast to a traditional notion of ideology with a powerful ruling class at the top, this new ideology presents a different structure that has no central apparatus of power. Indeed, it creates and recreates itself through a self-perpetuating and self-generating cycle materialized through media and TV: “localized centres” that control and manipulate its citizens in the comfort of their own sofa.

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«GENERATION П» ВИКТОРА ПЕЛЕВИНА И «ИДЕОЛОГИЯ ПЕПСИ»

Виктор Пелевин в романе “Generation П” описывает новое поколение русского общества 90х годов, оказавшееся под волшебным влиянием новой идеологии – “Идеологии Pepsi” – которая быстро и эффективно заменила коммунистическую идеологию и породила новую социальную мифологию. Однако, в отличие от традиционной идеологической концепции, которая порабощает и осуществляет контроль над населением, используя репрессивные меры, этот новый вид идеологии воздействует на людей на подсознательном уровне, концентрируясь на либидинальных желаниях. Через нескончаемый поток рекламы, новая идеология содействует бессмысленному потреблению, создает новый миф о «вечности» и тем самым формирует обманчивое впечатление, что покупая определенную вещь, человек каким-то образом может прикоснуться к «вечности» и завладеть свободой, связанную с ней. Таким образом, формируется симулякр реальности – одновременно фиктивный и обязательный. По сравнению с традиционным пониманием идеологии, включающим в себя всевластный господствующий класс, эта новая идеология выдвигает на первый план другую структуру управления, у которой отсутствует централизо-ванный аппарат власти. Эта идеология порождается и самовоспроизводится через нескончаемый цикл, материализованный средствами массовой информации и телевидением: «локализированными центрами», манипулирующими массами, комфортно расположившимися на своих диванах.

Текст научной работы на тему «Victor Pelevin’s Homo Zapiens and “ideology Pepsi”»

Драфт: молодая наука

JULIA GERHARD (Университет Колорадо в Болдере, Болдер, США)

УДК 821.161.1 -32(Пелевин В.)

ББК Ш33(2Рос=Рус)63-8,444

VICTOR PELEVIN'S HOMO ZAPIENS AND "IDEOLOGY PEPSI"

«GENERATIONП» ВИКТОРА ПЕЛЕВИНА И «ИДЕОЛОГИЯ ПЕПСИ»

Аннотация. Виктор Пелевин в романе "Generation П" описывает новое поколение русского общества 90х годов, оказавшееся под волшебным влиянием новой идеологии - "Идеологии Pepsi" - которая быстро и эффективно заменила коммунистическую идеологию и породила новую социальную мифологию. Однако, в отличие от традиционной идеологической концепции, которая порабощает и осуществляет контроль над населением, используя репрессивные меры, этот новый вид идеологии воздействует на людей на подсознательном уровне, концентрируясь на либидинальных желаниях. Через нескончаемый поток рекламы, новая идеология содействует бессмысленному потреблению, создает новый миф о «вечности» и тем самым формирует обманчивое впечатление, что покупая определенную вещь, человек каким-то образом может прикоснуться к «вечности» и завладеть свободой, связанную с ней. Таким образом, формируется симулякр реальности - одновременно фиктивный и обязательный. По сравнению с традиционным пониманием идеологии, включающим в себя всевластный господствующий класс, эта новая идеология выдвигает на первый план другую структуру управления, у которой отсутствует централизованный аппарат власти. Эта идеология порождается и самовоспроизводится через нескончаемый цикл, материализованный средствами массовой информации и телевидением: «локализированными центрами», манипулирующими массами, комфортно расположившимися на своих диванах.

Ключевые слова: идеология, симулякр, реальность, вечность, реклама, потребительство, русская литература, российское общество.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union and consequently communist ideology, Russian people in the 1990's found themselves disoriented and in

Драфт: молодая наука

need of spiritual guidance or a system of values that they could rely on. The communist myth of eternity evaporated, and the myth of emerging capitalism, manifested in advertising, burgeoned and became the simulation of reality. Thus, commercials, promoting mindless consumerism and at the same time offering a new myth of reality which simulates eternity, filled the post-communist ideological gap and became the dominant ideology of Russia in the 90's. This new kind of ideological influence, however, seems to differ from a traditional view on ideology with its oppressive nature and coercive techniques. The new ideology directly speaks to the human unconscious and responds to their libidinal desires, slowly penetrating the minds and seducing them into its illusory saccharine world, ultimately producing a simulacrum of reality. Victor Pelevin in his novel Homo Zapiens masterfully depicts the essence and main techniques that this ideology employs in order to exercise its manipulation and warns us of potential dangers that it can inflict on individuals and society as a whole.

The word ideology is usually associated with the tyranny of the rule of the dominant class that completely subjugates its people by controlling their actions and manipulating their minds, thereby producing a world of fear, coercion and repression. Ideologies are thought as means for supporting and maintaining the absolute hegemony of the state through various means of propaganda to influence the mind and constant surveillance to regulate and monitor human behavior. However, this type of ideological indoctrination is more associated with totalitarian states depicted in classical dystopias such as Zamyatin's We or Orwell's 1984. Terry Eagleton in his book Ideology defines ideology as "ideas and beliefs which help to legitimate the interests of a ruling group or class specifically by distortion and dissimulation" [Eagleton 1991: 30]. This definition suggests that the values and beliefs disseminated throughout society are altered and manipulated by the dominant class to favor its interests. What this definition fails to acknowledge is that people have to trust that these beliefs that the ruling class inculcates into public consciousness will be beneficial to them as well. Eagleton also maintains that in the past the representation of ideologies used to be as controlling entities that exploit the general populace for the advantage of a select elite. However, in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries with the rise of global capitalism ideologies took on a different appearance. He suggests that modern ideologies rely on consumerism as the driving force behind it, endowing the consumption of commodities with an ideological status. Eagleton asserts that this type of ideology becomes increasingly more powerful because it no longer relies on coercive methods but rather relates to people on a subliminal level: "Consumerism by-passes

Драфт: молодая наука

meaning in order to engage the subject subliminally" [Eagleton 1991: 37]. The subliminality or the unconscious that this new kind of ideology attempts to reach plays an important role in Pelevin's novel Homo Zapiens, which I will explicate later in this paper. The concept of mindless consumption of material goods has been widely discussed by various literary critics in regards to Pelevin's novel; however, I would like to propose that it is not capitalism or consumerism that is the crux of the new post-Soviet ideology, but rather the idea of consumerism disseminated with the help of marketing techniques through advertising. The idea of consumption manifested in the ideology of advertising in Pelevin's Homo Zapiens glorifies superfluous spending by creating a myth of eternity and tapping into the human unconscious, thereby producing a simulacrum of reality, a virtual world that has no original and yet appears to be real.

First of all, to analyze how media and advertising function as ideology in Pelevin's novel, I would like to demonstrate how new post-Soviet ideology, the one that propagates Pepsi, employs methods akin to most traditional ideologies. To begin this discussion, let us take a look at how Louis Althusser, a prominent Marxist philosopher, envisions ideology and the main principles it operates on. In his famous essay "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses," Althusser argues that "ideology represents the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence" [Althusser 2007: 1264]. He elaborates by saying that ideology is an imaginary representation of the real world, produced by the ruling class "who base their domination and exploitation of 'the people' on a falsified representation of the world which they have imagined in order to enslave other minds by dominating their imaginations" [Althusser 2007: 1265]. He also introduces the idea of ideological function, which categorizes or, as he puts it, "hails" individuals into "subjects." He states that a human being, who is subjected to ideology involuntarily turns into a "subject," as his outlook on the world will be shaped congruously with the values and interests of the dominant ideology. The "imaginary relation" mentioned above will therefore dictate how individuals perceive themselves in the world and what social function they will occupy. A person's ability to identify oneself is perceived through the lens of social practices that are imposed on people through imaginary construct materialized by ideology.

Althuseerian interpretation of ideology can be applied to analyze the idea of consumerism in Pelevin's Homo Zapiens to investigate how advertising becomes the new post-Soviet ideology. First of all, the imaginary reality that TV creates portraying money as the central pillar that holds society where everything is expressed through money generates what

Драфт: молодая наука

Althusser refers to as a "falsified representation of the world" [Althusser 2007: 1265]. Such illusion leads to the conviction that people are an essential part of a consumerist cycle and perceive themselves as subjects by identifying themselves via commodities they buy. In the famous treatise by Che Guevara, Pelevin writes that while watching TV, a person, through the use of various technomodifications, turns into a "virtual subject, which for the duration of the television programme exists in place of the individual, fitting into his or her consciousness like a hand into a rubber glove," transforming the viewer, who gradually forgets that he or she is an observer, into "a remotely controlled television programme" [Pelevin 2002: 79-81]. Pelevin further elaborates that this new subject that the individual is transformed into in actuality doesn't exist because thanks to the brilliant marketing techniques of producers and cameramen, the virtual subject that replaces the person's actual consciousness resides in the virtual consciousness of collective non-existence. This world of unreality, however, appears as a real material world in the mind of the virtual subject watching TV. This is where the switch to the false, illusory representation of the world that Althuseer discusses occurs in Pelevin's novel. The new virtual subject that the ideology of advertising turns an individual into is called Homo Zapiens (who received its name from the habit of constant zapping). Because this new subject is a dweller of the unreal, imaginary world of TV commercials and programs, he/she now becomes an integral part of this new imaginary reality, where under the magic spell of the TV human beings perceive reality in a distorted way: through the lens of money. In fact, human beings now become a part of Oranus, which is a kind of a simulation of societal organism consisting of individual cells-human beings. The main type of nourishment that this organism receives is money: the membrane of each cell "allows money to pass into and out of the cell," and "the function of each cell is to absorb as much money as possible" [Pelevin 2002: 82]. Thus, the belonging of a human being to the Oranus' social body presents a distorted reality that everybody participates in and simply cannot escape from, and this is exactly the kind of ideological influence that Althusser discusses. The protagonist of the novel, Vavilen Tatarsky, though seemingly above this ideology since he is the one who creates and "feeds" the commercials to people, proves to be one of its subjects as well. He quickly abandons his passion for composing poetry and adapts to the new ideology by joining the team of creators and copywriters, essential element in media manipulative system. This demonstrates that Tatarsky, who is in charge of creating manipulative commercials, himself

completely buys into this ideology and becomes another cell in the social organism of Oranus.

Another interesting thing about ideology that Althusser points out is its ability to "hail" subjects, who as a result of this hailing alter the perception of their identity. Similarly, in Pelevin's work, through the treatise of Che Guevara we learn that the new subject, Homo Zapiens, via numerous psychological manipulations that advertising employs functioning as a kind of hypnosis begins to define itself through a "combination of the material objects shown on television" [Pelevin 2002: 86]. Thus, the subject identifies itself through its material possessions: "I am the individual who drives such-and-such a car, lives in such-and-such a house, wears such-and-such a type of clothes" [Pelevin 2002: 86]. According to Maxim Pavlov who wrote an article "Generation П или П forever?," due to such hypnosis, people lose touch with reality and begin to live in the "reality" that they see on TV, identifying themselves through the products. Ultimately, TV producers and copywriters have unlimited freedom in manipulation of people's consciousness since television, similar to a drug's euphoria, submerges an individual into an altered state of consciousness, and achieve what they want such as buying the thing you don't want or voting for the president you don't know. This becomes possible due to people's transformation into subjects, who develop an altered sense of their identities. The alteration of one's ego is directly correlated with the alteration of one's reality, which is exactly what happens in Pelevin's world ruled by ideology P. Now we have an imaginary subject who lives in an imaginary world and possesses an altered perception of his/her identity. This intriguing web of imaginary relations is precisely what Althusser highlights as an important part of any ideology.

Althusserian definition of ideological influence presents a classic version of how ideology can generate a false consciousness. However, as Terry Eagleton suggests in his work Ideology, present day ideologies function on a more subtle, subconscious level, addressing and focusing on our unconscious desires so that no coercion or tyrannical disciplinary techniques become necessary. Hence, to complicate the traditional Althusserian version of ideology and see how the ideology of wowerism in the novel lures and speaks to individuals on a more sensitive and psychologically manipulative plane, I would like to explore how Zizek's definition of ideology can be employed in the novel and introduce a subliminal layer to it. Slavoj Zizek, while explicating the concept of ideology, is more interested in the question: how an alteration of reality via ideology becomes viable in the first place and why do individuals allow themselves to be duped? Zizek in his work The Sublime Object of Ideology

Драфт: молодая наука

elucidates that ideology is "not a dreamlike illusion that we build to escape an insupportable reality," but . . . "a fantasy construction which serves as a support for our 'reality' itself: an illusion which structures our effective, real social relations and thereby masks some insupportable, real, impossible kernel" [Zizek 1989: 45]. He further elaborates that "the function of ideology is not to offer us a point of escape from our reality but to offer us the social reality itself as an escape from some traumatic, real kernel" [Zizek 1989: 45]. The "traumatic, real kernel" that Zizek refers to here is the embodiment of our unconscious desire that we may never access or materialize, thus trying to constantly disregard or mask it. Hence, for Zizek ideology functions as a fantasy-like formation that enables us to organize and interpret social reality, masking the Real of our unconscious desire. In Lacanian interpretation (Zizek borrows a lot of elements from Lacan's theory), we can escape our unconscious desire situated in reality through dream, and that dream in Pelevin's novel becomes the TV.

Media and advertising function as ideology in Homo Zapiens because people voluntarily submerge themselves into it to forget about their desire until it is too late and they are so much sucked into it that they simply can't break the vicious cycle. TV and advertising become the epitome of the dream that Lacan talks about making people dissolve in it and thus disregard the Real of their desire. That unconscious desire that people attempt to conceal via TV in Pelevin's novel is the desire for eternity or freedom, which simply vanished after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Hence, people by mindlessly consuming commodities mask their real desire-attaining eternity: they want to pretend that by buying a product they are buying the actual thing, but subconsciously they are buying not the product itself but a myth of eternity associated with it (a more thorough elaboration on the idea of the myth will follow later in the paper). Thus, when people consume, they experience what Zizek refers to as jouissance or enjoyment. Because civilization represses people's desire or jouissance, individuals try to get closer to their jouissance through the fantastical structure imposed on reality, namely ideology. Similarly, consumption of commodities in Pelevin's world gives people an outlet for expressing their repressed jouissance. However, the concept of jouissance, enjoyment, also involves an element of pain or discomfort which individuals undergo when they reach jouissance since the pleasure that they experience is too much to bear causing people to eventually feel pain or void. The concept of jouissance is materialized in the novel in the oral and anal wow impulses that belong to Oranus' nervous system and control activities of its monadic cells-humans: the oral wow-impulse represents an obsessive desire or

Драфт: молодая наука

yearning for money and impels the cell to ingest money, while the anal wow-impulse is the "pleasurable elimination of money" [Pelevin 2002: 89]. These two types of wow impulses correspond with Zizek's concept of jouissance as they embody the unbearable feeling of yearning for money and the satisfaction that people get from spending it. However, when there is an absence of oral and anal wow-impulses, individuals lose interest in everything that doesn't involve oral/anal component or money and experience void or a feeling of boredom, which consequently forces them to consume more. As Pelevin says, our oral wow-impulse "corresponds to the internal auditor holding up the flag 'loser'" and therefore, constantly reminding individuals of that void, motivating them to consume [Pelevin 2002: 88]. Such psychological manipulation adds a twist to the typical depiction of ideology and makes people that much more dependent on it.

Pelevin in this novel sets up the stage for the depiction of the society ruled by their libidinal desires, or, to use Freud's term, by "id" (pleasure principle), from the very beginning of the novel when we learn that the main character's career as a poet with a literary background is no longer relevant and is rendered useless in this new society. As the plotline develops, we bear witness Tatarsky's transformation from an aspiring poet with idealistic dreams and aspirations into a "successful" but spiritually empty copywriter. Such a transformation obviously illustrates how an individual can be altered and morally corrupted in a society ruled by ideology, only interested in exploiting the human beings by exciting their libidinal energy and decreasing their faculty for critical thinking. The values in this new society have undergone a tremendous shift: intelligence and moral values have lost their luster (since critical thinking can hinder consumerism), while immediate satisfaction of one's wants and desires is encouraged (since it enables the perpetual cycle of consumerism). This becomes possible thanks to the use of a variety of manipulative marketing techniques that have a contaminating effect on people's mind and lead to the creation of society that has lost the ability to think for themselves, perceiving reality as "the material world as it is shown on the television" [Pelevin 2002: 81]. That, however, can have a detrimental impact on an individual and society as a whole, leading to a complete moral degradation of the entire generation.

This manipulation continues to exacerbate when eternity embodying our unconscious desire that Zizek emphasized, is being substituted by the myth of eternity delicately interwoven in the commercials in Pelevin's novel to promote consumerism via crafty marketing techniques. I mentioned this idea earlier and now would like to analyze it more closely. After the collapse of the

Драфт: молодая наука

Soviet Union and consequently the Soviet ideology, people, including the main character of the novel Vivilen Tatarsky, found themselves in need of a new set of values that they could rely on, a new eternity since the previous eternity disintegrated with the communist ideology. Tatarsky finds himself completely lost in this new society that seemed to be changing and evolving rapidly, leaving no trace of previous existence and more importantly no trace of eternity [Pelevin 2002: 11]. This ideological gap was quickly filled by a new ideology, Ideology Pepsi. This new ideology manifesting itself in advertising and media created a new eternity; however, it wasn't real eternity, but rather a myth of eternity. The myth of eternity became the catalyst behind hyper consumerism in post-Soviet Russia because it created an illusion that by buying a certain product one can achieve or at least get closer to eternity or freedom. The relationship between the commodity advertised on TV and the eternity or a certain sense of freedom possible to attain only by consuming this commodity is achieved through a semiotic manipulation of signs, which Roland Barthes elucidates on in his work Mythologies. He claims that myths are created through arbitrarily attaching additional connotations to a signifier, which already has an established signified, thereby infusing the signifier with a different meaning [Barthes 1972: 113]. Once this additional different meaning is interpreted by the human psyche, an individual has submerged himself or herself into a cultural myth, engendered by a deliberate manipulation of the relationship between the signifier and the signified. In Pelevin's novel, commercials become the perfect medium for the creation of the myths. Advertisement of Coca-Cola that Pelevin refers to at the very beginning of the novel is a vivid example of that. In this commercial one monkey is shown drinking regular Cola while the other monkey is drinking Coca-Cola. After drinking regular Cola the first monkey is able to perform some logical exercises with cubes and sticks, while after consuming CocaCola the second monkey drives away towards the sea in a Jeep in the company of pretty girls. If we analyze this commercial through the correct application of semiotic signs, we would correlate each signifier with its appropriate signified. For instance, signifier "monkey" would be connected to its signified which means a primate with a long tail that typically lives in the trees or signifier "Coca-Cola" would match up with the signified a carbonated refreshing drink. However, when the secondary connotations, masterfully interwoven through the signifiers, are observed, one begins to understand that Coca-Cola in this commercial is not actually associated with a refreshing drink, but rather contains a different connotation: money which guarantees happiness and freedom. What this commercial really implies is that by drinking Coca-Cola, you can buy a car, attract the attention of the pretty girls

and relax by the seaside-the ultimate myth of eternity. Thus, when you buy a product, you don't really buy the product itself, but rather the myth interconnected with it-the myth of ultimate freedom.

The myth of eternity created in human minds and the material world on TV that people perceive to be real ultimately engenders the myth of reality. What Pelevin reveals is that with the use of this ideology P and intense psychological processes used by media to manipulate and exploit human psyche via various subliminal methods, the illusory reality that humans reside in eventually (de)evolves into not just a false representation of reality, but a simulacrum of reality-the last and final product of the ideology Pepsi. The idea of the simulated reality obviously evokes Baudrillard's ideas about simulation and simulacrum. In his work Simulacra and Simulation Jean Baudrillard defines simulacrum as something that is "never that which conceals the truth-it is the truth which conceals that there is none. The simulacrum is true" [Baudrillard 1993: 342]. To paraphrase, for Baudrillard, the simulacrum of reality doesn't intend to conceal reality or even distort it, but rather it reveals that there is nothing to conceal because reality doesn't exist. The process of simulacrum unfolds in the following sequence: at first, the sign and the real are equal to one another, then the sign distorts the original, afterwards the sign pretends to be related to reality, but there exists no relationship between signs and reality (so it masks the absence of reality), and lastly, pure simulacrum comes to place where signs do not correspond to any reality at all [Baudrillard 1993: 346347]. As a result, simulacrum, since it is not actually connected to any reality, itself becomes real.

This simulated reality is the final stage concocted by the ideological manipulation in Homo Zapiens revealing the fundamental danger of the magic spell of ideology. First of all, the disappearance of eternity that Tatarsky talks about at the very beginning of the novel indicates that reality is not very stable to begin with, that with each myth, socially constructed by ideology, reality changes its essence and alters its myth of eternity. This becomes evident when Tatarsky inspects the Soviet-made shoes covered in dust in the shop window and realizes that these shoes are reminiscence of the bygone era, a metaphor for reality that ceased to exist [Pelevin 2002: 4]. With reality changing its myths, Tatarsky's literary talents could find no use in this new reality anymore just like these old shoes. The simulacrum of reality here is in its initial stages. Throughout the novel, however, Pelevin continues to constantly allude to the reality being simply its simulacrum. A good example of it occurs in the scene where Tatarsky, under the sedating power of drugs, writes the following in his notebook:

In itself a wall on which a panoramic view of a non-existent world is drawn does not change. But for a great deal of money you can buy a view from the window with a painted sun, a sky-blue bay and a calm evening. Unfortunately, the author of this fragment will again be Ed-but even that is not important, because the very window the view is bought for is also only drawn in. Then perhaps the wall on which it is drawn is a drawing too? But drawn by whom and on what? [Pelevin 2002: 53].

What this quote indicates is that Tatarsky, being in the heart of the advertising business, intuitively feels that this reality is slipping away by gradually turning into a false reality at first (when the view is simulated by the painting), and then into its pure simulation (when the walls of the house are being simulated) where all signs, bearing no relation to reality whatsoever, have confused the human brain so much that people now perceive this simulacrum of reality to be real. Another example of the allusion to the simulated reality can be found in the Che Guevara treatise, where Pelevin's insinuations become more and more explicit. Pelevin here emphasizes the non-existence of human beings (who watch TV) and reality that is imposed on them through technomodifications: "What is taking place could appropriately be called the experience of collective non-existence, since the virtual subject that replaces the viewer's actual consciousness is absolutely non-existent - it is merely an effect created by the collective efforts of editors, cameramen and producers" [Pelevin 2002: 80]. Tatarsky himself realizes that he is a part of this simulacrum of reality when he finally "climbs up" the tower of Babylon and prepares to marry the goddess Ishtar, becoming the all-powerful God. As soon as he reaches the top, he learns that he has to join this simulacrum since to be able to marry Ishtar he has to be digitized and converted into a series of visual images. In fact, he himself is not allowed to marry the goddess; it is his 3-D model that will become Ishtar's husband. Thus, Tatarsky becomes a God of the virtual reality that he himself helped to establish. Last example that I would like to discuss which blatantly reveals that our reality is simply a simulacrum of reality is when the protagonist realizes that the major politicians of the country are in fact virtual mannequins created by media and belong to Duma 3-Ds. This proves that the world is a mere simulacrum of reality where a whole crew of copywriters via the use of advanced technology works day and night on simulating reality and the whole political apparatus of power. With that being said, since Tatarsky is one of the copywriters that participated in creating the simulacrum of reality, he ultimately becomes a part of it, a virtual God.

Now that the key aspects of Pelevin's ideology P have been discussed, the final question to investigate remains the following: who is behind this charade? To answer this question, let's first consider a traditional

Драфт: молодая наука

constitution of ideology. The structure of any society typically consists of a ruling or dominant class that usually manipulates the human mind of the general populace via ideology to propagate its ideals and controls human body and behavior to achieve the ultimate power. However, if we look at Pelevin's novel in an attempt to identify a class or a figure that could be in control, orchestrating this ideological manipulation and gaining profits from it, the answer could not that easily be found. In fact, Tatarsky himself ponders that question throughout the whole novel only to no avail. Obviously media here seems to be the crux of manipulation, but who is in control of the manipulation? Since the novel doesn't offer any suggestions, it seems that Pelevin implies that nobody is at the top (since even the politicians are just scanned images) and this ideology is generated through a self-perpetuating and self-generating cycle revolving around the media apparatus where copywriters create advertisements to sell commodities, people buy the commodities, encouraging copywriters to produce more advertisements that create a virtual reality - a simulacrum of reality where the artificiality of its dwellers and their existence becomes, in a distorted and absurd way, the truth. What seems to be at work here is the Foucaldian concept of power with no center, which he develops in his book The History of Sexuality. Foucault argues that power is not exercised from top to bottom forming a ruler/ruled binary; instead, it comes from everywhere and permeates the entire society [Foucault 1990: 93]. He also adds that power is produced through "local centers" peppered throughout society [Foucault 1990: 94]. These local centers are present in Pelevin's novel and are materialized through media and TV, to which the author refers to as "an illusory structure" "that has no center," conveniently located in the apartments of the subjects (as local as it can get), who are being exploited and manipulated in the comfort of their own sofa [Pelevin 2002: 86].

To conclude, Pelevin in his novel Homo Zapiens brilliantly depicts the transformation of a post-Soviet society that under the spell of the new ideology controlled through media and advertising turns into a mindless, malleable mass that can be easily manipulated and controlled. This new ideology found a way to alter human psyche in a way that it somehow offered people things they most desired, tapping into their unconscious desires, making the process of identity alteration plain and simple. As a result, this new generation Pepsi has lost its capacity for intellectual development and critical thinking and became solely interested in satisfying its needs and desires via hyper consumerism. This vicious ideological cycle that individuals become a part of ultimately changes the fundamental nature of reality itself by making it unreal and illusory, and what remains is only its simulacrum, a copy

Драфт: молодая наука

with no original. Thus, Pepsi, the refreshing bubbly drink which becomes a symbol of the ultimate manifestation of freedom for Russians after the Soviet Union collapse, instead of offering freedom provided only a simulation of freedom, existing only on TV and in the minds of people.

ЛИТЕРАТУРА

Althusser, Louis. "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses." The Critical Tradition: Classic Texts and Contemporary Trends. Ed. David H. Richter. New York: Bedford, 2007. 1264-1272. Print.

Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. Trans. Annete Lavers. New York: Hill and Wang, 1972. Print.

Baudrillard, Jean. "The Precession of Simulacra." A Postmodern Reader. Ed. Joseph Natoli and Linda Hutcheon. New York: State U of New York P, 1993. 342-375. Print.

Eagleton, Terry. Ideology. New York: Verso, 1991. Print.

Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality: An Introduction. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage Books, 1990. Print.

Pavlov, Maxim. "Generation П или П forever? " Znamia 12 (1999). Zhurnal'nyi zal. http://magazines.russ.ru/znamia/1999/12/pavlov.html. Accessed 19 Dec. 2013.

Pelevin, Victor. Homo Zapiens. Trans. Andrew Bromfield. New York: Viking Penguin, 2002. Print.

Zizek, Slavoj. The Sublime Object of Ideology. New York: Verso, 1989. Print.

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