On the Heuristic Validity of Aesthetics: Economy, Media and Power in Arkadij and Boris Strugatskijs’ Monday Begins on Saturday (1965)

Literature and art own a specific sensibility towards paradoxes and aporias produced by technological progress and thereby unexpectedly ongoing transformations of knowledge and communication. This heuristic sensibility results from the self-referential mode of aesthetic narration and representation—from the inner “form of finality” already analysed by Immanuel Kant in his Critique of Judgment. Aesthetic recursions allow making sense by bridging syntagmatic breaks and fractions by paradigmatic similarities and by releasing and shifting semantic relations. Thus, aesthetic representations always narrate something different and more than merely theoretical discourses operating within defined disciplinary and institutional realms. This can be considered as a guideline which has been elaborated by postmodern discourses in three different dimensions: in a sociological perspective by Theodor W. Adorno’s critical Aesthetic Theory (1970), in a media technological sense by Marshal McLuhan’s Understanding Media (1964) and in an aesthetically orientated philosophy by Gilles Deleuze’s and Félix Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus (1972). The efficiency and capacity of these three approaches to grasp and handle the heuristic and epistemological surplus of aesthetic artefacts will be proved by an example taken from Soviet literature: Arkady and Boris Strugatsky’s fantastic novel Monday Begins on Saturday (1965). Using a bundle of motifs from well-known Russian folktales the text appears—at first glance—as a funny parody of the Soviet scientific mentality and academic institutional practices. At the second sight there is an intricate poetological structure dealing with economic questions on three different levels. On the first level the novel performs a deconstruction of the ideology and sociology of the Soviet planned economy. On the second level the text goes far beyond Soviet culture and analyses the logic and dispositions of neoliberal consumerism. On a third level the economy of consumerism is essentially connected with television as the new extending mass medium of the 1960s.