The Warehouse

Mikhail Epstein

The warehouse, where all objects are arranged in a particular order, could serve as a symbol and prototype of world harmony. Everything here is quantified, distributed according to categories, reflected in lists--the conceptual hierarchy and classification of things acquires a visual incarnation in space. Nowhere besides the warehouse could there be such a strict correspondence between an object's name, fixed on paper, and its real existence. When things are used--brought in, brought out, set in motion--they cannot be precisely fixed in idea and word. In the warehouse they acquire a sacred immobility, the proof of which is the inventory list, where names, unentangled by any grammatical relationships, stand individually, under numbers, in an immobile vertical order.

Numeral-word-object: the ideal correspondence of Pythagorean-Platonic thought. Just as people, in correspondence with a numerical order, arrange themselves in a queue, so things are ordered in the warehouse using the same numerical means. Motion is inherent in people, immobility in things, but in a certain sense one could say that the line is a mobile image of the warehouse, while the warehouse is the immobile image of the line. Common to both is the organization of all units, human and inanimate, in conformity with a sequential number; for, as the Pythagorean Thilolaeus said, "everything knowable has a number . . . the nature and the force of the number acts . . . everywhere in all human matters and relations."[i]

Is this not the reason that the warehouse acquires a special, highly symbolic meaning in the Soviet state? Is it accidental that church holdings, having lost their sacred purpose, were converted into warehouses?

Here what occured was not the abolition of the holy, but, so to speak, its replacement. The warehouse is just as ideal an order in the material world as the church is in the spiritual world. The warehouse is a materalist church, but instead of collecting people who are seeking in prayer an exalted form of the soul, it houses a multitude of objects which have found a precise inventoried form. Both the church and the warehouse are like sealed-off refuges of harmony in a fallen, sinful world that has been plundered and pillaged. To sin, to carry off a soul from God—this is stealing, carrying off an object from the warehouse, from the depository of social property, property as incorruptible and impervious to mercenary interest as the conscience.

One of the leading figures in Soviet reality is the warehouseman. Everyone ingratiates himself with him--not only petty employees, but also bosses and managers. Everyone must feel his own inadequacy before him, must be tormented by his own unclean conscience. For the warehouseman stands on the threshold of the sacred world, separating it from the profane. The managers, in all their administrative bustle, are on this side, while the warehouseman is on the other. He is the tsar and the keeper of the immobile kingdom of objects, beyond the limits of which their harmony can only incur losses, deterioration--in the hands of business-like and anxious factory managers. Sending an object out of the warehouse is the same thing as casting it down into dark, sinful, inconstant earthly life.

This is why warehouse bolts are so reliable and warehousemen are so severe: they are guarding our happy future. There eternal abundance and the perfect arrangement of all things await us. And since we all live and work in the name of the future, sacrificing our immediate interests to it, the warehouse rank of things is incomparably greater than their production rank. To store and re-stock things in a warehouse--do we not here see the highest law of a society which aims at an ideal future? For where if not in the warehouse is this future already attained, if for now only in a fenced-off space? This is not yet the fully transformed world, but a happy forerunner, where things have found their own measure and number.

The main thing in socialism, as Lenin taught, is accounting [uchet] and control [kontrol']. "Socialism means keeping account of everything. You will have socialism if you take stock of every piece of iron and cloth."[ii] But this imperative--"widespread, general, universal accounting and control"[iii]--presupposes the existence of things in the warehouse: only there can they be completely "accounted for" and correspond to their exact description. "Every piece of cloth," taken in the perspective of accounting and control, no longer covers the body, no longer serves as clothing, is no longer subject to everyday wear-and-tear, instead being preserved under its inventory number. All management becomes the warehousing of inventoried things. And the task is not to get things out of the warehouse, releasing them into a dubious, wasteful enterprise, but to bring them into the warehouse, distributing them in their necessary places, in the fullness of control and rational organization. To the extent that all our life is relocated into the warehouse, and is formed according the image and model of the warehouse, our happy future will cross into the present, and the nation, under powerful locks and stern warehousemen, will begin to live a severe and orderly warehoused life.

But the problem is that time forces its way even into the eternally peaceful warehouse. From immobility the stock spoils, rots, rusts. Things which are not renewed by time grow old from time. And that is why the more the warehouse (sklad) approaches its ideal, the quicker it turns into a dump, into a cemetery (kladbishche) of untouched things. Touched by no one and nothing, except time. As soon as the warehouse triumphs in our life, we will find ourselves in a cemetery, and our warehouseman, like a cemetery watchman, will unlock the gates himself--there's no longer anything left to take out, anyone to bring it to, any reason to do it.

1982

Trans. Jeffrey Karlsen