Where are our hands, in which our future lies?
The specific cultural situation, with its dramaturgical interweaving of fragments of previous situations and embryonic elements of those still to come, shapes the dominant and concomitant models for the behavior of artists.
In order to understand the essential nature of the present cultural situation, one must understand how it differs from the preceding one and put forward possible suggestions concerning its dynamics, duration, and location.
In effect, there are three conjectures that can be proposed: (1) The current process will develop and the current moment, together with the forms of its sociocultural organization, are temporary; while the previous period’s forms of sociocultural organization have become obsolete and are no more than an apologetic rudiment, if not a retarding encumbrance; (2) the present situation will continue interminably, with small-scale fluctuations, sometimes backwards and sometimes forwards, so one should not be in any hurry to bury the past; (3) everything will come full circle and the former channels of association and socialization should therefore be scrupulously and lovingly preserved, without indulging vain hopes in an enticing future.
What, then, did we have in the past that we are currently in the process of rejecting and in relation to which we are structuring our current strategy of behavior and suppositions concerning the future?
The previous cultural situation was constructed on the principle of a rigid binary opposition: ‘official/unofficial’, which, like the two poles of a magnet, was repeated at every point of the structure. In the Union of Writers, let’s say, (as in the other unions of the creative professions) an opposition of ‘left/right’ emerged, followed by an opposition of ‘Union of Writers/milieu around the Union,’ and then an opposition of ‘milieu around the Union/unofficial literature.’ In the milieu of unofficial literature the articulations followed the principle ‘can be published/can’t be published.’ A form of insult even appeared: you could get published! This scale of derivatives from a single basic principle of oppositions formed the entire unsophisticated spectrum of variety.
If one set out all these positions on some single scale, then noncongruence with the starting point of official recognition offered compensation in the form of an entitlement to artistic truth and moral judgement, a right augmented by an increase in the distance from that point. The significance of this law is interesting, not in those cases when it coincided with the real right of a gifted writer and highly moral individual, but when it was mechanically extended to anyone who came under the given system of calculation. By the way, even officially recognized and freedom-loving masters of the official art could not avoid, if not acknowledging this law openly, then at least feeling it with their not completely hardened hearts and developing an inferiority complex about it.
At the present moment, in about twenty years of functioning the unofficial culture has developed into a rather formalized organism with its own hierarchy, means of socialization, and rules of acceptance into it. Incidentally, this very formalization creates difficulties for the active representatives of unofficial culture which, if not the same in essence, are probably just as complicated as those faced by representatives of the official culture in terms of depth of psychological restructuring and adjustment to a new cultural mentality.
In the unofficial culture (in the milieu of artists and writers) two basic structures have taken shape – the milieu around the Union and the strictly unofficial milieu. The appearance of the structure around the Union was facilitated by the way that established masters and clans disrupted the natural means for the younger generation to enter official circles, with the result that a horizontal, generational cross-section was formed, united by a desire to be included in the official culture and the impossibility of this happening, a circle of people of extremely varied poetic and artistic predilections, who at any other time would have been unlikely to come together on a single platform. By the very necessity of life this ‘overcooking’ in the official sphere engendered in many of them distinct features of unofficial consciousness.
The unofficial culture was established on the basis of a principled rejection of the official culture. It consists of several, so to say, vertical and parallel threads of an alliance of individuals of various ages, but with closely similar aesthetic leanings.
Such a cultural situation also rigidly codemarked locations: on the one hand journals, exhibition halls, and stages; and on the other hand apartments, basements, and typed manuscripts, engendering a corresponding, instantaneously engaged mechanism of orientation and perception. Moreover, this rigid codemarking meant that the appearance of unofficial artists and writers in official places always bore features either of a scandalous event or a travesty, which prevented artists and writers from identifying with them.
All these appearances had the significance of events that exceeded their literary or artistic significance, and their infrequency generated a frenzied commotion around them that bunched together people with rather different professions and interests in the sphere of culture and art. Accordingly there crystallized out a certain type of artist-poet-performer-tribune, standing in at every specific point for all of these positions, being their plenipotentiary deputy and at the same time champion, martyr, and teacher. In fact such an image of the artist-poet arose here very long ago and has simply varied, depending on the times.
The present cultural situation is characterized by an erosion of the oppositional structure (by which I mean the sociocultural structure, and not the simply cultural one, which will evidently always exist – and incidentally this very moment is the hardest of all at which to determine precisely the position of purely cultural opponency). There also seems to be emerging an imprecisely articulated third zone of culture, emerging as it were unclearly, virtually.
This leads to a reconfiguration of the groups that have emerged in an unofficial culture, of which the vertical structure is rapidly being eroded by horizontal age-related trends. And meanwhile the circle of the milieu around the Union is undergoing intensive differentiation according to degree of ideological and aesthetic identification with the official culture.
Incidentally, whereas previously fellows in art and fate were primarily fellows in their fate, nowadays the art is beginning to dominate as the criterion of fellowship.
Literally only yesterday a conversation at home was more than a conversation, it was a cultural event. Over the course of time, the intonation of domestic confidentiality, the significance of intragroup events, and the appeal to a narrow circle of those who had accepted this fate had become features of the poetic (and this did not represent any decline, since fresh springs of culture welled up at precisely those points, the sore spots of culture gaped open at precisely those points). But now it is as if one of the walls is collapsing, revealing those seated there in almost defenseless nakedness, and the force lines of culture are being rearranged, so that former merits are unfortunately no guarantee of the genuineness of present actions and utterances.
In going public, the a priori rights of the unacknowledged and persecuted are lost, the right to unappealable moral judgement is lost, the advantage of trust that was automatically advanced is lost. And this, by the way, can be seen from several free poetic readings, from the collected volume of the Leningrad club Krug and from the experience of socializing rock groups.
The formation of certain new associations, refashioning the boundaries of past articulations in culture, and the socialization of small domestic groups dictate a new ethics of cultural behavior, replacing all-round mutual support and ideological kinship with principles that are close to a corporate code. Many judgements, pronouncements, and maxims that were formerly based on the pardonable, noncommittal nature of table-talk and friendly trust, and sometimes simply on sympathy, are now revealed as simply expressions of weakness and inadequacy. This, by the way, is the same time when there occurs a fundamental cultural and stylistic break, which can be detected in all forms of art and also facilitates a reconstruction of the hierarchy that has taken shape in both the official and unofficial spheres, as well as rearrangements of the hierarchy of actual types of art within culture.
It is clear that poetry’s age-long role of pop-heroism is slipping away from it to the rapidly expanding rock movement and the pop sphere. Because of this, an event in literature is shrinking to the true dimensions of a literary event, a poetic event, an event in visual art … If everything continues in the same vein, then the present status of literature, say, may persist by inertia for another two years or so, but then it will assume a form familiar to us from western examples: normal commercial literature and literature as such, which circulates in narrow academic circles. With twenty or thirty years of honest and selfless service a writer will attract the benevolent attention of some award-granting foundation or some prestigious prize or other, and they will appoint him a celebrity, without any subsequent necessity for anyone to read him. If everything moves in this direction and does not return to the past, or if no local means for the existence of culture is found, then it is entirely possible that the prevalent form of writer will be the philologist, the well-balanced individual capable of calmly and honestly dividing his time between business and literature, whereas the ideal type of local poet is a tramp, genius, favorite of the masses, and hysterical prattler; the poet who is a national hero retreats into history, like the storytellers, Slavic bards, and rhapsodists no longer known to us. In addition, before our very eyes the press is taking away from literature perhaps its most fundamental reader – the lover of social wit, moral problems, an instantaneous, on-the-spot response to instantaneous events, and a certain kind of ambiguity. Perhaps the press, along with the spheres of philosophy, sociology, psychology, and the institution of religion, which have been engendered by the current social awakening, will become the people’s teachers, relieving literature of the backbreaking burden but also, of course, stripping away its aura of exclusivity.
And so literature will be left to be literature.
Therefore it is pointless for the Poetry club, let’s say, to place its reliance on events like a festival in the Dukat club in its cultural and community activity. One must become accustomed to reading in a narrow circle of staunch lovers of this activity (which, by external necessity, was effectively the case previously, but the invisible yet palpable external groundswell of suffering readers and listeners who were not admitted created the impression of a major event and gave rise to illusions); now it will all happen without any added value, be what it is, according to the natural course of things in culture. The same thing will happen with passionately anticipated publications. While literally a year and a half ago a book by Zhdanov, say, was an event even for writers far removed from him, now it would pass off unnoticed except by a narrow circle of lovers of poetry.
It is obvious that the processes occurring in visual art are moving in the same direction. The syncretism of the event is being removed from exhibitions and they will be, or rather at this point wish in the future to be, subject to the laws of the market.
I would like to remark that I am describing all the changes, assuming the uninterrupted development of the present process, that is, understanding everything that is happening now as temporary formations, since this process in my view can only be described with a dynamic model, although of course a change of vector is possible.
Therefore I regard such strange emanations as the Poetry club, with its 180 members, as mutational formations. In the sphere of culture, as I see things, only one functional structure is possible: pluralism. Therefore, if some conscious effort is to be invested, it should be in the direction of pluralism, and the creation of huge alternative formations. As a start it would be good to have numerous clubs and associations, the existence of which could later be regulated, for instance, by an institute of free cooperative publishing houses or journals. In visual art I see a solution in the fragmentation of the single channel of resources that dictates a single artistic and stylistic policy. Possibly this will be facilitated by the self-employed labor activity that is now emerging, which will make possible the accumulation of sufficient resources in private hands and revive the glorious institution of patronage of the arts.
The question arises, of course, of participation in this process. Naturally, the basic precondition making it possible to involve oneself in this process is a certain internal confidence in the possibility of a result. At this stage, of course, it is a matter of purely personal intuition and risk. But on condition that the process is taking place and is irreversible, nonparticipation in it, which was formerly a merit, a cross and an inalienable part of poetics, now becomes simply a matter of personal choice, a personal preference. In exactly the same way, preferring a private apartment to a public hall ceases to be a cultural-moral act and is merely a personal one.
And the final thing: if, as I mentioned above, the harsh codemarking of places and binary nature of culture previously made it possible (as Boehme put it, an angel in the midst of hell flies in his own little cloud of heaven) to fly onto other people’s territory and depart unsullied, now, with boundaries blurred, one is simply identified with the point at which one presents oneself, as happened with the actions at the Manège, the appearance of heroes of the underground on the television screen and so forth, in other words, untainted places are required, which will have to create their own image. I therefore hope that this hall, despite its plain homeliness, will become one such place.
1987
The second sacro-cularization
In the period of time (and for these days it is quite a long one – about two years) between declaring my theme – “the second sacralization” – and receiving the theses of this conference, somewhere a mutation has occurred in the title, to “The second secularization.” However, having briefly considered the matter, I realized that everything that happens of its own accord (as things usually do) has much more meaning, at least it reflects far more accurately what is happening to me, as a participant and character in a ‘big’ cultural process. (Something like Freudian slips of the tongue, slips of the tongue in the process of cultural dialogue.) That is, the very process of transformation and ease of any vectorial conversion (which has unwittingly been summed up in the typologically similar process of transformation of the name) is far more adequate to the present, suspended, pseudo-unarchivized condition of culture and art bereft of both evaluative and axiological preferences. For this reason, the contamination of names, in reflecting the general condition, also indicates two possible (entirely and completely heuristic and nonobligatory) routes to resolving the situation (which is perceived as one of crisis), two possibilities which can be extrapolated into the future as equally possible. The equal possibility and indefiniteness of the proposals (as distinct from the imprecise articulation of recurrent features) are testimony to an attempt to guess at a fundamentally different structure from within the limits of the old cultural mentality that is coming to an end. And it is the attempt to describe this very mentality as already achieved and approaching its conclusion, with its specific parameters, history of formation and signs of exhaustion, that will manifest at this moment the possibility of understanding at least what should not be expected.
The term “second sacralization” arose as a certain metaphorical definition of the entire sum of vague attempts to make sense of the current situation in art within my own artistic experience, and correspondingly through means far removed from terminological and experimental purity and correctness. But of course, taking into account the history of such ancient relations as those between religion and art, bearing in mind the dynamics of social and ideological processes, it hardly makes sense to expect a sharp shift of balance towards religion in their interrelations – just as there are no grounds for counting on the appearance of a new, big religion or significant denomination that would advance a fundamentally different cosmology and anthropology. Exactly to the contrary, it is, rather, precisely within the confines of culture that any substantial ideas might arise (well, of course within the framework of the fundamental basis of Christian culture, which is culture as such in the aspect we are considering here, that of historical development). Precisely these ideas, postulates, and maxims can become the extra-aesthetic limit of artistic aspirations and activity, a limit which, while not transcendental, is factored out beyond the boundaries of purely artistic problems – and I actually wished to designate them metaphorically as “the second sacralization.”
At the same time, the identification, deconstruction and objectivization of the inner spirit of contemporary art and its ambitions to be a quasi-religion could be called a “second sacralization.”
But all this is something like a finale, a summation or conclusions, obliged, owing to the mishap with the title, to outstrip the natural course of the account of the event and therefore possessing a perfectly real chance of appearing a second time at the end of this text.
And so now there will rightfully follow the totally and absolutely real beginning.
Right then.
Round historical dates, especially the end of a millennium, are always experienced psychologically as catastrophic frontiers. Their thresholds always abound in apocalyptic anticipations expressed, if not in the terms of religious dogma, then at least in eschatologically tinged terms. This is all the more evident within the limits of the former Soviet Union, where the end of the millennium coincided with the end of the Soviet period of Russian history and, possibly, with the end of the great Russian messianic, logocentric mentality. If such a situation does not itself give rise to a crisis in art, it does at least create and facilitate the growth of fine cracks and gaps into rifts and almost terrifying abysses, ready to smash to splinters the edifice of culture that was erected above chaos with such long, laborious effort. The crisis of the eastern, communist component of the intricately arranged mechanism of global equilibrium cannot help but affect the West too, if not in its economic and state organization, then at least in its system of cultural notions and world outlook. Western leftist thinking that identified itself with communism (perhaps not the real thing, but the powerful myth) and Soviet oppositionist dissident thinking, orientated towards western democracy (in its absolute terms and ideologemes also possessing all the features of myth) have lost their relevance and in their collapse are provoking and presaging the reconfiguration of elements of ideology, political thinking and culture. It is also obvious that hitherto stable western society, coming up against the sharp increase in volume of the economically backward world, into which all the former socialist countries have tumbled, will find itself face to face with an eternally breathing abyss, ready to gape open in front of it at some unexpected and therefore unprotected place.
Of course, something similar has occurred more than once in history. But every time it has been resolved by rather earthly means, so far without vindicating the expectations of the apologists of apocalyptical thinking. Let us hope that this time also everything will be resolved in a similar fashion.
The entire complex of problems enumerated above, which are more a subject for politological and social research, is of interest to us as a background, a complex of events that have coincided with an extremely important and painful phenomenon in the sphere of art as such – the end of the avant-garde type of artist and work in art. It should be said that the definition ‘avant-garde’ works within the limits of a large historical period, overlaying all other definitions and closing off stylistic divisions, in accordance with a stable and dominant strategy of artistic behavior that is characteristic of all the actual tendencies of this time.
In fact, the basic drama of the avant-garde type of behavior in culture and the appearance of basic problems in culture was manifested in the constant resolution of the fundamental opposition between art and not-art, in the sense of a constant expansion of the zone of art until a condition was reached when no zone of art remained. That is, the zone of art became all possible spheres for the manifestation of the artist with a dominating, designatory gesture.
This process proceeded slowly but uninterruptedly and insistently throughout the whole twentieth century. Every time an artist emerged into public sight, dragging something out and declaring: This is art! No! No! they shouted to him, but they got used to it and the next time, at the sight of something else, they again shouted No! No! and Yes! Yes! said the artist. And it really did turn out to be Yes! And again they got used to it. And so on, until at any gesture, at a mere single assertive attempt by a cunning artist to take something out from under his shirt, everybody shouts in advance: Art! Art! – just hang on, will you! – no, no. Art! Art! – just hang on, will you! the disheartened artist shouts in reply (I mean the artist who has thought and worked in the categories of a strategy, and not simply the producer of its material byproducts, the tracks of this dramaturgical activity.) And so, the problem is solved. In exactly the same way, as it happens, as a different dramaturgy was exhausted previously: the beautiful and the ugly. Duchamp’s urinal made its appearance in culture as the symbol of its end and resolution.
So we now find ourselves in that congealed, suspended time that is the only concentrated embodiment of what is customarily called postmodernism. Usually this concept is blurred to the extent of losing any specific features, by using it to cover any and all tendencies that don’t fall within the classical definitions. But the present-day condition of culture (by no means a tendency or a style), in which eclecticism, intimacy and the absence of a preferential axiology, position, or language are the consequence of a discarded dramaturgy, of nondramaticality – precisely this could be preferentially and specifically termed postmodernism (of course, these are strictly my own preferences, not prompted by anyone and not constraining anyone to anything). Existence in this rather enervated culturo-dramatical condition, an excellent understanding of it (a profoundly considered position, if not personally, then by groups, communities or simply the large artistic process), a reluctance to overcome it, and even the fostering of such a situation, are typical for the majority of artists who determine the present-day artistic situation. This reflects not only or even so much the wager made by certain artists on a certain hedonism, as the general dead-end state of large sociocultural processes.
This dearth of strategy and inertness in artists’ behavior is reminiscent of existence in a culture of traditional craftsmen, who lack any idea of the affirmation of any particular artistic or poetic stance, that is, the articulation in culture of some actual image of the artist (logically preceding the generation of texts or objects). The crisis is precisely of the immediate relevance of the strategy that is set and, through the inertia of direct inheritance, is continued in the reproduction of certain, almost ritual gestures of the supposed conquest of new territories against the background of an all-accepting culture, since the way it runs through all the paradigmatic possibilities of the given model of behavior creates the impression of a certain automatic, a certain robotlike deadness.
Obviously, when bounded by the horizon of the old dominant cultural mentality, it is extremely difficult to forecast the mentality of the future. As a rule, the overcoming of the present-day situation is habitually conceived as overcoming the canon of the dominant way of thinking through an intensification of the existing means. The ease and rapidity of a change in directions, styles, stances and artistic positions in recent decades, especially in the sphere of the visual arts, gives rise to the illusion of the ease of overcoming the crisis that has now emerged. But all previous innovations have proceeded within the limits of a full-blown, unified dramaturgy of avant-garde artistic practice, as distinct from the end and crisis of this self-same dramaturgy, in the history of the development, consolidation and consummation of which we can distinguish, as it were, its three ‘ages.’
The first is the futuristic-constructivist age (of course, by this we do not intend a description of a period or movement in its completeness, but a certain ideologeme and extreme) the basic objective of which was separating out the ultimate ontological units of the text (geometrical figures, textures, and pure color in painting – Malevich, Tatlin, etc.) and using the genuine laws so distinguished to construct genuine things. Already manifested in this pure, abstract construction is the implicitly inherent idea of certain universal units, fragments or quarks of the world, and general, universal laws that can be extrapolated into any sphere of human activity. For this reason it was highly typical for artists to move into the sphere of practical and social activity and a huge number of utopian-projectural, philosophical, and esoteric texts were produced by the authors of this generation. Through the inertia of this intention to define the human being as a certain extremely simple, unequivocal, pure unit of the social text, in many ways, both ideologically and psychologically, they predetermined and facilitated the totalitarian mentality of the mid-twentieth century. The proponents of totalitarian culture, having taken this mechanistic utopianism, made an extremely interesting and fundamental addition to, or interpretation of, a linguistic strategy of such a kind: they discovered and promulgated ‘large’ ontological units of text, macromolecules as it were, that can be manipulated as an indestructible and genuine ultimate unity with the same ease: for instance, the classical tradition, humanist philosophy, magical practice. (This should be distinguished from the conceptual and postmodernist manipulation of others’ practice and citation of their texts as nongenuine and not possessing any self-sufficient value, coherence or comprehensibility out of context.)
The second age of the avant-garde (we do not have in mind, of course, the tangled chronology of the multinational art of that time, with heterogeneous elements moving at discrepant speeds, but a certain logically discriminable, ideal progression) was, naturally, one of reactions against the mechanicity and projectural euphoria of the first. Proclaimed in opposition to it was the absurdity of all levels of language, which is not determined either by any general regularities or general memory or generally applicable operational laws with conventional optionality in the choice of units of a text. Being a romantic, more vitally oriented movement (as distinct from the first, constructivist-projectural stage) within the bounds of totalitarian cultures, absurdism was a negative reaction in the sphere of social awareness against the state’s claims of being a simple mechanism embodying pure projectural ambitions. It should be noted that within the bounds of big culture, alongside the marked avant-gardist trends there were also found traditional, inertial tendencies that were not an articulation of a new type of artist or a new type of cultural dramaturgy. Essentially they were the direct outcome of an official, depersonalized culture (in this case I have in mind the specific features of Soviet culture) and as a result they were vague, unreflecting perpetuators of the ideology of the avant-garde’s first age. It was precisely from them that the most recent Soviet avant-garde was able to read off and recode elements of linguistic tactics into strategies, coinciding in time as they did so with the new western avant-garde, a result of the direct inheritance of the tradition.
And finally, the third age (this is the most recent avant-garde mentioned several lines previously), the beginning of which is identified with the appearance of the pop art/conceptual movement (as the notorious and odious, classical, dialectical, Hegelian-Marxian consummation of the dynamic triad within our Soviet bounds) which attempted to resolve the contrarily-mutually orientated linguistic positions of the first two ages. The thrust of the third period was the affirmation of the genuineness of every language within the bounds of its axiomatics (identified with an adequate degree of probability and self-evidentiality) and the declaration of its falseness and totalitarian ambitions in its attempts to break through these bounds and cover the entire world with itself. In this case there arises a huge, almost incalculable cluster of possible variations that originates from the center of the problem: the interrelations between object and language and languages, the mutual ambitions of languages behind the back of the world of objects, the substitution of language, the contamination of languages, the hierarchy of languages, the world of objects used as a language, the objectification of language and so on, and so on, and so on. And in this sense art and the artist in this kind of manipulative and mediatory activity find themselves in the metalinguistic zone of the operational level. This kind of metalinguistic position, having invalidated the tactile and formal features of visual art, drew into its sphere such types of artistic activity as the performance, the happening, the action and also text, videos, and audio effects, which in terms of their generic and specific features were in former times qualified rather as types of theatrical, literary, musical and cinematic activity. All these difference are canceled out at the level of the artist’s linguistic-behavioral model. In fact, very often, only the authorial, volitional gesture of designation can determine, even post factum (after the primary artistic act of the material production of a text or an object) the role a work is meant to play – designate it as literature or as an object of visual art. And incidentally, precisely this media-oriented, operational model of behavior has entirely prepared the ground for a possible move in the near future to working with technogenic, virtual, computer-based pseudospaces.
Correspondingly, even modern-day museums of contemporary art, in organizing their own space, image and model of museological behavior, have been converted into the temples of a kind of religion – their huge, beautiful buildings occupy the finest sites in cities. The prestige of visiting them coincides with the fundamental incomprehensibility, almost transcendentality, of both their exhibition of work and their policy agenda, their embeddedness in the specific problematics of contemporary art, their involvement in the immanent processes of intracultural self-awareness and profound, concealed, almost sacral dialogues between those who belong to the narrow circle of the initiated. For the outsider this process is sometimes revealed only in the form of some kind of kitschy, mass-media enticements (by no means providing access to the inner, immanent laws and motivating causes of the emergence of things of this kind).
In addition, with the proliferation in the practice of modern art of the intensity of the installation, the performance, the image, and media process in general and the activity of artists, the museums accumulate a huge number of certain objects produced by this activity (or even the life) of the artists, as the material bearers of their phantasmal activity, which are impossible to understand without a knowledge of the work of the specific artist as a context, as well as of the broad context of art as a whole. In other words, the items presented are, as it were, sacred objects or, figuratively speaking, the relics of the ‘saints’ of modern art, which demand worship, but not understanding and empathy.
This overview of the completed and exhausted state of both the immanent-dramaturgical, sociocultural level and the strategy of cultural behavior prompts the suspicion that the specific cultural type and mentality are exhausted, which, after a certain period of inertial reproduction of the basic, habitual features of this manner of thinking and existing, creates the impression of an end and a crisis, if it proves impossible to discern the clear, visible features of a breakthrough and the appearance of something new.
Actually, this is the point in the text at which there could appear once again the beginning that was promised as the end and was conceived as the end, but showed up at the beginning simply as an explanation of a certain confusion with the title as declared and as unveiled, remember: The second sacro-cularization.
Actually, there is not even any need to reproduce it, it is quite enough to refer the reader to it.
And having lost the space required to reproduce it, I can conclude all this only with the assumption that the sacro-cularization is already in operation, i.e. that its features are sufficiently visible. However, it is, after all, proceeding within the bounding horizon of an avant-garde art that is exhausting itself, while something new that is already complete (although it will be to some extent subject to our present abilities to identify and evaluate it) could be described as either one thing or another: accomplished secularization or simply secularization.
1990