Mundo soñado y catástrofe: la desaparición de la utopía de masas en el Este y el Oeste

by Susan Buck-Morss

La construcción de la utopía de masas fue el sueño del siglo XX. Fue la fuerza ideológica impulsora de la modernización industrial tanto en la forma capitalista como en la socialista. El sueño fue, en sí mismo, un inmenso poder material que transformó el mundo natural, confiriendo a los objetos elaborados industrialmente así como a los entornos edificados un deseo político y colectivo. Mientras que los sueños nocturnos de los individuos expresan deseos frustrados por el orden social y a los que se ha hecho retroceder hacia formas regresivas de la infancia, este sueño colectivo se ha atrevido a imaginar un mundo social aliado con la felicidad personal, y ha prometido a los adultos que su realización estaría en armonía con la superación de la escasez.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction, History, Politics, Theory, Academic, Utopia

395 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2000

About the author

Susan Buck-Morss is an American philosopher and intellectual historian. She is currently Professor of Political Science at the CUNY Graduate Center.

Reviews

[Jane · Rating 2 out of 5]

I loved the essay version of this, and it has some great stuff in it. But the crudity and abstraction of the model for explaining *everything* about the Cold War and the confrontation between socialism and capitalism, the "plague on both your houses" mentality, and above all her utter utter obliviousness to colonialism, which leads her to ignore the fact that the Cold War was actually fought neither in the US nor the USSR nor in Europe but in the rest of the world, leading her to bizarre, completely false claims like that "capitalism destroys people through neglect, not terror" - argh!

[Miloš · Rating 5 out of 5]

Jedan pesnik (Aleksej Gastev) se nalazio na čelu Centralnog instituta za rad, koji je osnovan 1920. godine radi primene tejlorističke metode rada, uvezene iz SAD. To je bila eksperimentalna laboratorija za mehanizovane ritmove rada. U tom još uvek predindustrijskom kontekstu, ljudska tela su se kretala u ritmovima mašina, kao šamani koji u svom magijskom ritualu mimikrijom željenog stanja dovode do ostvarenja tog stanja. Naučno proračunati pokreti tela bili su ekvivalent dodola u industrijko doba. (137)

[Brian · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm re-reading this right now, and I wish I could give it a 6th star. Its basically about the profound but overlooked commonalities (politically, economically, culturally, etc.) between the empires on either side of the Cold War.

[Köstebek35 · Rating 1 out of 5]

Rezalet. Anti-Komünist propaganda. Tek yıldızın sebebi, bozuk saatin bile günde bir defa doğruyu gösteriyor oluşu, ya da 'accidental communist propaganda' diyelim. Sahiden yazarın zayıf marksizm bilgisine bir de temelsiz, içi boş 'demokrasi' zırvaları eklenince kitapta ilerlemesi zorlaşıyor. Ha yine de arada ilginç şeyler öğreniyorsunuz, tabii böyle bir çöple karşılaşınca insan öğrendiklerini de double check etme ihtiyacı duyuyor. Allah ıslah etsin.

[Roberto Yoed · Rating 2 out of 5]

Interesting approach to ideological issues but in the end it fails miserably because of it's poor understanding of Marx: if you think culture had the same alienating effects in the Soviet Union as well as in capitalist nations, then you didn't really understand the relation of infrastructure and superstructure.

Also, the solution isn´t redeeming ideology: the answer is exactly the opposite, a profound and scientific critique of the different manifestations of ideology.

[Joe Olipo · Rating 4 out of 5]

I would like to investigate three categories of dreams at play in Dreamworlds and Catastrophe and their attendant constellations beginning with Buck-Morss’s conception of “Dream” which undergirds the (effective) use of images in the text:

When an era crumbles, “History breaks down into images, not into stories.” Without the narration of continuous progress, the images of the past resemble nightdreams, the “first mark” of which, Freud tells us, is their emancipation from “the spatial and temporal order of events.” Such images, as dream images, are complex webs of memory and desire wherein past experience is rescued and, perhaps, redeemed. Only partial interpretations of these images are possible, and in a critical light. But they may be helpful if they illuminate patches of the past that seem to have a charge of energy about them precisely because the dominant narrative does not connect them seamlessly to the present. The historical particulars might then be free to enter into different constellations of meaning.

This is what is meant by “Dream” in Dreamworld, but “Dream” conceived as the images of the broken-down dream-era freed from its narrative implies, second, the dream as it appears to one within that era - the (dream)world which the dreamer still inhabits, and, third, the dream-narrative as another kind of dream (in the 'I Have a Dream' sense) - The dream the dreamer is dreaming.

In the sense that Buck-Morss employs the metaphor of a “dream” we are to understand (dream)worlds as governed by their own internal logic and subject to dissolution upon waking. The dream, as a consequence of the metaphor itself, is already understood as a kind of folly - a fantasy disjuncted from so-called waking life. Yet, if we want to proceed with our analysis, would it not be more productive to dispense with this fatalistic connotation. The disjunctions between the dream-image and the dream-narrative, between the dream-present and the (shattered) dream-past, between the dream and the dream-within-the-dream – these can be understood as the circuits of a libidinal “black-market” shooting up between the cracks in the connections between these concepts. Zizek remarks that, rather than short-circuiting (undermining) the soviet state, the aberrant circuitry of the black market was necessary for the preservation of the centrally planned soviet economy as it actually existed. Is the ability to purchase caviar on the street not similar to the short-circuits produced from the disjunctions and “wrong dreams” of the soviet era, which, while appearing to undermine the party line, give expression to the forces of desiring-production functioning behind the scenes in the form of a (necessary) waste product: “wrong dreams”. (It would not be inappropriate to introduce here Adorno’s conception of ‘art as a waste product’.) It follows that an analysis of these disjunctions is necessary, not only as ‘autopsy’ of the process of dreamworlds ‘running aground’, but also toward the critical analysis of our own dreams and the disjunctions they necessarily entail when realized in so-called ‘waking life’.

'Disjunctions' present as a kind of historical joke. They are constellations which ‘do not follow’ – “You can’t get there from here – How did you?" – Historical images, facts seem out of place. The dream-within-the-dream is always the “wrong dream” pining after the wrong object – doomed to failure (the wrong-dream achieved is also failure manifested as anticlimax). Buck-Morss recalls the inexorable mummification of the deceased Lenin (initially preserved for 40 days [biblical reference] eventually preserved by a refrigeration system and "ancient ritual" ostensibly against the wishes of many who were directly involved in the project. Lenin's tomb is the echo in wood of a previous 4th century design set in stone. (The most consequential action in this narrative is the formation of the Immortilization Commission – even this can be bureaucratized – which, even in the Buck-Morss narrative, does not receive the proper emphasis)

1949—The Bulgarian Communist leader Georgi Dimitrov “went to Moscow for medical treatment and was sent back mummified through the Soviet method.”

[<- embalming as if by accident - the 'punch-line']

1952—The cadaver of Choybalsan, Communist leader of Mongolia, was mummified by the Moscow embalming experts of the Laboratory of the Lenin Mausoleum.

1953—Stalin’s mummified body joined Lenin’s in the mausoleum.

[<- mummification discussed as though it were a fashionable fad. Stalin joining Lenin in getting his ears pierced (<- the additional implication of joining Lenin in his preserved (death)bed with the implication of a kind of coitus beyond the grave (which is actually imagined to exist in the afterlife and is then incarnated backward into the form of the preserved bodies))]

The wrong-dream itself can be observed in the form of its manifestation in art/literature:

“Prushevsky! Are the successes of higher science able to resurrect people who have decomposed or not?”“No,” said Prushevsky.“You’re lying,” accused Zachev without opening his eyes. “Marxism can do any-thing. Why is it then that Lenin lies intact in Moscow? He is waiting for science—he wants to be resurrected —Andrei Platonov, The Foundation Pit

The horror (wrong-dream) that the Marxist-Leninist socialists would have any desire to resurrect the transitional worker with all his _HIS_ defects and prejudices implies an imperfect future which has not attained the goal of true socialism. (this clarifies the notion that the only true socialism is that which can perceive the past as a time of unremitting horror - see Adorno, with reference to Benjamin, "The task of philosophy is to perceive … how all things would appear from the perspective of redemption." – looking backward from redemption one views the past as damned.) And yet, against all reason, the Marxist-Leninist future would go on to resurrect precisely those who are not worthy, and not just the most despicable characters, who could conceivably be selected for the purpose of an anthropological study, but also all the transitional workers who were neither exception in sin nor in ethical purity but who were not distinct from the morass of the human race according to any discernable metric – this would be redemption by Marxism-Leninism by virtue of the absurd – a kind of realized Kierkegaardian Christendom.

But we are forbidden to rest here. (This material has been covered before.) Buck-Morss continues the thread. The waste product of “wrong dreams” can be fed back into the desiring machines (coprophagia) - a bizarre action - a short circuit capable of re-invigorating the dialectic (it’s possible to proceed to truth but only from the starting point of delusional falsehood):

"The attempt by radical groups in Slovenia and elsewhere to close the gap between socialist ideology and socialist reality by taking the old ideology at its word, paradoxically forced the political situation wide open. Zizek described the “inherently tragical ethical dimension” of those who “took socialism seriously” and whose role was that of the “vanishing mediator,” a term he borrowed from Jameson: [They] were prepared to put everything at stake in order to destroy the compromised system and replace it with the utopian “third way” beyond capitalism and “really existing” socialism. Their sincere belief and insistence that they were not working for the restoration of Western capitalism, of course, proved to be nothing but an in-substantial illusion; however, we could say that precisely as such (as a thorough illusion without substance) it was stricto sensu nonideological: it didn’t “reflect” in an inverted-ideological form any actual relations of power."
[...] “We witnessed a kind of opening; things were for a moment visible which immediately became invisible.”

Though it is unclear which has the potential for greater harm, the wrong-dream as depicted in soviet propaganda which perceives the dream-state as actually having existed as historical fact, or the wrong-dream of Capitalism, per Lukács, "the only principle of which is the negation of transcendence...." Whether we can afford to take our delusions seriously (wrong dreams fed back into the machines of desire) or transcend everything (continuously waking from all wrong dreams - this becomes the ultimate transcendence which declares 'there is no transcendence') Buck-Morss responds:

“When the structuring topology between words and the world under-goes a seismic shift, it may happen that the truth cannot be said."

The task then becomes to short-circuit these dreams (mixing the metaphor).

"To be engaged in the historical task of surprising rather than explaining the present—more avant-garde than vanguard in its temporality—may prove at the end of the century to be politically worth our while. […] Such imaginings, freed from the constraints of bounded spaces and from the dictates of unilinear time, might dream of be-coming, in Lenin’s words, 'as radical as reality itself.'"

[<-- “I come by at night and surprise it”]

"In some respects, a revolution is a miracle. - Lenin 1921" (qualifying language - “in which respects?”)

[A YOGAM · Rating 4 out of 5]

In „Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West“ (2000) präsentiert Susan Buck-Morss eine tiefgründige und unkonventionelle Analyse des 20. Jahrhunderts. Das Werk stellt die vorherrschende Auffassung in Frage, dass der Kapitalismus wünschenswert und unvermeidlich sei. Ihr Zugang verbindet marxistische Kritik mit der Ästhetik Walter Benjamins und dekonstruiert die utopische Bildsprache der Moderne als gemeinsame Traumlogik beider Systeme. Stattdessen beleuchtet Buck-Morss die fundamentalen Gemeinsamkeiten der Gegner des Kalten Krieges. Sie argumentiert, dass die politischen Regime in Ost und West Variationen eines gemeinsamen Themas der industriellen Moderne waren, vereint durch den utopischen Traum, dass die industrielle Neugestaltung der Welt materielles Glück für die Massen bereitstellen würde. Die Autorin fordert eine Kritik der katastrophalen Folgen (wie Krieg, Ausbeutung und Diktatur), die eintraten, als diese Träume von Machtstrukturen instrumentalisiert wurden. Das Buch, das die binäre Rhetorik des Kalten Krieges („Totalitarismus versus Demokratie“) im Kern herausfordert, nimmt das Ende dieser Ära als Ausgangspunkt für eine kritische Neubewertung der Geschichte.
Die zentralen, widersprüchlichen „Traumwelten“ der Massenutopie in Ost und West unterschieden sich vor allem in den Dimensionen, die ihre politische Vorstellungswelt dominierten. Obwohl beide den grundlegenden Mythos teilten, dass industrielles Schaffen zu einer „guten Gesellschaft“ führen könne, basierte die politische Imagination des Westens (Kapitalismus) auf dem Raum (Geopolitik), während der Osten (Sozialismus) von der Zeit dominiert wurde. Im Westen war das Feindbild in Form von potenziell feindseligen Nationalstaaten in einer geografischen Landschaft verortet, wobei die nationale Grenze die Trennlinie bildete. Die Legitimation basierte auf der politischen (formellen) Demokratie. Im Gegensatz dazu beruhte das Feindbild im Osten auf unversöhnlich antagonistischen, kriegführenden Klassen, wobei die Revolution als historisches Ereignis und Fortschritt in der Zeit verstanden wurde. Die Legitimation des Ostens lag in der ökonomischen (substanziellen) Demokratie basierend auf der egalitären Verteilung sozialer Güter. Diese unterschiedlichen Topologien führten zu gegensätzlichen kulturellen Schwerpunkten, wobei die Illusion der totalen Sicherheit durch den Staat (im Osten) der Illusion der sofortigen Befriedigung als Konsument (im Westen) gegenüberstand.
Die Untersuchung der Massenutopie entstand aus einer engen und intellektuell fruchtbaren Zusammenarbeit mit Moskauer Philosophen. Die Autorin besuchte von 1988 bis 1993 häufig das Institut für Philosophie der sowjetischen (später russischen) Akademie der Wissenschaften, um mit einer neuen Generation von Intellektuellen zusammenzuarbeiten, die die Sowjetkultur als Machtsystem kritisch analysierten. Zu den Schlüsselfiguren gehörten Valerii Podoroga, Mikhail Ryklin und Elena Petrovskaia, denen das Buch gewidmet ist. Diese Gruppe eignete sich westliche Theorien, darunter die der Frankfurter Schule und des Poststrukturalismus, an, um eine anhaltende kritische Analyse der Sowjetkultur zu ermöglichen. Die Kollaboration, die unter anderem durch die MacArthur Foundation finanziert wurde, führte zur Organisation wichtiger philosophischer Veranstaltungen und zur ersten Veröffentlichung von Walter Benjamin in russischer Sprache. Diese Moskauer Zusammenarbeit, aus der auch die erste russische Ausgabe von Walter Benjamins Schriften hervorging, war mehr als ein akademischer Austausch – sie war Teil jenes globalen Nachdenkens, das die Reste der Massenutopie zugleich kritisch sicht- und denkbar machte. Die gemeinsamen Diskussionen, die in einer Zeit des intensiven politischen Wandels stattfanden, ermöglichten es, die gemeinsamen Probleme der Moderne zu erkennen, wobei die Moskauer Philosophen trotz des Zerfalls des Kalten Krieges ihre kritische Arbeit fortsetzten und den Verlag Ad Marginem („Philosophie am Rande“) gründeten.
„Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West“ ist ein seltenes Beispiel dafür, wie Philosophie, Kunsttheorie und Zeitgeschichte zu einer gemeinsamen Sprache der Kritik finden – einer Sprache, die den Traum der Moderne nicht verklärt, sondern aufweckt.

[Orysia · Rating 4 out of 5]

In the fourth chapter of the book, Susan Buck-Morss, an American follower of the Frankfurt School's first generation, shows how technologies enabled the emergence of masses in the US and the USSR in the first half of the 20th century. Buck-Morss demonstrates similarities between American and Societ mass culture, making an individualistic/collective difference to be less significant. From the carnival to the show and finally to the cinema masses became more passive and detached from real experiences.
The book (or at least a chapter) concentrates mainly on cultural, historical and visual components, showing us how the masses were deprived of dreamworlds, promised to them, which makes one really sad. The question of subjectivity and consciousness of the masses is not answered which only contributes to the book's story, which is full of cultural evidence and is similar to a photograph of the time (with many photos amongst the text,btw)

[Alek Sigley · Rating 5 out of 5]

Illuminating reflections from an American intellectual historian on the Soviet experience of state socialism, based in the notion that socialism and capitalism are offshoots of the same European Enlightenment project of modernity. Also deserves much credit for using critical theory as a prism for critiquing Soviet culture, observing the ways in which power operated through architecture, film, and literature. The author's personal experiences collaborating with Soviet philosophers during the late 80s bring much to the table (and are quite fascinating). Highly recommended for those with an interest in state socialism and its ramifications on Western thought and history.

[Caroline · Rating 4 out of 5]

look, I didn't have time to read the final section before my inter-library loan ran out, but I'm counting this as read given the last section is about the process of writing the book. doubtless very interesting, but not my main priority. for my purpose the book was worth reading for the incredible quote about Lenin's autopsy alone

[Ray Dunsmore · Rating 3 out of 5]

A fairly interesting critique of Soviet society through the ways its art and politics collide. Quite illuminating, though I feel the strong want to read an actual history of the Soviet Union after this, it's just left too many things unsaid.

[Sardaana Rumyantseva · Rating 3 out of 5]

A clever and imaginative spot-the-difference exercise for anyone interested in modern mass politics

[Intiya · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautifully/poetically written while still being academically informative and insightful. Some very moving intimate portrayals of the impact of mass planning in the Soviet Union and its indoctrination of children.

[erin · Rating 5 out of 5]

fascinating way of using footnotes. and a good way to access the intersection of images and politics.

[Joaquin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Masterfully handles a range of subjects too broad and too ambitious to even summarize here. Incredibly insightful.