Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West

• Published in: Labour (Halifax) 2001, Vol.48 (48), p.336-339
• Main Author: Wernick, Andrew
• Format: Review
• Language: English
• Subjects: 20th century; Bolshevism; Canada; Capitalism; Cold War; Collective memory; Critical theory; Culture; Dialectics; History; Iconography; Ideology; Post-communist societies; Reviews/Comptes Rendus; Socialism; Utopias
• ISSN: 0700-3862; 1911-4842
• DOI: 10.2307/25149198

A WIDE READERSHIP, inside and outside the academy, will welcome Susan Buck-Morss' superb new book. Lavishly illustrated with the iconographic debris of a disintegrating Soviet Union, and studded with parallel examples from the rival symbology of Fordist consumer capitalism, her study offers a profound, scholarly, reflection on the "mass utopias" of 20th-century industrialism, grasped at the moment of their disillusioned end-of-the-Cold-War collapse. As the book's title suggests, its focus is especially on the official dreamworlds that faced one another, in complicity as well as hostility, across the East-West (meaning Soviet-American) divide. Other mass utopias are set aside, including the atavistic nationalisms and fundamentalisms that have rushed to fill the post-Cold War gap. It is indeed that gap itself which is her main concern--a disorienting ideological vacuum most palpable, perhaps, in the rapidly becoming ex-"socialist" world where the book (in a confessedly touristic sense) locates itself: Many will already be familiar with Dialectics of Seeing (1989). This earlier text brilliantly reconstructed Walter Benjamin's unfinished "Arcades" project (on the consumer culture of Baudelaire's Paris), and established Buck-Morss both as an authoritative commentator on Benjamin and as a major cultural thinker in her own right. Dreamworld and Catastrophe seeks, in effect, to extend Benjamin's dialectical investigations into the imaginary of modern culture to another time and place. The moment is similarly one of danger, similarly involves the play of trauma and recollection, and similarly provokes reflection on the place of the messianic in history. But the scene shifts from Paris to Moscow, from les Galeries Lafayette and the Hollywood dreamworld that fascism was about to shatter in the 1930s, to Soviet socialism at the hallucinatory moment of its Gorbachevian disappearance 50 years later. This double transposition, Buck-Morss makes clear, involves more than a mere updating. In late 1980s Moscow new themes present themselves, including the shift from modernity to postmodernity, the fate of the socialist dreamworld, and the prior over-determination of the ideological field, in both camps, by the binaries of the Cold War.