DREAMWORLD AND CATASTROPHE
January 28, 2015
Reading:
Susan Buck-Morss, Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West (MIT Press, 2000).
Questions:
Where is everyday life and people? The ethnography behind the philosophy?
How rigidly do we need to oppose possibility/impossibility?
Utopian desire in both socialism and capitalism?
Does the artistic avant-garde represent an alternative? Political alternatives that art itself represents?
What is the book’s basic theoretical claim?
What is the place of Lenin in this work?
Who feels betrayal? Melancholy? (East or West?)
What is the redemptive hope? Is avant-garde a form of aesthetics that has an alternative temporality.
What is the concept of the mass? Is it an aesthetic concept?
Is the author's notion of images of philosophy portable to history?
Relation to Benjamin and Adorno? Anything new?
Themes and Topics Discussed:
January 28, 2015
Reading:
Susan Buck-Morss, Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West (MIT Press, 2000).
Questions:
Where is everyday life and people? The ethnography behind the philosophy?
How rigidly do we need to oppose possibility/impossibility?
Utopian desire in both socialism and capitalism?
Does the artistic avant-garde represent an alternative? Political alternatives that art itself represents?
What is the book’s basic theoretical claim?
What is the place of Lenin in this work?
Who feels betrayal? Melancholy? (East or West?)
What is the redemptive hope? Is avant-garde a form of aesthetics that has an alternative temporality.
What is the concept of the mass? Is it an aesthetic concept?
Is the author's notion of images of philosophy portable to history?
Relation to Benjamin and Adorno? Anything new?
Themes and Topics Discussed:
- Art: Role of art and aesthetics -- esp. as an alternative vision of time ("open temporality"), in contrast with the close teleologies of politics: when the temporality of party accepted, art lost the role that “set reality into question”
- That “‘history’ has failed us”—but rather than submit to cynicism or melancholy seek to recover the dream of human happiness? (For structures of power not utopian desire/idea to blame.)
- Shock and modern experience (shell shock, shock work, war, shock therapy [and "Shock Doctrine" (Naomi Klein)?]. Permanent state of emergency as ongoing shocks. Does shock awaken or anesthetize?
- Method and form of book
- Intellectualism as avant-garde. The “us” that history has betrayed are intellectuals.
- Socialism and capitalism as competing forms of the modern dreamland -- in relation to uses of space and time.
- Producers versus audience
- Memoir of the 90s
- Fragments of Marx and Lenin as attempts to recover them
- Hollywood comparisons to Soviet avant-garde
- Art and the state in other places such as Mexico
- Eurocentrism and classism
- Place of the working-class and "masses"
- People do not want to live in these experimental worlds
- A dream in the name of the masses but not in control of the masses. Challenging “in our name” ideas. Real people come in only on a theoretical level.
- Possible different readings by only looking at the art. The visual method. (History breaks down into images)
- Project of recovering utopian desire from utopian practices that colonize time.
- Theoretical claims come from a political project.
- New constellations of European social theorists. How to salvage the utopian from the past.
- Sovereignty as imaginary as art.
- Focus mostly on socialist failure, much less focus on consumerism of the west.
- Utopias of consumptive, capitalist, urban society.
- The place of a body. Universal? Sensing? Object?
- Aestheticizing the world.
- Historian, Philosopher, or Curator? Curation for a political purpose
- Juxtapositions – Chaplin vs. Eisenstein?
- Modernity as problem and Modernism (artistic form) as answer.
- The cloak of radical cosmopolitanism.
- Concern about the catastrophe to human life from all forms of industrial modernity.