Dreamworld and Catastrophe - The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West
Susan Buck-Morss was in Moscow during events leading to the fall of the Soviet Union, working collaboratively with members of a new generation of philosophers who were developing an independent reading of Western theory (Adorno, Benjamin, Foucault). That experience provides the reference point for this provocative analysis of East and West as two closely related versions of modernity. Out of visual images and historical fragments she constructs constellations that resonate unexpectedly with present concerns: ecology, gender, sexuality, and mass media. She recasts traditional narratives across a wide spectrum of historical topics, from revolutionary politics to avant-garde art, from mass entertainment to industrial labor, from collective action to domestic privacy. Rejecting the established discourse of democracy versus totalitarianism, she argues that the socialist imaginary failed because it mirrored the dreamworlds of capitalism too faithfully.
Dreamworld and Catastrophe is an experiment in visual culture, using images as philosophy, presenting, literally, a way of seeing the past. Its pictorial narrative rescues historical data that with the end of the Cold War are threatened with oblivion, and challenges common conceptions of what the century was about.
Susan Buck-Morss is Professor of Political Philosophy and Social Theory, Department of Government, and Professor of Visual Culture, Department of Art History, Cornell University. She is author of The Dialectics of Seeing (MIT Press, 1989) and The Origin of Negative Dialectics.