Helen Grace

School of Humanities
University of Western Sydney
h.grace@uws.edu.au

 

Review of: Susan Buck-Morss, Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West.Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000.

 

Such imaginings, freed from the constraints of bounded spaces and from the dictates of unilinear time, might dream of becoming, in Lenin’s words, “as radical as reality itself.”

 

–Susan Buck-Morss, Dreamworld and Catastrophe

“Don’t you know philosophy is dead?… Marxism-Leninism killed it here, Deconstruction in the West. Here we had too much theory of reality, there you had not enough.”

 

–Malcolm Bradbury, Doctor Criminale

 

In Malcolm Bradbury’s 1992 novel, Doctor Criminale, the English narrator Francis Jay, a somewhat jaded journalist researching a mysterious Central European intellectual named Bazlo Criminale, arrives at an international literary conference in the Italian Lakes District. The conference participants (the usual suspects: “American Postmodernists, American feminists,… distinguished elderly French academicians,… muscular young academics from Southern California, carrying tennis rackets,… mean-looking dark-clad theoretical critics from Yale, formerly dissident writers from Eastern Europe uncertain about what exactly they are now dissenting from, African writers in multi-coloured tribal robes, German writers from East and West all wearing black leather jackets”) all have come to grapple with the conference theme, “Literature and Power:… Writing After the Cold War.” Bradbury’s portrait of literary conferences is wry and immediately recognizable–as are a number of the intellectuals. Criminale (“the Lukacs of the nineties” who had had a bitter quarrel with Heidegger, attacked Adorno, and revised Marx) turns out to be not entirely criminal, but neither does he prove to be innocent (“as Nietzsche said, when an epoch dies, betrayal is everywhere. To make ourselves heroes of the new, we must murder the past” [330]). He is a creation of the Cold War itself and if the novel is too close for comfort for Western critical intellectuals, it has resonance in Eastern Europe. Recently translated into Russian, it was essential summer reading in Moscow last year.

 

The novel’s fictional conference takes place in November 1990–but in October 1990, a real conference sharing a number of the characteristics of Bradbury’s account occurred in Dubrovnik–in a venue not so very far from the fictional one. Attended by an impressive assembly of what might be called a new postmodern nomenklatura (including Susan Buck-Morss, Boris Groys, Wolfgang Fritz Haug, Fredric Jameson, Helena Kozakiewicz, Merab Mamardashvili, Valerii Podoroga, Mikhail Ryklin, Vladislav Todorov and Slavoj Zizek), this was to be a renewal of a critical tradition of scholarly exchange established thirty years earlier by Herbert Marcuse and continued by Jürgen Habermas. Within six months of the conference, Dubrovnik was in ruins and in just over a year, the Soviet Union no longer existed. The Dubrovnik meeting–and the intellectual exchanges which continue in its wake–remain, however, a serious and unresolved challenge to Western theories of postmodernity and globalization, and this challenge cannot be ignored if these two terms are to be regarded as truly critical concepts and not just another dimension of liberal-democratic hegemony, masking the same old First-World expansionism.

 

In Dreamworld and Catastrophe, Susan Buck-Morss’s brilliant account of the end of the Cold War–part intellectual biography, part polemic, part philosophical picture-book, part “hypertext”–“fact” once again turns out to be far more fascinating than “fiction.” Buck-Morss’s method clearly draws upon Benjamin’s Passagen-Werk, cross-weaving description and quotation with astute observation and rich images to produce a new textual entity that exceeds the limits of the book, promising a future form better suited to the way in which ideas seize the imagination than the academic book is able to provide. As the author herself says, “Books are slow organizers, producing mass predispositions but seldom inciting direct action” (134). This presents a challenge to academic publishers which none–including MIT Press–yet seem able to grasp. What remains is a virtual film script or an unrealized multi-media project, demanding to escape from the limits of the printed word.

 

The book’s first chapter on power, sovereignty, and the nation-state draws upon an idea of the political imaginary as something considerably less abstract than the logic of a discourse or “world-view,” as Western political theorists understand it. Buck-Morss prefers to see the political imaginary as a specific iconographic, visual representation of the political terrain, as understood in Russian post-structuralist philosophy (especially in the work of Podoroga)–a political landscape rather than a political logic, a visual field in which political actors move and are also acted upon in a bodily sense. This allows three “icons” of the political imaginary–the common enemy, the political collective, and the sovereign agency, which acts in its name–to be brought into focus and considered at the same moment. In addition to these visible components, there is also a blind spot, a “wild zone” in which power remains arbitrary and violent, beyond the rule of law. She summarizes thus: “the class nature of the state may explain its violence, but not its legitimacy; the democratic nature of the state may explain its legitimacy but not its violence” (6). This zone of the state’s excess already exists in the French Revolution–the Ur-form of both models of mass democracy (the nation-state and revolutionary class). Although historically located in the French post-revolutionary Terror, which is echoed in Stalinist terror, it is also clear that the idea of the “wild zone” draws upon the particular post-Soviet experience in which politics, emerging civil society and criminality become indistinguishable. Boris Kagarlitsky has aptly described this scenario:

 

Everything that can be divided up, pulled apart or plundered will be privatised and distributed among the top people in the state. Anything which does not reach the top will go to the hangers-on. The remainder will be picked up by the mafia which, as the liberal press has already announced, “does not exist in our country.” (ix)

 

The “wild zone” is also located at the heart of capitalism as Braudel has noted:

 

[Above the layer of the market economy] comes the zone of the anti-market, where the great predators roam and the law of the jungle operates. This–today as in the past, before and after the industrial revolution–is the real home of capitalism. (qtd. in Buck-Morss 341)

 

Buck-Morss attempts to spatialize the relation between her discursive account of the (relative) movement of politics and the (relative) immobility of the concepts deployed to understand it (Cold War Enemies; French Revolution; Separation Between the Economic and the Political; Sovereign Party/Socialist State; Space; Time) by dividing the visual field of the page between text and “hypertext” (though this is a misnomer since it is placed below rather than above or beyond the text). This is an adventurous move, but the “Euclidean geometry” of the printed page does not lend itself to the kind of fluidity (if not “fourth-dimensionality” to refer to a particular theme of the Russian avant-garde) which the material requires and which a (more ephemeral) website or a CD-ROM would provide. The exigencies of academic publishing for the global intellectual finally seem to demand the immobility of the book over the constant movement of the body and ideas of the author and this remains a paradox of criticism.¹

 

The hypertextual experiment of the first chapter gives way in subsequent chapters to a much more successful quotation and image-based intertextuality. The “life-building” experimentation of Gastev, Bogdanov, and Melnikov is explored via a broadening of aesthetics to incorporate a more embodied experience, defined as “perception through feeling.” This approach involves a now familiar critical maneuver through which the artist is displaced by the artwork itself–so it is artworks, rather than artists who are said to be “avant-garde” and, even further, it is said to be the aesthetic experience of the artwork which counts rather than the work, and in the end it is not the object but its critical interpretation which is avant-garde.

 

This displaced status of both the artist and the object was certainly a theme for the Russian avant-garde, but it is perhaps an oversimplification to argue that the non-objective is representational to the extent that it is “mimetic of the experience of modernity” (63). Such a suggestion does however indicate that within an approach such as Buck Morss’s, space can be given to something that exceeds politics (the “wild zone”)–but there is nothing that exceeds representation (the iron grip of materialism). It is this tendency that runs the risk of reducing all images to being mere illustrations of critical concepts, rather than being generative of them. The materiality of the image or object is never allowed to be its own, so that the labor of the artist is always subordinated to that of the critic. This then remains another critical paradox–justified perhaps in this case because “the original field of aesthetics is not art but reality–corporeal, material nature” (101).

 

But critics are not alone in displacing artists. In the twentieth century totalitarian figures made something of a habit of it–and more recently, totalitarian leaders have been criticized precisely on artistic grounds–Hitler by Syberberg, and Stalin most notably by Groys. Unsympathetic to this trend, Buck-Morss challenges it:

 

But is the lesson that political revolutionaries should not be artists, or is that they should become better ones?… Revolutionary politics needs to take seriously the fact that democratic sovereignty represents the masses, and that political actions represent history by giving it sensory, material form. (66)

 

In order to explore the relation between revolutionary politics and democratic sovereignty, Buck-Morss attempts a brief history of time, which proves to be too sketchy to grapple satisfactorily with its theme in book form (though in a moving image or multi-media form, this chapter would work much better). She relies on images which are well known–Lenin’s sarcophagus (designed by Melnikov), the Lenin mausoleum (designed by Shchusev), stills from October of the toppling of the statue of Alexander III, an image of the toppled Dzerzhinskii statue (a “victim” of the 1991 coup), images of the death and resurrection of the Cathedral of Christ the Savior in Moscow. A fascination with death (or, at least, the mummified bodies of dictators) gives way to three chapters on “life-building,” mass culture, and the dreamworlds of capitalism and communism.

 

The shock of modernity via Benjamin provides a nice segue into a discussion of Stakhanovist shock work. Drawing upon Stephen Kotkin’s account of the building of the “showcase” industrial project at Magnitogorsk (literally, “Magnetic Mountain”) in the Urals in the 1930s (by U.S. engineers–and Soviet labor–modeled on the steel town of Gary, Indiana), Buck-Morss points out a key distinction between Taylorism and Stakhanovism: Taylorism, she reminds us, is a rational/ist model aimed at the establishment of norms and standardized rhythms based on scientific observation of individual bodily movements; Stakhanovist shock work on the other hand was carried out in rushes or “storms” by teams of workers. Said to have its origins in very old rural rhythm-setting work cries, the aim was to achieve higher productivity through superhuman effort without machines, a process involving team spirit and an everyday heroism in which ordinary workers’ lives could be transformed. This idea of life transformation through labor probably owes more to messianic belief, rendered material by Bolshevism’s promise of paradise on earth, than it does to a Protestant work ethic from which it deserves to be distinguished.

 

If we accept, as Buck-Morss argues, that mass society is a twentieth-century phenomenon, the idea of “the masses” has undergone significant change and from both “East” and “West,” there seems to be a tendency now to abandon the concept.² For Buck-Morss, mass society itself has transformed the masses from Marxist historical consciousness (class-for-itself) to a style-conscious consumer-led collectivity: “People become part of the collective by mimicking its look” (134). For Podoroga, “the mass” is primarily a visual phenomenon, a simulation produced by cinema’s imaginary space and existing only within that space. Especially in Eisenstein’s cinema, the crowd is a composite form, a “protoplasmic being in the process of becoming” and a “flow of violence” (147). Interestingly, this idea of “protoplasmaticness” is developed by Eisenstein himself in writing, not about “the masses” but about Disney (see Leyda).

 

Much has been written in recent years about the spectacle of the revolution, the mass theatrical spectacles commemorating it, and Stalinist culture’s phantasmagorias. As the archives continue to be mined and the Soviet Union rendered as a simulacrum, comparisons might be made with the mass culture of its “other”–the United States. This is precisely what Buck-Morss attempts, concluding that the collective imaginaries of both capitalism and socialism are “virtual worlds,” although it remains a social project to make them real (149).

 

Just as the image of the crowd became a “protoplasmic being” in Eisenstein’s cinema, a composite of moving masses flowing across the screen and close-ups of faces at the limits of expressivity, so Hollywood’s creation of a new mass figure–the star–relies upon the composite image (close-ups of mouth, eyes, legs, breasts, projected in super-human dimensions) and plastic surgery to eliminate the imperfections of the natural body. To this extent the image of the star, which is quintessentially female, presents an “awesome aesthetic spectacle” of “monstrous proportions,” and Buck-Morss goes so far as to liken it to a huge church icon, surrounded by objects of conspicuous consumption. The star constitutes a standardized image, an instantly identifiable cliché, like an advertising logo. But a distinction can still be made between Soviet and Hollywood cinema, one providing the prosthetic experience of collective power and the other (Hollywood, of course) the prosthetic experience of collective desire. A different economy of desire operates for Soviet cinema, one which is productive rather than consuming (for example, the vital energy of Liubov Orlova), coinciding with the particular industrial needs of the Soviet Union in the 1930s.

 

In an especially forceful section entitled “A Cosmopolitan Project,” Buck-Morss brings together Kotkin’s work on Magnitogorsk, Sutton’s on technology transfer, and Williams on Mellon’s millions to discuss the mutual dependence of the Soviet Union and the United States in the 1930s (at a point when the U.S. did not recognize the Soviet state) and the relative value of art and technology. While the Depression gripped the U.S. population, throwing many into unemployment, U.S. firms were doing substantial business in the Soviet Union, which was selling off the plundered treasures of the aristocracy (and masterpieces from the Hermitage) to the West in order to pay for the new technology being imported to build socialism. Buck-Morss powerfully encapsulates the intricacies of these exchanges:

 

Thus the profits of capitalism (surplus value withheld from the wages of American workers) moved (via the Mellon family fortune) to finance (via the capitalist firm of McKee Construction Company) the building of technologically advanced socialist factories, an increase in what Marx called “constant capital” that in turn increased the value of Soviet labor. Meanwhile, in the counter direction, cultural “treasures” that had been owned by the Russian aristocracy and nationalized by the Bolsheviks became (via Mellon’s “philanthropic” cover-up of tax evasion) the property of the United States government–and the American public received socialized culture in the form of a national museum…. What is the proper accounting when the sale of one Raphael (at 1.7 million gold dollars) buys more than half of the design of one Magnitogorsk (at 2.5 million gold rubles), which translates into jobs for thousands of Soviet workers, and the production (by 1938) of millions of tons of finished metal? How does one make political sense out of an economic exchange whereby the U.S. Secretary of the Treasury uses his private millions to “build socialism” in Stalin’s Russia–at the same time as the output of steel mills in the United States is falling precipitously due to a Great Depression that, to Stalin’s delight, affects capitalism alone? (172)

 

In the final chapter Buck-Morss writes an equally dazzling analysis of “shock therapy” economics in the post-Soviet context.

 

Needless to say, dreamworlds, “vacillating between a desire that is expressed and a fear that holds it in check” are followed by awakenings (176). The dream is dismantled, its images parodied (Komar and Melamid: “Thank you Stalin for our happy childhood”). Catastrophe follows.³ Monumentalism is reduced to the horror movie (an image of the Palace of the Soviets is likened to a movie poster advertising King Kong, with the gargantuan statue of Lenin replaced by the gorilla). The ecstasy of the Soviet sublime (“the physical suffering that hollows out the individual for the sake of the collective”) is double-edged: triumphant and destructive of the body at the same moment. Capitalist individualism on the other hand leaves no space for such ecstasy:

 

Capitalism harms human beings through neglect rather than through terror. Compared to the personal will of a dictator, the structural violence of market “forces” appears benign. Those individuals (or groups) excluded from capitalism’s dreamworlds appear themselves to be to blame. (188)

 

As Eastern Europe becomes “subalternized” by IMF policies and pressures on some territories to join NATO or the European Union, all those populations who have been subject to the “ecstasy of the Soviet sublime” will be free to decide the true nature of the difference between subjection to the personal will of a dictator and the structural violence of market forces. It may well be that the de-Stalinization already well established in dissident culture, with its combination of political cynicism, anti-utopianism, and distrust of all totalizing discourse (in a word, “postmodernity” which arrived well in advance of the West’s) will provide some resources for thinking afresh the problems of this New World Order. The Indian critic Geeta Kapur once argued that the use of the word “appropriation” to describe a feature of postmodernism could only be used in a Western context since it properly belongs to the colonizing phase of Western consciousness. Its use as a description of the pastiche of postmodern art has to be seen as arising precisely from a condition of surplus, of saturation: “If there is a surfeit of cultural input and output, you appropriate, jettison and parody, you make blatant pastiche because the options are too many” (Jayamanne 43).

 

If we agree with Kapur’s suggestion for a postmodernism of surplus, perhaps we now need an account of a postmodernism of scarcity–and such an account will not come from the West.

 

The real strength of Buck-Morss’s book comes less from its own appropriation of earlier scholarship on the Soviet Union (for this is a legacy of the Cold War, when the American academy was funded to research and know–in an “expert” sense–Soviet culture better than Soviet citizens were able to do).⁴ The book’s final chapter, entitled “Afterward,” describes the dilemmas of incommensurability, the difficulties of translation, and the privileges and contradictions of global intellectual culture better than almost any other account I’ve read. This is an “eyewitness” account providing a level of depth which transcends the surfaces of the dreamworld to an unusual degree–only possible at the precise moment of passage from dreamworld to catastrophe since it is at this moment and this moment alone that the notion of “the enemy” dissolves sufficiently for a new kind of intellectual exchange to occur.⁵ At the core of this exchange with Western intellectuals is a remarkable group of philosophers, led by Valerii Podoroga and forming the Laboratory of Postclassical Studies, located in Moscow in the Institute of Philosophy at the Russian Academy of Science. Podoroga’s “underground” seminars on Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Freud, Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Benjamin, Adorno, Barthes, and Foucault challenged what many regarded as the bloodlessness of orthodox Marxist-Leninist epistemology. The word “postclassical” alerts us immediately to a different understanding of “postmodernism,” since it is argued by these philosophers that Stalinism was a classical civilization (continued in the high “official” culture of the Brezhnev period) and that the term “postmodern” as it is understood in Western critical theory is an inaccurate concept in describing late/Post-Soviet reality.

 

As Buck-Morss reports, contestation of the term was especially heated at the Dubrovnik conference, which focused the differences between Eastern and Western concepts of power and culture. She cites Jameson’s description of the dynamics of the exchange: “The more their truths are couched in Orwellian language, the more tedious they become for us; the more our truths demand expression in even the weakest forms of Marxian language… the more immediately do the Eastern hearing aids get switched off” (237).

 

Jameson’s own totalizing assumption (“Cold War anticommunism has lavishly supplied all possible and imaginable stereotypes”) would seem to be a particular barrier to conversation, since one might equally suggest that Cold War anti-capitalism at least had the capacity to imagine different worlds not simply reducible to a reversal of anticommunism. If this were not the case, then there ought to have been no difficulties in reaching agreement at Dubrovnik, since everyone would have been talking essentially about the same thing.

 

The final word in this fine account must however go to Buck-Morss, who describes the central moral dilemma for global intellectual culture in these chilling terms:

 

All of us sense (rightly) that our success depends on global name recognition. To achieve the status of a global intellectual, it is not necessary to saturate national markets, not even one’s own. No one speaks of writing for the majority, much less for the masses. It is enough to be known among a tiny but mobile transnational elite, who have inordinate power to replicate locally the hegemony of globally transmitted discourses. If one wanted to be dramatically pessimistic, one might describe this phenomenon of globalization as a membrane that spans the world like an oil slick, thin but tenacious, and capable of suffocating the voices of anyone speaking beneath it. (262)

 

The ecological-catastrophic image in the last sentence deserves to resonate in the way that Benjamin’s most startling quotations continue to have force. The moral challenge is to be able to encourage the suffocated voices to be heard on their own terms–even at the risk of loss of power and position for the global intellectuals who assume the authority that comes from speaking on their behalf.

 

Notes

 

1. On the question of “movement” and “immobility,” see Vladimir Papernyi’s Kul’tura Dva. See also the translated section entitled “Movement–Immobility” in Efimova and Manovich’s Tekstura: Russian Essays on Visual Culture.

 

2. I am using the terms “East” and “West” in the way in which they are used by Buck-Morss, even though it makes no geographic sense to use them in this way in Australia, where “the West” is Africa and “the East” South America (if one is facing north).

 

3. The word “catastrophe” has a broader range of meaning in Russian (where it can encompass the merely accidental as well as the totally disastrous) than it does in English. It is also worth remembering that Kerensky’s first account of the Revolution was entitled The Catastrophe. Not surprisingly, “catastrophe theory” is also a Russian specialization, in the work of renowned mathematician, Vladimir Arnold.

 

4. Important British and European research institutes certainly existed in this period, but almost all of Buck-Morss’s sources are scholars working in the U.S.

 

5. The highly original work of Elena Petrovskaia on “the enemy” lies behind these exchanges and is crucial in enabling them. It deserves to be better known in the West (though it will not be easily appropriated by it.) See in particular Chast’ Sveta.

Works Cited

 

• Arnold, Vladimir I. Catastrophe Theory. New York: Springer-Verlag, 1992.
• Bradbury, Malcolm. Doctor Criminale. London: Secker and Warburg, 1992.
• Efimova, Alla, and Lev Manovich, eds. Tekstura: Russian Essays on Visual Culture. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1993.
• Groys, Boris. The Total Art of Stalinism: Avant-Garde, Aesthetic Dictatorship and Beyond. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1992.
• Jayamanne, Laleen. “Discussing Modernity, ‘Third World’ and ‘The Man Who Envied Women’: Interview with Geeta Kapur and Yvonne Rainer.” Art & Text 23/24 (Mar.-May 1987): 41-52.
• Kagarlitsky, Boris. The Disintegration of the Monolith. London: Verso, 1992.
• Kerensky, Aleksandr Fyodorovich. The Catastrophe: Kerensky’s Own Story of the Russian Revolution. New York: D. Appleton, 1927.
• Kotkin, Stephen. Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization. Berkeley: U of California P, 1995.
• Leyda, Jay, ed. Eisenstein on Disney. Calcutta: Seagull Books, 1986.
• Papernyi, Vladimir. Kul’tura Dva. Moscow: Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie, 1996.
• Petrovskaia, Elena. Chast’ Sveta. Moscow: Ad Marginem, 1995.
• Sutton, Anthony C. Western Technology and Soviet Economic Development. (3 vols.) Stanford: Hoover Institute Press, 1968-1973.
• Williams, Robert C. Russian Art and American Money 1900-1940. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1980.