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.”

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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.

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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.'"

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

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I liked the first chapter of this book a lot. It sets up a lot of interesting ideas: that there is an intimate connection between the state and violence (1) (shades of James C. Scott's Seeing Like a State), that state violence against noncitizens is more acceptable than that within the civil state (8, 16), that revolutions are simply wars fought in civil society for the control of time rather than space, i.e., the future rather than territory (22, 29), and that revolutions sacrifice the present to bring about a better future (29). Once Buck-Morss set up these basic principles, however, I found the rest of the book much less compelling; it was one of those critical books where I just kept flipping pages, hoping to find something insightful, but to very little avail. As always, this doesn't necessarily mean it was bad, but it certainly wasn't the book I was looking for.

one of the few really original books i've read in last years ( )