"In the last days of the Soviet regime, dissident artists within the Soviet Union represented its past history as a dreamworld, depicting the crumbling of the Soviet era before it occurred in fact. For this generation, the moment of awakening replaced that of revolutionary rupture as the defining phenomenological experience. Exemplary is a 1983 painting of Aleksandr Kosolapov, The Manifesto, in which, against a martial, red sky and amidst ruins that include a bust of Lenin, three putti try to decipher a surviving copy of Marx’s Communist Manifesto. The dreamer who is still inside the dream of history accepts its logic as inexorable. But at the moment of awakening, when the dream’s coherence dissipates, all that is left are scattered images. The compelling nature of their connection has been shattered.
It is crucial to recognize that the end of the Soviet era was not limited spatially to the territory of the Soviet Union. The Bolshevik experiment, no matter how many specifically Russian cultural traits it developed, was vitally attached to the Western, modernizing project, from which it cannot be extricated without causing the project itself to fall to pieces—including its cult of historical progress. Those who at this stage of awakening attempt the task of political interpretation are not to compare themselves with revolutionary prophets. They do better to approach the dream fragments like soothsayers who read the entrails of animals before a battle, not to predict which army will win, but to decipher what forces of collective fantasy exist to withstand the violence of any army, aiding those forces by exposing the deceptive representations on which every army depends.
“History” has failed us. No new chronology will erase that fact. History’s betrayal is so profound that it cannot be forgiven simply by tacking on a “post-” era to it (postmodernism, post-Marxism). There is real tragedy in the shattering of the dreams of modernity—of social utopia, historical progress, and material plenty for all. But to submit to melancholy at this point would be to confer on the past a wholeness that never did exist, confusing the loss of the dream with the loss of the dream’s realization. The alternative of political cynicism is equally problematic, however, because in denying possibilities for change it prevents them; anticipating defeat, it brings defeat into being. Rather than taking a self-ironizing distance from history’s failure, we—the “we” who may have nothing more nor less in common than sharing this time—would do well to bring the ruins up close and work our way through the rubble in order to rescue the utopian hopes that modernity engendered, because we cannot afford to let them disappear. There is no reason to believe that those utopian hopes caused history to go wrong, and every reason, based on evidence of the abuses of power that propelled history forward, to believe the opposite.
When an era crumbles, “History breaks down into images, not into stories.” Without the narration of continuous progress, the images of the past resemble night dreams, 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. The juxtaposition of these past fragments with our present concerns might have the power to challenge the complacency of our times, when “history” is said by its victors to have successfully completed its course, and the new global capitalist hegemony claims to have run the competition off the field.
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."
- Susan Buck-Morss, Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2000. p. 67-69.