You say you want a revolution

Joseph Skvorecky, a survivor of both Nazi and Communist regimes, is quoted:

In 1981, long before the Iron Curtain fell, Mr. Skvorecky shared a stage in Toronto with Margaret Atwood, Allen Ginsberg and others who were discussing “The Writer and Human Rights.” He said that an artist must be a reactionary, to stand out from his culture by offering “some little opposition.”

“Frankly, I feel frustrated whenever I have to talk about revolution for the benefit of people who have never been through one,” he said. “They are — if you’ll excuse the platitude — like a child who doesn’t believe that fire hurts, until he burns himself. I, my generation, my nation, have been involuntarily through two revolutions, both of them socialist: one of the right variety, one of the left. Together they destroyed my peripheral vision.”

National Post, Jan 3/12

Compare, oh, say Ursula LeGuin, in "The Day Before the Revolution" (1974):

Amai had grown up in Odonion Houses, born to the Revolution, a true daughter of anarchy.  And so quiet and free and beautiful a child, enough to make you cry when you thought: this is what we worked for , this is what we meant, this is it, here she is, alive, the kindly, lovely future.

reprinted in Claeys and Sargent, The Utopia Reader, p. 413

She does try to evade the peripheries via "anarchy", but, as I think we've seen (Spanish Civil War, etc.), this simply makes her revolutionaries  inept, not less burning. And LeGuin is certainly an example of someone who's been chastened to some degree at least by the 20th century:

There would not be slums like this, if the revolution prevailed. But there would be misery. There would always be misery, waste, cruelty. She had never pretended to be changing the human condition,... So long as people were free to choose [!], if they chose to drink flybane and live in sewers, it was their business. Just so long as it wasn't the business of Business, the source of profit and the means of power for other people. 

pp. 417-8

But note the old, almost medieval scarecrows of "Business" and "profit". 

History vs. Utopia

Once upon a time, as I've said elsewhere, I was a socialist, and a "Marxian" if not a Marxist (the former indicating, not  a being from the planet Marx, but simply strong but not uncritical influence). In those days, this position was strongly associated with the idea of History (the upper case indicating that this was a special sort of abstraction). Indeed, in those days it was clear to we socialists that History was on our side, and this was a conviction built right in to the intellectual structure of the system. You can get a taste of this conviction from a passage like this, in Darko Suvin's overview of Science fiction:

When the industrial revolution becomes divorced from the democratic one [a way of putting the fact that capitalism has not given way to socialism] -- a divorce which is the fundamental political event of the bourgeois epoch -- activism becomes exasperated and leads to the demand for another epistemological and practical break, signalled by Blake's Jerusalem in England's green and pleasant land and the cosmic "passionate attraction" of Fourier's phalansteries. Such imaginative energies converge in Marx, the great prefigurator of the imaginative shift still being consummated in our times.

Metamorphoses of Science Fiction, pp. 73-4 (emphasis added) 

It would never have done, of course, to admit that there might be elements of faith in such a conviction -- rather, it was always insisted that this historical bias or tendency was a matter of science, the science of history, aka dialectical materialism. But this was hardly the sort of politically disinterested science that is content to follow wherever research and observation points -- nor was it even politicized science. It was, from the beginning, a wholly political project that simply assumed or appropriated the mantle of science. And its notion of History, therefore, as a kind of force that constructs and controls the future was always merely the expression of a political desire or wish or dream.

Not unlike, ironically, the notion of Utopia. Except, of course, that Utopia is the wish or dream stripped bare, its cloak of "science" and inevitability torn away. Now, Suvin's remarks above were published sometime in 1979, before Thatcher and Reagan, and before the collapse of the Soviet Union and the global disintegration of communism or "actually existing socialism". Since all that, the confident faith that we see in Suvin has certainly been tried, and in many cases has crumbled. And with that, it's not surprising, however pathetic, to see the former believers return to musing about Utopia again, sometimes, as we see in Jameson in 2005, with a kind frustrated defiance. Contrast the tone of the passage below with the blithe confidence of the Suvin passage above:

The relationship between Utopia and the political, as well as questions about the practical-political value of Utopian thinking and the identification between socialism and Utopia [!?], very much continue to be unresolved topics today, when Utopia seems to have recovered its vitality as a political slogan and a politically energizing perspective.

... What is crippling is not the presence of an enemy but rather the universal belief, not only that this tendency is irreversible, but that the historic alternatives to capitalism have been proven unviable and impossible, and that no other socio-economic system is conceivable, let alone practically available. The Utopians not only offer to conceive of such alternate systems; Utopian form is itself a representational mediation on radical difference, radical otherness, and on the systemic nature of the social totality,...

Archaeologies of the Future, pp. xi-xii

Anti-anti-utopianism

On the analogy to "anti-anti-communism" (Sartre):

... even if we can no longer adhere with an unmixed conscience [!] to this unreliable form [of Utopia], we can now have recourse to that ingenious [!] political slogan Sartre invented to find his way between a flawed communism and an even more unaccaeptable anti-communism. ... for those only too wary of the motives of its critics [!?], yet no less conscious of Utopia's structural ambiguities, those mindful of the very real political function of the idea and the program of Utopia in our time, the slogan of anti-anti-Utopianism might well offer the best working strategy.

Jameson,  Archaeologies of the Future, p. xvi

 Noteworthy for its moral, political, and cultural defensiveness -- the siege mentality of the contemporary Left. Akin, in this, to the replacement of "socialism" with "anti-capitalism" among the lumpen "masses".

Underlying it is also a rather bizarre notion of a separation between "art and culture" and "the social" -- "a separation that inaugurates culture as a realm in its own right and defines it as such". But then 

... that very distance of culture from its social context which allows it to function as a critique and indictment of the latter also dooms its interventions to ineffectuality and relegates art and culture to a frivolous, trivialized space in which such intersections are neutralized in advance.

p. xv

But, amid the confusions, bad faith, and special pleading involved in such contortions, you can feel a real pathos in such passages. And perhaps a certain courage, in facing the loss of belief, unaccompanied by any foundational alternative.

Were it not that I have bad dreams

Would be interesting to know how much this is representative, albeit in a more intense way, of its intellectual/academic, ideological milieu -- from the Crooked Timber blog:

Ever since I was very young I have been able to recognize that I was dreaming (not always). The first time was awful and thus memorable: I dreamed that robbers had driven down our driveway and shot my mother and father and brother and me with shotguns. And our dog. I was in terrible pain, full of buckshot and slick with blood, but I realized that I couldn’t die, in my own dream. So I thought I would go scare the robbers, that they would think I was a ghost and maybe I could call 911, maybe my family hadn’t bled out in the yard under the big oak tree. But when I came in they laughed and said some of the worst words I have ever heard, then or since: “this is your dream. We can kill you as many times as we like.”

Since then I have developed the ability to wake myself up if the dream is so awful that I can’t bear it. But since I never had anything but nightmares for years and years, with the odd exception, shit has to get pretty rough before I can pull the ripcord and sit up in bed, panting. Oddly for a person my age, I have done Freudian analysis, 3x a week on the couch just like a New Yorker cartoon, for a whole year. The goal was that I stop having nightmares. The therapy was very successful. For a time I had no nightmares at all. Even now they are scattered and few compared to my earlier life. My sister’s experience is the same, and our evening kiss good-night was always followed my the ultimate benediction: “don’t dream!”

This is representative of early childhood, I think, but the idea of "Freudian analysis, 3x a week on the couch just like a New Yorker cartoon, for a whole year" as necessary to rid an adult of bad dreams does point to other and deeper anxieties than the fears of a young child. And there's at least an irony in the notion of a person ideologically predisposed toward the idea of social control being terrified by the horrific and out-of-control creations of their own sleeping imagination. 


P.S.: Might "lucid dreaming" be a short description of socialism?

Artistic politics/Political art

"Decolonizing architecture" -- description of a talk:

Decolonizing Architecture seeks to use spatial practice as a form of political intervention and narration. Their practice continuously engages a complex set of architectural problems centered around one of the most difficult dilemmas of political practice: how to act both propositionally and critically within an environment in which the political force field, as complex as it may be, is so dramatically skewed.

The people involved (see the "imaginary denizens", overlaid on real people) :

Organized in conjunction with exhibition, a panel discussion co-presented by REDCAT and MAK Center for Art and Architecture will bring together Alessandro Petti, founding member and director of Decolonizing Architecture/Art Residency; Iain Boal of RETORT, the Bay Area collective of writers, activists and scholars, and co-author of Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War;architect and UCSD professor Teddy Cruz whose work centers around urban research/design within context of the U.S.-Mexico border; and Geoff Manaugh of BLDGBLOG. Moderated by director of MAK Center Kimberli Meyer on Wednesday January 26 at 7:30pm at REDCAT.

Caption: "How to re-inhabit your enemy's house" (2009)

Thanks to BLDGBLOG

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