Association for Political and Legal Anthropology

Oral Presentation Session

Feeling Falling the Dream of Mass Utopia

Presenter(s)

• LM

  Lisa Min

  University of California, Berkeley, Department of Anthropology

Co-Author(s)

Annie Malcolm (UC Berkeley)

In the opening lines of Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West (2002), Susan Buck-Morss writes of a moment of falling: “The construction of mass utopia was the dream of the twentieth century. It was the driving ideological force of industrial modernization in both its capitalist and socialist forms. The dream was itself an immense material power that transformed the natural world, investing industrially produced objects and built environments with collective, political desire…As the century closes, the dream is being left behind.” Now, nearly twenty years later, we are still falling. In the dreamworld of broken bridges, ice-cream selfies, and other crumbling paths to socialist utopia, this paper searches for the embers of collective imagining to help us understand what this falling feels like. Drawing inspiration from the intimate and affective resonances of the “new ordinary” of late capitalism that Lauren Berlant and Kathleen Stewart (2019) try to get at, this paper follows the sultry resin of socialism’s demise, asking where it accumulates, how it persists, looking to colors, scenes, and scents to feel out the worlds composed by the distributed sensible of the “fall.”