boredom is always counter-revolutionary

‘It will… become evident that the world has long dreamed of possessing something of which it has only to be conscious in order to possess it in reality.’ Karl Marx, 1843

The project of their new journal, Marx wrote to his friend Arnold Ruge in 1843, should be to rediscover the unrealised ambitions of the past: to reveal to the world its own dreams about itself, in order to precipitate the actualisation of those dreams. Marx’s assertion that to move forwards we must first look backwards is a sentiment that is (or at least has become) something of a cliché. It is important, however, to factor in Marx’s emphasis on the dream-image in order to distinguish his gesture from, say, George Orwell’s over-quoted statement from 1984:

‘Who controls the past, controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.’ George Orwell, 1949

The difference, I think, between Marx’s and Orwell’s hypotheses, is in the seeming irrationality of the dream-image as deciding factor. Orwell’s quote relates to hegemony, ideology, media, society’s self-image: sensible, understandable, logical things. Marx’s quote relates to a utopian impulse, and also to a curious form of historical determinism: the future is contained within the dreams of the past, and it is our task to unleash those dream-images. Marx’s utopianism is not one that advocates throwing ourselves into an unknown future, but one that bases our future-ima(gin)ings in already-existent impulses. ‘…it will become evident that mankind is not beginning a new work, but is consciously carrying into effect its old work’. In the letter to Ruge, Marx doesn’t envision the problematics of this free movement between dream-image and real future; the notion of the dream remains more of a motivating principle than anything more substantial.

‘Every epoch dreams the one to follow.’ Jules Michelet, 1925

Michelet’s rather more succinct statement of the dream-image’s relationship to the future was itself quoted by Walter Benjamin in his Exposé of 1935. Benjamin took this notion as his starting point in his expansive project of a cultural-historical mapping of the Nineteenth-Century Parisian arcades, whereby the dream-image becomes coterminous with Benjamin’s own conception of the dialectical image. Benjamin attempted to discover precisely how the historical materialist could reveal and realise the dreams of the past. In his, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, Benjamin recognised that the past is not simply free to be mined for such dream-images. The past is conquered territory; history is written by the victors. As such, ‘every image of the past that is not recognised by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably.’

‘The realization of dream elements, in the course of waking up, is the paradigm of dialectical thinking… Every epoch, in fact, not only dreams the one to follow, but, in dreaming, precipitates its awakening. With the destabilisation of the market economy, we begin to recognise the monuments of the bourgeoisie as ruins even before they have crumbled.’ Walter Benjamin, 1935

The task of the historical materialist is thus to reclaim a history from the dominant order, ‘to wrest tradition away from a conformism that is about to overpower it’. Then the historical materialist must constellate these dream-images into a dialectical-image, which we recognise in a flash of illumination and which blasts open the continuum of a history written by those who have suppressed and flattened historical time. The historical materialist is here endowed with a ‘weak Messianic power’, a sensitivity to the monadological nature of the historical dream-image, and a connection with what has otherwise been suppressed by the myths of capitalism.

‘I believe in the future realisation of these two states, dream and reality, which are seemingly so contradictory, into a kind of absolute reality, a surreality, if one may so speak.’ André Breton, 1924

The realisation of the dream-image, of course, was also central to the Surrealist project. Benjamin distinguished his own project from the Surrealist one by affirming that he is working towards an actualisation into reality, ‘whereas Aragon persistently remains in the realm of dreams, here it is a question of finding the constellation of awakening’. Whilst Aragon eventually renounced Surrealism to facilitate his acceptance by the Third International – who from the beginning regarded Surrealism as too unserious and trifling, too concerned with dreams rather than their prescribed conception of historical materialism – Breton fought for Surrealism’s acceptance as a serious and weighty proposition to the political order. In doing so, despite his own warning that, ‘When it comes to revolt, none of us have any need of ancestors’, Breton situated his movement into various lineages. When addressing the Third International directly, Breton emphasised the Marxist origins of Surrealism (‘“Transform the world,” Marx said’), which were combined with a more poetic element drawn from Rimbaud (‘“Change life,” Rimbaud said’) in a dialectical relationship (‘These two watchwords are one for us’). Elsewhere, he looked to the dream images produced by the Marquis de Sade, Lautréamont, Edgar Allan Poe, Jonathan Swift and more. Indeed, the ‘Swift is Surrealist in Malice…’ list-section of the first Surrealist manifesto is itself something of a Benjaminian constellation, as an arrangement of historical objects placed together so as to reveal the dream-image that they harbour.

‘Anyone who combines consciousness of past renunciations with a historical consciousness of decomposition is ready to take up arms in the cause of the transformation of daily life and of the world. Nihilists, as de Sade would have said, one more effort if you want to be revolutionaries!’ Raoul Vaneigem, 1967

Now, we are told at every juncture that Utopianism is either exhausted or irresponsible, and that there is no alternative course of development than the one which currently propels us towards ecological disaster whilst reinforcing the power of the wealthy over the poor. So when these ideas have been revisited more recently, the focus has been slightly shifted, from the dream-images themselves to the moments of their having been dreamt. In other words, not looking so much for the dream-images themselves, as for the historical junctures and consciousness that have facilitated their articulation. The Situationist International spoke of its own conflicted relationship with the early Surrealist movement, whereby the latter had for a moment moved in the right direction but had too easily allowed their own recuperation. Dada, according at least to Vaneigem in his Revolution of Everyday Life, had come closer to realising its own revolutionary potential, but had descended into a state of ‘passive nihilism’, due to largely to its own unawareness of its revolutionary predecessors. To move from nihilism to revolution, Vaneigem argued, was a case of producing an active nihilism, which could harness the force of its own historical tradition.

To linger on these seemingly frivolous or fanciful ideas about dream-images and suppressed radical traditions may seem somewhat perverse when simultaneously asserting how staggeringly real are the threats that society now faces. Yet we are in a position whereby we must discover the histories and dreams which have been concealed by the capitalist present in order to contest its version of events and its own projections of the future. To choose our past is to choose our future; but when the past is not ours, we must find the dream-images which shame and contest the nightmare of the capitalist present. This is not to dwell on the past, or to advocate nostalgia, but to find a historical current that generates a productive friction against the stasis of the capitalist present. We can recognise that Fukuyama’s claims for the end of history were premature, but we cannot yet identify the emancipatory dynamics of the era we inhabit. If the end of history hypothesis was incorrect, so may have been the claim that Utopianism is exhausted and irrelevant. So, by choosing our own histories as, say, the radical refusals and dream-lives of the political avant-gardes, over the hegemonic accounts of the Twentieth Century, we can prophesy an alternative image of the future.