The City as Dreamworld and Catastrophe

Article published in «October» — 1995. — Vol. 73 (Summer) — pp. 3-26The end of the Cold War is the determining moment of this presentation. A certain kind of industrial dreamworld has dissipated, one that dominated the political imagination in both East and West for most of the century. To be sure, in the East the dream-form was a utopia of production, whereas in the West it was a utopia of consumption. But both shared intimately the optimistic vision of a mass society beyond material scarcity, and the collective, social goal, through massive industrial construction, of transforming the natural world. Despite open hostility to many aspects of modernity, fascism, too, shared in this mass utopian dream.Industrial contamination of water and air has the same chemical composition whether it has been produced under socialism or capitalism. Despite all the political rhetoric that has been invested in arguing that one can differentiate decisively between variants of modern culture—that certain architectural styles are inherently “fascist,” that constructivist principles are intrinsically “progressive,” or that heroic iconography is uniquely “socialist”—these cultural forms have shown themselves remarkably resilient, adaptable to the most diverse social and political purposes. The fact that these forms are used interchangeably by contemporary artists and image-makers implies that one of the casualties of the end of the Cold War is the structure of cultural discourse itself.