Does this work? What have I just spewed? The mixing of autobiographical trivia and political background noise with criticism? Susan Buck-Morss apparently thinks it does. In Dreamworld and Catastrophe, she combines breathtakingly pretentious gobbledygook—“Constructed at the intersection between lived time and historical time, [part IV of the book] is the author’s version of a feminist strategy” (xvi). But why italicize “intersection”? Why not “version” or “historical” or “time”? How long did it take to decide? What is she talking about?—with memories of time spent in the kitchens and bedsits of Russian intellectuals, described with the humor of Dana Carvey’s Church Lady on Saturday Night Live: “We sat at a ‘round table’ on knowledge and power, and at numerous square ones stocked with cake and tea” (252).

The good thing about this book (oh yes) is that Buck-Morss goes about unfolding her ugly points of view in such a far-fetched and incomprehensible way. The result is a literary construction so dysfunctional, rickety, and weird, that it actually has some intriguing and even hilarious moments. I have rarely, for example, read a book so pompous and self-conscious about its bookness. “Although written in fragments, this book is meant to be read as a whole, as the argument cannot be divorced from the experience of its reading”; and then: “The book can be read on several levels” (xv). Well, here are some things to know about the fragments: the political-philosophical first chapter sits on the longest footnote in the history of scholastic endeavor. Professor Buck-Morss calls it “hypertext,” and she uses it to inject the history of the Bolshevik Party into the reader’s brain. Another fragment is a collection of microhistories of modern art from the 1920s and the 1980s. While most of the book’s “fragments” are intended to provoke some serious chin-stroking in neo-Marxist quarters, one is actually fit to retell to your friends at a party: the comic sequence of the embalming of Vladimir Lenin’s corpse, its reembalming, the fate of the mummy, and the obscure history of the Moscow laboratory that embalmed hundreds of national and international friends of the people—ending with Kim Il Sung in 1995—and that after the collapse of the evil empire began to take private commissions from the Russian Mafia.

Buck-Morss also puts into the mix personal accounts of the momentous political shifts of the late ’80s and early ’90s, the years when she researched this book. “The fall of the Berlin Wall affected the nature of our intellectual relationship,” she writes about her connections with intellectual and political colleagues in Eastern Europe. “Surprisingly, it made collaboration more difficult. Our interest had been in criticizing the past of our respective cultures, using the same theoretical tools to analyze those structures of modern power that had done violence to humanity on both sides of the great divide. Ironically, in ways that gradually became apparent, the commonality of that project seemed to depend on the very divide that it sought to transcend” (227–228).

But of course. Susan Buck-Morss has not given up. In this latest book she projects all her (neo)-Marxist-cultural-criticism theory onto a hybrid but stalely familiar series of images from Constructivist art and architecture, Stalinist propaganda, Hollywood movies, and ’80s and ’90s sarcastic-dissident art. But this ostensible focus on a devalued iconographical currency now mainly used by the international cult of Walter Benjamin exegetes serves a purpose: the hard core of what Buck-Morss is really arguing slips into the background. Maybe it’s a quirk of mine, but I find that I like it when sophisticated and beautiful ideas are clearly, even simply and viscerally, presented. But apparently Susan Buck-Morss prefers a difficult, convoluted, and deeply erudite style, which she employs to present ideas that are one-dimensional, ugly, and bad. The great advantage of this approach is that you can, having resurfaced after slogging through the book, easily summarize what you have read. Lenin and Stalin weren’t all bad. They were better than the capitalists because they were communists and communism is about making life better for the people and capitalism is about making life worse for the people, and these paintings and these designs show it, and the bad things Stalin did were no worse than what the capitalists did. So shut up!

You don’t believe me? You are skeptical that this is the message of the book? Dreamworld is sprinkled with examples of (avant-garde) art and architecture that show realistic or fanciful images of a better life for the people. In these designs, Susan Buck-Morss recognizes the benign and even idealistic soul of communism. Of course, nowadays she must sneak her argument past us—past what we all know now about the reality of Stalinism—and she does this by pretending to focus on Stalinist terror, all the while castigating capitalism for not having any soul. As in this passage:

It is this double-edged imaginary of Stalinist culture, the dreamworld of happiness promised to the masses and the nightmare awaiting those who were banished from it, that became the effective instrument of mass control. And it is here that Western Capitalism and Soviet Socialism need to be thought together as systems of power. Capitalism harms human beings through neglect rather than through terror. Compared to the personal will of a dictator, the structural violence of market “forces” appear [sic] benign. Those individuals (or groups) excluded from capitalism’s dreamworlds appear themselves to blame. The fate of the poor is social ostracism. Their gulag is the ghetto. (188)

Do you see what I mean? Capitalism is worse than communism, to Buck-Morss, because communism actively hunts you down and tortures or kills you, while the sophisticated machine of capitalism makes you believe that it’s all your own fault that you and your family suffer in abject poverty. To Buck-Morss, it was a good thing that under communism you had no chance at all of escaping your fate—there was nothing to regret when it hit you over the head. The author combines this misanthropic attitude toward the fate of human beings with idealism about the value of avant-garde art and architecture. Here, describing various constructivist works, she seems both frumpy and esoteric:

They were dream images, expressing the wish for a transformed relationship between human beings and their environment. Becoming collective property through their multiple reproduction as image, they gave sensual representation to the dialectical convergence between revolutionary imagination and material form. This accounts for what Gassner has called the utopian surplus or supplement of production art. The point of this supplement was that it did not lose sight of why in a socialist society humans were making the machines: not to exploit nature but to enhance human existence within it. This goal remained palpable in the works of the revolutionary avant-garde at precisely the time that it was in danger of being forgotten by the political vanguard. The imagination of such designs interrupted existing time and space as a nonfunctional, utopian presence in the present. By not closing the gap between dream and reality, the artworks of the avant-garde left both dream and reality free to criticize each other. (64–65)

Shit. Do you get anything from that? I’m afraid I do. Buck-Morss makes a moral and even an idealistic argument that is essentially anti-humanist. She dismisses the empirical condition of a population that lives under a dictatorship, arguing that living in a democracy is just as repressive and murderous, except the malevolence is better disguised. She then judges the dictatorship on the basis of the artistic “dreamworlds” it has produced. When the dreamworlds are actually implemented and turn out to be disastrous, she does not blame the dreams themselves but rather the fact that they have been made real. She idealizes and morally elevates the art of the avant-garde by relieving it of every moral burden it ever took on.

But does capitalism have a dreamworld? Oh yes—consumerism, of course! Here Buck-Morss inverts the argument she has made for communist art. She exculpates communism by saying that its essence was not its empirical reality but rather its imaginary dreamworlds. About capitalism in America, however, she argues that the production and distribution of luxury goods and the right to vote are not empirical realities, but rather aspects of a consumerist dreamworld. Your refrigerator is not there to keep your vegetables fresh, but instead to lull you into the delusion that you are happy. According to Buck-Morss, consumer choice is the central myth of capitalism. “The United States government joined the capitalist class in its ideological commitment to the expansion of consumption without limits. Similarities of consumer styles came to be viewed as synonymous with social equality, and not merely as a compensation for its lack. Democracy was freedom of consumer choice” (204). So much for the weedy argument that the Soviet Union was not democratic; democracy is just a consumerist plot.There is a curious contrast between Buck-Morss’s lovingly nuanced descriptions of the regimes of Lenin and Stalin and the hysterical hyperbole of her evocations of the terrors of capitalism. “Industrial modernity in both really existing forms, capitalist and socialist, created a hostile environment for human life, precisely the opposite of the dream of modernity. . . . Its form under capitalism is the consumer illusion of instant gratification, while long-term needs go unattended and social security is so precarious that unemployment strikes with the fate of a natural catastrophe” (205). Is she really saying that losing your job is just as bad as being killed by an earthquake because neither can be predicted? The problem here, I think, is one of respect. Buck-Morss has so little respect for her fellow human beings—for their intelligence, depth, ability to discriminate and resist, etc.—that she assumes that they are enslaved by their gadgets, houses, books, and television programs—that we in the West have deluded ourselves into believing we are free when actually we are worse off than our Eastern counterparts. In the East people are enslaved in the real world, but according to Buck-Morss, “free” in their imaginary worlds; while in the West people may be free in an empirical sense, but they are enslaved on an imaginary level by their refrigerators. The imaginary universe of the avant-garde is the most desirable place to inhabit. But then, just when Buck-Morss hoped she might actually gain access herself, and reach Marxist Nirvana, the whole thing came crashing down around her. This part of “her story” is described in the riveting “Afterward.”

Sometimes vanity and egotism move people to inform us of their every move, thought, bowel movement, or telephone call, and in so doing they accidentally reveal everything and are left standing before us naked, in a concrete room, in the basement of a huge government building, lit by a single bulb. “Afterward” is the day-to-day account of her contacts with a small group of Russian intellectuals from the late ’70s. This group had been writing and teaching in the somewhat isolated Institute of Philosophy in Moscow. Their increasingly idiosyncratic writings were to Susan Buck-Morss nothing less than the contemporary version of the avant-garde art of the ’20s and ’30s. Buck-Morss believed she had found an unspoiled Eden, removed from the real world by the blind formations of Soviet repression. She outlines the stories of the noble dissidents in an adolescent diary style, gradually tracing the disaffection between the American Marxists—who insisted that the repression in the “sowjet union” was just another version of the same repression in capitalist America (where people openly preferred to watch TV rather than listen to lectures about Walter Benjamin)—and the Russians, who in the ’90s didn’t want to talk about Marx anymore.

Not only Buck-Morss but also Fredric Jameson has tried to salvage Marxist thought as a theoretical new world order that could span the globe; in the meantime Russian philosophers like Valerii Podoroga have insisted that certain works and experiences cannot be understood outside of their contexts, their time and place—for instance, the experience of Stalinist terror. As good neo-Marxists, Buck-Morss and Jameson find the Russians’ insistence on the unity of region, political context, and language to be “exclusionary hermeneutics.” It might sound kind of hazy and academic, but believe me, the trajectory that Susan Buck-Morss describes is heartbreaking. Just imagine, from the late ’70s on, she had experienced something of the coziness and camaraderie of hard-drinking, emotive Russian underground intellectuals. She had projected their sense of urgency and closeness onto her own relatively privileged existence as an American Marxist academic. She had watched with horror how from the Cold War had come a triumphant capitalist culture, and she had expected her Russian friends to join with her and Jameson to form a global Marxist underground, drinking hard, eating cake, being paranoid about the system, and writing barely comprehensible texts that they could explain to each other as critical of the repressive system. And then what happens? At a meeting in ubrovnik, the Russians point out that they have experienced a specific political and cultural reality that the American Marxists have not experienced; and they refuse the offer to join any international critical theory movement. Does Buck-Morss feel like an old-time missionary who sees “her” natives smash up the school they have constructed in a clearing in the jungle? To read the account of her disappointment, and to note how swiftly and harshly she judges her former friends, is at once touching and scary.

Now I know why I usually refuse to review books or things that I dislike. I had assumed it was because “negativity” is uninteresting. In fact, it’s because the effort to make sense of works like this can draw you into a world, a brain, a life that you do not want to be part of—like a police officer who has to take longer showers and more drinks each day that he is exposed to crime. Yes, I know that this might sound self-serving, pathetic, slanderous, and unfair. I am truly sorry for having written this review; I should never have been permitted to go anywhere near this book. Blame the editors.