ConfRpt: Alternative Realities. Utopian Thought in Times of Political Rupture (April 2018)

Paul Lerner Discussion

Conference Report

 

Alternative Realities: Utopian Thought in Times of Political Rupture (April 16-17, 2018)

 

Alternative Realities, an international and interdisciplinary conference, was hosted by the Wende Museum and USC’s Max Kade Institute for Austrian-German-Swiss Studies. The conference was co-sponsored by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), the German Historical Institute-West (Berkeley) and the Centre for Contemporary History/ZZF (Potsdam). Additional support was provided by the USC Libraries, the USC Dornsife Dean’s Office, and USC Dornsife Departments of Art History, History, and Slavic Languages and Literature.  The first conference day, April 16, was held at the Wende Museum, and on April 17, participants met at USC’s Doheny Library.

 

Alternative Realities took as its central subject the emergence and persistence of utopian thought and experimentation in the twentieth century. It foregrounded German experiences of twentieth-century political, cultural and social upheaval but framed these experiences in terms of transnational and global currents and connections. The conference was inspired by the observation that times of crisis and rupture have often paved the way for the imagination of a new order. Indeed, papers focused on the key role of utopian visions, both artistic and intellectual, that changed the world from the twentieth century to the present day. With the German experience of twentieth-century upheavals at the center, the papers explored moments of profound social and cultural self-examination and experimentation in a variety of geographical and political contexts.

 

In his introductory remarks, conference co-organizer Joes Segal (Wende Museum) traced a historical lineage of thinking about utopia from Thomas Moore through recent times when post-cold war commentators asserted that history was over. He argued that utopias are not necessarily totalitarian and upheld the crucial distinction between alternative realities and “alternative facts,” especially in times of dangerous political constellations. Co-organizer Paul Lerner (USC) then emphasized the dynamic of catastrophe and utopia that has marked the last century of European history, briefly noting other strains of utopian thought like psychoanalysis and consumerism whose utopian energies have over time faded into complacency and conformity.

 

The conference’s first panel, on “utopian thinkers,” was chaired by Ellen Dubois (UCLA) and featured papers on key thinkers, institutions and moments in the first half of the twentieth century. Choi Chatterjee (Cal State, LA) focused on two twentieth-century radicals, Emma Goldman and M. N. Roy, and recreated a global network of leftists who rejected both capitalism and Soviet-style state socialism, reclaiming the legacy of utopianism from its totalitarian taint and asserting a lineage between these theorists and activists and the New Left of the 1960s and beyond. Beáta Hock (Leibniz Institute, Leipzig) offered a gendered perspective on the history of the Bauhaus and revealed a cohort of Eastern European women who trained at the academy but whose lives and careers have not featured prominently in historical accounts. Hock pointed to the tensions between the Bauhaus’ emancipatory program and the reality of the limits to women’s advancement. Robert-Jan Adriaansen (Erasmus University, Rotterdam) then recast the so-called conservative revolution of Weimar Germany as a utopian movement. Conceiving of utopia temporally rather than spatially, Adriaansen addressed thinkers such as Arthur Moller van den Bruck and Paul Ludwig who broke with nineteenth-century notions of history and sought to overcome disruptions in the relationship between humanity and nature and the individual and the collective.

 

The second panel, on “state-sponsored utopias” was chaired by Andrea Westermann (GHI-Berkeley). Sarah Panzer (Missouri State) analyzed the German-Japanese relationship in the early-twentieth century as a site of utopianism, seeing German projections of Japan in terms of wider discourses about “the East” and the limits of Western modernity. Sara Pugach (Cal State, LA) spoke about African students in the GDR both in terms of East German social tensions – e.g. its anti-imperialist stance, yet persistent racism -- and with reference to international relations, reframing the Cold War as a multipolar conflict which triggered a multiplicity of political visions. Oliver Sukrow (TU Vienna) continued the discussion of East Germany, focusing on two phenomena from the year 1969, the film Network [Netzwerk, dir. Ralf Kirsten] and the opening of the Academy of Marxist-Leninist Organizational Theory (cybernetics), both of which, he showed, represented awareness of the challenges of an increasingly mechanized world and East German notions of the future as a solvable problem.

 

In the third panel on “landed utopias,” chaired by Paul Lerner, the speakers moved to local and rural settings for utopian thought and movements in Germany, Poland, the Soviet Union and Palestine/Israel. Katherine Lebow (Oxford University) discussed radical pedagogy in interwar Poland, especially through the new peasant universities which grew out of the condition of Polish statelessness and notions of self-reliance and agricultural utopianism in the interwar years. Vitali Taichrib (Free University Berlin) framed utopian thinking in the Soviet 1920s in terms of the altered sensorium which he explored through a close reading of Platonov, through whose texts he traced the effects of the revolution on the soundscapes, smells and sensations of Soviet life.  Erin Sullivan Maynes (Los Angeles County Museum of Art) brought to light emergency currencies (Notgeld) issued during Germany’s inflationary crisis after World War I, which reasserted the local landscape and notions of craft and tradition at a time of dizzying transformation and uncertainty. Aviva Halamisch (Open University, Israel) then presented Israeli kibbutzim as micro utopias, indeed small socialist islands in a capitalistic society, which ultimately failed to spread utopian values into the broader society and whose socialism proved less enduring than their nationalism and Zionism.

 

The conference’s second day began with a panel on “art and politics” chaired by Joes Segal. Mary-Ann Middelkoop (Cambridge University) focused on the Weimar Republic’s cultural policy, showing the pronounced role of Kultur [notions of German culture] in international relations and the continued belief that aesthetics could secure Germany’s place in the post-World War I world. Hunter Bivens (UC Santa Cruz) turned to Werner Bräunig’s novel Rummelplatz, about the construction of the GDR in the late 1940s and early 50s. Bivens connected the novel to notions of the laboring body as the foundation of a socialist biopolitics between the regime’s efforts to cultivate a working-class literary movement (Bitterfelder Weg) and its clampdown on writers and filmmakers in the 1960s. Sofia Kalo (U Mass Amherst) then spoke about visual art in communist Albania, reading various representations of the body in political, cultural and gender historical contexts.

 

The fifth panel, on “utopian continuities and discontinuities” was chaired by Amy Ogata (USC) and began with a paper by Anna Krylova (Duke University), which disentangled the political discursive history of the Soviet Union, drawing a contrast between the early post-revolution Bolshevik utopian vision and the later Soviet reconfiguration of Marxist class categories. Farrah Karapetian (visual artist, Los Angeles) focused on the body and movement in the work of Russian theater director Vsevolod Meyerhold, tracing the resonance of his utopian biomechanics through key moments in twentieth-century theater. The panel’s final paper, by Maarten Doorman (Maastricht University) framed Woodstock and its utopian visions as a kind of latter-day romanticism, finding the roots of its celebration of free love, nature, spirituality, and drugs in eighteenth-century Romanticism.

 

The sixth panel was concerned with “the end of utopia.” Chaired by Annette Vowinckel (ZZF, Potsdam), it began with Jennifer Allen’s (Yale University) attempt to capture the utopian strains in the post-1989 period, a moment often associated with the end of utopia. Allen demonstrates through memorialization practices in recent and contemporary Germany, the reemergence of utopian modes of representing the past and imagining the future. Anikó Imre (USC) then analyzed television programming in the Eastern bloc, above all in Hungary, to trace the emergence of a socialist spectatorship in the 1970s and the alternative reality of everyday political speech. Finally, Witte Hoogendijk (Erasmus University, Rotterdam) offered a kind of human biological perspective on utopia and the stresses that modernity causes on the human organism.

 

In a closing session, the sibling artists Katya and Alexei Tylevich presented a short film, parts of which had been running silently throughout all conference intermissions, which explored several of the themes that were discussed throughout the conference, presenting a humorous yet thoughtful glimpse of contemporary utopian thinking.

 

During the question-and-answer sessions and throughout the conference’s vigorous discussions, the participants agreed that whereas all-encompassing utopian projects tend to result in dystopian realities, the utopian impulse itself provides a helpful -- indeed necessary --way of critically distancing ourselves from the world in which we live and coming up with creative and imaginative alternatives.

 

Submitted by Paul Lerner, Amanda Roth and Joes Segal, conference organizers