Between Athlos and Arbeit: Myth, Labor, and Cement

Abstract

Against those reveling in the demise of utopian discourse at the end of the Cold War, Andreas Huyssen made the unfashionable claim fifteen years ago that utopia was still with us. Even a cursory glance at developments in the cultural landscape since then—from Fredric Jameson’s massive volume on utopia, Archaeologies of the Future, to the peripatetic art installation project Utopia Station—would seem to confirm the accuracy of Huyssen’s prognostic. At the moment when capitalism had lost its great ideological other, the Soviet Empire, the noplace of utopia assumed the latter’s function as a cache of alternative social designs within the post–Cold War world order. But this transition did not leave the contents of utopia unaffected. As Huyssen explained, this transition reversed the polarity of utopia, as it were, making the past into the site of its investments rather than the future. With the demise of the eastern bloc, utopian thought turned back the clock and began to focus on what Huyssen called “memories of utopia.” This shift from a “futuristic pole toward the pole of remembrance” pursued what is, in effect, a nostalgic variant of utopianism. “In this search for history, the exploration of the noplaces, the exclusions, the blind spots on the maps of the past is often invested with utopian energies very much oriented toward the future.”1