take seriously its historical and theoretical challenges to dominant cultureand
hegemonicpractices.
To return to the epigraph, in defining the proletarian public sphere as a
counterpublic sphere, Negt and Kluge in 1972respondedtoaprofound legitima-
tion crisiscausedbythe disappearance of traditional classsociety,the crisisof
liberal democracy,the weakening of the nation-state, and the rise of modern
mass media.³⁶Kluge would laterexpand on their critical intervention by high-
lightingthe power of emotionsasaproductive force, beginning with his charac-
terization of politics as an intensification of everydayfeelingsand, moregener-
ally, as part ofamaterialist theory of experience.With special relevance forThe
Proletarian Dream,Negt and Kluge’sargument for the importance of counterpub-
lic spheres,proletarian or otherwise, findspowerful expression in their insist-
ence not to“allow wordsto become obsolete before thereisachangeinthe ob-
jects they denote.”It is in the same spirit thatthis book has reconstructed the
proletarian dream across late-nineteenthand early-twentieth centuryGerman
history and through the cultural practices that imagined the revolutionary work-
ing classasanemotional community.
Foranearlyreflection on these connections,see Alexander Kluge,“The Political as Intensity
of EverydayFeelings,”trans.Andrew Bowie,Cultural Critique4(1986): 119–128.
356 Afterword