loveof, socialism. Asacollective fantasy,the proletarian dream promises the vic-
tory of class struggle and revolution and, for that reason, is inseparable from the
work of the imagination and itsrepresentations and mediations. However,asan
integralpart of class-based politics, whether in the name of Social Democracy or
Weimar-era Communism, the proletarian dream also has disciplining functions
and normative effects, most obviouslyinthe genderedhierarchies of labor
and industry and in the communist habitus of discipline and self-control.
Speaking of dreams in combination with the proletariat meanstoapplyaes-
thetic categoriestothe practice of collective dreaming, to highlight the utopian
qualities usually reserved for works of art in the narrowsense, and torethink
working-class culturealong the lines of what Siegfried Kracauer once concluded
about another collective imaginary when he called films the daydreams of soci-
ety.And evoking the proletarian dream resonates withreflections byWalterBen-
jamin on the phantasmagoria of commodity fetishism thatallowed him in the
Arcades Projectto connect the nineteenth-centurydreamworld of capitalism to
alonger messianic history of catastrophe andredemption. Built around the
promise of revolution, the dreamworldofsocialism arises in conscious opposi-
tion to this dreamworld of capitalism. Nonetheless its emotional regimes,both
through the dominantformsthat are emphasized inWilliam Reddy’sdefinition
of the term and the oppositional and alternative functions thatare emphasized
in this book,remain foreverhaunted by what might be called antagonism, con-
tradiction, or Hegelian dialectics.²Todaythese forgotten archivesofproletarian
identifications can be accessed not by treating political emotions asamere ex-
pression of class identityoramere function ofrevolutionary praxis but by using
them asaheuristic device in the reconstruction of socialist and communist imag-
inaries (rather than ideologies) and by readingthemaproductive means in the
making of working-class culture(rather thanofthe workingclass).
The conventional wayofthinking about emotions in social movementshas
involved highlighting their destructive effect in the irrational behaviors of the un-
educatedmasses and blamingthe departure from reason for the massappeal of
nationalist,xenophobic, and populist ideologies. Liberal democracies, within
this logic, are based on therationalpursuit of self-interest and its full articula-
tion within the boundaries of civil society and the nation-state. The ongoing com-
promise between self-interest and the commongood, which confirms the individ-
ual at the center of this elusive process, hinges on the characterization of
Theterm“emotional regimes”is taken fromWilliam M. Reddy,The Navigation ofFeeling:A
Frameworkfor the HistoryofEmotions(Cambridge:Cambridge University Press,2001). Historical-
ly,this argument about dreamworlds has been made bySusan Buck-Morss inDreamworld and
Catastrophe:ThePassing ofMass Utopia in East andWest(Cambridge,MA: MITPress,2002).
Introduction 3