Radical Dreaming

Dreamers have a poor reputation. They are not especially respected within academia, or even in the arts. But perhaps radical dreamers are, in fact, the new realists. At least this is the thesis of philosopher Slavoj Žižek in his book Pandemic! He argues that dreaming - and here especially the nightmare - confronts us with a deeper truth about the nature of the world. Dreams allow us to peer into a collective unconscious that remains closed. They have a revelatory character. In his writings, Žižek repeatedly reminds us that otherwise philosophy and thinking, in their approach to the world, are reliant on dreams, the fictive and the imaginary as instruments of knowledge.

But have we perhaps forgotten how to dream in this sense? Has the function of dreams changed? Does dreaming gain a new function in the face of increasingly dominant digital simulations and virtual worlds? What is the epistemological role of dreams in a world in which ideas of the future are based primarily on the algorithmisation of the past?

The arts play a specific role in the creation of imaginative, dreamlike spaces of possibility. Without imagination, as the French philosopher Jacques Rancière argues, we move in a reality that is “incessantly representing itself to itself “. Epistemically, he writes, following Freud, art settles in an in-between space between the real and the fantastic, shaping its very own relations “between knowing and not-knowing, sense and non-sense, logos and pathos, the real

and the fantastic”. Because art is such a distinct instrument for opening up the future, it is important to take a closer look at this epistemic technique and how artistic projects expand this in-between space precisely where a transformation of social relations is at stake.

In his book “The New Dark Age. Technology and the End of the Future”, the British computer scientist and cognitive scientist James Bridle describes a digital-technological future that ultimately dispenses with an emphatic concept of the future through the computerisation of thinking, because thinking means calculating and computers begin to make decisions that are no longer comprehensible to humans. In our age of the “digitisation of everything” (Shoshanna Zuboff), have virtual worlds possibly long since replaced dreaming? What is the significance of dreaming and the unconscious in such a world? Does it no longer play a role in generating utopian energies? Are we dream-forgetful? Or does the new wave of utopias and dystopias we are currently experiencing testify precisely to a new, different function of radical dreaming? How can dreams of a different society, as Robin D.G. Kelley describes them in his book Freedom Dreams, become catalysts for political engagement?

These questions open up a horizon of historical theory because they concern the condition of the possibility of producing the future. But they also touch upon contemporary epistemology and the relationship between the virtual, the fictional, the fantastic and the real.