Marc Ries

A date: 1789, the Storming of the Bastille, the Declaration of Human Rights. A revolution is a time-based operation, a precise cut in the historical timeline, it can be dated, it marks the interruption of continuity, it changes the existing conditions by an act of destruction and postulates a new beginning. Revolution is the evocation of a different, a new time, a new relationship amongst people and with the world. All revolutionary movements can be defined along this temporal structure of before and after, be it the Bourgeois revolution, the Marxist communist revolution, or even the “peaceful” Fall of the Wall. Revolutions thrive on the hope and drive for radical change, for a new quality after the storm, after upheaval and destruction. Yet this drive is simultaneously its beacon. For it is precisely because it defines itself as a political caesura in time and concentrates on overturning the existing situation that it often lacks time to make plans with circumspection and implement them in the new situation. The new revolutionary forces had prepared for the moment of the disintegration of the old system, but they had scarcely made arrangements for the realization of their own ideas. Hence the revolutionary action randomly, dogmatically and immoderately enforced its post-revolutionary programme in the social realm, thus provoking new contradictions and unrest. Each revolution enshrines its own failure.

The Bourgeois revolution at the end of the 18th century was a revolution of middle class rationality and middle class economy. The ensuing disillusionment, the “aberrations of reason” that eventually came to characterize it, provoked a counter-movement at the outset of the 19th century that promoted a different way of thinking and a different practice of social change. The later so-called “utopian socialists” posited a spatial operation, a decelerated, expanded spatial utopia against the postulate of time that marks fast and abrupt revolutions. Their aim lay not in the interruption or overturn of existing conditions but in departure and moving; their programme was not the universal new beginning but the territorially defined new start in a new place. The medium of this spatial movement was not the system of a political-rational analysis but imagination, the “system of the imaginary” of a utopian-political reason. The collective’s different and new way of thinking was now no longer linked to the deduction of a new practice from the speculative design of an exemplary society, which was to bring forth a new society thanks to propaganda, education and knowledge! In Charles Fourier’s and Robert Owen’s designs, the example, the model itself, was always a spatial programme, a territorial invention, the evolutionary construction of a “new quantity”: “Phalanstères” and “New Harmony” were attempts to produce an imaginary recreation of the social sphere via a fantastical redefinition – a humble and flawless collective in a place remote from “civilization”.